Цитаты из книг — Shlaim Avi

But the most striking and unexpected part of Rabin’s speech concerned Israel’s place in the world. Jewish history had traditionally been presented as an endless chain of trials and tribulations, which reached its climax in the Nazi gas chambers. Likud leaders, for their own political purposes, had assiduously cultivated…

Realizing that ultimately the Jews would have to fight for their state, he [Ben-Gurion] wanted a clear-cut Jewish military victory. That is why he assumed personal responsibility for directing the military struggle and left it to Moshe Sharett to conduct, in New York, the diplomatic campaign for a Jewish state.

Rabin doubled as prime minister and minister of defense in the new government. He appointed Simon Peres, his old rival, foreign minister, but on the clear understanding that he himself would be in overall charge of the country’s foreign policy. Peres’s authority was curtailed. He had to agree not to launch any independent…

The key figure on the Israeli side throughout the first Arab-Israeli war was David Ben-Gurion. As the strongman of the Yishuv, Ben-Gurion relentlessly concentrated power in his own hands. In 1946 he assumed the defense portfolio in the Jewish Agency Executive and immediately started preparing the Yishuv for a military…

In the absence of a world government, individual states are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. But the quest for absolute security is self-defeating because it generates insecurity on the part of one’s enemies and prompts them to resort to countermeasures that they…

“Even more ironic,” noted Rabin, “was the fact that because the Syrians were prevented from moving south of the ‘red line,’ southern Lebanon became a haven for terrorists. We had foreseen such an eventuality but preferred it to Syrian military control of the area bordering on our territory. But that did not reduce the…

The relationship between Israel and France began with the supply of arms, developed into political and military cooperation, and reached its climax in the joint war against Egypt. In the arms supply relationship, the first significant turn occurred in October 1955 when Prime Minister Edgar Faure promised Sharett two dozen…

Israel’s War of Independence was long, bitter, and very costly in human lives. It claimed the lives of 6,000 soldiers and civilians, or 1 percent of the entire Jewish population of around 650,000. The war consisted of three rounds of fighting punctuated by two UN-decreed truces. The first round lasted from 15 May until 11…

In a very real sense history is the propaganda of the victors, and the history of the 1948 war is no exception. To say this is not to suggest that the conventional Zionist version of the first Arab-Israeli war is based on myth rather than on reality. On the contrary, this version is largely based on historical facts, but…

Winston Churchill’s white paper of 1922 limited British support for the Jewish national home in three significant ways: it laid down for the first time economic criteria for Jewish immigration, it proposed elected institutions based on proportional representation instead of parity, and it excluded Transjordan from the…

Samuel Lewis was one of the few foreign diplomats who understood that Sharon’s ultimate aim was to cause the collapse of the Hashemite regime and its replacement by a Palestinian state on the East Bank of the river Jordan and that this was linked to his plans for Lebanon.

Carter was thus the first American president to champion the Palestinian right to national self-determination. Convinced that the PLO was ready for compromise, he used the terms PLO and Palestinians interchangeably.

To compensate for Sadat’s “defection” the Syrians tried to create a crescent-shaped coalition, or “banana front,” extending from Aqaba on the Red Sea to Naqura on the Mediterranean Sea. The banana front was to consist of Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon, with Syria as its pivot, and it was to stretch around Israel’s eastern and…

The Sinai II agreement was widely unpopular in the Arab world. Syria and the Palestinians were not alone in thinking that Sadat had weakened the chances of Israeli withdrawal from the other Arab territories captured by Israel in 1967. The Syrians felt that Sadat eroded the political assets that they, no less than he, had…

The differences in temperament between Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol were very striking. She was a fighter; he was a man of compromise. She was dogmatic and domineering; he was open-minded and often hesitant. She was intransigent; he was flexible.

Israel did not join in the Franco-British war plot in order to get a French nuclear reactor. The sensitive question of nuclear power was raised only toward the end of the conference and after the basic decision to go to war had been taken. Nevertheless, the nuclear deal concluded at the private meeting at Sèvres is…

At the same time the Yishuv mounted its own active resistance to the policy of the white paper that restricted Jewish land purchase and Jewish immigration to Palestine. The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 placed the Yishuv in an acute dilemma: it was behind Britain in the struggle against Nazi Germany but at…

Acceptance of the UN plan implied acceptance of a Palestinian state, but in practice the Zionist leaders preferred to seek an understanding with one of the rulers of the neighboring Arab states. They had their greatest success with their neighbor to the east, with King Abdullah of Transjordan. Did they have any diplomatic…

Jabotinsky turned sharply against those Zionists who portrayed the Palestine Arabs either as fools who could be easily deceived by a watered-down version of Zionist objectives or as a tribe of mercenaries ready to give up their right to a country in exchange for economic advantage: “Every indigenous people,” he wrote,…

With a victorious army behind him, Ben-Gurion ignored not only the advice of the political experts but also the calls of the UN for a cease-fire. At the end of December he launched a second offensive in the south, Operation Horev, with the aim of throwing the Egyptian army back across the international border. The IDF…