The reviews appear in the Spring edition of the Naval War College Review. Below are the two opening paragraphs. Be sure to read the whole thing. These books are definitely on my father's day wish list:
Adelman, Jonathan. The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State. London: Routledge, 2008. 269pp. $37.95
Cohen, Stuart A. Israel and Its Army: From Cohesion to Confusion. London: Routledge, 2008. 210pp. $39.95
For much of the world, Israel remains a controversial, indeed reviled, state. It has been described as a “racist, colonialist” nation; the subagent of American or Western imperialism; a “stepchild” of the Holocaust or the Jewish Diaspora; the “brutalizer of Arabs”; and an intransigent enemy of regional peace in the Middle East.However, as JonathanAdelman shows inThe Rise of Israel, there are serious shortcomings in all these descriptions of the Jewish state.
Adelman does more than merely debunk the negative stereotypes of Israel arising from the “Arab victimization narrative” and post-Zionism. In this interesting and informative book he argues that the creation and survival of the Jewish state constitutes something of a miracle. The fact is that over the past several centuries, only some 5 percent of the four thousand peoples (“nations”) of the world have achieved statehood.Most have done so because they had large populations constituting demographic majorities within given regions, populations that possessed a common culture, language, history, and religion. Accordingly, they were able to predominate in single areas for many centuries. The Jews who created the State of Israel lacked these normal attributes of statehood. So how did Israel come into being, and why did it flourish against all odds?
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