Ben-Ze'ev's book presents an ethnographic examination of how a crucial moment in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the 1948 events, is now being remembered. The author highlights personal accounts of Jews, Palestinians, and Britons who experienced the events, and elaborates on the meanings and interconnections of their testimonies and the effects of collecting them fifty to sixty years after the events.

Efrat Ben-Ze'ev uses various means to go Beyond National Narratives: he focuses on personal accounts, which sometimes depart from hegemonic narrations; finds correspondences between narratives of individuals from different national collectives; employs gender analysis to reveal how national projects affect men and women differently; and traces what have been silenced and tabooed topics throughout the decades in both official and personal narrations.

The book is divided into four parts: The first describes the conflict and grounds it in the context of British colonialism and growing national sentiments of both Jews and Palestinian-Arabs, mainly by focusing on cartographic practices. The other three parts foreground personal accounts of the 1948 war, each focusing on memories of a different canonical group: Palestinian-Arab villagers (men and women), Jewish-Israeli paramilitary fighters (men and women), and British Mandate policemen. Although each part can be read separately, when read together they offer a rare, balanced account of the period, and we see that “1948” is not always a battlefield of conflicting narrations. Contrary to mainstream perceptions, those who bear witness to events, both Arabs and Jews, sometimes tell a similar story.

The book does not present heavy theoretical elaborations, but it nonetheless allows us to draw historiographical, methodological, and political conclusions. Although it concentrates on 1948, it also shows how preceding events shaped people's actions and interpretations, and thereby counters the growing “1948-ization” in the historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moreover, although the book is organized according to the national logic of the conflict (focusing separately on Jews, Palestinian-Arabs, and Britons), each section, by presenting numerous similarities, convergences, and differences between narratives and their carriers, makes it possible to think beyond not only national narratives but also national categories. A different organizing logic for the book, with similar data, could have shown how national categories are being constructed (rather than taking them for granted), how these work in conjunction with social construction of other categories (such as class, gender, ethnic, and generational belonging) and practices (such as pilgrimages and practices of remembrance), and how opportunities for cross-national ties, identifications, interests, and collaborations are being created.

The book draws on a mixture of qualitative data collection methods, mainly trilingual interviews, ethnography, and archival documents, and it utilizes both microhistorical and ethnographic modes of analysis. It will interest readers from the fields of history, anthropology, and memory studies, and those who study colonialism, nationalism, and the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through his critical examination of the interplay between national narratives and personal accounts, and how they change over time, Efrat Ben-Ze'ev offers a meaningful political contribution by cultivating an alternative mode of thinking about the region's past, present, and future.