Paul Cheney's "Revolutionary Commerce"

Paul Cheney is Assistant Professor of History, University of Chicago.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Revolutionary Commerce deals with the economic and historical thought of the Chevalier d’Arcq, a downwardly mobile literary hack who found himself—like many other members of France’s military aristocracy—on the wrong side of history as Europe became more commercial, meritocratic and bourgeois. For the majority of writers prior to the French Revolution, economics was a discipline more akin to comparative political theory or sociology, and so here we find d’Arcq puzzling over the question of how France (and more importantly, members of the French elite like himself…) could find a place in an international order increasingly dominated by trade. This question was all the more pressing for the French because it seemed to many that their ancient monarchy was ill-adapted to economic competition with commercial republics such as Holland and England. As I discuss in the closing chapters of Revolutionary Commerce, the French never really found a successful formula for politically adapting to the challenges of globalization, which helps to explain the form that the Revolution took when it came in 1789.

Read an excerpt from Revolutionary Commerce, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marla Miller's "Betsy Ross and the Making of America"

Marla Miller directs the Public History program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she also teaches courses on the American Revolution and early Republic.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Betsy Ross and the Making of America, and reported the following:

My book, Betsy Ross and the Making of America, is the first scholarly biography of the famed seamstress, the alleged maker of the nation's first flag. The book aims to get past the Betsy Ross of folk legend and historical pageantry and recover the world of Elizabeth Griscom Ross Ashburn Claypoole (1752-1836), a Philadelphia upholsterer and flagmaker for more than sixty years. One of the main challenges of the book is that, since Ross wasn't yet famous at the time of her death, none of her papers were saved for posterity. The legend of the making of the first flag is preserved wholly in affidavits signed by descendents and other family members decades later. The book, then, seeks to tell her story by restoring it in the context of Revolutionary Philadelphia, and the large Griscom family (Betsy was one of 17 children) who weathered the rebellion and its aftermath together.

Page 99 introduces one of my favorite episodes in that family history, the disownment of Betsy Ross from the Society of Friends, or Quakers. On that page -- the second page of Chapter 6, "Domestic Rebellions" -- I'm just warming to the topic of resistance in the household of Betsy's parents, Samuel and Rebecca Griscom, who were having as much trouble controlling their "unruly subjects" in the late 1760s and 70s as was George III.

People who know a little bit about Betsy Ross usually know that in order to marry John Ross (who, as the son of an Anglican minister, was off-limits to Quaker girls like Betsy), she had to elope to New Jersey; she was disowned from the Society of Friends for marrying, as they say, "out of unity." Much has been made of this romantic episode--Betsy Ross as headstrong, and lovestruck. So on p. 99 I am just introducing the story of how Betsy's four older sisters, as it turns out, had each, also, been disowned for marrying "contrary to discipline"--one of them, in fact, for having had a child our of wedlock. As I explain how each girl, in turn, was chastised by the church, and how some of them managed to drag the deliberative process of disownment out for months and months, I set up the story of Betsy's own elopement and disownment, events that end far more abruptly as she quickly reports that she will be leaving the Society, so there's no need for any long conversation about possible regret, forgiveness, and the restoration of unity with that community of faith.

This is one of the juicier sections of the book, and contains some of the most fun stories to tell, and I'd say too that it is indeed pretty well representative of the larger book because it's mainly about Betsy's sisters, but ends by yielding new insight into Betsy, too, since her comparatively quick decision to forego the traditional means by which such breaches are resolved suggests--to me at least--her very decisive nature. In the Myers-Briggs typology, as I suggest elsewhere in the book, Betsy Ross was rock-solid "J" (quick to make judgments), and this episode helps me to show that.

Read an excerpt from Betsy Ross and the Making of America, and learn more about the book and author at the official website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wenda Trevathan's "Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives"

Wenda Trevathan is the Regents Professor of Anthropology at New Mexico State University. A biological anthropologist whose research focuses on the evolutionary and biocultural factors underlying human reproduction, her publications include Evolutionary Medicine and Health: New Perspectives.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: How Evolution Has Shaped Women’s Health, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: How Evolution Has Shaped Women’s Health is given over to a discussion of pelvic organ prolapse (POP), not the most attractive of the health problems I talk about in the book. My first reaction was to dismiss the whole idea and argue that it isn’t representative of the book, but, on reflection, it actually does a pretty good job of exemplifying the arguments I make. The evolutionary process has involved a number of tradeoffs over the course of human history; very few of the fundamental characteristics that make us human has required more compromises than the evolution of bipedalism, or two-legged walking. In fact, there are a number of medical specialties that owe their existence to the fact that we walk on two legs, including orthopedics, podiatry, physical therapy, chiropractic, osteopathy, sports medicine, and obstetrics/midwifery.

