Author Spotlight: Shaul Bartal

The State of Israel was founded in 1948 on the ruins of Arab Palestine. Hundreds of Arab villages were destroyed and thousands of refugees found themselves homeless in the neighboring Arab states or in the districts that were left of Mandatory Palestine – the Jordanian West Bank and the Egyptian Gaza Strip. Israel started to establish its sovereignty over the areas it had captured during the war. But what of the Palestinians? They were supposedly forgotten. Through deep and extensive research this book describes the Palestinians’ conflicts during the 1950’s. This is the struggle of a defeated generation through its own eyes, the struggle of groups and individuals against a reality they could not accept. Their aim was to survive and restore their lives to the path cut off by the Naqba, the “disaster” of the founding of Israel. This is how the second inter-communal war was started. This war included widespread infiltration of Israel by Palestinians and large-scale Israeli retaliatory acts against them. These Palestinian protest movements succeeded in influencing Arab governments (notably Nasser’s Egypt) to take anti-Israel steps. This was a movement of self-sacrifice, Fdaa, whose aim was to liberate Palestine. This volume details the various aspects of Palestinian struggle against Israel during the 1950’s.