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Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair

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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.

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.

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.

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 (www.Israeli-Occupation.org):

[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]

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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!

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.

British journalist Jonathan Cook knows his subject intimately. The only Western journalist based in Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel and married to a Palestinian woman, he experiences Israel's experiments in human despair on a daily basis. The experience is not a pleasant one, and "Disappearing Palestine" is not an easy book to read. In fact, I found the experience -- though enlightening -- a deeply depressing one. His subtitle -- "Israel's experiments in human despair" -- is attention-grabbing, biting, and deadly serious. It is also deadly accurate. Israel's consistent goal has, from before it became a nation in 1948, been to rid Palestine of its Arab residents and claim the whole thing for Jews alone. Here is how the author explains it in his Introduction: "It is my contention that Israel has turned the increasingly confined spaces left to the Palestinians not only into open-air cages but also into laboratories where experiments to encourage Palestinian despair, and ultimately emigration, are being refined. In fact, these experiments were begun inside Israel, only being `exported' to the occupied territories after their conquest in the 1967 war," something that is confirmed by Hatim Kanaaneh's "A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel". "Without the constraints impose by trying to maintain its image as a Western-style democracy inside its own borders, Israel has been able to develop a more aggressive and transparent form of imprisonment for the Palestinians under occupation. It has `industrialized' Palestinian suffering through curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits and surveillance systems, creating a lucrative `homeland security' industry that has grown in importance since the US began a similar occupation of Iraq. The holding pens in which the Palestinians are kept today are ideal places for testing new methods of urban warfare, crowd control and ghettoization, as well as developing techniques for excluding observers such as journalists and aid workers. The gradual ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland, on both sides of today's Green Line, is likely to take place with few witnesses to record it" (pages 7, 8). Within these enclosed areas, "Palestinians are being deprived of any economic prospects -- even the basic ability to subsist. Their immiseration ... is designed with one end in mind: the encouragement of `transfer', the word Israelis prefer to `ethnic cleansing'." (page 8)

The rest of the book's 251 pages of text (plus 30 pages of notes) is a detailed description of what goes on in Israel and the Occupied Territories on a daily basis. As the old saying goes, the Devil is in the details, and the details are horrendous. If reading them is like taking an acid bath, imagine what living them every day of your life must be like. There hasn't been a single Israeli leader who has not been directly complicit in this horror. Nor a single U.S. president -- with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter -- who hasn't steadfastly supported Israel's abhorrent behavior, all of it justified in the name of "security needs".

There is no excuse at all for supporting Israel in its inhuman treatment of Palestinians and its blatant racism concerning anyone who is not a Jew. This book ought to be required reading for every US Senator and Representative, and anyone running for those offices. The same goes for political leaders in the UK and Europe. That the West continues to condone and outright support Israel in this is a bitter indictment of all of us.

If you don't know this book, go to your local book store or one of the online booksellers and buy your copy today. It is an eye-opener, even if you consider yourself knowledgeable on the subject, as I did. I didn't know the half of it.

Jonathan Cook, the anti-semite and professional Israel basher, has now written his third book containing nothing but vitriol, huge distortions, and a complete lack of context and objectivity in relation to Israel.

Indeed, the author appears to be a bit of a crank, being completely obsessed with Israel. Apart from the three books he has written about Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians/Arabs, he also has a website exclusively dedicated to bashing Israel. And if that's not enough, he even lives in Israel, ostensibly for the purpose of being able to see the situation first hand. Given that his entire life is devoted to Israel bashing, one wonders what the author would do if Israel didn't exist. Needless to say, for readers wanting so much as an ounce of objectivity, books by Cook are to be avoided like the plague.

The basic premise of this book is as follows: Despite the Palestinians accepting the UN partition of what was then British Mandate Palestine in 1947 by UN Resolution 181 and desiring to live peacefully side by side Israel in the two state solution, the wicked Israelis have systematically continued to occupy more and more Palestinian land, with Palestinian resistance being solely attributable to Israel continuing to expand beyond its internationally recognised borders.

What a load of tosh.

As anyone who knows anything about this dispute knows all too well, the Palestinians (not to mention the whole of the Arab world) violently rejected - and continue to reject - the creation of Israel, and ever since its creation have fought a ruthless terrorist war to destroy it. In the words of Hamas' Charter, which, as critics of Israel are forever pointing out, was democratically elected by Gazans:

'Israel exists and will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it...'.

Apparently, the likes of Cook expect Israel to do one of two things:
- Make peace with those who seek to 'obliterate' it
- Sit on its hands and allow Palestinians (not to mention other terrorist groups like Hizbollah) perpetrate suicide bombings and fire rockets with impunity

Strange as it may seem, Israel has chosen the third option, which is to take all action necessary to provide security to its citizens.

Inevitably, due to Israel's tiny size, this necessarily involves annexing Palestinian land, as quite simply, Israel is not defensible in its internationally recognised borders.

As Hizbollah and Hamas have both clearly demonstrated, even in its expanded borders, Israel is still highly susceptible to even primitive rockets. Now imagine Israel had smaller borders and Hamas/Hizbollah had more sophisticated rockets...

Then there's the fact that when Israel withdrew from occupied land (Southern Lebanon in 2000; Gaza in 2005), rather than gaining peace, it had rockets fired at it from the very land from which it had withdrawn. Which makes it rather obvious why Israel is so loathe to withdraw from the West Bank.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that Israel should continue to expand its settlements in the West Bank. To the contrary, I am opposed to such a policy. However, there are clear security based reasons, albeit not recognised by international law, why Israel has occupied and built settlements in the West Bank.

And speaking of international law, what right do the Palestinians and critics of Israel have to invoke international law when they reject the most fundamental principle of international law governing the Israel-Palestine conflict, namely, Israel's right to exist?

The reality is that there can never be a two state solution. The only practical hope of ending this tragic conflict is the three state solution, entailing Gaza becoming part of Egypt, and the West Bank, or part thereof, becoming part of Jordan.

Jonathan: May I make a suggestion? Having flogged to death the topic of Israel and its relationship with the Palestinians/Arabs, I have a suggestion for the topic of your next book. I recommend you write a book about how the Jews are behind the financial crisis currently sweeping the world. There are two clear reasons why the Jews had the motive to bring about the collapse of the world's economy:
- Reduce the power of Iran through decimating the oil price
- Cause Western leaders (Barak Obama in particular) to focus their time and energies on their economies rather than devoting time to the Israel-Palestine conflict

Surely you have noticed the incredible coincidence that as soon as it appeared that Obama - believed by many to be reasonably symapthetic to the Palestinian cause - was likely to be elected in late 2008, the financial crisis suddenly moved into overdrive. And what caused the crisis to reach these new depths? The sudden collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank with significant Jewish ownership and control. Hardly a coincidence.

So there we have it, means, motive, and opportunity. Not to mention timing. Surely enough material for your highly fertile mind to weave together a compelling story.

Of course, you should make absolutely no mention of all the non-Jewish bankers who were heavily involved in bringing about the financial crisis. Nor mention the Jewish bankers who carefully avoided the worst of the subprime crisis (Goldman Sachs). Nor should you make any mention of the fact that Jews have lost their jobs/businesses/fortunes in the same proportion as everyone else. In writing the book, you should continue your well established form of argument whereby any and all facts - irrespective of how strongly they contradict your views - are completely ignored.

As we know, the Jews have been blamed for numerous recessions/depressions in the past, so why should this one be any different? The only difference on this occasion is the motive, as noted above.

May I also suggest that before writing this book, first carefully read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to ensure you incorporate all of its key themes. Then again, you are probably already extremely familar with the Protocols.