The historiography of the 1948 war in Palestine: the missing dimension

While the “New Historians” of the 1948 Palestine War have deepened our understanding of those events, they have primarily been interested in its diplomatic history. What is still missing is a thoroughly documented military history of the war, which can help us treat the war as a war, and not as a political or ideological event, and thus address issues that have so far been neglected. This article shows how such a history can illumine the diplomatic and political aspects of the war through the study of three test cases: the Israeli–Jordanian fighting, which reveals that the two armies came into combat only because of mutual misperceptions and a lack of channels of communication; the Palestinians' success in inflicting severe blows on the Haganah in late March 1948, which points to the role of the Haganah's strategy in its failure; and the story of the unsuccessful Israeli attack on the Egyptian forces at Isdud on the night of 2/3 June 1948, which sheds new light on the meaning and nature of the Jewish victory in the war.