Book Alert / A History of Palestine

A History of Palestine -- From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel by Gudrun Kramer, Princeton UP '08, $35, ISBN #0691118973. Index, bibliography, footnotes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"It is not for nothing," writes Prof. Kramer, "that we speak of a 'tunnel vision'" when discussing the history of Arabs and Jews, for commentators and historians alike tend to see their interrelationship through the eyes of one group or the other. As a result, she argues, social, economic and cultural ties among Jews and Arabs tend to go unexamined. She sees her book as a corrective.

While many books on Palestine are dominated with discussion of the first Zionist immigrants in the 1880s, the transformation of the Jewish community in Palestine and, in 1948, the founding of the modern State of Israel, Kramer endeavors to hone in on the Arab majority and how they co-exist with Jews and Christians. Kramer teaches Islamic studies at Free University Berlin and has written other books on Middle Eastern topics.