About the Book

From longtime Guardian correspondent and editor Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors, a major new history of the Arab-Zionist conflict, told from both sides.

Setting the scene at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in the Ottoman-ruled Holy Land, Black draws on a wide range of sources—from declassified documents to oral testimonies to his own vivid-on-the-ground reporting—to illuminate the most polarizing conflict of modern times. Taking the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British government’s fateful promise to favor the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, as a first major milestone, Black proceeds through the Arab Rebellion of the late 1930s, the Nazi Holocaust, Israel’s independence and the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), the watershed of 1967 followed by the Palestinian re-awakening, Israel’s settlement project, two Intifadas, the Oslo Accords, and continued negotiations and violence up to today. Combining engaging narrative with political analysis and social and cultural insights, Enemies and Neighbors is both an accessible overview and a fascinating investigation into the deeper truths of a furiously contested history that has preserved Palestinians and Israelis as unequal enemies and neighbors.

Praise

“Black . . . argues in this sweeping history that Zionism and Palestinian nationalism were irreconcilable from the start, and that peace is as remote as ever.”—New York Times Book Review, “Editors’ Choice”

“A good read . . . sharp, fast paragraphs filled with vivid detail . . . keeps a tight focus on events on the ground. Punctures the view . . . that Palestinians bear virtually all the blame for the failure of recent efforts to create a Palestinian state.”—Peter Bienart, New York Times Book Review

“A remarkable book that combines sharp insight with absolute impartiality on one of the world’s most complex and intractable conflicts. Black captures the voices of the Palestinians and Israelis with equal compassion, and holds their leaders to account with equal severity. An outstanding accomplishment.” —Eugene Rogan, author of The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920 and The Arabs: A History

“In a conflict like this, it is impossible to understand the present without being familiar with the past, and this superbly researched and highly readable book helps the reader to do just that. Even those who are well read on the subject will find new insights that had escaped them.” —Raja Shehadeh, author of Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine and Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape

“When Israeli and Palestinian historians eventually sit down together to compose a single narrative to replace their bitterly conflicting histories, they will find that Ian Black’s book has already done it for them. It is a tragic tale, full of blood, agony and missed opportunities, but this brilliant, dispassionate work leaves us, curiously, optimistic—for he shows us that there is a middle ground.” —Meron Benvenisti, author of Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948

Excerpt

The sixty-seven typewritten words of the Balfour Declaration combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances, a colonial mindset—as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea. With them, as Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably—neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy—“one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.” Lloyd George highlighted sympathy for the Jews as his principal motivation. But the decisive calculations were political, primarily the wish to outsmart the French in postwar arrangements in the Levant and the impulse to use Palestine’s strategic location—its “fatal geography”—to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to India. Other judgements have placed greater emphasis on the need to mobilise Jewish public opinion behind the then flagging Allied war effort. As Balfour told the war cabinet at its decisive meeting on October 31: “If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal [Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America.” Historians have spent decades debating the connections and contradictions between Balfour’s public pledge to the Zionists, the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain, France and Russia about postwar spheres of influence in the Middle East, and pledges about Arab independence made by the British in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein of Mecca to launch his “revolt in the desert” against the Turks.

The truth, buried in imprecise definitions, misunderstandings and duplicity, remains elusive. The consequences of the declaration are still being played out.

Awards

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice pick