Contra Naqba

Efraim Karsh takes a second look at heaps of British documents from the end of their control over Mandatory Palestine, and learns that most Palestinians would have been willing to live alongside Israel, had it not been for an aggressive leadership that pushed towards war with the Jews, and forced its own people to get out of the way and come back once the Jews were gone.

Meanwhile, Shlomo Avineri takes a look at the Palestinian story from a different perspective, sees a different process, but essentially the same result. Avineri is further to the left than Karsh, and he's a political scientist to Karsh's historian. The way Avineri sees things, the Palestinian's problem is that they never managed to cobble together a responsible national leadership that would offer their people institutions whereby to execute any sort of national policy.

I liked his comparison of the Palestinian failure with the Algerian success: surely the Algerians faced a far more brutal foe than the Palestinians ever did, but the Algerians created a national structure that brought them ultimate victory. On second thought, however, before going agog about how successful the Algerian national movement has been it's worth keeping in mind that the numbers of Algerians butchered by other Algerians is significantly larger than the total numbers of Palestinians and Israelis together who have been killed these past hundred years or so.

Neither Karsh nor Avineri use the most important documentation: that of the Palestinians. Though I'm not aware of anyone else who has, either. Assuming it exists in any accessible form, which it may not, or certainly not fully.