A CLASH OF DESTINIES

Founded on a vast amount of research and personal interview, as well as direct involvement in the Palestine War (1947-48), the authors have written a book on this much disputed subject which presents a few new theories and outlooks. With minute detail, they treat and trace the history, preambles, development, and actualities of the war, and include several maps of the strategic areas and manoeuvres of the battles. Pinpointing the central and most significant personalities of the war, they belittle Glubb Pasha and his often detrimental influence because of the lack of confidence placed in him by the Arabs and because of his frequent lack of shrewd and calculative insight into the critical situation. Above all, however, they attack the British, attaching a great deal of importance and blame to the British policy in Palestine, indeed in the Middle East in general. A basic and initial assumption of the authors is that the Palestine War had begun not as an Israel-Arab conflict, but as a rebellion of the Jews against the impositions of the British Mandatory rule in Palestine. Underscoring the war as more a loss for imperial Britain than for the Arabs, and the theory that this was due to Atlee's (in fact, the British government's) policy of drifting and hedging (a policy true also of the United Nations), they maintain that ""Palestine was not, as they (the British) were inclined to treat it, an irritating sideshow; it was the first link in the chain of British imperial decline."" They neglect, however, in this context, the prime significance of the events and state of affairs which led to the British withdrawal from India. Though the objectivity of a book such as this is necessarily relative, because of the controversial nature of a subject so deep and so hot in the hearts of so many, it is for the same reason a book which should and will find a great reading audience all over the world.