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Reviewed by:
  • The Making of Modern Israel 1948-1967
  • Matthew Silver
The Making of Modern Israel 1948-1967, by Leslie Stein. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. 412 pp. $25.00.

As a readable, well-researched survey of the first phase of Israel's history, Leslie Stein's volume The Making of Modern Israel 1948-1967 is a valuable contribution to the field of Israel Studies. Despite intensive media and public discussions about Israel's current and past circumstances, it is difficult to think of an English-language volume that reviews key events and processes in Israel, up to the 1967 Six Day War, in a manner that is both accessible to students and interested non-specialists, and also highly conversant with the wealth of professional research about many aspects of Israel's history. Stein's book fills this gap admirably.

Stein announces in his introduction that the volume aims to present a judicious synthesis of published material for students and sophisticated lay readers. His book clearly delivers what it promises, though at times Stein appears to revisit in overly lavish detail the few topics which will be familiar to many or most readers, while neglecting topics which are prominent in Israeli culture and society but are somewhat less known outside of Israel.

Very much like the survey authored at the beginning of the current decade by Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, Stein puts a premium on description of military events—but in his case the emphasis is probably less warranted, since Morris was in his volume explicitly focused on the Zionist-Arab conflict, whereas Stein sets out to write a comprehensive survey of Israel's early years. Partly because it has been covered in excellent, popular surveys (by, among [End Page 161] others, Michael Oren and Tom Segev), a topic such as the Six Day War will be known to many of Stein's readers before they pick up his volume, so the extensive emphasis given to it in this book can be questioned.

It would be misleading to say that Stein ignores issues such as ethnicity in Israel, since his is one of the first English-language texts which will introduce readers to key events such as the 1959 Wadi Salib disturbances in Haifa, and yet this topic (ethnicity) and other dimensions of Israeli society seem underrepresented in his volume. That just one short paragraph (p. 93) is devoted to "Jews from Morocco," whereas the 1967 War receives some sixty pages, suggests that this is a volume which could reinforce readers' pre-existing suppositions about what is "really" important in Israeli history, without encouraging them to explore new topics, whose salience is obvious to all Israelis.

When it comes to the enduring conflict with the Palestinians and the Muslim world, Stein overtly (and sensibly) tries to explain how processes and events in the era covered by his book set the stage for what came after 1967. In contrast, when it comes to topics such as ethnicity, his analysis covers, at least in an abbreviated way, all that happened before 1967, but it is noticeably unconcerned to point the reader toward phenomena of the post-1967 period that must, in some way, be outgrowths of issues in the period covered by his book.

On some topics, Stein's discussions might have benefited from reference to literary texts or recent scholarship. On the ethnic issue, for example, this volume conveys just one disinterested reference to the author Sami Michael, and ignores a wealth of writings by Mizrahi authors, as well as scholarship about Iraqi, Moroccan, and other Mizrahi communities in Israel. Stein seems tied to the military conflict on principle—even on topics in his own areas of expertise, particularly economics, he appears sometimes abruptly to cut discussions short, in order to return to the wars.

Unnecessarily, Stein spends some pages wrangling with post-Zionist scholarship, particularly Ilan Pappe's theories about expulsion during the 1948 war. On this topic it might have been wiser to refer the reader to the main lines of the dispute between historians and polemicists, and then move on to related topics unknown to many English language readers but of crucial importance to the topic Stein has...

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