The 1948 Palestine-Israel War is known to Israelis as 'The War of Independence', but for Palestinians it will forever be the Nakba, the 'catastrophe'. Alongside the creation of the State of Israel, the end of the war led to one of the largest forced†migrations in modern history. Around a million people were expelled from their homes at gunpoint, civilians were massacred, and hundreds of Palestinian villages deliberately destroyed. Though the truth about the mass expulsion has been systematically distorted and suppressed, had it taken place in the twenty-first century it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Prominent Israeli academic Ilan Pappe argues passionately for the international recognition of this tragedy. His groundbreaking and controversial work sheds new light on the origins and development of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, asking questions that the world has so far failed to ask to reveal the real story behind the events of 1948. Based on meticulous research, including recently declassified Israeli archival material, Dr. Pappe's vivid and timely account demonstrates conclusively that 'transfer' - a euphemism for ethnic cleansing - was from the start an integral part of a carefully planned strategy, and lies at the root of today's ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

The controversy over settlements in the occupied territories is a far more intractable problem for Israel than is widely perceived, Gadi Taub observes in this illuminating book. The clash over settlement is no mere policy disagreement, he maintains, but rather a struggle over the very meaning of Zionism. The book presents an absorbing study of religious settlers’ ideology and how it has evolved in response to Israel’s history of wars, peace efforts, assassination, the pull-out from Gaza, and other tumultuous events. Taub tracks the efforts of religious settlers to reconcile with mainstream Zionism but concludes that the project cannot succeed. A new Zionist consensus recognizes that Israel must pull out of the occupied territories or face an unacceptable alternative: the dissolution of Israel into a binational state with a Jewish minority.

During his reign over the former Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin oversaw the forced resettlement of six million people -- a maniacal passion that he used for social engineering. The Soviets were not the first to thrust resettlement on its population -- a major characteristic of totalitarian systems -- but in terms of sheer numbers, technologies used to deport people and the lawlessness which accompanied it, Stalin's process was the most notable. Six million people of different social, ethnic, and professions were resettled before Stalin's death. Even today, the aftermath of such deportations largely predetermines events which take place in the northern Caucasus, Crimea, the Baltic republics, Moldavia, and western Ukraine. Polian's volume is the first attempt to comprehensively examine the history of forced and semivoluntary population movements within or organized by the Soviet Union. Contents range from the early 1920s to the rehabilitation of repressed nationalities in the 1990s dealing with internal (kulaks, ethnic and political deportations) and international forced migrations (German internees and occupied territories). An abundance of facts, figures, tables, maps, and an exhaustively-detailed annex will serve as important sources for further researches.