NO OF PAGES: 412 SUB CAT I: Jerusalem SUB CAT II: History SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: Renowned historian Martin Gilbert offers a history of Jerusalem in the 20th century through the eyewitness accounts of those who lived through it. Through documented accounts in letters, books and journals he follows the development of the city from a neglected Ottoman backwater, through the British mandate to the declaration of the state of Israel and the ensuing war in 1948, and on to the travails of the modern state which made Jerusalem its capital and created a modern city alongside the ancient one. Some of the most dramatic testimony concerns the division of the city in the 1948 war, and its reunification in the 1967 Six-Day war. Full of anecdotes that put history on a human level, the book includes the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the bus bombings of 1996. A recurrent theme of this wonderfully vivid political, social and military history of 20th-century Jerusalem is that Arab intransigence in the face of repeated Jewish offers of peace, negotiation and reconciliation led to the protracted Israeli-Arab conflict. Gilbert contends that the Arab uprisings of 1921, 1929 and 1936 led to the separation of Jerusalem into Arab and Jewish neighborhoods. He also charges that Palestinian Arabs were, for decades, betrayed by their leaders, who rejected any form of Jewish sovereignty. And he notes that thousands of moderate Palestinians, who supported some form of compromise with the British or with the Jews, have been murdered by their fellow Arabs. He credits Teddy Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993, with making major efforts to draw Arabs into the municipality as equals and active city administrators. Marshaling primary sources and weaving in the accounts of journalists, politicians, settlers and visitors to Jerusalem, Gilbert makes a compelling, if debatable, case.NOTES: Purchased from Half Price Books. SUBTITLE: