Customer Reviews

All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Despite some of the negative reviews that were written by a few ignorant so-called historians, this book is actually extremely accurate. Whomever you may be, whatever you believe, or whatever side you are on, what happened happend and the facts are there and Mr. Khalidi has documented them well. Israel was formed on land that does not belong to it and this book showed what they did to accomplish that-destroy Palestinian villages. The content of this book and the history behind this conflict is best described by a movie made by Israelis and shown at the San Francisco Jewish film festival calle AL-NAKBA.

There is a very good reason why this book received so many 1-star reviews [...]: because it exposes the truth that most Israelis and pro-Zionists wish to hide, forever.

This is history:

step 1: pre-1948 Zionist claim: "there are no people in Palestine"

step 2: 1948 Zionists deliberately expelled 800,000 Palestinians from their homeland

step 3: 1949-1952: Israel systematically destroyed every remnant of 418 Palestinian villages that were depopulated in 1948, in order to erase the evidence.

This monumental book finally presents the evidence, drawn from over 20 sources (including Zionist ones), organized district by district, village by village. It's the evidence Israeli leaders would have hoped been buried forever, so they would never have to face War Crimes Tribunals.

So now their strategy is to post bad reviews for this book here so as to prevent you, potential reader, from seeing that evidence for yourself. Don't close your eyes: see it for yourself, then THINK!

With respect to all the other reviewers of this book. Yes: war is war and people should expect to get hurt. Yes: Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian stand-off have suffered from acts of terrorism and it serves no purpose to compare wounds, the dead are dead, we don't need any more. However, this book is a very important research tool for one reason. Unlike the terrorist acts that have been committed by both sides in this pathetic tragedy. This book lists actions that were carried out by the Israeli GOVERNMENT, and which they do not deny. War is war, we expect to hear about violence and inhumanity. This is systematic, the book chronicles a policy that began during a war and is still occurring today despite the Oslo accord and numerous agreements entered into by the Israeli GOVERNMENT. Terrorism and broken treaties are to be expected from people who have been raised with an agenda of hate; wether they be the perrennially armed settlers or the fanatical terrorist groups. What should NOT be considered normal is when these acts are committed by a government, acknowledged and excused. Again I repeat, the Israeli government does NOT deny that these actions were taken. In addition, no one can deny the since the Oslo accord- during "peace" time, Israeli settlements in PALESTINIAN areas have increased by over 50%. Don't believe me if u don't want to, the world is full of libraries, go out and do some research. Finally, with regards to the book, it is a good research tool, containing many statistics and accurate descriptions of places, however, that is all it contains. It is far more useful as an aid when reading accounts ar articles as it can help verify information. however, it is not a history of the missing Palestinian villages and should not be read as such.

A sad, but true testament of the fate of the Palestinians in 1948. Those who haven't read of these events will discover a world mostly kept hidden in the west. Highly recommended.

This is a book that tells the truth about a subject many would rather cover up. It is a voice of truth against a decades long propoganda campaign which wishes to pretend that Palestinians didn't have homes or villages within what is now Israel. Khalidi catalogs hundreds of villages which are now gone. Gone as a result of Israel's extensive efforts after 1948 to erase every trace, with explosives and excavators, of the villages. Even with the extensive catalog of information presented, there are those who are in denial. They start with dishonest works that claim what is now Israel was empty when they arrived. Since it was empty, the villages destroyed were simply empty ruins. Lies build on lies.

The first british count of the population of Palestine after they took over showed around 80,000 jews and around 700,000 who were not Jews. Khalidi shows the reality of those 700,000 people and their lives. And how the evidence of that reality was erased.

Many will be angry that Israeli pseudo-scholars and pseudo-scholarship which has definitively "proved" that what is now Israel was empty before Jewish settlers arrived is not accepted as fact. But they have little to be angry about considering that their scholarship has no crediblity outside of Israel and the US Christian Right. The grim reality as shown by Walid Khalidi in this book is impossible to dismiss because the truth of it is right there on the page. No matter how many books they can find to say that what is now Israel was empty of people, every census and what physical evidence is left proves them wrong.

