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Volume 10, No.2 Winter 1992 137 habitants of the territories, barely a score of Israelis had lost their lives, fewer than in any month of traffic accidents and fewer than a twentieth of the Arab lives lost. The fact that few had suffered led to acceptance of the situation, reinforced by persistence of the national self-image: Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East; "purity of arms" in the IDF; equality of all citizens; the Arabs against peace and the Jews for it. One critic described this as the "psychology ofself-deception" ... (p. 157). Given this public mood together with the increasing power of the extreme nationalists and the religious right evidenced in one instance by the inclusion of the Moledet (Motherland) Party in the government in the spring of 1991-a party that advocates the "transfer," Le., expulsion of the Palestinians from the territories, it is difficult to be optimistic about a peaceful settlement of the IsraelilPalestinian conflict or about the future security of either Israelis or Palestinians. Professor Peretz has done an admirable job of presenting the complexities of this enduring conflict. Cheryl A. Rubenberg Department of Political Science Florida International University Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice, by John Quigley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. 337 pp. $42.50 (c); $18.95 (p). This book takes up the question: "To whom does Palestine really belong ?" The author's professed aim is to assess conflicting claims rather than to propose solutions. He attempts to demonstrate that the Palestinians hold better legal title to the territory than the Jews. Though perusing a wealth of secondary literature, Palestine and Israel contains very little new information and rehashes well-known theses expounded in the 19605 and 19705 by Nathan Weinstock, Maxime Rodinson, Uri Davis, and other anti-Zionist analysts. Its narrow legalistic perspective represents a step backward from the sociological-historical approach of these authors. From the land acquisition practices of the Jewish National Fund, to the forcible expusion of Palestinians in 1947-49, to Israeli settler violence in the occupied territories nowadays, Palestine and Israel reads like a catalogue of Zionist sins unmitigated by extenuating circumstances such as norms of behavior and ideologies in vigor at the time of acting, human tragedy, thwarted goodwill, and the intransigent hostility from the other side. The author manifests little awareness of intra-Zionist disputes, developments within Israeli society, and the growing polarization around precisely those practices he so vehemently criticizes: Israel's divide-and.~rule practices vis-a-vis its Arab mi- 138 SHOFAR norities, the discriminatory nature of the Law of Return, the oppression of Palestinians living in the occupied territories, etc. Quigley's attempt to demolish the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish State and its very right to exist form the book's most controversial part. He posits that it was the people living under the Mandate, i.e., the Palestinians, who held sovereignty: writing the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate was therefore a violation of their right of self-determination-and Zionist leaders such as Ben-Gurion were well aware of this. According to Quigley, the key ingredient in international law for conferring title to territory is longevity of unchallenged factual occupation. He repeats the quasi-scientific argument that the Arab-speaking inhabitants of Palestine are descendants of the Canaanites. The fact that Palestinians manifested no separate national distinctiveness before the twentieth century does not detract from their national right (p. 74). While Quigley's points about Arab rights on Palestine are well-known, the case of Jewish needs and rights is stronger and more complex than his legalistic reading allows for. He rejects the notion that Jews constitute a nation entitled to a right of self-determination. For him, Zionism based its claim to Palestine on ancient title which, he argues, confers no rights whatsoever. Moreover, he asserts that latter-day Jews show little biological continuity with Jews of antiquity, and that the Jewish "race" is not pure anymore since most Ashkenazi Jews supposedly descend from converted Khazars in the eighth century (the ugly connotations of introducing biologistic prejudices in his argumentation apparently escape the author's notice). Neither does Jewish psychological attachment...

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