Publisher's Synopsis
For at least a hundred years Arabs and Jews have engaged in what may be the modern world's most embittered and intractable dispute. This conflict has engendered five interstate wars and innumerable low-intensity clashes. As a source of daily media attention, United Nations resolutions, impassioned debate, and Great Power rivalry, the Arab Israeli conflict has no equal. Nor despite persistent interventions by the United States, Europe, and the UN is any resolution in sight.
This study assesses the origins, the dynamics, and the amazing, chameleon-like persistence of the conflict from the early 20th century to the present moment. How did Arab Zionist rivalry begin? Who won the various wars, and why did no victory produce a stable solution? What historical, legal, and moral arguments does each side marshal to justify its position? Why have all efforts at peacemaking failed to date?
The Hundred-Year Struggle for Israel and Palestine opens with a general history of the conflict, which is followed by secondary readings that illustrate and enrich that preliminary survey. Readings have been carefully chosen to express a variety of interpretive and political viewpoints. The introductory history also pursues a contrapuntal logic, stating sympathetically but dispassionately the arguments of both sides. In effect, the book creates an open-ended debate that the reader is invited to join. Not only students of the Mideast, but broadly informed observers of contemporary events should find this work of interest.
Victor Lieberman graduated first in his class from Yale University and obtained his doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. Both an historian of Asia and a comparativist interested in patterns of global integration, he has won the Harry J. Benda Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies and the World History Book Prize from the World History Association. Lieberman is the Marvin B. Becker Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, where he teaches a lecture course on the Arab-Israeli conflict."
