MONTY NOAM PENKOWER, Decision on Palestine Deferred: America, Britain and Wartime Diplomacy 1939–1945, Cass Series: Israeli History, Politics and Society (London: Frank Cass, 2002). Pp. 397. $62.50 cloth.

Extract

Monty Noam Penkower has written a detailed and documented account of the diplomatic relations of American, British, and Palestine-based Zionists with the American and British governments from 1939 to 1945. His theme is that these governments showed a callous disregard for the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust because they refused free immigration into Palestine. The author's scholarship is sound in terms of the people and diplomacy with which he deals. The probable audience for the book is scholars and researchers who are interested in the history of the Holocaust and the response to it by both the Allied powers and Zionist leaders, as well as those interested in the origins of the Israeli state. However, the events covered in this work are explicitly tied to Palestine and its fate, and in that regard the author has produced only a “half history.” Penkower's treatment of Palestine is incomplete because the subject of the Palestinian Arabs, who bear the consequences of the negotiations, planning, and conspiring that the work details are mentioned only in passing and then almost always in negative terms. It is as if one were to write the history of Nazi planning for the Holocaust and only rarely and disapprovingly mention Jews.