Sources: Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Essential Reference Guide

Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Essential Reference Guide. Ed. by Priscilla Roberts. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014. 377 p. Acid free $89 (ISBN 978-1-61069-067-6). E-book (978-1-61069-068-3) available, call for pricing.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is one of the most emotion-laden, controversial phenomena in modern history. Too often, the way that American students learn about the Arab-Israeli conflict is through propaganda spread through social media channels, faculty with political agendas, or campus rallies siding with one faction or the other. Educators have an ethical responsibility to provide foundational information about this conflict in a straightforward, neutral manner, ideally from a concise, authoritative source. Dr. Priscilla Roberts’ reference guide to the Arab-Israeli conflict can easily fill this niche.

Roberts is a history professor at the University of Hong Kong specializing in twentieth-century international history, Asian-Western relations, and Anglo-American foreign policy. Her research background gives her the required context to present information about the Arab-Israeli conflict in an objective, factual manner. The list of contributors selected to collaborate on this publication include researchers of history, criminal justice, military history, international studies, and Middle Eastern studies.

This single compact volume—a condensed version of the massive four volume Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Political, Social, and Military History edited by Spencer and Roberts (ABC-CLIO, 2008)—contains four sections. First, Roberts lays out a general overview of the Arab-Israeli conflict, its causes, and its consequences. Then she provides forty-nine reference entries covering the most important countries, people, events, and organizations involved in the conflict. Each entry includes an extensive further reading section of related scholarly books and journal articles. Documents referenced in the entries are provided in the “Primary Source Documents” section, which includes the online sources where readers can access the original texts in full. Last but not least, the appendix provides a special section that specifically addresses the historical dilemmas of the conflict, as well as a chronology of events, selected bibliography, and a list of contributors that include researchers from American and Canadian universities and the United States military.

At this time, no other broad yet well-researched survey of the Arab-Israeli conflict exists as a single-volume reference resource. For those libraries that do not have Spencer and Roberts’ encyclopedia set, this single volume resource would pair well with The Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (ed. Rubenberg, Lynne Reine Publishers, 2010), a three volume set, that provides other details of the conflict such as Israeli laws in the Occupied territories and Palestinian school textbooks that indoctrinate students in anti-Semitism and terrorist activity.

Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Essential Reference Guide would be appropriate for high school, academic, and large public library collections. It would also make a solid textbook for students taking introductory courses on modern Israel or Palestine.—Rachel Wexelbaum, Associate Professor / Collection Management Librarian, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota