ABSTRACT
In the past half-century, Israel and the Arabs have fought five wars, each of them-1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982-distinguished by an individual name. However, the historian of the future, with the benefit of hindsight, will probably see the wars fought by Israel and the Arabs as points on a sequence which will be called ‘The Arab-Israeli War,’ beginning with the 1948 conflict. Yet 1948, too, was but one event in a long history of confrontation dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the Zionist movement penetrated Palestine. The research on these themes is far from exhausted. Not only has the Arab-Israeli conflict and the wars that have punctuated it not been examined from the broader perspectives of social, economic and cultural history, much remains to be done even as regards military-diplomatic history. This is perhaps most true of the 1948 war, even though it has recently been scrutinized in various academic and public forums within the context of the debate over the ‘New Historians’.1