Another fundamental characteristic of humans is our large brains and heads, and just as natural selection was favoring a narrow pelvis for bipedal walking, it was also favoring increased brain size. This helps to explain why birth is so much more challenging for humans than it appears to be for most other mammals. In a four-legged animal, the tough muscles of the abdominal wall contain the internal organs in a sling beneath the spine and their weight is spread out evenly along the horizontal support. With the shift to bipedalism, the organs are now packed in the bowl formed by the pelvic bones and they are squished downward, sometimes spilling forward out of the basin, putting strain on the abdominal wall. Too much strain can result in small openings in the lower abdomen through which the intestines can spill known as hernias. The abdominal muscles provide only a little support from the front, so it’s up to the muscles and ligaments in the lower pelvic basin to do the hard work of holding the organs in and keeping them from falling through the pelvic opening. Unfortunately, sometimes they do fall through, resulting in the medical disorder called pelvic organ prolapse or POP. This is thoroughly discussed on page 99, but if that’s all you read, you’ll miss a lot of the more interesting topics including the health consequences of early puberty, highly frequent menstrual cycling, difficult births, breastfeeding, and menopause.

Read an excerpt from Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives, and learn more about the book at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ian Johnson's "A Mosque in Munich"

Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Ian Johnson spent five years researching and writing A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, interviewing survivors, scouring archives, and pressuring governments to release sensitive intelligence documents. He is also the author of Wild Grass: Three Portraits of Change in Modern China.

Johnson applied the “Page 99 Test” to A Mosque in Munich and reported the following:

This is a part of the book that I had a lot of fun researching. It's the late 1950s and one of the coldest points in the Cold War. Espionage is rife and each side is angling for "assets" to use against the others. Thanks to newly declassified information that I used on this page, I could piece together a turning point in the book.

The West Germans have identified a group of Muslims living in Munich who had fought for the Nazis in World War II. The government in Bonn hopes to use them to curry favor in the Muslim world against the East Germans. But the CIA has started to make overtures to these Muslims and is hoping to usurp the Germans and use these Muslims in covert propaganda operations against the Soviet Union.

At this point in the story, one of our protagonists, Gerhard von Mende, has just brought back to Germany an Uzbek who had been the imam of a SS division in the war and declared him head of Munich's Muslims. He hopes that this person will unite the Munich Muslims and keep out the United States. Von Mende's letters are rife with criticism of the Americans and grand plans to win over the Muslims. At this point in the book, his man has just arrived in Munich.

When you think of it, the move was audacious--and kind of galling. Who the heck was von Mende, himself a Nazi agent and post-war spook, to anoint someone as head of a group of Muslims? It was also a tactical disaster. The man he picked had worked in a division famous for its cruel suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Today we
might call him a war criminal. Back then he lacked credibility. The upshot: the West Germans lost control of the Muslims and the door was opened for the Muslim Brotherhood to gain its first toehold in the West.

Learn more about the book and author at Ian Johnson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacy Dittrich's "Stumbling Along the Beat"

Stacy Dittrich is an award-winning law enforcement officer and former detective specializing in sex crimes. A certified law enforcement instructor, she is also a media consultant in the area of law enforcement. Her books include the CeeCee Gallagher thriller series and the true crime thriller, Murder Behind the Badge: True Stories of Cops Who Kill.

Dittrich applied the “Page 99 Test” to her recently released memoir, Stumbling Along the Beat: A Policewoman's Uncensored Story from the World of Law Enforcement, and reported the following:

Interestingly enough, page 99 of Stumbling Along the Beat actually set the stage for things to come. This particular case involving “Edward” became embedded in my brain forever. It was the case that actually set the stage for my exit as a full time law enforcement officer. The story of Edward and his dolls became the inspiration and the beginning of my new career as a writer. My first novel, The Devil’s Closet, follows protagonist—female detective CeeCee Gallagher, as she hunts a serial child killer who has a disturbing affliction for life-sized dolls. I thought it was extremely important to feature Edward’s case in Stumbling Along the Beat as it leads the reader towards an understanding of why I chose to take a different career path in the end.

