Title: Bible and
Sword
Author: Barbara W.
Tuchman
Genre: Non-fiction
327.420569
Read by: Wanda
McCaddon
Originally Published:
1956
Publisher/Date:
Blackstone Audio/2009
Dates listened to: 9/9/17 – 9/29/17
CDs/Hours: 10/12.5
IBSN: 978-1-4417-0218-0
From the back cover of the CD, “In this acclaimed account,
Barbara Tuchman reveals that today’s troubles in the Middle East originated
long before the first efforts at founding a modern state of Israel.
“Historically, the British were drawn to the Holy Land by
two major influences: the translation of
the Bible into English and, the imperial need to control the road to India and
access to Middle East oil.
“With the lucidity and vividness that characterizes her
work, Tuchman brings to life the development of these dual motives – the Bible
and the sword – in the consciousness of the British people, until they were
finally brought together at the end of WWI when the Balfour Declaration of 1917
established a British-sponsored national home for the modern survivors of the
people of the Old Testament.”
From the epilogue “…the (Palestine) Mandate (aka the Balfour
Declaration) might have had a chance.
Instead, it became a long effort by Britain to escape the consequences
that conscience had committed her to.
The original pledge which she soon found was awkward to keep she attempted
thereafter to whittle away, to invalidate and at last, desperately weary of the
entanglement, to cancel. The final years were spent in an attempt to
stay on in Palestine as mandatory after having repudiated the terms of the
mandate, until this position, too, became no longer tenable. … Does Israel then exist today because of the
British or in spite of the British?”
The answer? Partly
both, perhaps, depending upon each historian’s interpretation.
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