History 492P - S-War for Palestine, 1948

The war for Palestine in 1948 has been the subject of exciting new research in the last several years. At the center of this war stands the interdependence of Jewish independence and the Palestinian Nakba (the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians during the war). New studies have contributed to our knowledge of the war, as well as to its causes, going back to the British Mandate in 1917-1948, and to its consequences for Jews, Palestinians, and other Arabs after 1948. In this seminar we shall explore the local, regional, and global factors that gave meaning to this war, looking at the cultural and political history of Jewish and Palestinian societies, while placing it within a larger international context of the post-1945 period. Some of the topics to be discussed are the British Mandate, social studies on Jewish and Palestinian society, decolonization, partitions, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism. An important goal of our endeavor is to capture the experience of Jews and Palestinians during the war; we shall therefore read primary sources, particularly diaries of contemporaries.