Page 99:

“Can we go upstairs?”

“I…I suppose.” By now, he was sweating profusely.

Basically, we needed to stall as long as possible, to give the department time to get the warrant completed and signed. Jim had already called the detective writing the warrant to get him to add the information on the photo album.

Searches are tricky. Yes, Edward had given us consent to search certain areas, and we’d found more than enough for probable cause, but only in the general area in which the contraband was found—not in the bedroom. We clearly had enough to arrest Edward for child pornography, but a search warrant would make the evidence and arrest airtight. And it would give us free rein to search the rest of the house, including the bedroom. Luckily for us, it was the middle of the day, so the judge was in his chambers, ready to review and sign the warrant.

When I got upstairs, I found more startling photos. This wasn’t mail-order kiddie porn. By the upstairs window, lying next to a camera, were photographs of little girls playing in sprinklers wearing bathing suits, little girls playing hopscotch and riding their bikes on the sidewalk. In the corner of each photograph was the distinct image of a window frame.

I looked out the window and back at the photographs, realizing that Edward stood at that particular window taking photographs of little girls in the neighborhood. As a mother, the thought horrified me. Little did the parents in that neighborhood know that their daughters were being photographed for a grown man’s sexual gratification.

Browse inside Stumbling Along the Beat, and learn more about the book and author at Stacy Dittrich's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Eig's "Get Capone"

Jonathan Eig is a former writer and editor for the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal and the former executive editor of Chicago magazine. He is the author of two highly acclaimed bestsellers, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. Luckiest Man won the Casey Award for best baseball book of 2005, and Opening Day was selected as one of the best books of 2007 by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Sports Illustrated. Eig lives in Chicago, half a mile from the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, with his family.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster, and reported the following:

The test fails.

Page 99 of my book is a section break. It’s the start of the book’s second act. The page contains only four words:

PART TWO

KING CAPONE

For some time while I was writing, I thought about using “King Capone” as the book’s title. It has a nice ring to it, evoking King Kong, of course, but also suggesting that he was a man who ruled his world.

Capone was in fact the king of the Chicago underworld, if only for a period of four or five years. He came to the city in 1920, at the dawn of Prohibition, and worked at first as bouncer and bartender in a dive called the Four Deuces. He was fortunate, though, to have for his boss a man named Johnny Torrio, who recognized that the ban on booze could make criminals insanely wealthy. So Torrio, with Capone at his side, assembled an organization that would continue to produce and distribute beer and alcohol in spite of the national law.

Capone was a capable lieutenant, but he was not the visionary, and he did not seem particularly hungry for power.

So how did he become king?

In 1926, two things happened that changed his life: Torrio got shot, decided to retire, and left Capone in charge. The man known as Scarface was only 27 years old at the time and a virtual unknown.

The second event was even more critical: Someone shot and killed a prominent local prosecutor, William McSwiggin. Most people assumed the killer was Capone. So the big man disappeared for a couple of months, and it appeared that perhaps he would never return.

Instead, in the summer of ’26, Capone came back to Chicago. He summoned the press. He declared his innocence and declared that he’d been bribing the prosecutor for years and certainly had no reason to kill him.

From that moment on, Capone became a towering figure on the national scene. He embraced celebrity like no gangster before or since. He tried to make the world see him as he must have seen himself: as a businessman merely trying to meet the public demand for his product, a man who had been all but forced into a life of crime by an unpopular law, a man who tried his best to avoid conflict but, yes, did occasionally find it impossible to avoid.

There were bigger criminal outfits in the country. There were more vicious gangsters out there, too. Capone became king not so much by his actions but by his words. He loved talking to reporters. He always felt like he had to explain himself. He felt picked on. When the stock market collapsed in 1929, he said he couldn’t wait to see how the feds would blame that on him, too.

Damon Runyon and other ink-stained wretches ate it up.

But crime kings, as a rule, do not enjoy lengthy periods of rule.

