Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair [Paperback]

Jonathan Cook (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 11, 2008 | ISBN-10: 1848130317 | ISBN-13: 978-1848130319

This book claims that Palestine is fast disappearing and fulfilling the objectives of Israel's founding fathers. Over many decades, Israel has developed and refined policies to disperse, imprison and impoverish the Palestinian people, in a relentless effort to destroy them as a nation. It has industrialized Palestinian despair through ever more sophisticated systems of curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs. Cook analyzes how Israel has transformed the West Bank and Gaza into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, creating a lucrative "defense" industry by pioneering the technologies needed for urban warfare, crowd control and collective punishment.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'This is an impressive and timely book written by one of the most knowledgeable writers on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Its insight into the devastating impact of Zionist settler colonialism and its account of the current reality on the ground are unique. A must read for those seeking peace and justice in the Middle East.' - Nur Masalha, Director of the Holy Land Research Project, St Mary's University College (UK), and author of The Bible and Zionism (2007)'No one is a keener observer of Zionism's true goals, from its bald usurpation of land and resources to its bad faith about seeking real peace. The book provides an unusual depth of evidence and sharp analysis, and a devastating indictment of Zionism. It is a penetrating piece of scholarship and a gem of easy readability.' - Kathleen Christison, former CIA analyst and author of Perceptions of Palestine (1999)

About the Author

Jonathan Cook is the only western journalist to be based in Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian people in Israel.  He was previously a staff journalist on the Guardian and Observer newsletters, and has also written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Times, Le Monde diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Al-Ahram Weekly, Counterpunch and Aljazeeria.net.  He is the author of Blood and Religion:  The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (2006) and Israel and the Clash of Civilisations (2008).  

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Zed Books (November 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1848130317
• ISBN-13: 978-1848130319
• Product Dimensions: 0.7 x 5.2 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #226,745 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 64 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful journalism May 25, 2009

By Chris

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Mr. Cook starts off the book by examining the foundations of the Jewish state. 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes in 1948 because of ethnic cleansing by Israel. Cook notes that this ethnic cleansing plan, "Plan Dalet" was approved by the Zionist leadership in Tel Aviv in March 1948. Both sides committed atrocities in the 1948 conflict but the Zionists committed several dozen massacres at minimum. Cook writes that the Deir Yessin massacre did not actually kill 250 Arabs but around 100 and that Begin exaggerated the number killed so as to sow terror in Palestinians.. Cook notes that, in the midst of the ethnic cleansing of Lydd and Ramla, forces under the command of Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin massacred about 170 Palestinian males who had taken shelter in the Dahamish mosque in Lydd. Thousands of Israeli Arabs were quietly expelled from their homes in the 1948-56 period. Cook writes that an attempt to create a pretext to expel the Israeli Arab inhabitants of the Iron Triangle, called Operation Hafarferet,had to be called off after the massacre of 47 Israeli Arabs by the Israeli border police at Kafr Qassem.

Israeli Arabs, i.e. non-Jews, make up a fifth of Israel's citizenry. Yet non-Jews are effectively excluded from owning or receiving leases on 93 percent of the land within Israel's pre-1967 borders. They are barred from many job categories because of Jewish racism and numerous barriers limit their access to higher education. Israeli Arabs are forced to use the vast majority of the land allotted to them for residential purposes. They have very little access to land to build new housing or start new businesses--Israeli local and regional government planning bodies make sure that they do not. .... Israeli Arabs have the right to vote and Cook extensively discusses the fear of Israeli elites that their high birthrate might lead them to use the ballot box to overturn the racist foundations of the Israeli state. Cook quotes an article from one of Israel's leading newspapers, Ma'ariv, in early 2007 which reported that Prime Minister Olmert discussed with Shin Bet officials the need to target Israeli Arab leaders and organizations that engage in the "subversion" of advocating the elimination of Israel as a Jewish supremacist state.

