This book adds to information provided in other exceedingly well-documented books on the same period--including Arieh Avneri's Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement 1878-1948 and Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial.

It too cites numerous British census, agricultural, statistical and other reports, and the writings of C.F. Volney, Mark Twain, Edward Robinson (1841) and British consul James Finn (1878). But Idinopulos also turns to other primary and secondary sources, including the 1854-59 German writings (still untranslated) of Ulrich Seetzen, who traveled the Middle East disguised as an Arab.

In the earliest chapters, Idinopulos confirms an important conclusion of Avneri and Peters--that a large Arab migration into Palestine followed the Jewish immigration that began in about 1870. He also notes that thousands of Jews previously lived in the land, and that Palestine was otherwise largely, though not completely, desolate. More than two thirds of the land west of the Jordan River was desert and swamp, including much of the coastal Sharon plain and the interior. Less than a third of it was fertile. Except for a few wealthy landed Muslim families, inhabitants were unlanded and conditions terrible.
Travelers were routinely attacked by Bedouin thieves. The Ottomans overtaxed everyone, adding for Jews and Christians special dhimmi "protection" taxes." Epidemics of Bubonic Plague, malaria and cholera were common.

Idinopulos, however, did not consult the rich Turkish, Jordanian, Egyptian, Russian or other sources used by Efraim and Inari Karsh in Empires of the Sand. That major drawback naturally limits and skews some conclusions.

For example, his map of the Palestine Mandate does not show land east of the Jordan River, although the Mandate included all of current-day Jordan, which Britain unilaterally ceded to the Emir Abdullah in 1922. Idinopulos breezes through this point, attributing its sole importance to political relations between the left-wing labor Zionists and right-wing Revisionists. Its significance was far greater than that.

In an unfootnoted passage, he also reports that in correspondence with King Faisal, Britain's Henry McMahon promised the Arabs domination over Palestine. This is the Arab view, adopted years after the 1915 correspondence.

Efraim and Inari Karsh and David Fromkin give a sharply different picture: McMahon felt he gave no such assurance, and the Karshes substantially document that Faisal knew it. Isaiah Friedman supports them, with translations of the original correspondence, in Palestine: A Twice Promised Land? Among the strongest evidence is Faisal's signature on a 1919 treaty with Chaim Weizman--agreeing that Palestine, including Jordan, was to be a national home for the Jews. Idinopulos omits that important treaty from his history.

We do learn that the Jewish people acquired land by legitimate purchases, often at above-market prices and that Arabs who complained of Jewish immigration "in the darkness of night were selling land to the Jews." British refusal to invest exacerbated problems, just as Ottoman tax laws had done. But while Zionist-induced prosperity increased the Arab population markedly, Arab violence also increased. Intense Arab inter-factional fighting was in part encouraged by Britain, by empowering Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini, had given power to the most uncompromising and divisive of Arab forces.

In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended a partition and population transfers like those that had occurred with the Greeks and Turks after their 1922 war. The Arabs rejected the plan because it allowed for a Jewish state, and in 1939, Britain attempted to appease the Arabs by cutting off Jewish immigration.

The early chapters are worth reading for the fine writing and detail. Overall, beware of the errors and glaring omissions. Alyssa A. Lappen