When Herbert Hoover took office (and before the economy tanked), he grew furious with Capone’s high and mighty image. He wanted to show Americans that he intended to enforce the nation’s laws, including the unpopular ones. He made plans for sweeping reforms in criminal justice, but he also wanted to make a symbolic gesture, and to do that he informed his top officials that he wanted them to go after Capone.

That’s the turning point of my book. That’s where the conflict and the suspense really arise. That’s why, after much debate, I decided not to call my book King Capone.

If you read Get Capone and think I chose badly, you can rip out page 99 and paste it on the cover. I won’t mind. And you won’t miss a word of text.

Here’s the first full page that follows, the beginning of the “King Capone” section on page 101:

Al Capone called his organization the outfit, small t, small o. He referred to it casually, and, despite the organization’s Byzantine structure and bountiful cash flow, he ran it fairly casually, too. The word “mafia” never crossed his lips. The term usually applied to Sicilian criminal groups, and Capone was not a Sicilian. He was also non-discriminatory in his hiring practices. His closest aides were Jack Guzik, a Jew,; Tony Lombardo, a Sicilian; and Frank Nitti, who hailed from Angri in Calabria. Brother Ralph Capone supervised beer distribution (thus his nickname, “Bottles”), assisted by Capone’s cousin Charlie Fischetti and another Italian business associate named Lawrence Mangano. Pete Penovich, a native of Austria, ran much of the gambling business. A pair of Irishmen, George “Red” Barker and William “Three Fingered” White, along with a Welshman named Murray “The Camel” Humphreys, took care of the labor unions and rackets. The outfit’s principal gunman was Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, a Sicilian, whose real name was Vincenzo Antonio Gibaldi.

The Capone empire reached every corner of the city, and yet, like Lake Michigan, it was nearly impossible from almost any single angle to comprehend its depth and breadth. Capone owned the house on Prairie Avenue, along with with his wife and mother. But that was it. He didn’t want to be tied too closely to any of the illicit businesses he helped to supervise and supply. Members of his organization, on the other hand, had their own hotels, casinos, speakeasies, lower-class speakeasies known as “blind pigs,” cabarets, restaurants, breweries, bakeries, and brothels. Capone would get a slice of the profits…

Read an excerpt from Get Capone, and learn more about the book and author at the official Get Capone website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bonnie J. Rough's "Carrier"

Bonnie J. Rough is an American writer living in Amsterdam. She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new memoir, Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA, and reported the following:

The test works perfectly for my book! On page 99 of Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA, I’m 27 years old and getting a taste of what my road to becoming a mother might feel like—a perfect slice of the “quality of the whole.” My blood sample was still in the lab for DNA testing, to determine whether I risked passing a rare genetic disorder to my future children. I had just published an essay in The New York Times “Modern Love” column about the dilemma my husband and I might face: If I turned out to be a carrier of hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, or HED, any sons we bore risked being born with a lack of sweat glands, only a few tooth buds, sparse hair, a slightly unusual appearance, and extra susceptibility to illness and infection. HED was not necessarily life-threatening. But, as an exploration of my family tree had begun to reveal, it could be profoundly and painfully life-altering.

The day my essay appeared in The New York Times, I told four million readers that if Dan and I decided to avoid having children with the disorder, these were our options: We could remain childless, consider adoption, use IVF and discard certain embryos, or become pregnant naturally and test our fetus near the end of the first trimester, possibly facing an excruciating choice.

I began receiving e-mails by the dozen. Even though half of the e-mails validated my indecision by grappling with the same question I asked—should fate or medicine shape our babies?—a great many letters came from readers who believed they knew exactly what Dan and I should do. One called our in-vitro option a “no-brainer,” comparing the cost to the price of a car. Several others, all adoptive parents, called adoption the clear choice for us, implicitly agreeing that HED was best avoided. Other letter writers begged us to forget about testing and allow fate to decide as a way of protecting the diversity of our gene pool. Many readers didn’t care what we did, as long as we ditched the abortion option.

