Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review: The Balfour Declaration: Empire, the Mandate and Resistance in Palestine – By Bernard Regan – Verso, 2017

Posted on November 11, 2019 by admin

by John McHugo In The Balfour Declaration: Empire, The Mandate and Resistance in Palestine, Bernard Regan shows us what Britain did (and what Britain thought it was doing) by issuing the Balfour Declaration, by incorporating it into the League of … Continue reading →

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Legacy of Empire – Book Review

Posted on October 12, 2019 by admin

By Tim Llewellyn, Oct 10th 2019 LEGACY OF EMPIRE Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel By Gardner Thompson Saqi, £20.00 “…[T]he Mandate has proved to be unworkable in practice…[and] the obligations undertaken by the two communities in Palestine have … Continue reading →

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Book Review – ‘Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–9’ by Matthew Hughes

Posted on June 12, 2019 by admin

by Ian Black The 1936–9 Arab Revolt against British rule in Palestine, and its suppression by the British army, was a precursor to the devastating war against the nascent Israeli state that the Palestinians lost a decade later. Matthew Hughes‘s extensively researched new study … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Persecution to relieve persecution

Posted on December 9, 2018 by admin

The Balfour Project is most grateful to the Times Literary Supplement for allowing us to reprint this review of The Arab Awakening, by George Antonius, the review by Harry Pirie-Gordon being published on November 26, 1938. Readers might also like … Continue reading →

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And the best book about the Balfour Declaration is…

Posted on October 22, 2018 by admin

Book review of Palestine the Reality by J.M.N. Jeffries – Skyscraper By John McHugo  Many people trying to get to grips with the Israel/Palestine conflict begin with the First World War and the contradictory promises Britain made at that time. … Continue reading →

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Book Review: “Enemies and Neighbours” Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 by Ian Black

Posted on July 29, 2018 by admin

By Tim Llewellyn This is a dispassionate book, written by someone who knows almost everything, about the tragic progress of Britain’s experiment with Zionism in Palestine to the present day’s existential horror. Black does not make judgments. His careful selection … Continue reading →

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“You cannot ignore the sacred trust of civilisation or disdain the scholarship of Avi Shlaim”: a review of Lord Leslie Turnberg’s Beyond the Balfour Declaration by John McHugo

Posted on September 24, 2017 by admin

In Beyond the Balfour Declaration: The 100-Year Quest for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, (Biteback Publishing, 2017) Leslie Turnberg has tried to grapple with the difficult problem of achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Turnberg is a Labour life peer. He is a … Continue reading →

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The 1929 Palestine Riots: A Conflicted Jewish Historiography,

Posted on July 21, 2017 by admin

By William M Mathew Violence in Palestine in 1929 has influenced the conflict ever since. William Mathew offers us the chance not only to learn more about those events, but also to reflect on the business of history and the … Continue reading →

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Part II The 1929 Palestine Riots: A Conflicted Jewish Historiography

Posted on July 21, 2017 by admin

By William M Mathew IV: Commissions & Reports; White Paper & Letter These, 1929-31 – from Shaw and Hope Simpson to Passfield and MacDonald – have been cited in the opening paragraph above. Hillel Cohen`s approach is merely to list … Continue reading →

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Balfour, Weizmann and the Creation of Israel by Charles Glass

Posted on September 8, 2016 by admin

Charles Glass, writing in the London Review of Books in 2001, reviewed two books looking at the period of the British Mandate in Palestine. It was also published in the Guardian under the tilte: The Mandate Years; colonialism and the … Continue reading →

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J.M.N. Jeffries` Palestine Deception: Modern Resonances

Posted on March 21, 2016 by admin

In a recent review article (New Middle Eastern Studies 5 [2015]) on , The Palestine Deception, 1915-1923: The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the Balfour Declaration, and the Jewish National Home. ed William Mathew Dr. Nadia Naser-Najjab of the Institute of Arab and … Continue reading →

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Joseph Jeffries and the ‘Palestine Deception’, 1923 by William Mathew

Posted on September 23, 2014 by admin

In a new book, historian William Mathew publishes a series of articles from the Daily Mail of 1923. These presented a hitherto uninformed British readership  with details of official promises made to the Arabs in 1915-16 of post-war independence for … Continue reading →

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Debating Palestine and Israel – Book review by Jeremy Moodey

Posted on June 26, 2014 by admin

Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Mary Grey, Debating Israel and Palestine, (Exeter, Impress Books, 2014). It was George Orwell who wrote in his book 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” As with the … Continue reading →

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Setting the Desert on Fire. Book Review

Posted on February 17, 2014 by admin

James Barr, Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E.Lawrence and Britain’s’  Secret  War in Arabia, (London: Bloomsbury 2006) This book does not fit easily into any one category: it is dramatic, a thrilling account of the last struggles of the Ottoman … Continue reading →

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Anti-Zionism in London’s Jewish East End, 1890-1948

Posted on February 11, 2014 by admin

Anti-Zionism in London’s Jewish East End, 1890-1948  A summary of Chapter 6 with this title in Brian Klug’s: Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life, Vallentine Mitchell (2010) Brian Klug, being a philosopher, approaches this subject from a … Continue reading →

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