Customer Reviews

Coffins on Our Shoulders: The Experience of the Palestinian Citizens of Israel

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This book is an excellent, very well written description of the Palestinian experience in Israel. It is particularly remarkable in its creative collaborative narrative form, a blend of social anthropological and family therapy/ family systems perspectives. The authors effectively use the personal stories of their own families, respectively Jewish and Palestinian, especially for three generations over the last 50 years, to illustrate the impact of the sociological story. The book then is a unique weaving of social anthropology with intergenerational family dynamics. The authors conclude with suggestions for hope for the younger, Palestinian "Stand Tall" generation in their relationships with their counterpart younger Jewish Israeli generation.

This is a must read for anyone interested in an "insider's" view of the Palestinean-Israeli conflict. By intersecting their own personal histories alongside the social and political history of the region, the authors succeed in crafting a unique work of scholarship, told from the voice of the "other." As the authors re-construct their own identities, the reader is also invited to examine his or her own assumptions about the region and the multi-faceted meaning of being a survivor. This is a truly compelling account that sheds new light on the lives of Palestinians living in Israel. Highly recommended!!

This is an important book for readers to understand the dynamics at play between Israel's minority and majority populations. I found the authors use of their own family histories an enlightening narrative technique they gave the book a human perspective that helped me identify more readily with the work than I otherwise would have. At first I felt that it might come off a little pretentious, but in the end it really helped tie the work together, and I found the technique to be more helpful than pretentious.

The main thing it did was illustrate the progression and evolution of the relationship between Israel and its minority population. One of the most important moments in this narrative was when as a middle aged, professional woman Khawla Abu-Bakar and her husband are delayed in an airport by Israeli security and asked humiliating and demeaning questions, she finally loses her cool and lashes out against these airport workers. The reader gets the sense that this moment is the culmination of years of tiny, seemingly innocuous little incidents that finally breaks the camels back so to speak. You realize this is a major problem; the fact that for almost a million Palestinians they are treated as strangers in their own homes. This book helps readers understand how this impossible situation affects their lives.

I also really enjoyed the discussion how the Left in Israel is really more of a problem than a solution. Their focus on supposed liberal democratic principles of freeing the individual do not take into account the group dynamic of the minority population under a government based on ethnicity. I found the discussion of the incongruities between liberal democracy and a government based on ethnicity to be very interesting. This book gave voice to some aspects of the conflict between these two concepts that I had been going over in my own mind, and as such I really enjoyed these ideas being expounded upon here.

As a further discussion of that topic they show the real world consequences of this untenable relationship by showing how the ethno-centered state uses its levers of power to shift benefits of the state toward the hegemonic majority, and how those same levers are used to shift support away from the ethnic minorities. This of course causes tensions, and further alienates the minority from the state. This book also illustrates how the "liberal" side of the government uses little half measures and progressive rhetoric to assuage the conscience of the people in court decisions that pay lip service to progressive notions of equality and minority rights, but in the end the legalese language used is such that no real change is affected. This allows the left in Israel to pretend they are supporting liberal policies, but in the end these policies do nothing for the minority.

I do have some criticisms though. I really wish they would have spent more time getting into the government and the court systems to really illustrate how this plays out. In the end several examples are used to illustrate this point, but the book I was hoping for was one that delved deep into these issues with numerous sources and examples. In the end the several in this book were enlightening, but just not as much as I was hoping for.

All in all this is an important work to read. It takes a humanistic approach to its subject, and it will give the reader a much needed insight into the Palestinian minority inside of Israel.

Yes, some of us can remember the generation in Germany that stood up to those Jews, Czechs, and others. But we can also remember that this generation accomplished little of value. And that win or lose, they wouldn't have improved the quality of life for many folks. Now there is a generation of Arabs that is willing to stand up to the Jews. And maybe to others as well. And once again, I can't see how this attitude is going to help anyone, win or lose.

While this book purports to see the Arab war against Israel from both sides, it basically faults Israel for not recognizing the suffering of the Arabs. And I think this misses the point. Even if the charges made against Israel were true, I think Israeli confessions would do little to make life better for Arabs.

The authors seem to praise (and boast about) racist Arab aggression against Israel. And they say that sympathy for the Jews after World War Two is responsible for Israel's existence. They thus imply that Israel's very right to exist is dubious. But they do not point out that had there been no second World War (or at least, no slaughter of millions of Jewish civilians), Israel would still exist, and be quite a bit stronger (and very likely larger).

The authors dismiss the Six Day War as only having a price of seven hundred Israeli dead. Well, they are right about the casualty figures. They are some of the lowest in Jewish history. They might want to look at Jewish casualties at other times when Jews were attacked in the past few centuries. Do you suppose the authors would be so dismissive of an Arab victory if there were relatively few Arab casualties?

Rabinowitz and Abu-Baker say that Israelis are too self-righteous. But even if they are, shouldn't the authors worry about the Arabs too? Doesn't it matter how much Arabs value truth, justice, human rights, peace, or prosperity? Or, for that matter, their own Arab Empire?

It seems to me that if the authors get their way, Israel will become just one more Arab state that discriminates against non-Muslims. That's nothing to cheer about.