I wanted to argue my side, but I’d had my chance. I typed a few heated responses, but never sent them. For a few days, I felt overcome. Responses continued to flow in, all different, all strong, all personal. The only practice I’d had in fielding the commentary of riled readers had been in a few years’ experience writing for a little newspaper with a circulation of twenty thousand—nothing like the shelling I was taking now. Still, I was glad I had written the essay before Dan and I had made up our minds about what we would actually do if I turned out to be a carrier. I imagined all the weighing-in I would have invited by revealing an actual decision, as if I were offering it up for judgment and asking for a mass verdict.

With my essay, I had hoped to describe a moral dilemma and give a personal account of how it might look to approach such a problem thoughtfully. But scores of people treated my real-life story as we tend to treat the movies: She should never have said that. He could have been more courageous. There was too much scenery and not enough sex. It should have been different in the middle. Why couldn’t they just sell everything and start over?

But, I reminded myself, my readers weren’t the only ones who approached the essay with a cinemagoer’s mentality. The only way I could write it in the first place was to calm myself the way I often did at the movies: by telling myself, It’s not real—I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to. At least not yet.

Read an excerpt from Carrier, and learn more about the book and author at Bonnie J. Rough's website and blog, The Blue Suitcase.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judith Stein's "Pivotal Decade"

Judith Stein is professor of history at the City College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of The World of Marcus Garvey and Running Steel, Running America.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, and reported the following:

On page 99 I am in the midst of telling the story of the American response to the rise of OPEC after the 1973 oil embargo and price rise. OPEC attempted to use its new wealth and power to woo other developing nations. The U.S., trying to counter OPEC’s influence, began to acknowledge some of the complaints of the newly independent countries. The U.S., and especially Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had viewed the “third world” through the lens of the Cold War. Thus, Kissinger cut off aid to left-leaning Chile in 1970, a prelude to more active intervention against Salvador Allende, which led to the successful coup in September, 1973. But in 1975 and 1976, Kissinger advised President Ford to cultivate Socialist Michael Manley of Jamaica, even when the prime minister initiated several joint projects with Fidel Castro of Cuba. Jamaica received more assistance. Kissinger made his first trip to Africa. (See the cartoon on p. 93) Aid was one tool employed to keep developing countries in the American strategic orbit. But the more significant techniques, written about earlier in this chapter, were loans for industry and non-reciprocal trade access to the U.S. market. Both policies produced new competition for American industry.

This chapter demonstrates two of the factors that hobbled U.S. manufacturing. First, rising oil prices raised production costs. Although many Americans supported an industrial policy to keep jobs here, banks and multinationals opposed, preferring to meet the crisis by producing, not selling abroad. Second, diplomats used the American market to bolster strategic alliances. Market access was employed after 1945 to bind Europe and Japan to the United States. After 1973, American consumption cemented strategic relations with developing countries.

American elites thought that U.S. affluence was eternal or that the “serious injury” of “some domestic industry” was necessary for “the broader national self-interest.” This second point was not articulated publicly. (That is why the presidential and departmental archives, which reveal intra-governmental debates, were vital for this book.) Over time, the burdens on manufacturing shifted domestic investment to the “non-tradables,” like housing and finance and reduced the real wages of most Americans. The resulting trade deficits produced the global imbalances between consuming nations (United States), and producing nations (now China) that are at the root of the contemporary global economic crisis.

Learn more about Pivotal Decade at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Heaney's "Cradle of Gold"

Christopher Heaney worked as a journalist in Peru on a Fulbright fellowship. He has written articles on Hiram Bingham for The New Republic and the New York Times. A graduate of Yale University, he is currently a doctoral candidate in Latin American History at the University of Texas, Austin.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu, and reported the following:

Cradle of Gold is a history with two halves: explorer Hiram Bingham’s search for Vitcos and Vilcabamba – the “lost cities” where the Incas resisted the sixteenth century Spanish conquest – and the ensuing fight between Yale University and Peru over the artifacts of Machu Picchu. I began the project that became Cradle of Gold seven years ago, when I was a senior at Yale, and I realized that Bingham and his expedition’s papers showed how thornily those halves – exploration and possession – were intertwined.

