ABSTRACT
Though the boundaries of “Palestine” have been imprecise and shifting since ancient times, the term refers generally to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Glenn Robinson outlines a history of the area since it was incorporated into the Roman Empire in 63 BCE and then as it passed under the successive control of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. With the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, Great Britain administered Palestine from 1917 to 1948. The British made vague and contradictory promises to Arab Palestinians about independence from the Turkish Ottomans and to Jews in both Palestine and Europe about an eventual Jewish homeland in Palestine, thus setting the stage for inevitable conflict between Arabs and Jews with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. The consequent 1948 Arab-Israeli War scattered some 700,000 Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East, and in the 1967 and 1973 wars the territory occupied by Israel expanded beyond its 1948 boundaries. Robinson calls attention to Israel’s recent withdrawal from Gaza and its continuing attempts to divide the West Bank according to unilaterally imposed boundaries. Essential to the Palestinian narrative, too, is the growing influence of Hamas in representing the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, counterposed to the role played by the longer-established Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas. Robinson concludes with the bleak assessment that “Palestinians . . . do not control their own fate” but instead live under the power of other states.
