The standard works place the coup against Mossadeq solidly in the context of the Cold War and the fear of communism – both of the Tudeh Party and of the Soviet Union. This chapter instead locates it firmly within the context of the wider American concern that successful nationalization in Iran would inevitably became contagious and endanger business enterprises elsewhere, especially oil investments in Latin America, Indonesia, and other parts of the Middle East.

The 1906 Constitutional Revolution had tried to create a parliamentary form of government with the monarch as titular figurehead. Reza Shah, however, in 1925–41, had reduced parliament to a rubber stamp. Mossadeq, in addition to nationalizing the oil industry, tried to reassert parliamentary authority and civilian control over the armed forces. This brought him in conflict with Mohammad Reza Shah. Thus the oil crisis and the constitutional crisis became interwoven paving the way to the coup.

The book is an analysis of recently released CIA and State Department documents on Iran during the period of Mossadeq’s premiership beginning in April 1951 until his overthrow by the CIA in August 1953. These documents had been kept classified some thirty years beyond their scheduled date of release. They reveal that the United Kingdom and USA resorted to “fake news” and “electoral collusion” to undermine Mossadeq. They also reveal the existence of a “deep state” within the Truman administration advocating Mossadeq’s removal as early as May 1951.

The United Kingdom and USA favored the removal of Mossadeq as early as 1952 but the main obstacle to a military coup had been the shah. He insisted the removal had to be through non-military means. The CIA began drawing up plans for a coup early on, but succeeded in persuading the shah to lend his name to the coup only after the parliament method had failed. It even had to resort to intensive pressures including the threat of replacing him with one of his brothers.

Our knowledge of the 1953 coup has been distorted in part because US documents remained classified until recently – the British ones remain so; and in part because revisionist historians have argued endlessly that external powers played merely secondary roles while the primary actors were internal ones, namely the conservative clergy. The new documents show that without the CIA there would have been no royal participation, no parliamentary obstructionism, no tank officer coordination, and no clerical involvement. The coup, by undermining the legitimacy of the monarchy, helped pave the way to the 1979 revolution – precisely the reason the shah had been reluctant to lend his name.

The documents reveal the deep involvement of the USA and the United Kingdom in internal Iranian politics before the 1953 coup – especially in attempts to water down nationalization, to replace Mossadeq with a more compliant prime minister, resulting in the July 1952 uprising, and to prevent the shah from leaving Iran in early 1953. The shah later thanked the USA for having saved the monarchy in February 1953.

The introduction to A Battlefield of Memory provides the reader with an understanding of the societal importance of the foundational pasts under review while highlighting existing trends of denial. Readers are also familiarized with polls conducted among Palestinians and Israeli-Jews on attitudes toward the other’s foundational trauma and failed reconciliatory attempts, which shed light on the materialization of mnemonic delegitimization efforts. Interviews conducted with the Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian individuals responsible for these initiatives demonstrate that they have, ironically, been accused of the same perfidious conduct, namely “selling out to the enemy.” The introduction further provides a synopsis of scholarly approaches to collective memory theory and the key research methodologies that have been applied in the collection of primary source material. It is in this particular context that the reader is informed of important caveats that should be taken into account during the reading of this work. One such provision concerns this work’s simultaneous deliberation of the Holocaust and the Nakba, which does not mean equating them or promulgating a causal linkage. Such a conflation would not only be historically – and ethically – erroneous, but equally fail to recognize the divergence in historical culpability. Nevertheless, as this work illustrates, a more relational linkage does exist: as dominant national metanarratives, the Holocaust and the Nakba have bolstered exclusive identities within the two groups, both centering on unique claims of ongoing victimhood and loss and a consequential devaluation – if not denial – of the other’s catastrophe