The State of Israel

Galina Nikitina's study is a working Orientalist's monograph rather than a pamphlet, and its research apparatus is Israeli and Western almost throughout: the Statistical Abstract of Israel, the Bank of Israel Bulletin, The Israel Economist, The Jerusalem Post, Keesing's Contemporary Archives, the Government Yearbook, and the memoirs of Weizmann and Abba Eban.

Nine chapters carry the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate, the Yishuv, the partition vote, the 1948 war, five Knessets, the Sinai campaign, immigration, agriculture, industry, foreign trade, American aid and West German reparations. An afterword extends the story to July 1971 through the June war, Resolution 242 and the Rogers plans.

The economic chapters are the best of it and remain useful, tracking American transfers from 1948 onward, the 1952 reparations agreement and its industrial destination, the balance of payments, the state budget and the unusual tripartite economy of state, private and Histadrut sectors - all from Israeli official statistics, cited by table and page.

Her treatment of immigration is genuinely good social science. She argues that migration to Palestine was driven chiefly by external persecution, and tests it the obvious way, by looking at where Jews went when they had a choice: of the millions who emigrated between 1881 and 1930 the overwhelming majority went to the Americas. She then does something few writers on either side were doing at the time and counts the people leaving, setting emigration against immigration year by year. Yerida was a real and under-studied phenomenon, and she saw it.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which is exact about where the book is reliable and where it is not.