Bitter lessons from the past unearthed and expertly reexamined.
An impassioned argument that the Arabs of Greater Syria who fought for the Allies in World War I, deeply committed to the Wilsonian notion of self-determination, were robbed of their chance at democracy.
Thompson, the Mohamed S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace at American University, claims that this tragic story of Syria’s occupation by England and France—and their deliberate effort to “destroy the Syrian Arab state” just as it was forming its democratic constitution—has “never before been told in English.” She notes that only four books have covered the Syrian Arab Congress and its drafting of a “147-article constitution modeled on its Ottoman predecessor with modifications inspired by American federalism and checks and balances”—a document created within the slim window between the declaration of Syrian independence and the imperial partition of Syria as agreed upon at the San Remo Conference in April 1920. Beginning in 1916, Prince Faisal, the championed leader of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire who was famously advised by T.E. Lawrence, defied his father in advocating for Syrian independence. Yet with Woodrow Wilson incapacitated by stroke, English and French leaders, using the League of Nations system of mandates as pretext, declared Faisal’s government illegal. The author clearly demonstrates how they planned the occupation and partition just as a remarkable coalition of liberals and religious leaders agreed on a system protecting minorities to “balance freedom and rule of law.” In a book sure to interest students of Middle Eastern history, particularly in the 20th century, Thompson fashions an original, authoritative study, laying out the process of the “theft” of Syrian democracy. “The history of postwar Syria,” she writes, “reveals that the tragedy of the 1919 [Paris Peace] conference was due not to the oversight of a few exhausted and old-fashioned statesmen, but rather to their vigorous effort to expand a colonial and racialist world system.”
Bitter lessons from the past unearthed and expertly reexamined.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4820-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Caveat emptor: This is most definitely not ``the history'' of the Jews. It is, rather, a series of very free-flowing exercises in what the author refers to as ``historical sociology.'' Cantor (History, Sociology, Comparative Literature/New York Univ.; Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 106, etc.) is attempting a huge tripartite task: to write a history of the Jews, to provide a historiographical commentary of some major works on Jewish history, and to offer a cultural critique of modern Jewish life. For the complex saga of the Jews, this is an utterly unrealistic goal for a one-volume work, especially by someone who hasn't specialized in Jewish history. Perhaps the foremost problem here is the author's unsympathetic attitude toward Judaism and observant Jews and his lack of knowledge about them. Cantor dredges up the hoariest stereotypes, claiming for instance that in the late Middle Ages ``the rabbinate drugged itself into comfort with the narcotic of the Cabala, an otherworldly withdrawal into astrology and demonology.'' He also gets far too many facts wrong (he claims that the biblical heroine Esther was Mordechai's sister, when in fact she was his ``uncle's daughter''). Some major developments in Jewish history are scarcely mentioned, such as the origins and development of the Reform and Conservative movements. Cantor champions such Jewish thinkers as Freud, Wittgenstein, and LÇvi- Strauss, who played a key role in shaping the culture of modernity. He appears to have little familiarity with intellectual leaders within the Jewish community such as Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. Thus he rather harshly- -and unjustly—critiques Jewish religious life for not responding sufficiently to the culture of modernity (although he never makes clear exactly what he means by this); yet non-Orthodox Jews have been so accommodating to modernity that, as Cantor acknowledges, traditional Jewish culture has become very attenuated. The lack of footnotes or other documentation is further evidence that this is an intellectually shoddy book. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-016746-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
A wide-angle saga that adds a chapter long missing from official and traditional histories of WW II's Pacific theater: the story of the torments endured by Allied military personnel captured when Japanese forces overran Greater East Asia. Drawing on interviews with survivors of the Japanese prison camps as well as archival sources, Daws (A Dream of Islands, 1980, etc.) effectively combines the experiences of individual American, Australian, British, and Dutch POWs with a panoramic perspective. He probes why the death rate among the more than 140,000 men interned by the Japanese reached 27% (as against but 4% for military prisoners of the Germans). By the author's painstakingly documented account, the causes were legion: inhuman living conditions, starvation diets, an almost complete lack of medical care, constant beatings by brutish guards whose (heartily reciprocated) racial hatred of whites often led to summary executions, forced labor on construction projects like the Burma- Siam railroad, and workaday atrocities. Thousands more POWs perished when the ships transporting them from the fetid jungles of conquered lands to Japan were blown out of the water by Allied aircraft or submarines. Daws provides a start-to-finish narrative, tracking the battered veterans of Bataan, Java, Midway, Singapore, and other campaigns before, during, and after their captivity. While he devotes considerable attention to group bonding, scavenging, and the other stratagems it took to stay alive behind the wire, Daws doesn't neglect the surprisingly cool receptions accorded repatriated POWs. Indeed, he reports, there are precious few memorials to Allied soldiers who died in Asian camps, let alone tributes to the brutalized, sometimes bestialized, survivors condemned to make peace with their freedom after VJ day. Overdue witness, eloquent and harrowing. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-11812-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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