ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE

An Israeli journalist recounts how Britain pledged the Holy Land to Jew and Arab alike.
By OMER BARTOV
Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate.

Editors' Choice: "In what is becoming a very noisy debate as young Israeli historians challenge the patriotic narratives that have governed the country's history for 50 years, the voice of Tom Segev, a newspaper columnist who was trained in history in the United States, is cool, slightly aloof and highly effective. In what is probably the best overall history of the period when Britain ruled the Holy Land under League of Nations mandate, Segev argues that the mandate was the most important factor in the formation of the Jewish state, that the British nurtured a culture of government in the small Jewish population they found there, and that the Holocaust was not the major impulse toward the establishment of Israel, having in fact deprived Zionists of the great Jewish migration they had hoped for. Furthermore, his book is the only one to analyze the mandate period from all three perspectives -- British, Arab and Jewish. Because its argument is moved along by people who were not the great policy makers, but Arabs and Jews living in Palestine and the British working there, it makes a powerful case that the bitter warfare that developed when the mandate ended, war that sometimes seems to have no end, was not a necessary or natural outcome. Segev's aloofness can make him sound arrogant at times, and because he avoids analyzing the policies and strategies underlying modern Israel his history lacks a fundamental dimension. But the personal histories he evokes -- especially those of an Arab intellectual and a Jewish businessman and poet who were deep friends until events divided them -- expose large and probably dangerous holes in the received accounts of how Israel came to be.

Reading Tom Segev's remarkable book just as another round of violence and frustration erupts in Israel and the Palestinian territories, one is instantly gripped by a powerful sense of déjà vu. Once again the region has succumbed to despair, and peace seems, at best, a distant prospect. And yet ''One Palestine, Complete'' is more than the tale of a historical tragedy in the making. For Segev is unusually attuned to the hopes and dreams that both Arabs and Jews have invested in this divided land. Instead of telling his story through the loud pronouncements of political leaders, he has woven a fine tapestry of individual portraits, curious anecdotes and penetrating insights. One is left with a faint hope that the current crisis is as much a convulsive reaction to an anticipated settlement as it is a compulsive return to old patterns of prejudice and violence.

Although Segev makes only a few fleeting references to the controversy over the so-called new historians in Israel, his book is a major, if somewhat oblique, contribution to the debate. In the last decade or so, a number of younger Israeli scholars, mostly born after the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, have boldly challenged the patriotic narrative of the past, which cast Israel as an innocent victim of Arab aggression and rejected Palestinian claims of nationhood. Sifting through previously classified documents in British and Israeli archives, scholars like Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé have used this evidence to present a more balanced and detached examination of the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict. Not surprisingly, they have provoked fierce resistance from conservative scholars as well as from right-wing and ''security-minded'' politicians, journalists and intellectuals in Israel and the United States.

Segev is something of an anomaly among the new historians. Despite a doctorate in history from Boston University, he makes his living as a journalist for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. His column is titled, significantly, ''Foreign Correspondent,'' though he lives in Jerusalem and writes mostly on domestic matters. Segev is also the author of several influential books, notably ''The Seventh Million,'' a controversial study of how the Holocaust shaped Israeli identity.

Segev's distinctive place in Israeli intellectual life, however, has as much to do with his style as with his unconventional opinions. In a culture accustomed to intense emotions, he stands out for his wry, often aloof sensibility. He has a keen eye for the ironic, even the ridiculous, detail, and seems to take particular pleasure in deflating heroes and exploding the myths that are the lore of national identity. Segev's coolness generally serves him well, but it is not always a virtue. ''One Palestine, Complete'' is written in the authoritative, sometimes arrogant tone of an author who feels no need to engage in debate with his opponents. The omniscient voice masks some significant lapses in the narrative, while Segev's apparent detachment conceals his own ideological views, which are heavily tilted against the Zionist interpretation.

That said, Segev has written an enormously important book, perhaps the best single account of Palestine under the British mandate. For the first time in the historiography of the region, the story of the mandate has been told from all three perspectives -- the Zionist, the Arab and the British. The book opens with the conquest of the land from the Ottoman Empire in World War I, when, Segev writes, ''the British were received as an army of liberation. Both Arabs and Jews wished for independence and assumed they would win it under British sponsorship.'' The British gave them no reason to think otherwise, making vague promises to the Arabs in ''an evasive and amateurish correspondence,'' and announcing in the Balfour declaration of 1917 that England ''views with favor'' the creation of a Jewish ''national home'' in Palestine. As Segev remarks, ''The Promised Land had, by the stroke of a pen, become twice-promised.''

The book ends with the departure of the British following the United Nations resolution to divide the country into two separate states in 1947. That resolution, and its rejection by the Arab leadership, led to a bloody war that culminated in the establishment of an independent Jewish state -- by then no longer in line with official British policy -- and the resulting flight and expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs. Tragically, the creation of a Jewish state just three years after the near-total destruction of the Jewish diaspora by Nazism led to the creation of a Palestinian diaspora, whose fate has yet to be determined. Thus, what Israelis remember as their War of Independence is marked by Palestinians as al nakba -- the catastrophe.

