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A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel. Gudrun Krämer. Graham Harman and Gudrun Krämer, transls. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xiii + 357. $35.00 (cloth).
In her preface to this book, Gudrun Krämer contends that existing histories of Palestine are susceptible to a modernist myopia. They tend to start with the arrival of the first Zionist settlers in 1882, as if the history of the region begins and ends with the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Krämer, a professor of Islamic studies at Freie Universität Berlin whose previous work includes books on the history of Islam and on the Jews in modern Egypt, chooses instead to begin her narrative with the earliest records of settlement from the Old Stone Age, and she continues from there to the biblical period, the Ottoman era, and the British Mandate. Her account ends, as the title suggests, with the Arab-Israeli armistice of 1949.
The scope of the coverage means that this is necessarily a very broad survey. Krämer relies heavily on secondary sources-primarily in English, but also in German and Arabic-and she moves fairly rapidly through the pre- and early modern periods, devoting just two chapters to Jewish antiquity in Palestine and to the reasons for the region's spiritual significance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This introductory section is followed by three chapters on the late Ottoman period, focusing on the years between 1750 and 1918. The closing date is uncontroversial, since it marks the fall of the Ottoman empire following the Allied victory in the Levant, but the starting date once again emphasizes Krämer's effort to unseat 1882 "as the date of Palestine's entry into modernity" (40). By beginning her account in the eighteenth century, Krämer is able to...