It reflects contemporary colonialist assumptions about Arabs and Jews, the innate authority and arrogance of the world’s largest empire and the author’s mounting frustration as the confrontation unfolded in its earliest days. His memoir is elegantly if pretentiously written.
Storrs was the first British military governor of Jerusalem after the Ottoman surrender in December 1917. Here are ten others which in different ways and at different times have made a significant contribution to illuminating this unending story. Well-known books, especially by Israel’s “new” historians, have made a big impact on knowledge of the formative pre-state period. Perceptions can still be polarized about Israel’s war of independence and the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, the 1967 war, and the character of the occupation that persists 50 years later. Views of fundamental issues like the legitimacy of Zionism or the Palestinians’ right to resistance inevitably color the interpretation of key events from Balfour to the 2014 war over the Gaza Strip. Conflicting or irreconcilable narratives mean that works which tell the story of, and from, both sides, are rare. A century of conflict in Palestine/Israel has produced a vast and ever growing historical literature in English, as well as in Arabic and Hebrew. November 2 marks the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, when the British government famously promised to establish a Jewish “national home” in Palestine.
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