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    Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
    Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
    Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
    Audiobook6 hours

    Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

    Written by Amy Dockser Marcus

    Narrated by Joyce Bean

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Searching for the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, historians for years focused on the British Mandate period (1920-1948). Amy Dockser Marcus, however, demonstrates that the bloody struggle for power actually started much earlier, when Jerusalem was still part of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism laid the groundwork for the battles that would continue to rage nearly a century later.

    Nineteen thirteen was the crucial year for these conflicts-the year that the Palestinians held the First Arab Congress and the first time that secret peace talks were held between Zionists and Palestinians. World War I, however, interrupted these peace efforts.

    Dockser Marcus traces these dramatic times through the lives of a handful of the city's leading citizens as they struggle to survive. A current events must read in our ongoing efforts to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 15, 2007
    ISBN9781400173617
    Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

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    Reviews for Jerusalem 1913

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    • 5/5
      Interesting review in regards to unknown era before 1948 Palestine
    • 3/5
      The copy of this book bears the authors autograph; purchased at Goodwill. The author recounts the historical origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the earliest moments of the quest by Jews to re-establish a presence. Both Arabs and Israelis accommodated each other -- to some degree -- under the watchful political "eye" of the Ottomans and Turks -- prior to their defeat in WWI -- and the British after WWI and the Balfour Declaration. But an uneasy peace existed. Resentment to the Jewish influx grew. And the bedrock of the conflict was cemented.
    • 5/5
      Jerusalem is one of those few places on Earth that seems never to be able to be at peace. Of course, it's not true - there have been plenty of times when there wasn't. But the times of conflict fill the histories of continents and at least three religions. Over the last hundred years, the modern Arab-Israeli conflict has become the latest of these. Amy Dockser Marcus, profoundly affected by her experiences in Jerusalem, examines how we got to the current state of affairs in Palestine by showing vignettes of the city in 1898 through the beginning of World War I. Jerusalem 1913 isn't so much an depth study of the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict as it is a series of studies of the people and decisions made during the period of interest. Of special note is Dockser Marcus' ability to present how opportunities for peace were missed and how that decision-making both mirrored and led to today's situation.Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Horrified, and with her life haunted by images from the suicide bombing at Café Apropos in Tel Aviv, in 1997, the author says she could not help but wonder "How had this happened? . . . this inability to see the other as a human being. Had it always been this way? At any point along the path that had brought us to this point, could things have turned out differently? . . . There had been a time when various groups shared the city [of Jerusalem], when they saw the place as their common homeland. You could not help but wonder, when confronted with this amazing heritage, about what had gone wrong. How did a place with such a rich history of ethnic diversity become so divided by sectarian conflict? And when had it happened?"This book is the author's attempt to answer those questions. She sets the time frame for the growing Arab-Israeli conflicts at not more than 125 years. “The Arab-Israeli conflict is not the legacy of millennia of hostility. Given that Zionist settlement in Palestine did not even begin until the end of the nineteenth century, the dispute is 125 years old, at most.”The book looks at the growth of Arab-Israeli divisiveness and conflict during that 125-year period in two ways. First, it includes a broad survey of Arab-Israeli attitudes and conflicts from the late 1880's, "when the first Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine with the goal of reclaiming Zion," up until the present day. Second, the book also includes a more detailed examination of what, in retrospect, might have been called the First Arab-Israeli Peace conference, in 1913, when a different road might have been chosen leading to a happier outcome for the present day.Her methodology is, as much as possible, to tell the story through the eyes and writings of several respected and influential leaders of the day who were closely involved with the events and history described. They included: Theodore Herzl, well-known as founder of the Zionist movement; “Albert Antebbi, a Jew born in Damascus who came to dominate the Jewish community in Jerusalem but never embraced Zionism; Ruhi Khalidi, the scion of a prominent Muslim family that had held important religious and social positions in Jerusalem for years, who found himself at the cusp of an emerging Arab nationalism; and Arthur Ruppin, an ardent Zionist [and head of the Palestine Office for land acquisition], and the only one of the three to live to witness the creation of the state of Israel.”The book is therefore historically accurate with respect to the