Book Reviews : Israel and the Arabs By MAXIME RODINSON. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969. Pp. 239. 95¢.)

Abstract

Israel and the Arabs by Maxime Rodinson (translated from the French by Michael Perl) provides an informed account of Arab-Zionist and Arab-Israeli relations, with emphasis on the Arab view of Israel as an illegitimate colonial occupier of Palestine. Rodinson, himself a Jew who has lived in the Middle East and served in the Syrian army, offers a rationale and elaboration of Arab positions on Israel in a low-key, non-polemical style. The book is cogent and well written; the reader sorely misses an index and bibliography. Rodinson presents a history of conflicting ambitions and claims in which the potential for Arab-Jewish cooperation against Turkish supremacy and later West European domination was dissipated, as mutually antagonistic Arab and Jewish nationalist claims became evident. The conflict during the mandate years centered on who should governPalestine, not whether or not Jews and Arabs could live together as neighbors. Increased Jewish immigration threatened the Arab majority, thus threatening Arab national hopes for political domination. Rodinson, in his effort to explain Arab claims, sometimes appears to ignore the unwillingness of Arab leaders to share political control with Jews. He declares that the Jews rejected the 1937 Peel Commission proposal of partition. But Walter