History 286 - Palestine, 1948

This course explores the war of 1948 in Palestine from the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947 to the cease-fire agreements in early 1949. It has two narratives. The first thread of the course focuses on the voices of Jewish, Palestinians, and British contemporaries taken from diaries and letters from the period. We seek to capture the human element in this event, marked by such different outcomes as redemption and catastrophe, while telling a story of commingled Jewish and Palestinian histories. The second narrative places 1948 in Palestine in global perspective of decolonization, partitions, and forced migrations in the post-1945 world, as well as in an international history of self-determination, minority rights, and the emerging post-1945 world order. We combine then the local and the global.