Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2002
For more than a decade, scholars and writers of various stripes have been revisiting the events surrounding the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948, whose outcome heavily shaped subsequent Middle East politics. Basing their work primarily on newly available Israeli, British, and American archival materials, they have shed considerable light and generated much heat regarding the origins, consequences, and degrees of responsibility for the events surrounding the birth of the State of Israel, the uprooting of two-thirds of the Palestinian Arab community, and the defeat of neighboring Arab armies.