Cook notes that all Israeli policy in the occupied territories since 1967 can be explained by the desire to make life so miserable for Palestinians, killing them and destroying their economic existence, that they will gradually leave the territories and Jews can take all the land. He quotes Moshe Dayan privately explaining in the 1970's that Palestinians would be made to live "like dogs" and hopefully they would be encouraged to leave the occupied territories. Israel refused to allow the Palestinian economy to develop after 1967. Large amounts of Palestinian land were confiscated, including communal farm land. Cook notes that the Swedish branch of Save the Children reported that 10,000 children suffered broken bones caused by Israeli soldiers in the first two years of the first Intifada. In 1988, a prominent settler leader named Pinchas Wallerstein chased around some Palestinian children with a firearm, killing one and wounding another. Cooks notes that Wallerstein said he was not exercising self-defense but attempting to teach the children about the supremacy of Jewish authority in the holy land. He was sentenced to 4 months community service. Similarly, in 2002, as the Israeli army looked on, Jewish settlers attacked the West Bank village of Yanun, forcing the inhabitants to flee as they fired on homes, poisoned the village wells and killed the villagers' livestock. The settlers often have carte blanche to engage in racist terror against Palestinians.

Cook quotes from a report authored by an Israeli defense ministry advisor, General Baruch Spiegel, in 2005. The Speigel report stated that a third of the 120 Israeli settlements in the West Bank were on land that was confiscated from Palestinian landowners in the following manner. The Israeli army would seize the land for "security" purposes and then quietly hand off the land for settlement to civilian Israeli settlers, not uncommonly religious fascists. The number of Israeli settlers during the Oslo "peace process" (1993-2000) doubled in the occupied territories, as Yasser Arafat's clique enriched themselves policing Palestinian population centers. The US and successive Israeli governments pretended that they were making substantial gestures toward Palestinian rights. Actually what they did was consolidate Palestinians into scattered population centers whose territorial contiguity was broken up by Jewish settlements and Jew-only bypass roads, with Israel controlling the aquifers and agricultural land of the Jordan Valley. Israel, since its occupation of the West Bank began, has stolen almost all the water of the West Bank for its citizens and settlers, making it extremely difficult for Palestinians to get water, much less clean water. It was this state of affairs that was offered to the Palestinians as a "state" by Ehud Barak in 2000, notes Cook. For all the horrible screaming about Barak's "generous" offer and Arafat's satanic motives in rejecting it, the fact that Barak offered Arafat a "state" of isolated Bantustans was confirmed, according to Cook, by written guidelines that Ha'aretz, Israel's leading newspaper, reported was provided to Olmert before the Annapolis summit in 2007.

Other essays include an examination of the legal charges against Azmi Bishara and reflections on the fate of Palestinian Christians. In another essay, he travels along with a group of Israeli Jewish women who hang around Israeli checkpoints in an attempt to deter Israeli soldiers from engaging in their usual activities of humiliating, abusing and beating Palestinians at the checkpoints. He discusses the largely bogus scare about the "new anti-Semitism" allegedly raging in Europe (see his endnotes for elaboration on a few of the points).

The economic strangulation of the people of Gaza has intensified since 2006, what with the periodic military bombardment of civilian infrastructure and agricultural land, has reduced Gaza to the worst destitution levels of Sub-Saharan Africa. Read more ›

64 of 70 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential book, outrageously overpriced in the US March 9, 2009

By Sherry Al-mufti

Format:Hardcover

This book is the first to focus on an essential aspect of Israel's conduct of its nearly 42 year brutal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. One cannot comprehend Israel's behavior toward the Palestinian people it holds under its control without the information in this book. What a shame, then, that it is so outrageously overpriced in the United States.

I buy the great majority of my books from Amazon, but in this case I paid about one third the Amazon price by ordering the book from a UK seller via abebooks.com. I strongly recommend this book, but I do not recommend buying it from a U.S. source.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Amazing Book by Jonathan Cook May 22, 2010

By Howard B. Lenow VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

If you want to understand, truly understand, what is going on inside Israel and what life is truly like for Palestinian citizens of Israel, you shoud read this book. NO one understands the intricacies of the Israeli's government's systematic and institutionalized discrimination against its Palestinian citizens like Mr. Cook.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I didn't get to read the whole book January 21, 2011

By marilyn selim

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I originally got this book through the library and read one and a half chapters before it had to go back. It was enough though to make me realize that it was worth buying and digesting slowly and thoughtfully. I won't get into the geo-political reasons to read this because that would open up too much backlash from shortsighted/blinded/brainwashed persons. As it happens, my daughter and a friend visited at Christmas time when my purchased copy arrived. The friend went home with the book. If I don't get it back, that's OK. I will be purchasing another for myself.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT Book! August 20, 2011

By Jordan

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Most important work by the exceptional, award winning [...] author Jonathan Cook.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Award for Journalism in June 2011. As covered on the Israeli Occupation Archive ([...]

