Visionaries of Agreement

Why did the Palestinians reject the 1947 Partition Plan? What political alternative did they put forward instead of going to war in 1948? And did the Mufti and his associates really “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” as the familiar saying goes? Visionaries of Agreement: A Different View of the Origins of the Zionist–Arab Conflict offers original answers to these questions, opening a window onto a forgotten world in which Arabs and Jews envisioned a shared future for the country—and at times even sought to shape it in practice.

Visionaries of Agreement is grounded in historical research centered on the question of how Palestinian society imagined the future of its homeland up to 1948, and what place it envisioned for Jews, both longstanding residents and newcomers. The book reconstructs the vision of the future reflected in Arab political discourse by combining theories of colonialism with the life stories of politicians, journalists, writers, and spies—Arabs, Jews (Mizrahi and Ashkenazi), Britons, Americans, and others. These figures, some long forgotten and others still remembered today, traveled between Jerusalem, Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, London, Paris, and New York, carrying with them a vision of coexistence in the land as well as political agreements intended to bring it about. The book concludes with an account of the collapse of Arab efforts to reach a political settlement before 1948, seeking to explain why even those who sought to pursue an alternative path failed. It thus offers a new perspective not only on the origins of the Zionist–Palestinian conflict but also on the debates surrounding it to this day.

Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East and a research fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Visionaries of Agreement is his first book, based on his doctoral dissertation written at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Shuruq (“sunrise” in Arabic) series, published by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, adopts a new scholarly and intellectual approach that views Israel as a Middle Eastern nation-state shaped by the same historical processes and transformations that shaped other nation-states in the region. The series challenges methodological nationalism and acknowledges the complexities of the interactions and mutual influences among political regimes and societies in the Middle East. In doing so, it seeks to unravel the boundaries of discourse and knowledge that characterize Hebrew-language scholarship on the Middle East and Israel, and to offer a critical, interdisciplinary, and comparative reading of regional issues. The books in the series explore Israel/Palestine, the societies and states of the region, and relations between Jews and Arabs, past and present.

The book Visionaries of Agreement was produced with the assistance of the Lottery Council for Culture and Art.