Beyond Partnership: The Jewish Agency and the Diaspora, 1959-1971 (review)

126 SHOFAR Summer 1996 Vol. 14, No.4 Beyond Partnership: TheJewish Agencyand the Diaspora, 1959-1971, by Ernest Stock. New York: Herzl Press, 1992. 259 pp. No better authority than Ernest Stock could offer such a cogent analysis of the functions and roles of the Jewish Agency. With its companion text, Chosen Instrument, we are introduced to the evolution and growth of this unique transnational institution. While the initial volume focuses on the Agency's functions as a quasi-governmental entity, prior to the birth of the state of Israel, as well as describing the tasks performed during the period 1948-1959, the second volume, Beyond Partnership, surveys the Jewish Agency story for the next twelve-year segment, 1959-1971. Dr. Stock's presentation is more than a record of events; his personal perspectives as Deputy Director between 1960 and 1966 offer the reader a marvelous insight into the politics and personalities associated with the Agency's evolution. The book's value can be measured in three distinct ways. Initially, the presentation ofmaterial affords the reader an opportunity to select specific aspects ofthat institution's agenda, whether it be immigration, governance and the policy making process, youth aliyah, or the agency's interactions with both the Israeli government and world Jewry. Secondly, of particular interest was the selection of items for the appendices. Dr. Stock offers us a combination of documents, including a fascinating case study on the Boston Jewish community's response to the Six-Day War; a copy of several key documents referenced elsewhere in the text, namely the Budget of the Agency (1965-1966) and the Agreement on Reconstitution of the Jewish Agency (1971); and the historic June 1967 correspondence of Israel's Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir to the Chair of the Agency Louis Pincus, reaffirming and redefining the special relationship of the Diaspora to the State of Israel, following the 1967 War. A third feature of particular importance to this edition is reflected in the numerous citations of actual minutes, reports, and official papers. This vast inventory of materials permits a first-hand accounting of not only how the Agency operates but more specifically the roles played by individual decision-makers and the various governing entities, in defining and executing its mandate. For the researcher interested in the "workings" of the Agency and the personalities associated with the development and implementation of policy, Dr. Stock's detailed cataloging of both the actual events and the Book Reviews 127 process for action covering this twelve-year period provides some special insights into this complex policy and service instrument. In the postscript to the book, Ernest Stock reflects on the twenty-year period following his research, noting the fundamental changes associated with the Agency, including the transition of leadership, the change of governance, and the evolution of Israel's role and position within the Jewish world. The Agency story is a unique experiment binding the Jewish people together in a system of governance and organization that deserves consideration and thoughtful study, as demonstrated by this text. Steven F. Windmueller School ofJewish Communal Service Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power, by Donna Robinson Divine. Boulder, co: lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994. 226 pp. $38.00. Stimulated in part by the increasing importance of the Palestinian factor in Middle Eastern politics, studies of the history of the Palestinian Arab community have become something of a growth industry over the past two decades. Informed by the diverse and rich Ottoman, Zionist, and Palestinian Arab source-materials that have become available in recent years, Israeli, Palestinian, and Western scholars have produced numerous monographic studies ofvarious aspects of the Palestinian Arab experience in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Palestinian history has now acquired a substance and complexity going well beyond the simplistic and politically driven polar images of a land of desolation versus a happy and harmonious traditional society found in much of the earlier literature on the subject. Professor Divine has mined this new literature on Palestine to write a careful, up-to-date, and generally persuasive overview ofPalestinian Arab history from 1800 to the initial phases of British rule...