The 400 years before the founding of the Jewish state is a historiographical minefield, but Krämer (The Jews in Modern Egypt
), a professor of Islamic studies at Free University Berlin, manages to produce an illuminating survey of the terrain. She insists that modern Palestine had a history before large-scale Jewish immigration began in the late 19th century, along with a substantial, rooted Arab population and society, and a growing economy. The author pays full due to the dynamism of the Zionist nation-building project and the development it brought to Palestine, often to the benefit of Arabs, but also accords weight and legitimacy to the Arab nationalist reaction—while observing that, even as the two communities remained socially segregated, they were economically interdependent and spatially intertwined. The author's restrained account of Israel's war of independence notes atrocities on all sides as it depicts a sometimes incidental, sometimes deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing of Arabs by the Israeli military. Krämer's fluent narrative pairs a much-needed focus on facts—including useful data on contentious issues of population growth and land ownership—with an evenhanded avoidance of partisanship. 14 b&w photos, maps. (Mar.)