Khalidi will also by some be said to be ungreatful to the British and the Jewish settlers. Along with the arguments that palestinians didn't exist and their villages were not real, is the sick idea (refuted by the book) that Palestinians were little more than savages whose only possiblity of advancement was by being civilized by europeans. They fail often to understand that slaves don't enjoy the benefits of progress created by their masters. In the end, they can only repeat the official line that these people didn't exist or were shiftless drifters who have no attachment to any land.

Khalidi provides in the book detailed surveys of villages lost in 1948. He has unearthed masses of documentation and photographs. The material shows the existance and life of these villages. What is presented will never be good enough for some critics. All that can be said is that we fortunate that so much survives considering the lengths that Israel went to after 1948 to erase even the rubble of these villages from the face of the earth.

Finally, Khalidi shows with Israeli documents how Israeli policies in 1948 led to the depopulation of the villages. It must always be remembered that Israel could only exist as a democracy after 1948 by driving enough palestinians from their homes during the war. The massacre of civilians
such as Dier Yassein and other policies drove these people from their homes and the borders drawn after the war did not let them come back.

Khalidi's evidence for the obvious, the existance of pre-1948 Palestinians, is so overwhelming that no honest person could deny the reality of what he presents. But the enemies of peace in the middle east will even in spite of all of Khalidi's material deny the truth.

As an Israeli Jew who is the son of American olim, I have been raised both very left wing and ardently Zionist. I do not disagree with the vast majority of the actions of the IDF during the War of Independence. However, this book, regardless of what happened in that war, I found incredibly interesting. Benny Morris, whom I respect, said it was a "dazzling encylcopedic" work. And Mr. Morris was exactly right. The book contains all sorts of interesting information about the villages that we Israelis tend to forget ever existed. If only Mr. Khalidi discussed the Jewish communities that were also fled or if he addressed the Arab villages that were depopulated BEFORE the War of Independence even started. Or perhaps something about those villages that are still there. Even if it is a little biased, I think that we Zionists should look past that and discover the tremendous volume of truly interesting information that lies in this book.

I always keep a copy of All That Remains handy. It is an excellent reference document that is a must have in the library of anyone interested in the history of Palestine. Although, for a Palestinian, it is a depressing reminder of what we have lost, it is of utmost important that we not forget. The names and memory of those 418 villages depopulated and destroyed by Israel will live forever. Never Again!

This is an excellent piece of worth for the academic, human rights and political fields. It describes the crux of today's conflict in the Middle East: the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by first, Jewish militias, and then the State of Israel. This book is a MUST READ for those, like myself, who still hope for peace in the the Middle East and an end to the unholy acts committed in such a holy land. "All that Remains" educates the reader at the cause of Palestinian frusteration - that they were driven out of their homes in '48 and live today in refugee camps. Sad isn't it that many of them still hold the keys to their homes? And these were not simple acts of war. This was systematic ethnic cleansing. I would give this book ten stars if I could.

It's a great buy for those who are looking for the facts and nothing but the facts about an issue with so many differnt views and spins on it. I really reccomend it.

This book is extremely misleading. In sections respectively labeled "occupation" and "depopulation, he lists and describes 418 villages, implying that in 1948, Israel forced Arabs from their homes and villages at gunpoint. At that time, however, thousands of ruins, abandoned during the Ottoman era, remained dotting Israel's countryside, according to Moshe Brawer's 1994 Israel Affairs review of the work.

Four years before Israel's War of Independence, a detailed study based on British Survey of Palestine maps listed 2,077 abandoned rural villages, hamlets and smaller sites--against only 1,274 inhabited Arab, Jewish and other villages and hamlets, some of them temporary.

Furthermore, Dr. Robinson's 1841 book, Journal of Travels in the Year 1838 and H.B. Tristram's 633-page Land of Israel (1865), detail earthquakes, droughts, conscriptions, onerous taxes, internal wars, thievery, malaria, cholera and other epidemics that depopulated much of Israel long before 1880, when the first wave of Jewish immigration began. It's disturbing that a work touted as a great academic achievement includes none of these facts.

