What Is Palestine?

T

HE London political commentator Michael Burleigh has entered the fray concerning the concept of Palestine as a state or nation. "There has never been an historic Palestine," he maintains, "except as a Roman province, though there certainly were two ancient Jewish kingdoms long before that."

He points out that "Palestine had no separate identity during the centuries of Ottoman rule either, in the latter part of which, from the 1880s onwards, the 25,000 Orthodox Jews who lived in Jerusalem were augmented by two major waves of East European immigrants who farmed on the plains."

In his illuminating account of global insurrection (in the face of decolonization and the Cold War) from 1945 to 1965 titled, SMALL WARS, FARAWAY PLACES, Burleigh devotes a chapter discussing the roots of Arab nationalism and the genesis of the modern Jewish homeland that is relevant to today’s headlines.

If anything, Burleigh is an equal opportunist, finding much to condemn among the British, the Jews and the Americans. He fulminates against Harry Truman’s advisers whom he paints as racists towards the Arabs; the malignancy of Zionist terrorism (Irgun, Stern Gang) that "murdered" 373 people in Jerusalem, Rome and London; "the Zionist screenwriter Ben Hecht" whose Exodus movie "was played up in an inflammatory way in the U.S."; and Stalin’s initial attempt to lure the nascent state of Israel into the Iron Curtain as he was mindful that "interwar Palestine had the largest Community party in the Middle East, dominated by its Jewish members," plus the Zionist kibbutzim bore a generic resemblance to Soviet collective farms, and being aware how rife pro-Nazi sympathies had been in the Arab world. "No wonder the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize Israel," Burleigh writes.

Israel eluded Stalin’s grasp and repulsed five Arab armies that rumbled through the West Bank to sweep the Jews into the sea and wipe the state off the face of the map. (Penguin Books, 608 pages, Amazon.com Price: $15.93)

Spread Of Worldwide Terror

O

NE of the most intensive studies focused on world terrorism in the decade following 9/11 is THE EVOLUTION OF THE GLOBAL TERRORIST THREAT which I have been absorbing over several weeks.

This beefy book is edited by two knowledgeable scholars: Bruce Hoffman, a former counterterrorism scholar at the CIA and currently director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, and Fernando Reinares, a political science/security studies professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. Both have been engaged in counterterrorism policy for their respective governments.

Their book is crammed with countless quotes from American players in all the major theaters from the Madrid train bombings to the Van Gogh murder in Amsterdam, both in 2004, to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, and the 2010 suicide attacks in Kampala, Uganda. The authors recount and analyze a total of 24 terrorist operations and offensives that rattled the globe from 9/11 to Osama bin Laden’s death.

Even though the central al-Qaeda leadership (i.e. Osama bin Laden) has been eliminated, the threat to attack their "most precious target, the U.S. homeland" remains constant. The next challenge may not originate in the Afghanistan/Pakistan-based al-Qaeda central but, rather, one of its franchises around the world. (Columbia University Press, 696 pages, $45.00 Amazon.com Price: $40.50)