Eugene L. Rogan

The war for Palestine : rewriting the history of 1948

Introduction 1. The Palestinians and 1948: the causes of failure Rashid Khalidi 2. Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948 Benny Morris 3. The Druze and the birth of Israel Laila Parsons 4. Israel and the Arab coalition in 1948 Avi Shlaim 5. Jordan and 1948: the persistence of an official history Eugene Rogan 6. Iraq and the 1948 war: mirror of Iraqs disorder Charles Tripp 7. Egypt and the 1948 war: internal conflict and regional ambition Fawaz Gerges 8. Syria and the 1948 war Joshua Landis Afterword: the consequences of the 1948 war Edward Said.

Agriculture in Egypt: From Pharaonic to Modern Times

From the Pharaohs to the United Arab Republic of the present day, Egypts agriculture has been subject to very different forms of political power and organization. The papers in this volume draw on the abundant documentary and archaeological evidence to analyse and compare the patterns of agricultural exploitation across historical periods (including Ptolemaic, Roman, and Ottoman times). Among important themes discussed are: the changing composition of agrarian elites, relationships between state, landholders and peasants, the impact of commercialization on the rural economy, technology, irrigation and water control, and changes in crop patterns and production. This volumes comparativist approach to the subject is crucial in crossing the linguistic and historical barriers between the different eras in Egypts agrarian history.

Agriculture in Egypt from Pharaonic to Modern Times

EVEN IN THE EARLIEST Written records, Egypt was an ancient land. It was so for Herodotus, whose Greece of the fifth century BCE was by comparison a new world, as it was for the Graeco-Roman geographer Strabo writing early in the first century of the common era. The antiquity of cultivation and prodigious fertility cyclically renewed by the annual flood of the Nile, has given rise to the modern myth of ‘eternal Egypt’, as a timeless and unchanging land inhabited by a toiling and fatalistic peasantry. It is easy even in the 1990s to stand on the banks of the Nile, to observe the rectangular plots of land, the primitive methods of irrigation, the continued reliance on animal power and basic tools and to aver that agrarian life in Egypt has changed little since Pharaonic times. Were this the case, there would be little to interest scholars of different periods in reading a collection of essays on the agricultural organisation of Egypt. This is not our view. For us to paraphrase Braudel’s encapsulation of the longue dur& in the Mediterranean-the Nile speaks with many voices; it is a sum of individual histories. As diverse as the voices of the inhabitants who have lived out Egypt’s history, the rural history of Egypt is one of dynamism and change, united by geography and the basic factors of production: land, water, labour, tools and seed. The geography of Egypt is the fundamental unifying factor of agricultural history, though obviously not in itself unchanging. The Nile, on which the diversity of life in its valley is dependent, has shifted course over the centuries.’ From

The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948

The 1948 War led to the creation of the state of Israel, the fragmentation of Palestine, and to a conflict which has raged across the intervening sixty years. The historical debate also continues, and these debates are encapsulated in the essays contained in a second edition of The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, updated to include chapters on Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. In a preface to the new edition, the editors survey the state of scholarship in this contested field. The fragmentation of the Israeli “new historians” and the continued unwillingness of Arab societies to engage critically with their own past constrain the field, while new research opportunities are opened through private papers and oral history. The impact of these debates goes well beyond academia. There is an important link between the state of Arab–Israeli relations and popular attitudes toward the past. A more complex and fair-minded understanding of that past is essential for preserving at least the prospect of reconciliation between Arabs and Israel in the future. The rewriting of the history of 1948 thus remains a practical as well as an academic imperative.