https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Book-review-Getting-the-world-to-sign-off-602139
BY YISRAEL MEDAD
Continuing his previous trenchant and detailed history of the Palestine Mandate which covered the years 1933-1939 in his 2014 two-volume Palestine in Turmoil: The Struggle for Sovereignty, Monty Penkower – former professor of Jewish History at Rutgers University, Bard College, Touro College and New York University – now allows the reader again to be able to grasp the intertwined elements of the sub-history of that era. We are led along as the British Mandatory ruler, facing a post-Holocaust reality (the Holocaust period was covered in an earlier 1994 volume, The Holocaust and Israel Reborn), a determined and increasingly militant Jewish community in the Jewish Yishuv community and its need to maintain proper relations with the United States as well as balanced ones with the Arab world. Ultimately, it failed to maneuver itself to a successful conclusion of its administration of the territory the international community decided in 1922 would be the reconstituted Jewish national homeland and awarded it rule over Palestine.
Penkower’s trilogy has marshaled the facts from the documents, memos, diaries and newspaper reports of the time as well as providing an up-to-date collection of the historical research that has been published. We are presented with off-the-cuff remarks, protocols, speeches and the more cached away notations at the time.
This volume, as with the others, is tightly framed in a chronological procession. Month by month, week by week and day by day, Penkower has his reader delve into the at times frenetic and at times frustrating attempts by all the major actors to push their policies, most times in a competing and contradictory fashion. Penkower, to his credit, does not allow the reader to lose the greater picture and provides analysis in an objective style of relating history as it happens.
If there are major lessons to be derived for those wondering what is happening today, the book reveals the utter reversal of British policy from the League of Nations intent in that senior British officials not only reformulate their 1922 charge but express horrible anti-Jewish views in complete opposition to the events they were caught up in.