Which side did the British favor in Palestine? Segev's argument is characteristically subversive of Zionist historiography, which portrays the British as hostile to Jewish aims. Although the Jews and the British clashed in the years immediately preceding independence, Segev argues that the British played a decisive role in the transformation of the tiny Jewish population they found in Palestine into an economically viable and politically well-organized community with a statelike infrastructure. Without the mandate, he insists, a Jewish state either would never have come into being or would have been greatly delayed. The mandate, in his view, was the single most important factor in the establishment of the state, and not, as was claimed at the time and is still believed by most Israelis and Jews, an obstacle to independence.

Segev tells the story of the Palestinian Arabs with a great deal of sympathy and balance. As we get to know some of the leaders of Palestinian nationalism more closely, we realize that they hardly correspond to the stereotypes often drawn by Zionist historians of primitive serfs and corrupt, lazy and pro-Nazi elites. Segev also personalizes Arab-Jewish relations in the mandate years in a way that shatters the starkly ideological prism through which they tend to be seen by both Jews and Arabs. Among his most affecting vignettes is the troubled yet powerful friendship between Khalil al-Sakakini, a teacher and writer who represents the fate of Palestinian intellectuals, and Alter Levine, a successful insurance agent and somewhat lesser poet, who embodies the curious blend of practicality and romanticism so common among the early Jewish settlers. Their bond, sealed by the shared experience of persecution under the Turks, was irreparably frayed by the mandate. Indeed, Sakakini had become so embittered by the anticipated loss of his homeland that he expressed sympathy for Nazi Germany. Yet Segev resurrects a time when such friendship was still possible and through it reveals how narrow our view of the past has been and the extent to which it has impoverished our understanding of the tragedy. Sakakini and Levine stand for all that was once possible before even its memory was erased in decades of bitter confrontation.

Segev views the British as astonishingly ill equipped to deal with the myriad problems of Palestine. Soon after their arrival, they found themselves frustrated in their efforts to support the creation of a Jewish state while appeasing an increasingly restive Arab population. The Arab rebellion of 1936-39, which British soldiers suppressed with brutal force, only deepened their sense of despair. As Segev observes, this first intifada had paradoxical consequences. On the one hand, British retaliation considerably weakened Arab military organization and thereby helped the Jewish forces gain the upper hand during the war of 1948. On the other hand, vehement Arab resistance to Jewish settlement convinced the British that staying in Palestine was not worth the price. Had it not been for the outbreak of World War II, they might have left earlier.

Among left-wing commentators in Israel, anti-Israeli critics in Europe and Palestinian nationalists, it is often said that Israel's establishment was a direct consequence of the Holocaust. Segev wisely rejects this idea. The Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine), he notes, was well on its way to statehood before the war, while the genocide of European Jewry deprived Zionism of the human reserves needed to fortify the future state. In this sense, the Holocaust served Palestinian interests, for it greatly reduced the threat of mass immigration. What is more, sympathy for Zionism was more common in British political circles during and after World War I than it was following the Holocaust. Even in 1938, the British ambassador to Egypt wrote, ''The Jews? . . . Let us be practical. They are anybody's game these days. But we need not desert them. They have waited 2,000 years for their 'home.' They can well afford to wait a bit until we are better able to help them get their last pound of flesh.''

Segev's penchant for the eye-catching detail and for personal anecdote occasionally lends his book a somewhat gossipy quality. We learn a great deal about who was sleeping with whom and what sorts of drinks certain individuals liked to have on their porch. And we read of fascinating outsiders like the Spanish consul to Jerusalem, Antonio de Ballobar, a raffish young count whose mother was Jewish and who was ''famous for the sumptuous meals he served at his home in West Jerusalem.'' To be sure, Segev is trying to evoke the lost and, for some, romantic world of mandate Palestine. But this also means that he tells us much more about the elites than about the majority of Palestinians and Jews so keenly observed by figures like Ballobar.

This approach also tends to give short shrift to high politics and strategy. For instance, Segev makes the striking observation that some key British politicians, including Prime Minister David Lloyd George, supported the Zionist cause not only out of sympathy for Zionism, but also thanks to the notion (greatly encouraged by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann) that Jewish power and influence would help bring the United States into the war on Britain's side. But one would have liked to see a more careful analysis of Britain's far-flung strategic interests and the perceived role of Palestine as an important link between India and Europe, a crucial obstacle between North Africa and the Caucasus, a base for British air and naval operations in the Mediterranean and a center for the local production of armaments. Moreover, Segev ignores the possibility that British awareness of oil reserves in the region also served as potential motivation for their presence.

It should also be noted that while Segev pays much attention to the Arab Palestinian population, most of his materials come from British and Israeli archives, as well as private collections of diaries, letters, newspapers and memoirs. The book is obviously directed at an Israeli, American and European audience, and the myths it sets out to dispel are mainly Israeli and Jewish. Palestinian myths are hardly addressed. Then again, the Arabs do not need Segev to tell them that the British were the friends rather than the enemies of the Jews; they already said so in 1917 and 1936.

Nevertheless, the merits of this book far outweigh its limitations. It is very well written and hard to put down despite its considerable length. This will doubtlessly become the authoritative text for the pre-state history of Israel, as well as a book that Palestinian scholars will and indeed should refer to. And, considering the terrible deterioration of relations between Jews and Palestinians in the last few weeks, one can only hope that this book will draw attention not only to the nightmarish quality of the region's history, but also to the promise of coexistence that was so recklessly tossed aside."

Omer Bartov's most recent book is ''Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity.''