Limits of the Land, Perspectives on Israel Studies

“An outstanding historical analysis of a core component to the current Middle East dilemma between Israel and the Palestinians.”—Choice Reviews

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.

“Based on a meticulous examination of numerous Israeli, US, and British archives, as well as relevant Arabic and Russian literature, Avshalom Rubin covers the role of the West Bank in the Arab-Israeli conflict in a comprehensive way. His book stands alone at the top of work on Israeli-Jordanian relations of the period.”—Robert O. Freedman, author of Israel and the United States: Six Decades of US-Israeli Relations