Overview

"On March 21, 1968, Yasir Arafat and his guerrillas made the fateful decision to break with conventional guerrilla tactics, choosing to stand and fight an Israeli attack on the al-Karama refugee camp in Jordan. They suffered terrible casualties, but they won a stunning symbolic victory that transformed Arafat into an Arab hero and allowed him to launch a worldwide campaign, one that would reshape Cold War diplomacy and revolutionary movements everywhere.In The Global Offensive, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin offers new insights into the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization in its full international context. After defeat in the 1967 war, the crushing of a guerrilla campaign on the West Bank, and the attack on al-Karama, Arafat and his fellow guerilla fighters opened a global offensive aimed at achieving national liberation for the Palestinian people. In doing so, they reinvented themselves as players on the world stage, combining controversial armed attacks, diplomacy, and radical politics. They forged a network of nationalist revolutionaries, making alliances with South African rebels, Latin American insurrectionists, and Vietnamese Communists. They persuaded the United Nations to take up their agenda, and sent Americans and Soviets scrambling as these stateless forces drew new connections across the globe. ""The Vietnamese and Palestinian people have much in common,"" General Vo Nguyen Giap would tell Arafat, ""just like two people suffering from the same illness."" Richard Nixon's views mirrored Giap's: ""You cannot separate what happens to America in Vietnam from the Mideast or from Europe or any place else.""Deftly argued and based on extensive new research, The Global Offensive will change the way we think of the history of not only the PLO, but also the Cold War and international relations since."

Full Product Details

Author:   Paul Thomas Chamberlin (Assistant Professor of History, Assistant Professor of History, University of Kentucky)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 23.60cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 16.00cm
Weight:   0.567kg
ISBN:  

9780199811397

ISBN 10:   0199811393
Pages:   336
Publication Date:   18 October 2012
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  General ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

"Acknowledgments Introduction: Palestine Liberation and the Dawn of the Post-Cold War Era 1. The Struggle against Oppression Everywhere 2. The Storm 3. Nixon, Kissinger, and the Terror of a Post-Imperial World 4. The Jordanian Civil War 5. A Worldwide Interlocking Terrorist Network 6. ""The Torch Has Been Passed From Vietnam To Us"" 7. The Diplomatic Struggle Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index"

Reviews

The Global Offensive makes a laudable contribution to the growing body of scholarship that places the developing world and transnational actors at the forefront of international politics, rather than treating them as peripheral, secondary actors or curiosities. --Jeffrey James Byrne, H-Diplo By establishing connections between the PLO and other revolutionary nationalist groups that most historians have either previously ignored or failed to recognize, Chamberlin has written a true work of transnational history that includes discussion of the United States, Palestinians, Israel, Vietnam, China, Algeria, and South Africa. By establishing connections between the PLO and other revolutionary nationalist groups that most historians have either previously ignored or failed to recognize, Chamberlin has written a true work of transnational history that includes discussion of the United States, Palestinians, Israel, Vietnam, China, Algeria, and South Africa. --Craig Daigle, H-Diplo Chamberlin's most innovative move is simply to insist that we view the PLO as part of a larger landscape of third-world revolutionaries and the global radical left, of which it viewed itself a part, and not merely as a subset of the Arab-Israeli struggle or the history of Arab nationalism and decolonization. --Bradley Simpson, H-Diplo The Global Offensive would be quite valuable for undergraduate and graduate history courses on the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy, or twentieth-century global history. Students and teachers would undoubtedly benefit from the balance of narrative and argumentation buttressed by clearly written explanations of key players and events. Most importantly, the book offers an opportunity for teacher and students to engage in questions regarding the latter decades of the twentieth century as less of a coda for the post-World War II global order and more as a beginning point toward understanding the twenty-first century. --Teaching Hi

<br> Paul Chamberlin's The Global Offensive moves from the camps of the Palestinian refugees to the air conditioned offices of the White House, from the deliberations of the Vietnamese guerrillas to the calculations of Tel Aviv's political elite. Drawn from an array of archives, Chamberlin's narrative teaches us that international relations is not simply the whimsy of states but that it is constrained and enabled by the dreams and frustrations of ordinary people forced to be extraordinary because of their circumstances. A brilliant study of how the Palestinian liberation struggle moved from the valleys of the Levant onto the world stage. --Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World<p><br> With balanced and comprehensive scholarship, Paul Chamberlin traces the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat, the widening gap of generations in both Israel and the Arab world, and the dilemmas of the U.S. government as Lebanon descended into civil war. The GlobalOffensive is a masterly account of the worldwide as well as the regional dimension of Arab-Israeli conflict in the critical decades of the 1960s and 1970s. --Wm. Roger Louis, University of Texas at Austin<p><br> Chamberlin is the first to frame the story of the Palestine Liberation Organization in a truly global context, and in so doing he sheds startling new light on his subject. He shows how the Palestinian struggle in the 1960s and 1970s was embedded in global revolutionary networks that stretched from Cuba to Vietnam, and argues convincingly for its centrality in the drama of Cold War decolonization and the transformation of international relations in this era. This book is not only a rare judicious intervention in the history of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; it is also a superb contribution to postwar international history writ large. --Erez Manela, author of The Wilsonian Moment<p><br> A major contribution to understanding US fo

<br> Paul Chamberlin's The Global Offensive moves from the camps of the Palestinian refugees to the air conditioned offices of the White House, from the deliberations of the Vietnamese guerrillas to the calculations of Tel Aviv's political elite. Drawn from an array of archives, Chamberlin's narrative teaches us that international relations is not simply the whimsy of states but that it is constrained and enabled by the dreams and frustrations of ordinary people forced to be extraordinary because of their circumstances. A brilliant study of how the Palestinian liberation struggle moved from the valleys of the Levant onto the world stage. --Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World<p><br> With balanced and comprehensive scholarship, Paul Chamberlin traces the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat, the widening gap of generations in both Israel and the Arab world, and the dilemmas of the U.S. government as Lebanon descended into civil war. The GlobalOffensive is a masterly account of the worldwide as well as the regional dimension of Arab-Israeli conflict in the critical decades of the 1960s and 1970s. --Wm. Roger Louis, University of Texas at Austin<p><br> Chamberlin is the first to frame the story of the Palestine Liberation Organization in a truly global context, and in so doing he sheds startling new light on his subject. He shows how the Palestinian struggle in the 1960s and 1970s was embedded in global revolutionary networks that stretched from Cuba to Vietnam, and argues convincingly for its centrality in the drama of Cold War decolonization and the transformation of international relations in this era. This book is not only a rare judicious intervention in the history of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; it is also a superb contribution to postwar international history writ large. --Erez Manela, author of The Wilsonian Moment<p><br> Paul Chamberlin's history of the relationsh

Author Information

Paul Chamberlin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky.

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