I want to express my gratitude to many people who, sometimes without their knowledge, contributed to the writing of this book: to friends, colleagues, and lovers of literature who discussed with me ideas over coffee, read chapters of the manuscript, traveled with me to Hebron and other sites, and brought to my attention sources I was unaware of; to readers of drafts who told me how much they appreciated what I was doing, and to readers who were less enthusiastic; to friends and research assistants who went with me (and sometimes without me) to archives to photocopy documents; to historians whose understanding of history helped me to shape my own through agreement or through debates; and of course, to people whose friendship makes my life nicer. The following list does not include all of them, and I hope and believe that my friends whom I do not mention will not take it too hard. So, thank you Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, Noa Bar-Haim, Dina Berdichevsky, Amitai Barouchi-Unna, Sigi B. Be’eri, Hillel Ben Sasson, Efrat Ben Ze’ev, Yigal Bronner, Karam Dana, Assaf David, Ron Dudai, Adva Falk, Yair Kunitz, Jeremy Hodges, Amos Noy, Iyad al-Sarraj, Hagit Ofran, Eli Osheroff, Amnon Paran, Assaf Peled, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Yehuda Shenhav, and Yael Shenker. Special thanks go to Yosef Barnea, who shared documents from his collection with me, and to Avner Wishnitzer. Many thanks to the following archives for granting me permission to use photographs for this book: The Library of Congress; The Central Zionist Archives; and Israel’s Government Press Office. I also thank the Karkar family of al-Quds (Jerusalem), who lent me the photograph of the family’s grandfather.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is my academic home, and it deserves a special thank you. And the Cohen-Bars of Jerusalem—my wife Efrat and my children Aya, Avshalom, and Osnat—deserve even more. Their love and happiness helped me not to fall into despair and depression while delving, day after day, into detailed descriptions of massacres and lynchings.
At the age of fifty-three, I come to realize how much my consciousness was shaped by my parents, Esther and Aharon, who both passed away during the writing of this book. My mother came to Jerusalem from Poland in 1933 at the age of five, and my father came to our city from Afghanistan in 1951 at the age of twenty-six. Both were happy and proud to be part of what they saw as the revival of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, and they had no qualms about the right of Jews to establish their national home in Eretz Yisrael, known in Arabic as Palestine. Nevertheless, this did not prevent them from seeing the Palestinian Arabs as equal human beings. Their generation, however, left to the next generations the question of whether it is possible to reconcile Jews’ and Arabs’ rights in this country. This book is dedicated to their memory, and to the memory of the rescuers, both Jews and Arabs.