The Bride: An Illustrated History of Palestine 1850-1948

by Roger Hardy

Palestine, 1850: a backwater of the Ottoman Empire, but soon to become the focus of intense jealousies. Locally Arabs and Jews became increasingly polarised, internationally the vacuum left by the demise of the Ottoman Empire was filled with the rivalries of Western nations.
This book is a vivid account, told through oral history and a wealth of photographs from the time, never previously published. They add new dimensions to our understanding of the history, the geography, and the human reality of Palestine.

142 pages, Hardcover

Published August 5, 2022

About the author

Roger Hardy is an aviation man, pilot, designer and latterly, safety regulator. He was born into a Royal Air Force family just before our noble Monarch ascended the throne and has worked in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany before finally settling in Portugal. He is European by instinct and inclination and currently runs his guesthouse business in Carvoeiro in the Algarve (www.casaluiz.com). He has two grown-up children and, having completed five novels, has set sail into eBook waters. Outside of writing, he can get a trifle boring on the subject of the operas of Richard Strauss, given half a chance. In addition (and we don't mention this in polite company) he restores old Dinky toy aircraft from the 1930s and 40s.

I have been writing novels for some years now and have seen the seismic changes to the book publishing industry with the introduction of eReaders and eBooks. Not one to buck a trend and conscious of the parlous state of traditional Dickensian publishing, I decided to publish my novels as eBooks and they are all now available from Amazon for the Kindle eReader.

My novels are in a variety of genres, sometimes mixed, from light to heavy, and I write what I want to write rather than what the market demands or what is trendy. Each one has been edited by professional editor and published novelist, Debi Alper. I write because I enjoy it. I hope you do as well.

Reviews

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Hardy, who has been a BBC Middle East Analyst stated his goal is presenting this history "in a concise and readable narrative” (p.9) He clearly achieved it through this short book, which at times is a page turner.

Hardy has poured over what seems like thousands of photos to select the ones that define the times. In reporting the events he quotes diaries, letters and memoirs of the people living through this history. Collectively they “tell us what it was like to be there. (p.10)

These are the voices of the professional class (educators, doctors, journalists, bureaucrats, etc). Hardy fills in for those who cannot read or write or have access to equipment so that we understand the feelings and hopes of those who have different roles and situations.

You get a portrait of the young Ben Gurion a bit on the young Moshe Dayan. There is a cameo for Golda Meier.

You see how the conflict was long simmering. I was amazed (again) as to how few people were able to create Israel against the legal claims of the Palestinians.

You guess that the title is a metaphor for Palestine with suitors fighting over her. “The Bride” is only alluded to at the end… the book does not use this as a theme.

Those who understand the conflict and those who do not can benefit from this because of how Hardy, with the photos and original material, is able to bring the reader into the period.

The photos are striking and make you wish for a coffee table sized book.

[MargCal · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 ☆
Finished reading ... The Bride: An Illustrated History of Palestine 1850-1948 / Roger Hardy ... 25 October 2022
ISBN: 9781912945337 … 248 pp. + Notes, Select bibliography, Acknowledgements, Dramatis personae, Illustrators, Picture credits, Index (320 pp. in total)

In this book you get what it says on the cover, an illustrated history of 98 years in Palestine, from the birth of Zionism to the Nakba. It is beautiful, the illustrations so well chosen. But it is also tragedy.

Earlier, I read the 7th edition of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict : A History with Documents / Charles D. Smith, then updated that by reading the relevant new material in the 8th ed. (which I own) and the 9th ed. It is now up to 10th ed., 2020. This is a history textbook. The fact that it includes documents (Balfour declaration, Peace Accord and UN resolutions, etc) correctly indicates that it is thorough but very dry reading. Hardy's book has a much briefer history, both in time span and detail. Yet it magnificently brings to life Smith's history through the many photos and personal detail and anecdotes.

Both books are stand-alone reads but together they make excellent companions. It would be hard for Smith's book to be more even handed. Hardy deals fairly with both sides, all sides is perhaps more accurate since there are so many players, but his final paragraph shows where his sympathies lie, as do mine - Palestine is the abused bride.

The situation in Palestine constantly reminds me of the situation in Australia. The British colonisers saw Australia as terra nullius, nobody's land. The indigenous inhabitants didn't, and still often don't, count as people. Palestine was seen as a land without a people for a people without a land, similarly disregarding the Arabs who had lived there for millennia. The difference is, indigenous Australians have been subjugated. Palestinian Arabs fight on.

If you seriously want to know what is going on in the Middle East, you need to read a textbook. News media are massively biased towards Israel. While Smith's book is excellent and backed up by included texts, Hardy's is a much easier read without losing accuracy in spite of his (not uncritical) sympathy for the Arab population.

Highly recommended.


Borrowed from my local library.
Purchased at my request.

[LibraryKath · Rating 2 out of 5]

The photos are beautiful. The text however... it's more colonialist bullsh!t framing the Palestinian people as "peasants" and a "backwater" until European settlement began. I just couldn't continue reading that garbage so I looked through all of the photographs. Hopefully I can find something less colonialist to read next.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting history of the land that became modern-day Israel, as well as the West Bank and Gaza, from the mid-19th century until the founding of the State of Israel. The author looks at how the area began to receive international attention during the mid-19th century, and how this transformed the region from a rural backwater into one of the most contested lands in the modern world. The author relies on photographic archives to tell the story of the region's people, and he starts off with a really interesting analysis of photographic evidence of the area's culture in the 19th century. Unfortunately, as he begins to look at the region post-World War I, he gets away from the photographic evidence and focuses more on the political story of the Arab and Jewish communities. Much of this was familiar, but he did add in some new material, particularly about how these communities interacted during the 1920s. He also highlighted the split between the relatively moderate Zionists, who sought to partition the land and seemed at least somewhat opposed to the massive expulsions of Arabs that occurred, and the more extremist militias, who fought the British presence and attacked Arab civilians. This divide exists to this day within Israeli politics. The author clearly supports Palestinian national aspirations, and I think he made his case overall fairly well, although he asserts at the end that the Palestinians were well on their way to developing a sense of nationhood that was separate from other Arabs by the 1920s. This may be true, but he doesn't present a lot of examples in the book to back up that idea.