Making Israel

Making Israel focuses on Israel's deep historiographic controversies, which erupted in the late 1980s and centres on the Israeli-Arab conflict and the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. The contributions, by leading historians and sociologists including Avi Shlaim, Anita Shapira and Mordechai Bar-On, describe and analyse the main points at issue: the morality of Zionism; the blame for the creation of the Arab refugee problem; Israel's treatment of its Arab and Sephardi minorities; and the relationship between the Jewish State and the Holocaust - from both the traditional Zionist and revisionist non-Zionist perspectives. The book aims to clarify the underlying causes of the continuing conflict between Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbours and, at the same time, the problems undermining Israel's social cohesion.