“A masterful examination of a key period in the history of mandatory Palestine by one of the foremost historians of the modern Jewish experience. A must read for anyone interested in understanding the origin of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its stubborn resistance to a peaceful settlement.”
Efraim Karsh, Professor of Middle East & Mediterranean Studies, King’s College London, and ... Read moreauthor of "Palestine Betrayed" “This is a thorough, painstaking analysis of the various forces that shaped Palestine’s fate in the decade that preceded the Second World War. Beyond its undoubted contribution to the historical knowledge of the 1930s, Penkower’s book refutes convincingly the Palestinians’ claim that Israel has been an outcome of the Holocaust – an assertion that many Israelis and others axiomatically accept. He shows how the basis of Jewish statehood in the Land of Israel had been established already before the war and the destruction of European Jewry. Similarly, Penkower shows how Palestinian-Arab society’s collapse had begun before the war.”
Yoav Gelber, Professor of History, The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, and author of "Palestine 1948: War, Escape, and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" “Penkower proves to be a historian of the first order, one who marshals hundreds of sources to present a cogent, almost weekly chronological record of six years of men’s failures and successes, their ideas, their ideals, their hatreds and their irrationalities. . . . Little escapes Penkower, even the minor instances that others have considered insignificant. . . . The author also includes certain gems that transform dry history into memorable history and echo contemporary times. . . . Palestine in Turmoil seamlessly moves from continent to continent, party to faction, person to personality, event to event, and despite the required hundreds of footnotes, it still allows the reader to follow the complicated story.”
Yisrael Medad
Jerusalem Post Magazine
“One would think that Israel’s genesis should be, by this time, well-trodden terrain. . . . But Monty Penkower’s two-volume work is the first that comprehensively explores the growing rift between the two peoples — and the fissures within the Arab and Jewish communities as well — against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism, the stance of the Arab states, and British realpolitik considerations. . . . Penkower deftly walks the reader through the seemingly endless negotiations amongst the three parties in Palestine, and — crucial to the narrative — through the internal divisions within each group. . . . “Palestine in Turmoil” makes a substantial contribution to history of 1930s Palestine Scholars and students will benefit from Penkower’s clear narrative and his prodigious archival research, and just plain folks — many of us had our unfortunate early education about Palestine from the blockbuster novel and movie “Exodus” — will learn about an era that is central to our understanding of how the Arab-Israeli conflict came to be.”
Jerome A. Chanes
The Jewish Daily Forward
“While Monty Noam Penkower’s two-volume account of the upheavals in Palestine in the decade before the Second World War covers familiar ground in terms of the historical scholarship, his books are rich in empirical detail, based as they are on an impressive range of archival material. . . . This is in essence a political history of the British–Zionist–Palestinian triangle in the formative years before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.”
Matthew Hughes, Brunel University
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Volume 14, Issue 1
"What Penkower calls "the crucial nexus that exists between the rise of the State of Israel and the Holocaust, the most significant events in the contemporary Jewish experience" has been at the heart of his scholarship for more than four decades. In critically-acclaimed books and seminal scholarly essays, the professor emeritus of Jewish history at the Machon Lander Graduate Center of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, has demonstrated an unparalleled grasp of the diplomatic, political, and social circumstances that shaped Jewish fate in the years 1933-39. His remarkable research and analytical skills are on full display in his new, two-volume Palestine in Turmoil."
Rafael Medoff
Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2016)
"While the impact of the Holocaust upon the creation of Israel during the later period 1945–1948 has been the subject of much scholarly and popular attention, Palestine in Turmoil takes us back more than a decade to present, in meticulous detail, the looming destruction in Europe alongside Arab and British threats to terminate the Jewish national home “experiment” in Palestine. . . .[M]akes an important contribution to the study of a crucial period in Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli history.”
Neil Caplan (Vanier College and Concordia University), Journal of Israeli History, vol. 35, no. 1 (March 2016) Show Less