UNDER FIRE: Israel's Twenty-Year Fight for Survival

This middle-sized anthology takes up where Anny Latour's recent documentary history (The Resurrection of Israel, p. 40) left off, with the establishment of the state of Israel. Robinson's emphasis is distinctly more military; the pieces are shorter and on the whole more journalistic, though they include two diary excerpts and a few proclamations. The three wars and two bloody armistices in between are covered by some first-rate writers (including Koestler, Bernard Fall, Hugh Thomas), and a range of news sources (the New York Times, L'Express, Mauldin, Murrow, Gellhorn, et al.). Politicians and generals are well represented; in addition to Rabin, Dayan, Ben-Gurion and Eban, there's a squib from JFK, and an Arab field marshal's June 2nd Orders of the Day. Unfortunately the introduction is rhetorical, the brief biographies of Weizmann, Ben-Gurion and Shertok are shallow, and the connecting narratives tend to be simplistic. Good reading nonetheless.