In late summer 1929, a countrywide outbreak of Arab-Jewish-British violence transformed the political landscape of Palestine forever. In contrast with those who point to the wars of 1948 and 1967, historian Hillel Cohen marks these bloody events as year zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict that persists today. The murderous violence inflicted on Jews caused a fractious - and now traumatized - community of Zionists, non-Zionists, Ashkenazim, and Mizrachim to coalesce around a unified national consciousness arrayed against an implacable Arab enemy. While the Jews unified, Arabs came to grasp the national essence of the conflict, realizing that Jews of all stripes viewed the land as belonging to the Jewish people. Through memory and historiography, in a manner both associative and highly calculated, Cohen traces the horrific events of August 23 to September 1 in painstaking detail. He extends his geographic and chronological reach and uses a non-linear reconstruction of events to call for a thorough reconsideration of cause and effect. Sifting through Arab and Hebrew sources - many rarely, if ever, examined before - Cohen reflects on the attitudes and perceptions of Jews and Arabs who experienced the events and, most significantly, on the memories they bequeathed to later generations. The result is a multifaceted and revealing examination of a formative series of episodes that will intrigue historians, political scientists, and others interested in understanding the essence - and the very beginning - of what has been an intractable conflict.

A new and provocative reassessment of the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict

A new and provocative reassessment of the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict

Fascinating revisionist history of Jewish life in Tel Aviv in the Mandate era

When did the Arab-Israeli conflict begin? Some discussions focus on the 1967 war, some go back to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and others look to the beginning of the British Mandate in 1929. Alan Dowty, however, traces the earliest roots of the conflict to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, arguing that this historical approach highlights constant clashes between religious and ethnic groups in Palestine. He demonstrates that existing Arab residents viewed new Jewish settlers as European and shares evidence of overwhelming hostility to foreigners from European lands. He shows that Jewish settlers had tremendous incentive to minimize all obstacles to settlement, including the inconvenient hostility of the existing population. Dowty's thorough research reveals how events that occurred over 125 years ago shaped the implacable conflict that dominates the Middle East today.

Tells the story of Arabs who, from the very beginning of the Arab-Israeli encounter, sided with the Zionists and aided them politically, economically, and in security matters. This book features Bedouins who hosted Jewish neighbors, weapons dealers, and pro-Zionist propagandists.

Based on his reading of top-secret files of the Israeli police and the prime minister's office, Hillel Cohen exposes the full extent of the crucial, and, until now, willfully hidden history of Palestinian collaboration with Israelis—and of the Arab resistance to it. Cohen's previous book, the highly acclaimed Army of Shadows,told how this hidden history played out from 1917 to 1948, and now, in Good Arabs he focuses on the system of collaborators established by Israel in each and every Arab community after the 1948 war. Covering a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors, Cohen brings together the stories of activists, mukhtars, collaborators, teachers, and sheikhs, telling how Israeli security agencies penetrated Arab communities, how they obtained collaboration, how national activists fought them, and how deeply this activity influenced daily life. When this book was first published in Hebrew, it became a bestseller and has evoked bitter memories and intense discussions among Palestinians in Israel and prompted the reclassification of many of the hundreds of documents Cohen viewed to uncover a story that continues to unfold to this day.