Israel: The First Hundred Years. Vol. I: Israel's Transition from Community to State

edited by Efraim Karsh. London, Portland: Frank Cass, 2000. 249 pp. $57.50.This volume, edited by the Director of the Mediterranean Studies Program, King's College, London, its somewhat expansive title (100 years?), is a thoroughly researched collection of Specialized essays. A concluding section abstracts is a welcome addition. contents are conveniently divided into major themes -- Nations, Nationalism and Building, Making of the Yishuv, and Struggle for Independence.Anthony D. Smith's Sacred Territories and National is scholarly and thorough, operating in a quite theoretical framework which deals other peoples and places more than Israel.David Vital's `State within a State' to State and Donna Robinson Divine's Civil Society to Sovereign State: Israeli Experience and the Palestine Quest ably examine the transition of the Jewish Community of Palestine to the of Israel and the organizations critical to Israel's establishment in 1948. Divine sees many common links between Zionist state building and the situation facing the Palestinians -- the role of the Histadrut in Israel and Hamas (!) and other voluntary bodies in the Palestinian entity. She asserts that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have created a more vibrant civil society than at any other time in their (sad commentary on that history past and present!).Ruth Kark and Joseph B. Glass in their study The Jews in Eretz-Israel/Palestine: From Traditional Peripherality to Modern Centrality assert that they are filling a research lacuna, state an ambitious set of objectives, and basically fulfill them. (We are informed that the word Palestine came from the Hebrew word Pleshet -- what happened to land of the Philistines?) essay is divided clarity into major sub titles and tables; pictures add to the reader's interest. Continuity and change between different generations are spelled out ably, relationships within the vis-a-vis economic, cultural, and political matters well delineated.Gideon Biger in his The Boundaries of Mandatory Palestine: How the Past Influences the Future describes in intricate detail the shifting versions of where boundaries were perceived and modified under competing claims. It is a very thick forest for which no maps are offered; other authors are able to do so.Zionism and -- Conflict of Priorities: Changes in Zionist Settlement in the Vicinity, 1937-48 by Yossi Katz notes that there was limited settlement activity in the vicinity of before the mid 1930s. Katz explains the number of factors involved in such neglect particular emphasis on Zionist thinkers and movement leaders having displayed an attitude of contempt, derision and estrangement toward Jerusalem (toward the Old Yishuv its ultra-Orthodox Jewish Community). pragmatic Zionist establishment in the aftermath of World War II had come to terms with the fact that within the framework of a solution to the Palestinian problem and the attainment of the Jewish State, Zionism could not avoid concessions on Jerusalem.Railways in Israel: Past and the Future, by Walter Rothschild, which consciously has no footnoting, may be of marginal interest to many readers, although materials on reasons for railroad building in World Wars I and II are of somewhat more interest. …