To belabor the flower metaphor, on page 99 the bloom is still on the rose. Chapter Ten, “The White Temple,” finds our tall, handsome and imperious protagonist in the afterglow of his fairytale-like revelation of Machu Picchu on July 24, 1911. Machu Picchu would prove the achievement of Bingham’s life, but it had been a surprise – the last cities of the Incas were supposed to be deeper in the Peruvian jungle. On page 99 Bingham is in fine form, puzzling over what he had seen. Bingham had this boyish enthusiasm for exploration – a quality later smirked at by no less than “Che” Guevara! – and on this page I had fun capturing the pulp adventurer in Bingham, trying to shoehorn beautiful Machu Picchu into the chronicles:

…his “new ruins (the fine ones at Machu Picchu) must be those referred to in the chronicles by the name of Vitcos or Pitcos,” Bingham wrote to his wife. “Pitcos is an easy transition from Pichu or Pitchu. Machu simply means ‘old’ in Quechua.” And Machu Picchu, Bingham explained, fit the chronicles’ description of Vitcos – a palace on a ridge. “It is really most exciting, for Vitcos (or Pitcos) was the actual residence of the last three Incas who lived over here in Vilcabamba after the Spanish Conquest,” Bingham explained. “In fact it was, as you know, with the hope of making this discovery that I came.”

But he hadn’t made the “discovery” – at least not yet. To do so, Bingham needed the help of Peru’s native people, who knew exactly where the Incas had once lived. On the second half of this page, Bingham learns from a “crusty old fellow” named Evaristo Mogrovejo that there were still ruins ahead: Rosaspata and a site named Espiritu Pampa, “which could be evocatively translated as Plain of Ghosts.” Mogrovejo would take Bingham there, but “there was a catch … The region separating Rosaspata and Espiritu Pampa was a no-man’s land, a place where ‘savage’ Indians held sway, Mogrovejo explained.”

So does the page pass Mr. Ford’s test? Almost. One of the sad twists of the next chapter is the revelation that those Indians were hardly “savage” – they had been forced to work for local landowners and were seeking refuge at Espiritu Pampa, which was actually Vilcabamba, like the Incas had three and a half centuries before. And after meeting them, Bingham learns that the Peruvian government had forbidden the exportation of artifacts, complicating his plan to give Yale a world-class collection of Peruvian antiquities. There are hard truths on the horizon, but page 99 finds Bingham happily, blissfully unaware of the fights and moral compromises to come.

Read an excerpt from Cradle of Gold, and learn more about the book and author at Christopher Heaney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Efraim Karsh's "Palestine Betrayed"

Efraim Karsh is professor and head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Programme, King’s College London. His books include Islamic Imperialism: A History; The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War, 1948; Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography; and Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1923.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Palestine Betrayed, and reported the following:

My latest book Palestine Betrayed rejects conventional ideas about the collapse and dispersal of Palestinian Arab society during the 1948 war, called al-Naqba or the catastrophe by Palestinians. Drawing on a wealth of recently declassified documents, it presents a new interpretation of the Naqba and of the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While many view the Naqba as an unavoidable result of the struggle between two national movements for the same land, I argue that there was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian-Jewish confrontation. Not only had the Zionist movement always been amenable both to a substantial non-Jewish minority existing on an equal footing with others in the prospective Jewish state, and to the two-state solution, but it went out of its way to foster Arab-Jewish coexistence. In the 30 years from the end of the First World War to the proclamation of the state of Israel on 14 May 1948, Zionist spokesmen held hundreds of meetings with Arab leaders at all levels, while ordinary Jews lived side by side with their Arab neighbors, who for their part were eager to take advantage of opportunities created by the evolving Jewish national enterprise. Consequently, throughout the Mandate era (1920-48) the periods of peaceful coexistence far exceeded those of violent eruptions, and the latter were the work of only a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.

The breakdown of this coexistence was the result of a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival waged from the early 1920s onward by the corrupt and extremist Palestinian Arab leadership headed by the militant Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin Husseini. This culminated in the violent attempt, supported by the entire Arab world, to abort the UN resolution of 29 November 1947, stipulating for the partition of mandatory Palestine into two states - one Jewish, the other Arab, linked in an economic union. Had the Arab leaders accepted the UN resolution, there would have been no war and no dislocation.

Page 99 fits nicely into this thesis in that it describes both the Mufti’s war preparations (including the assassination of moderate Palestinian Arab leaders) in the run up to the UN vote, and the animosity and distrust between the Palestinian leaders and their Arab counterparts, which played a crucial role in the creation of the Palestinian tragedy.

Learn more about Palestine Betrayed at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue