For more than a decade, scholars and writers of various stripes have been revisiting the events
surrounding the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948, whose outcome heavily shaped subsequent
Middle East politics. Basing their work primarily on newly available Israeli, British, and American
archival materials, they have shed considerable light and generated much heat regarding the
origins, consequences, and degrees of responsibility for the events surrounding the birth of the
State of Israel, the uprooting of two-thirds of the Palestinian Arab community, and the defeat of
neighboring Arab armies.