The Making of Israel

This book has some excellent information about the end of the British Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, with special emphasis on the final few days prior to the end of the Mandate. Still, there are some errors, here and there. And there is some extravagant language. Here are a couple of examples. It is true that Britain was guilty of a terrible crime by stopping Jewish immigration to the Levant during World War Two. And after the war, sending the ship, the "Exodus" from Haifa to Germany was a political error. But was it an act of "barely credible crudity?" Maybe so. But I certainly would have used different language. Now, what about the creation of Israel itself? This happened in spite of the slaughter of the European Jews, not because of it. But Cameron, rather dubiously, disagrees, calling the German Chancellor during World War Two the "Founding Father of the Land of the Jews." Actually, the British White Paper of 1939 appears to have been the direct cause of the establishment of Israel. And certainly, Ernest Bevin's attempts to stop Israel from existing tended to backfire. But it is hard to imagine how Israel would have failed to come into existence had those six million people still been alive. There was an ugly battle at Deir Yassin. And many have said that Jewish behavior was improper there. That could well be true. But Cameron calls it "a crude massacre that was bloody and shocking even by the brutal standards of the time, terrorism at its most savage." That seems to go overboard, to say the least, especially given the Arab attacks that tended to be far worse and tended to be directed against Jewish civilians. Still, I liked this book, and I do think that Cameron made a serious attempt to be fair.