The Lost Orchard - (Contemporary Issues in the Middle East) by Mustafa Kabha & Nahum Karlinsky (Paperback)

About the Book

"This book portrays the unknown history of the "Lost Orchard" of pre-Nakba Palestinian-Arab society, of the people who constituted its social fabric and of the special, amicable, bi-national and consociational relations it established with its Zionist-Jewish counterpart"--

Book Synopsis

The Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, devastated Palestinian lives and shattered Palestinian society, culture, and economy. It also nipped in the bud a nascent grassroots, binational alliance between Arab and Jewish citrus growers.

This significant and unprecedented partnership was virtually erased from the collective memory of both Israelis and Palestinians when the Nakba decimated villages and populations in a matter of months. In The Lost Orchard, Kabha and Karlinsky tell the story of the Palestinian citrus industry from its inception until 1950, tracing the shifting relationship between Palestinian Arabs and Zionist Jews. Using rich archival and primary sources, as well as on a variety of theoretical approaches, Kabha and Karlinsky portray the industry's social fabric and stratification, detail its economic history, and analyze the conditions that enabled the formation of the unique binational organization that managed the country's industry from late 1940 until April 1948.

Review Quotes

An innovative and important study. The level of Arab-Jewish cooperation in Palestine during the British Mandate period, especially during WWII, is under-told in the existing dominant historiography.-- "Tamir Sorek, author of Arab Soccer in a Jewish State"

This remarkably original book unearths the untold story of the Jewish and Arab citrus industry in the last hundred years from bilateral relations to Israeli memory appropriation. A must read for all scholars of Israel and Palestine!-- "Alon Confino, author of A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide"

Written by a Palestinian Arab and an Israeli Jew, the authors discover and uncover the complex history of Palestine's leading product, the Jaffa Oranges, and its vibrant main port city, Jaffa, through rich archival sources.-- "Mahmoud Yazbak, University of Haifa"

About the Author

Mustafa Kabha is associate professor and chair of the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at Open University of Israel.

Nahum Karlinsky is a senior lecturer at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He teaches modern Jewish history and Israeli studies.