Khalidi also omits the commonality of Ottoman depopulation programs. In Chio (Greece), Damascus, Hasbeiya and Aleppo, non-Muslims were slaughtered in 1822, 1858, 1859 and 1860. In southern Syria (as it was then called), the Turks conscripted all available youths and extorted "annual tax of several piastres for every fruit-tree from the very year it is planted," according to Tristram, even for olive trees that took 40 years to produce fruit. He and Robinson found Israel barren and empty, its villages poor--and frequently abandoned. In Tiberias, "almost exclusively a Jewish town," the Muslim quarter was in 1865 "almost wholly in ruins, having been overthrown in the great earthquake of 1837."

A true academic masterpiece would have at least referred to prior devastation and justified the conclusions made in spite of it. Khalidi fails this test, failing to remark (as well) that Schwobel in 1904 found, against 329 inhabited rural Galilee areas, some 460 ruined villages and hamlets. Finally, Khalidi misses another study, which determined that Ottoman rule brought devastation and abandonment to at least 50% of Hebron area villages and hamlets, 26-27% near Tulkarem and Nablus and 85% in Lower eastern Galilee and the central Jordan Valley.

The missing long-term perspective is bad enough, but equally disappointing is Khalidi's avoidance of the benefits that Arab labor derived from three decades of British administration (1918-48) and Jewish immigration, which together brought law, order, vital services, economic investment and modernization to the land. From 1922 to 1947, Jewish agricultural settlements increased coastal plain citrus groves 971%, to 75,000 acres. No mention of that, or of the masses of workers these groves attracted from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Arabia--according to Arthur Ruppin, Bill Farrell, Justin McCarthy, Yehoshua Porath, Alexander Schlolch, Neville Mandel, Vital Cuinet and official Ottoman data. This is a significant omission since workers lived in temporary shacks on land they didn't own, and in 1948 abandonned them precisely because they were not permanent.

Topping that is the failure to improve upon Arif al-Arif's 1950s historical-political study and personal archives. Alas, Khalidi's long, virulently anti-Israel introduction is followed by 418 sadly inaccurate surveys with only rough sketch-maps and photographs as backup. Although he lists each area's geographical attributes, history, distance from district capital, average elevation, land ownership, use, population and dwellings in 1931 and 1944, the blurred photographs could have been taken almost anywhere, including current-day West Bank villages.

There are also blatant inaccuracies. Khalidi calls Fardisiya and Khirbat al-Buri villages. In 1945, Fardisiya (2.5 kilometres south of Tulkarem) had 20 inhabitants who owned less than 20 acres and four small buildings. This was a village? Furthermore, Fardisyia was not conquered, but was ceded to Israel under the 1949 armistice. For Khirbat al-Burj, 34 kilometres south of Haifa, Khalidi lists no population, but states that residents owned less than 4 acres. Air photos show two stone buildings and some hovels. Again, a village?

In 1948, there were early 1940s British Royal Air Force photos showing sizes and numbers of houses, cultivated lands and villages. Israel supplemented these that year with high quality air photos of most rural areas involved in the war. The British Survey of Palestine included many detailed maps of villages later devastated. Until 1947, village headmen often kept population, economic and special event data in village notebooks. Israeli academics have also contributed substantial scholarship. But Khalidi did not consult any of the available data, including material declassified in the 1980s. He simply labeled these items "not available."

Worse, Khalidi employs the flawed Mandate government Village Statistics 1945--which reflects exaggerations by which headmen enhanced government food rations. He also relies on a Beirut reproduction, whose editor further embellished the initial over-counts. The original categorized land ownership as "Arab, Jewish or others." Beirut editor Sami Hadawi disingenuously shifted all non-Jewish land--including churches, monasteries, institutions and organizations--to Arabs. Khalidi unreservedly repeats this deception, Brawer reports.

And finally, Khalidi omits or grossly misrepresents war-related factors that contributed to 1948 depopulation. He often reproduces portions of Israeli reports--out of context--solely to lay blame on Israel. He nowhere mentions Arab villagers' major war contributions, or the locations of villages relative to their grueling, months-long assault on Israel's roads.

If the evidence was so overwhelming, why couldn't Khalidi obtain first-hand material from villagers who lived through these events?

Overall, a major disappointment.

--Alyssa A. Lappen