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4.25 AVERAGE
4.25 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
sad
slow-paced
challenging
informative
This was my first real source I read about Palestine. I cannot recommend this enough as an incredibly informative and enlightening introduction to this issue. This was also my first introduction to Ilan Pappe, and I definitely hope to look more into his work in the future. The structure of this book is a conversation between Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky in the first part, followed by various speeches and recounts of history in the second part. As someone without much knowledge of this history going into the book, I feel it may have been better organized with the history presented before the conversation, but I still finished the book with a thorough understanding for this history and the proposals outlined by Chomsky and Pappe.
challenging
informative
reflective
"So the past becomes an obstacle in the eyes of the so-called mediators, but the past is everything in the eyes of the occupied and the oppressed people"
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Important and informative. Written 10 years ago but could as well be now - like Chomsky says in the last chapter "little has changed since ... apart from the scale of the crimes". Pappé's thoughts on one-state solution were particularly interesting as previously I've only even heard about the two-state solution being talked about. The book gets slightly repetitive towards the end and I sometimes found it a bit difficult to follow - however someone more familiar with the issue and the history might not have the same problem. Would still recommend!
informative
This book was written in an interesting interview style. I was surprised to see this, and while it was interesting, it wasn't necessarily the best for me.
There were definitely very thoughtful and informative opinions in the book.
There were definitely very thoughtful and informative opinions in the book.
challenging
informative
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Genocide, Gun violence, Hate crime, Physical abuse, Torture, Violence, Police brutality, Islamophobia, Colonisation, War, Deportation
Insisting on describing what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 and ever since as a crime, and not just as a tragedy or even a catastrophe, is essential if past evils are to be rectified.
As with anything that I read for my own edification, I don't have much to say about this? It was really excellent, and I already know I'm going to want to reread it several times over, to really absorb it. It's a collection of conversations between these two authors/historians, and also some speeches and essays about Palestine and the Israeli occupation. Because they're taken from different sources and periods of time, there's a fair amount of overlap and repetition. But I didn't mind that; I was just learning and absorbing! (Like, the bit about Cuba helping in dismantling the South African regime. I had no idea.) I really appreciated seeing Profs. Chomsky and Pappé agree and disagree, verbally spar a little bit, and put forth their ideas on a way forward. (This was written several years ago, but it's prescient in many ways, and still applicable in many ways.)
Listened to the audiobook as read by George Newbern; really enjoyed it. A lot of this was interview/conversation style, but even with one narrator, he made it interesting and dynamic.
Nothing much to add; just gonna write down some quotes that resonated with me.
The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.
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Past injustices cannot all be undone; this is very clear to the people who have been branded as “unrealistic” even by their friends. Not all past evils can be rectified, but ongoing evils surely should stop.
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States recognize each other but not their right to exist. There is no such thing. But Israel raised that barrier to require that Palestinians accept that their oppression and expulsion is justified. Not just that it happened, but that it is justified.
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It was not just Christian Zionism alone that won the day for Zionism long before the Holocaust. The impulse to allow, indeed to push, Jews to settle in Palestine was motivated also by British, and Western, Islamophobia.
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I was in refugee camps not that long ago. The people live in horrible conditions. It’s very moving. I visited a family who lived in a small room. As usual, Middle Eastern–style, they offered coffee and so on, but when they start showing you the keys of their villages, their houses, pictures of their land, when they start telling you idealized stories about what life was like in the Galilee... you’re right, Ilan, it has to be dealt with realistically, but it’s hard to tell people like that, “You are never going to see your village again.”
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For the last ten years especially, there has been a very strong shift in Israeli mentality and politics toward the right, nationalism, toward more extremism, there is a kind of circling the wagons mentality which was also true in South Africa toward the end. “The world hates us because they are all anti-Semitic so we will do what we want.” Nothing is their fault; everything is somebody else’s fault, a lot of brutality.
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It was a bizarre mixture, which I like to call “a movement made by people who do not believe in God but God nonetheless promised them Palestine.”
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“I invaded your house, but I am generous enough to let you come back and take the sofa with you to the new place.” That is hardly a dialogue that wants to settle a conflict; it is almost more humiliating than the act of invasion itself.
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A world that would stop employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes elsewhere in the world.
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In January 2006, the Palestinians committed a serious crime. They voted “the wrong way” in carefully monitored free elections, placing the Parliament in the hands of Hamas. [...] The United States and Israel soon began planning a military coup to overthrow the unacceptable elected government, a familiar procedure.