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  • The Limits of the Land: How the Struggle for the West Bank Shaped the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Avshalom Rubin
  • Elaine C. Hagopian (bio)
The Limits of the Land: How the Struggle for the West Bank Shaped the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Avshalom Rubin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. 318 pages. $35.

Author Avshalom Rubin draws two conclusions in Limits of the Land: 1) Israel’s struggle for control of the West Bank to secure the 1949 armistice line shaped the Arab-Israeli conflict; and 2) as a result of the tenuous state of the Israel-Jordan agreement to keep the West Bank free of Arab armies, and the asserted hostile actions of Egyptian president Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, Israel had no choice but to initiate a “preemptive” war for its survival against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967. He insists the conflict was not a war of expansion, though he acknowledges Israeli leaders had contemplated West Bank expansion in the past. His study can be challenged on both counts.

Although Rubin draws on available multinational declassified documents, he configures them into an ahistorical Israeli perspective framework, i.e., post-1948 Israel was vulnerable to hostile Arab attacks because it lacked depth of territory. Rubin omits the ideological details and history of the Zionist project, which provide context and did actually shape the dual Arab- and Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The Zionist project had one major goal from its outset: to transform Palestine — mapped by the Zionist Organization in 1919 to include what would become Mandatory Palestine as the core, the Syrian Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, territory on the Jordanian East Bank, and a strip of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula — into a Jewish state. Tactical detours were allowed along the way, but the goal never changed. Explaining Israel’s tactical embrace of partition, Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi noted, quoting first Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion “that the realization of the Jewish state would come in two stages: the first, ‘the period of building and laying foundations,’ would last ten to fifteen years and would be but the prelude to the second stage, ‘the period of expansion.’”1 The two stages coincide with the 1948 and 1967 wars.

A main trigger of the 1967 war was not the land alone but the water resources there, as John Cooley, among others, noted.2 The borders projected on the 1919 map were defined primarily by location of water resources and Sinai access to the Red Sea. The water resources included the aquifers in Palestine, especially the West Bank, the rich confluence of water sources in the Golan Heights, the Litani River in southern Lebanon, and the Jordan River slicing through the Palestinian Jordan Valley. Zionists early on understood the importance of controlling water to develop an industrial and agricultural economic base and to provide a Western style of life to attract and retain Jewish immigrants.3 Referring to its map, the Zionist Organization statement at the Paris Peace Conference declared:

The economic life of Palestine . . . depends on the available water supply. It is, therefore, of vital importance not only to secure all water resources already feeding the country but also to be able to conserve and control them at their sources.

The Hermon [i.e., the highest peak in the Golan Heights and surrounding water sources] [End Page 696] is Palestine’s real “Father of Waters,” and cannot be severed from it without striking at the very root of its economic life.4

The 1967 war was not “preemptive” as authors such as John Cooley, Donald Neff, Norman Finkelstein, Richard Curtiss, Juan Cole, and Ilan Pappé, among many others, have documented. Before the war, Israel had military skirmishes with Syria related to water issues. The Israelis were also alarmed by Arab attempts to divert Syrian and Jordanian water sources away from Israel. In addition, Israel faced a new factor of Arab-supported organized Palestinian resistance, and it wanted to nip that in the bud. Israel wanted to destroy Nasser’s military and his popular Arab nationalist appeal. Hence, Israeli leaders assessed that the time was right for expansion. United States president Lyndon B. Johnson, preoccupied with the Vietnam War, by default...

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