observations of these and many others quoted by the author, but also has an easy-to-read anecdotal quality through the frequent appearance of these authentic narrative voices. But a book of only 216 pages, including 8 pages of bibliography, can only contain so much information in covering such a period of history and certainly much detail has been omitted in the author's broad overview. The author’s interest focuses mainly on origins of the conflict. In modern times, the Hagannah and the bombing of the King David Hotel, for example, can receive only brief mentions.When the first Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine in the late 1880’s with the goal of reclaiming Zion, the Ottomans had ruled the territory for 400 years. The author observes that “Ottoman control had been responsible for the longest peaceful period Jerusalem had known.” However, by the time Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, visited the city in 1898, “the rise of nationalism was [already] shrinking the shared traditions and communal spaces that had always been a central part of the fabric of the city.” She takes some time to describe those shared traditions, “when Muslims and Jews lived side by side in the same buildings . . . and were business partners in the various markets of the Old City, vouched for one another at the bank . . . . .and Jews brought their copper pans to the market to be thoroughly steamed and cleaned by Muslim shop owners before the Passover holiday in the Spring.”As settlers purchased land and became a larger part of the population, land ownership and cultural differences between native Muslims and immigrants from Europe and Russia created local friction, and immigration also became an issue.Arab families had been urging the sultan to start restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine. In 1891, five hundred representatives of the leading Arab families signed a petition asking the sultan to stop Jews from purchasing land there. As settlement continued and time passed, conflicting national and political aspirations grew separately in the Jewish and Arab communities. By 1913, at the Zionist congress of that year, the goal being voiced was that “the Jewish population will have to be in the majority” and “we [Jews] will therefore have to acquire the greater part of the land in Palestine.” Separately, at the Arab-Syrian Congress of the same year “delegates were focused much more on securing increased power for Arabs throughout the [Ottoman] Empire” in its waning days.It was against this background of competing nationalisms in 1913, that several Zionists and leading Arab nationalists were also engaged “in a set of secret negotiations . . . in the hope of making some kind of agreement before the violence and the growing conflict spun completely out of control.” One Arab group, the Decentralization Party in Egypt, in fact, actually recommended that common cause with the Zionists would be more effective in causing “the government to grant them all greater autonomy over their own communities.”When the realities were addressed, however, of creating an agenda and each side choosing suitable delegates to attend these secret negotiations, progress bogged down among mutual doubts. Plans for the conference were quietly abandoned shortly after the onset of World War I and the conference never occurred. “Both the Zionists and the Arabs recognized that there would be a parting of the way. The only question that remained was how soon that would occur. Each side preferred to postpone the inevitable until a more convenient time.”Elsewhere in the book, the author summarizes the failure from a different perspective.“In 1913 the Jews and Palestinians undertook the serious effort to negotiate what we today would call a Middle-East Peace Agreement, and the reason why those negotiations failed involved many of the same issues and problems that still undermine our efforts to find a way for the two sides to reconcile. In 1913, more than at any other time, choices that were made set both parties down a particular path that slowly and inexorably led to where they stand today.”By the close of the book, the author thought back to a solution originally proposed in 1937. The British, during the Mandate, had just proposed to divide Jerusalem into Jewish and Arab parts. Arthur Ruppin, a respected Jewish leader of longstanding "cast his eyes on all that had happened. ... the many achievements and setbacks, victories and losses of life that had followed [since 1913] It had been a long road to get to this moment. The compromise the British proposed did not represent all that he had wanted, dreamed about, worked toward. The choices that lay before him were painful. He knew that the idea of relinquishing any part of Palestine would be viewed by many Jews, including himself, 'as a serious loss' and he felt the potential loss sharply. Despite it all, though, he had still concluded, 'It is not, however, a question of what we would like but of what we can have.' (The emphasis is his). Whenever I walked in Jerusalem, those words seem as haunting and relevant for both the Arabs and the Israelis today as they were back then."[End of book]I hope nobody takes any part of this summary amiss. I have, as much as possible, tried to use the author's words to describe the book and the issues it covers, to avoid becoming personally embroiled in a very contentious subject. If I may offer one opinion, however, it is that, if one is at all interested in understanding the Middle-East conflict, then no single book can contain the complete story. This, however, is one of the books among many that should be read on the topic. It collects viewpoints and valuable information that I have not seen in other books I have read.