Book Reviews 115 

The War for Palestine: 

Rewriting the History of 1948 

Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Sh/aim, ed<;. 

Afterword by Edward W Said 
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 234 pages. 

The events of 1948 mark the Palestinians' nakbah (catastrophe) and the 

Israelis' war of independence. The historiographies describing and analyz­
ing these events have always been debated and contested. For instance, 

1948 can be described as a founding element of Palestinian and Israeli iden­

tities respectively. A serious attempt to rewrite earlier historiography was 

introduced by the Israeli "new historians" in the 1980s. Based on docu­
ments and materials from recently opened Israeli archives, they set out to 

challenge Israel's founding myth and the lopsided description of the caus ­

es and events leading to the Palestinian refugee problem. 
The volume under review moves the rewriting a step further by 

attempting to take a fresh look at the Arab states' and the Palestinians' 

involvement in the development of the 1948 war. The editors suggest that