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Ms Tuchman's work on this subject covers 2,000 years of British & Israel's history. Covering a long period of time is a difficult task & by necessity informative read. There is a lot to digest but she does a good job giving the background history leading up to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Her coverage of Theodore Herzl & Chaim Weizmann is also quite informative. ( )

The fifth book I've read of Tuchman's! I didn't know what to expect, but, as usual, a splendid romp! I have the impression this was the first book she wrote, if not the first published. She is looking at the Balfour Declaration - how did it come to be? Certainly Britain wanted to plant itself on the east bank of the Suez Canal, to protect the route to India. That's the sword. But it needed to salve its conscience, that's the Bible.

This is like Blake's seeing infinity in a grain of sand, the best kind of vision. The Balfour Declaration might be a big grain of sand, but Tuchman takes it back a few thousand years. Anything comprehensive would run into dozens of volumes at least. Tuchman selects a delightful set of dots for the reader's imagination and further research to connect.

I must say, the chapter on the Puritans ... whew! Back in the 1950s one could see how religion was becoming ever less powerful in public policy. But here we are in the USA with Dominionists in power. Should I be reassured that such fanaticism is nothing new? I do fear we're at the end of modern times... folks talk about WW1 being the end of the era defined by the Treaty of Westphalia. How much of the bloodshed do we need to repeat of the various wars that lead up to that treaty, and the attendant social disintegration.... anyway that's not what this book is about, it's just what it triggered in my mind.

The whole business of Israel and Palestine etc. has certainly gotten just messier since this book was written. Tuchman has her own perspective on the origins of the mess - she has Weizmann and Feisal in full agreement in Paris... I don't doubt that there are very many other perspectives on the matter and that Tuchman's declarations, of how things were, will incense many readers. But that's just a small part of the book. ( )

A masterful survey of the relationship between England and Israel, drawn back to the time before there was an England. The author traces the major players in the millennia of events that led toward the Balfour Declaration, and concludes that the declaration was not inevitable until a particular point in the nineteenth century; prior to that, things could have gone otherwise. There are some errors in the book that are hardly the fault of the author, since she could not be expected to report what was not known at the time she wrote the book, so her reports that archaeology always seemed to support the Biblical narrative jar in this day and time when new information shows that isn't so, but again, she worked with the best information she had. The main beef I have is that, in spite of her claims to be objective, explaining that she did not cover the period from Balfour on because she couldn't be objective, ring hollow when one reads her frequent cheerleading for Israel, the blunt statement that the anti-Zionists were wrong, and the use of fortunately and/or unfortunately when things went the direction she did not favor. In spite of all her well written rhetoric, she was unable to convince me that the Jewish community had any greater claim to the land of their desire than the inhabitants then in the land (who get mentioned a mere twice in passing as though there were some scattered goats and a shepherd or two). It would have been interesting to have heard more about the arguments of the anti-Zionists, especially during the late nineteenth/early twentieth century period as the creation of a Jewish state in Uganda vs. in Israel was being debated. Still, it is informative and interesting, and well worth reading, though it will not be a simple, quick read. You will need to commit yourself to the book for a period of many hours. If you do, you will come out with, hopefully, a clearer understanding of the history of this disputed area, though notably mostly from the standpoint of one country that was involved. ( )

הראשון בספריה של טוכמן ובוודאי לא המוצלח שבהם. הוא חולה בכל החטאים של יתר ספריה, חוסר מחקר, חוסר מיקוד, פטפטנות, אי הבחנה בין החשוב והטפל. הסיבה היחידה לקרוא אותו כי הוא עוסק בנו ( )