It is by now a familiar gesture for the historian, confronted with an intolerable and intractable present, to put their historical skills to the service of recovery. This is done by returning to the past with an eye on what might have been, excavating the buried and hidden possibilities that have been paved over and forgotten by all those traveling on what usually seems like the singular highway of time. Histories of Palestine and the Palestinians, and of Zionism and the State of Israel, are especially drawn to this approach. Beneath its broad umbrella, however, varying methodologies remain possible, as illustrated by the recent publication of two exemplary histories, more specifically one microhistory and one macrohistory. Academic “turns” often justify themselves by pointing to the shortcomings and failures of competing methods, but these works show that, when done well, they can complement each other on the bookshelf.

The Israeli scholar Hillel Cohen, who is associate professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has delivered a superb macrohistory in Enemies, a Love Story. Much of his previous work has been more narrowly focused; his most recent book that appeared in English, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) told the story of a single week in a single year, for example. Enemies is also a kind of culmination of his previous work on unusual or atypical Israeli–Arab relations. Books like Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 (University of California Press, 2008) and Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967 (University of California Press, 2010) focus on Palestinians who, for various reasons, collaborated with Zionism and the Israeli state in defiance of their own nationalist movement; he is also the author of The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem: Palestinian Politics and the City Since 1967 (Routledge, 2011), which looks at a broader band of Palestinian politics in one city. Enemies, however, far exceeds all of these in both thematic and temporal scope. Its focus is the trilateral relationship between Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and Arabs (primarily though not exclusively Palestinians) from the Ottoman period to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; a preface and conclusion bring the story up to the present.

Cohen’s style in Enemies is noteworthy: he offers very long chapters divided into very short sections, sometimes less than a single page. He asks rhetorical questions and answers them in an informal, conversational tone. The strength of this approach is that it can illuminate thorny methodological questions for beginning students. For example, Cohen might describe a fairly commonplace event such as a murder or riot that occurs across the boundary line between two communities (alas, far too many of these in these pages). He will then cite a response from a figure contemporary to the events: the police chief, perhaps, or the mayor, or a prominent activist, praising or condemning the violence and making a claim about how much it reflects or does not reflect the ordinary life of the community. Then he turns, as it were, to the reader, and poses the question: But is that true?! How representative of their community was this person? How many shared their view? Who disagreed? What form did that disagreement take? How representative of their community was that person? And so on. At times, this tactic can be taken a bit too far, leading the reader to wonder if Cohen has a bigger-picture analysis to go with his grand scope. The competing theories seeking to account for the right-wing orientation of the Mizrahi public in Israel, for example, are well-known and rehearsed here repeatedly: the right says Mizrahim hate the Arabs because they “know the Arabs,” and seek vengeance on them for the historic oppression they suffered in their homelands; the left says the Mizrahi hatred of Arabs is exaggerated to begin with, but such as there is was “made in Israel” by a government and Ashkenazi-dominated society that demanded Mizrahim sever themselves from their own Arabness, denying the very possibility of the “Arab Jew.” Cohen will let neither of these explanations stand uncriticized, although to my reading the latter emerges far more substantiated by the chronicle of the work.

What comes through vividly in Cohen’s telling, and the justification of his work’s ultimate thesis, is that the history of Palestine/Israel is understood far better when considered as a history of Ashkenazi “Sephardi”–Mizrahi “Arab”–Palestinian relations, rather than “Jewish”–“Arab” relations. At various times, each group has been motivated by a fear or fantasy of the alignment of the other two. In practical reality, Ashkenazi–Mizrahi alignment against Palestinians appears to have won out, with both groups agreeing that “Jewish” is the most relevant umbrella identity for Israelis, from which Palestinians are excluded. This alignment is precarious, however, as shown by the apparent need to continually reinforce it. Palestinians (and leftists more broadly) have long dreamed of an alternative, Mizrahi–Palestinian alliance, which would reimagine the country in rebellion against Ashkenazi, European colonial supremacy. And rightists, including Mizrahi rightists, have been militating for decades—at least since the creation of Peace Now in response to the Lebanon War of 1982—against what they see as a twisted league of Ashkenazi liberals in Tel Aviv with PLO or later Hamas militants. This imagined union has contributed greatly to the fallen fortunes of the Israeli center-left, and played a major role in the assassination of Rabin, the end of the Oslo process, and the rise of Netanyahu.

Despite having A Love Story in its title, Enemies is not a romantic book. It does not yearn for some simplistic realignment. It offers no comfort and calls for nothing except greater knowledge. Its dramatic macrohistorical sweep is placed in the service of human complexity: here is a Sephardi born in Jaffa who thought the Zionist “Moskobim” (“Moskobim” is a pre-WWI Sephardi term for Ashkenazim and means “Moscovites” or Russians) were arrogant brutes who threatened his Ottoman citizenship; now here’s another one born in Gaza who joined the Haganah. Here is an Ashkenazi pioneer who believed completely in the civilizing mission of bringing, as Vladimir Jabotinsky once put it, the borders of Europe to the Euphrates; now here is another one who took his socialism seriously enough to build a Jewish-Arab labor union. Here is a Palestinian who saw all Jews as Zionists; here’s another one who married a Jew. The “possibilities” of the past were all already realized, in the lives of individuals who really lived.

