New & Noteworthy

In 1949 about 700,000 fewer Palestinian Arabs lived in the area that had become the state of Israel than had lived there in 1947. Explanations of how and why that came about have fueled bitter debate for half a century, and help sustain two contending national mythologies. The creation of a refugee population that now numbers four million has nourished within the Arab world a murderous hatred for the Jewish state and helped trigger three conventional conflicts and a terrorist campaign that with varying intensity has lasted since Israel's creation, and may well prove to be the spark that ignites an apocalyptic war.

In 1988, in the first edition of this book, the Israeli journalist and historian Benny Morris examined the origins of this problem. He was motivated, he writes in this thoroughly revised and enormously enlarged edition, by neither ideological nor political commitment. Rather, he "simply wanted to know ...