Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947 by Bruce Hoffman - terrorism wins
Arguments about Middle Eastern history bear a frustrating resemblance to the physicists' conundrum of an irresistible force clashing with an immovable object. No one ever seems to win.
by Bruce Hoffman
Knopf
In Anonymous Soldiers, however, Bruce Hoffman makes the startling but persuasive argument that, in fact, there has been a winner in the battle among Jews, Arabs and the West for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. The winner, the author says, is terrorism.
Prepare to be deeply disturbed by this book. Hoffman, an authority on terrorism at Georgetown University, challenges popular characterisations of the valiant struggle of Jews to carve out their own nation, and advance Western concepts of democracy and civility in a land more often known for guns and savagery.
What if it turned out that Israel's freedom fighters bore a much closer resemblance to Carlos the Jackal than George Washington? What if it turned out that al-Qaeda's leaders drew inspiration from terrorist strategies employed by radical Jews in Palestine during the 1930s and '40s? Hoffman lays out in richly researched detail the case that terrorism and blackmail, not peaceful negotiation and diplomacy, are what formed the foundations of Israel's independence.
Anonymous Soldiers opens at the end of the first world war, as empires were disintegrating and indigenous populations were confronting colonialists through civil disobedience or outright military tactics. A gigantic power vacuum loomed over the post-Ottoman Middle East. The great European powers, working through the League of Nations, carved up the region, and Britain emerged with authority to rule over Palestine.