Efraim Karsh . Palestine Betrayed . New Haven : Yale University Press . 2010 . Pp. ix, 342. $32.50.

This is a competently written book about the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. Based on comprehensive research (mainly in Israeli archives), it joins the passionate debate on the responsibility for the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 war. Its narrative crux represents a sustained justification of the 1961 statement by then Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Golda Meir: “If Arab leadership had remained faithful to the concept of good neighborliness … then the world would have been spared all this misery and the Arabs of Palestine would have lived with us in the national home and in the state of Israel without any of the difficulties that ensued.” The book, as indicated by its name, goes a step further and accuses the leadership—of the Palestinian Arabs and of the Arab states—of betraying their constituencies. Karsh argues that they brought about the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian communities whose members have become refugees when they refused to accept the United Nations' 1947 partition plan (whose main point was the establishment of two states, one Jewish and one Arab in mandatory Palestine) and launched a war against the Jewish state. Karsh buttresses this claim by referring to testimony from Palestinian refugees in Gaza in 1950, and to charges by several Palestinian leaders against Arab countries for complicity for the Nakba.