[Start of quote]

Jonathan Cook, whose work appears regularly on the pages of the IOA, was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Award for Journalism.

The award citation reads: "Jonathan Cook's work on Palestine and Israel, especially his de-coding of official propaganda and his outstanding analysis of events often obfuscated in the mainstream, has made him one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East."

Indeed. As regular readers of Jonathan Cook's work already know, Cook's analysis puts today's events in an historical context that never fails to decipher the power interests behind the news. His knowledge of Palestinian and Israeli history; his insightful, astute coverage; and his commitment to justice result in unparalleled reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Occupation, and the life of Palestinians under Israeli rule, both within and outside of the 1967 borders.

[End of quote]

Source: [[...]

This book details the history and reality of Palestinian dispossession by Israel: the thoroughly planned and carefully executed campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by Israel over decades in which Palestine keeps shrinking and Greater Israel grows even greater.

An essential text for the understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel's Occupation and the dimming prospects for peace and resolution.

Most highly recommended!

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a lucid and comprehensive work March 21, 2012

By Theodore M. Horesh

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is probably the most comprehensive work I have read on Palestine. If you want to understand the history and mechanisms through which Palestinian land has been broken up, hemmed in, regulated, and stolen, this is the best work of which I am aware. Like many works, this book provides a comprehensive history of Israeli acquisition of Palestinian lands. But it is unique amongst my readings in this field in that it uncovers the administrative means through which Palestinian lands have been progressively... there is really no other word for it than... stolen.

This book does a far better job of making sense of the plight of the Palestinians than other excellent works, like those of Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, Jimmy Carter, and Saree Makdisi. Chomsky probably does a better job of making the moral case against the actions of Israel than anyone else. Rashid Khalidi presents a scholarly case for the endurance of Palestinain identity. Edward Said fluently speaks of the inner experience of Palestinians and the mechanisms of cultural oppression. Jimmy Carter provides a holistic picture of the plight of the Palestinians and a comprehensive view of a roadmap for peace. And Saree Makdisi does a better job of explaining how conditions in the West Bank shape Palestinian lives. But Cook provides a more comprehensive view of how Israel has exploited the Palestinians, how it has effected their prospects for forging a state, and what we might expect of future Israeli administrations.

However, this is a work of journalism, from an award winning journalist from what I understand, but journalism nonetheless. The sources are typical of journalistic works, mostly Hebrew sources, and often governmental, but less filtered than what you might get from an academic.... This means that it is harder to cite Cook with confidence. It appears to me that in uncovering multiple deceptive practices of multiple different Israeli governments, Cook has become a little too quick to assign motives. This is understandable. And of course, this is what a good reporter should get at, who is doing what and for what reasons. While no one would question the validity of such reporting on, say, Rwanda, there are many who demand more of scholarship on Israel. While I would recommend this to someone new to the issue, who is at least a little sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, I would not give it to an Israel-hawk, even though I am tempted by its comprehensiveness and conciseness.

One more thing: Cook has been accused by another reviewer of being an anti-Semite. Please be assured there is nothing in the book to warrant, or even provoke, such an accusation. Supporters of Israel will often throw around very strong language like this when they imagine an individual to be a threat to Israel. Whether or not they believe what they are saying, I am uncertain. What is certain is that if it were an intentional smear tactic it would be very successful. Supporters of Israeli oppression have managed to sideline many credible and respectable politicians and academics. However, the practice of branding opponents with inflammatory smears should itself should delegitimize its practitioners. They did the same thing with Jimmy Carter, when he wrote of Israeli abuses of Palestinians. This in spite of the fact that probably more than any other individual outside of Israel, Carter has been responsible for assuring Israeli security.

This work should be taken seriously and the arguments found therein taken up for further research by scholars. And we should salute Cook for his dedication to human rights. Read more ›