DepSem: WarPeace: Arabs Isr

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The course, conducted as a seminar and mainly on the basis of readings of contemporary documents, will focus on political, diplomatic and military aspects of the first Arab-Israeli war, of 1948. We will look at the United Nations partition resolution of 29 November 1947 and on the diplomatic-political struggle that preceded it. We will then look at the war's two halves - the civil was between the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine between November 1947 and May 1948, and at the war between the newborn Sate of Israel and the surrounding Arab states that followed, during May 1948-July 1949. We will look at the international context of the war (Cold War, decolonization) and at the policies of the Great Power players - Britain, the United States and the USSR, and we will devote time to the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem. Lastly, we will look at the war's consequences.