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Was Israel's occupation of the West Bank inevitable? From 1949-1967, the West Bank was the center of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many Israelis hoped to conquer it and widen their narrow borders, while many Arabs hoped that it would serve as the core of a future Palestinian state. In The Limits of the Land, Avshalom Rubin presents a sophisticated new portrait of the Arab-Israeli struggle that goes beyond partisan narratives of the past. Drawing on new evidence from a wide variety of sources, many of them only recently declassified, Rubin argues that Israel's leaders indeed wanted to conquer the West Bank, but not at any cost. By 1967, they had abandoned hope of widening their borders and adopted an alternative strategy based on nuclear deterrence. In 1967, however, Israel's new strategy failed to prevent war, convincing its leaders that they needed to keep the territory they conquered. The result was a diplomatic stalemate that endures today.
List of contents
Abbreviations Used in the Text and Footnotes
Note on Transliteration
Note on Sources
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Partition's Inheritance: The Making of the Israeli-Jordanian Entente, 1949-1962
2. The Jordanian Crisis of 1963 and Its Consequences
3. A Status Quo Settlement? 1964-1965
4. Louder than a Bomb: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians, 1964-1966
5. Partition's Undoing: The End of the Israeli-Jordanian Entente, 1967
6. The Harvest of War, June-November 1967
7. A Chance for Peace? 1968
8. The Jordanian Civil War and the Seeds of Disengagement, 1969-1970
Conclusion
Sources
Index
About the author
Avshalom Rubin