That insight is also the driver of Mejcher-Atassi’s book, the title of which is the inverse of Cohen’s. Instead of enemies in a love story, we have friends whose friendship cannot be. An Impossible Friendship tells the story of just five people, an “ecumenical circle” who met regularly at the King David Hotel in the days before it was bombed by the Irgun in a 1946 terrorist attack that killed ninety-one people. The five, pictured together in a photograph on the book’s cover, were the Jerusalemite scholar and scion of a foremost Palestinian family, Walid Khalidi; his bride, the Lebanese feminist Rasha Salam; the German-Jewish writer and artist, Wolfgang Hildesheimer; the mysterious Sally Kassab, a Greek Orthodox Christian from Beirut; and the Syriac Orthodox novelist and intellectual Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a survivor of the Assyrian genocide who went on to settle in Baghdad after 1948. A remarkable group of people, who went on to do many great things that cannot be summarized here, except to note that Khalidi (the only member of the circle who was still alive at the time of Mejcher-Atassi’s writing, but who passed away this year at 100 years of age) cofounded the Institute of Palestine Studies (IPS), under the imprint of which he published field-defining works, including Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-1948 (IPS, 1984) and All that Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (IPS, 1992). Khalidi laid the foundation for Mejcher-Atassi’s own work, and also contributed by doing personal interviews with her at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was Khalidi who named the group of friends “the ecumenical circle,” containing as it did two Muslims, two Christians, and one Jew.

The King David hotel bombing forms a kind of hinge to the book, physically destroying the friends’ place of meeting and presaging their eventual scattering. The agents of that violence, the Irgun, did not believe in a heterogeneous society; they were copying the Polish and Italian nationalists and fascists who inspired their leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky. But the ecumenical circle was not merely an ideological alternative; it was also a class affair. These were students, intellectuals, and writers whose friendship was based upon a shared love of European high culture as well as upon a certain marginality or exclusion from that culture, whether as Jew or as Arab. They were descended from prominent families (Rasha’s brother Saeb Salam was a six-time prime minister of Lebanon; Wolfgang’s great-grandfather was Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, founder of modern Orthodox Judaism in Germany). They gathered in a central symbol of the British Mandate, surrounded by soldiers and agents of various governments, in a time period known for cosmopolitan exchange. After events destroyed their circle, they went on to teach in places like Oxford or Harvard (Walid) or to win the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Wolfgang). In some sense, then, the idyll of the ecumenical circle was made possible by a certain privilege, unavailable to all.

Mejcher-Atassi is well aware of this, as she indicates in a perceptive discussion of the Swiss management and Sudanese migrant workers at the King David. The cosmopolitanism of the ecumenical circle was embedded in a wider capitalist economic network, conditioned also by colonialism (and Mejcher-Atassi also offers an incisive account of the Huleh Concession of 1934, in which the Huleh valley—which had been in the hands of Rasha’s family, the Salams—was acquired by the Palestine Land Development Company). One of the strengths of the book is the way it balances, in its descriptions of the lives of its protagonists, their intellectual and artistic interests with their material conditions. Wolfgang, for example, was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and his main interests were art and literature, but he was also the son of a wealthy factory owner, connected to global margarine production for Unilever. When that business came to Haifa, it observed the Histadrut’s restrictions on non-Jewish labor in its employment policies. But, more than that, the margarine it produced contributed to the autarkic economic goals of the Zionist movement by replacing samna, the traditional Arab cooking fat, in local diets.

The latter half of the book traces the melancholy separation imposed on the protagonists by events. Jabra, who emerges as one of the most compelling figures in the story, describes the situation of the Palestinian exile: “One was uprooted as a person, and uprooted as a group, and both seemed to float away by a mysterious impulsion” (179). Wolfgang, meanwhile, moved back to Germany to serve as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, identifying more with the occupying powers than with his “own” country. His ambivalence about Zionism is another throughline of the book—he was completely opposed to nationalism, but occasionally disposed to understanding the actions of the Zionists as those of desperate refugees like himself. Mejcher-Atassi skillfully weaves together discussions of Jabra and Wolfgang’s public work with their private thoughts as expressed in letters to their friends; even estranged, they still lived in a global cosmopolis in which, to quote Jabra again, “Shakespeare is al-Mutanabbi’s brother” (194).

Mejcher-Atassi’s book offers as little in the way of simple hope as Cohen’s. Its protagonists are fairly long-lived, and we are able to be privy to their perhaps half-hearted latter-day attempts to reconnect; we learn of Wolfgang’s reaction to the Lebanon war (“I am trying to set a friend to found a Society of Jewish Enemies of Israel” [229], he writes to Rasha in 1984) and of Jabra’s perhaps-coerced praise for Saddam Hussein in a 1988 televised documentary. Unlike Enemies, Mejcher-Atassi’s Impossible Friendship will probably be of more use to advanced than to beginning students of the region; like it, however, it evokes the complexity of individual experience and forces us to consider the unpredictable and contradictory connections of that experience to the broad sweep of history.