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Collusion Across The Jordan: King Abdullah, The Zionist Movement And The Partition Of Palestine

Avi Shlaim
Reviewed by John C. Campbell
Spring 1989
Collusion Across The Jordan: King Abdullah, The Zionist Movement And The Partition Of Palestine
Avi Shlaim
Columbia University Press
1988
676 pp.
$40.00
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This massive volume puts a burden on the reader, but it is a welcome burden because its very wealth of detail brightens the light thrown on relations among the three key actors in the drama of the partition of Palestine (Britain, Jordan and the Zionists). Access to recently opened archives in London, Washington and Israel, plus revealing interviews and the use of memoirs and other material on both the Israeli and the Arab side, enabled the author not only to fill in the gaps in the known story but also to change it in significant respects. He may overstress the point that his is "revisionist" history, but it does differ from many existing Zionist as well as pro-Arab accounts and, as the record he adduces shows, with good reason. The book should certainly stand the test of time.

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