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A review by zmorris1923
On Palestine by Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky
5.0
I won't pretend to have understood all the nuance of each issue, but this was a valuable historic insight into Palestine's plights, as well as a pretty hefty amount of information about the activist movement to help it.
Reading the history, it's easy to see Israel has no interest in working with Palestinians. It continually has used the attempts to solve the conflict as a means to stall: to reach a "no solution" purgatory where they can continue their land grab.
The ceasefires that are eventually reached--agreed to by Hamas and Israel, are ended because Israel attacks first. Israel is trying to make a theocracy, but to have a higher population of Palestinians than jews is antithetical to what Israel wants. So genocide is the next logical option.
And when conversations are started up again, Palestine and Israel are both considered to be equally at fault, when one is a colonizer, and the other a defender. This is done in a wish to appease Israel.
And it's crazy because there have been talks with Palestinian allies like Egypt giving Israel the chance to be secure in it's statehood, but Israel refuses, prefering expansion over security. And they will still be legitimate because the US backs Israel.
But what inspired me was the continued talk of the influence of the world's citizens, boycotting etc. This book was from about 8 years ago I think, and they were calling for boycotts of US markets, and I'm glad that's actually happening because that is how apartheid ended in some way in South Africa, and how the US stopped supporting them. (Also, I had no idea of Cuba's influence in that specific event, so learning of that here was interesting.)
Some insights about the book itself:
You can really tell Chomsky is an anarchist because he keeps talking about states being inherently violent. The start of a new state implies the end and usurpation of a past one. I believe he wishes for an end to statehood here generally, supporting, I think, a one state system.
I don't totally understand the two state solution versus the one state, so I didn't get a lot of answers in respect to what those are, but I think it helped me understand a bit more generally.
So yeah, a good book I think.
Reading the history, it's easy to see Israel has no interest in working with Palestinians. It continually has used the attempts to solve the conflict as a means to stall: to reach a "no solution" purgatory where they can continue their land grab.
The ceasefires that are eventually reached--agreed to by Hamas and Israel, are ended because Israel attacks first. Israel is trying to make a theocracy, but to have a higher population of Palestinians than jews is antithetical to what Israel wants. So genocide is the next logical option.
And when conversations are started up again, Palestine and Israel are both considered to be equally at fault, when one is a colonizer, and the other a defender. This is done in a wish to appease Israel.
And it's crazy because there have been talks with Palestinian allies like Egypt giving Israel the chance to be secure in it's statehood, but Israel refuses, prefering expansion over security. And they will still be legitimate because the US backs Israel.
But what inspired me was the continued talk of the influence of the world's citizens, boycotting etc. This book was from about 8 years ago I think, and they were calling for boycotts of US markets, and I'm glad that's actually happening because that is how apartheid ended in some way in South Africa, and how the US stopped supporting them. (Also, I had no idea of Cuba's influence in that specific event, so learning of that here was interesting.)
Some insights about the book itself:
You can really tell Chomsky is an anarchist because he keeps talking about states being inherently violent. The start of a new state implies the end and usurpation of a past one. I believe he wishes for an end to statehood here generally, supporting, I think, a one state system.
I don't totally understand the two state solution versus the one state, so I didn't get a lot of answers in respect to what those are, but I think it helped me understand a bit more generally.
So yeah, a good book I think.