Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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373 of 428 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A prerequisite for understanding the Palestinian experience, November 20, 2006
In order to achieve peaceful coexistence in Palestine/Israel, it is imperative that both Palestinians and Israelis hear the true stories of the other and acknowledge their own wrongdoings.
This book documents, using historical sources, the wrongdoings that were done to the Palestinians during the 1948 war (the Israeli war of independence and the war the Palestinians call the catastrophe). This book analyses historical evidence from Israeli sources, indepdently proving true the 1948 experiences the Palestinian refugees, men and women, rich and poor, muslim and christian recount about their cleansing from their land and property.
These events of 1948 accounted here were censored by the perpetrators from even the Israeli population. These events were never added to school books and intentionally pushed out of the Israeli society's consciousness.
However, these events and experiences are vivid in the Palestinian consciousness. Palestinians continue to live the consequences of their diaspora and forced migration in 1948 today.
In order to achieve peace, it is crucial to understand the Palestinian experience and acknowledge it. These experiences are just as true and unquestionable to Palestinians as true and unquestionable the holocaust is to the Israelis.
Now it is totally expected that the book would face resistence and bad reviews here by some Israelis who have never heard these stories and are unwanting to hear them (thanks to censorship). Similarly, zionist enthusiasts are likely to resist this book as they've always resisted any effort that would make heard the Palestinian history.
But a mutual aknowledgement of history in its good and bad, accepting responsibility for crimes and correcting any wrongdoings are a must for both sides to achieve true peace with the other.
This book is a must read for anyone (Israeli, Palestinian, Western or Eastern) that is truely interested in peace in the middle east and in a well-founded and well-informed understanding of the Palestinian situation.
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299 of 348 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb account of the Zionists' expulsion of the Palestinians, January 25, 2007
Pappe, an Israeli historian and a senior lecturer at Haifa University, has written a superb account of the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians from their land in 1948. He quotes David Ben Gurion, leader of the Zionist movement from the mid-1920 until the 1960s, who wrote in his diary in 1938, "I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it." This contradicts the Zionists' public claim that they were seizing a land without a people.
Pappe writes of the Israelis' March 1948 plan for evicting the Palestinians, "The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning."
Between 30 March and 15 May 1948, i.e. before any Arab government intervened, Israeli forces seized 200 villages and expelled 250,000 Palestinians. The Israeli leadership stated, "The principal objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages ... the eviction of the villagers." On 9 April, Israeli forces massacred 93 people, including 30 babies, at Deir Yassin. In Haifa, the Israeli commander ordered, "Kill any Arab you encounter."
This all happened under British rule in Palestine, where Britain had 75,000 troops: Britain's Mandate did not end until 14 May. The Labour government connived at the Israeli onslaught, although the British state was legally obliged as the occupier (and also by UN resolution 181) to uphold law and order. Yet the Labour government announced that it would no longer be responsible for law and order and it withdrew all the British policemen. It also forbade the presence of any UN bodies, again breaching the terms of the UN resolution. The government ordered British forces to disarm the few Palestinians who had weapons, promising to protect them from Israeli attacks, then immediately reneged on this promise.
On 24 May 1948, Ben Gurion wrote, "We will establish a Christian state in Lebanon, the southern border of which will be the Litani River. We will break Transjordan, bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight - we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. This will be in revenge for what they (the Egyptians, the Aramis and Assyrians) did to our forefathers during Biblical times." These ravings of an insane warmonger hardly betrayed any genuine fear of a `second holocaust'. The Palestinians were suffering massive expulsion, not trying to destroy the Jewish community.
Pappe summarises, "When it created its nation-state, the Zionist movement did not wage a war that `tragically but inevitably' led to the expulsion of `parts of' the indigenous population, but the other way round: the main goal was the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine, which the movement coveted for its new state. A few weeks after the ethnic cleansing operations began, the neighbouring Arab states sent a small army - small in comparison to their overall military might - to try, in vain, to prevent the ethnic cleansing. The war with the regular Arab armies did not bring the ethnic cleansing operations to a halt until their successful completion in the autumn of 1948."
Overall, the Zionist forces uprooted more than half Palestine's population, 800,000 people, destroyed 531 villages and emptied eleven urban neighbourhoods of their inhabitants. Pappe concludes that this was "a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity."
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250 of 293 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Palestinians pay the price for Europe's guilt, December 8, 2006
Ilan Pappe has written a scholarly work on the dark side of the formation of the state of Israel. While this is the first book I've ever read on the subject and can't ascertain whether the book is 100% factually accurate, you can't just dismiss all of it simply out of hand just because you don't agree with the contents.
While atrocities were committed by both sides one can't but help feel sympathy and sadness for the Palestinians. Not only were they the majority in Palestine but the world's memory of 1948 is that the land was empty and those few Arabs living there left voluntarily. They were up against a determined, highly organized and motivated Zionist movement that saw Palestine as their future homeland that necessitated a majority Jewish population. The Arabs were to pay for the blood on the hands of Europeans with their own blood and the land they lived on for centuries.
Well before 1947 there were extremely extensive surveys started of every Arab village down even into the minutest detail. These surveys were they used by the Nagana and the Stern gangs terrorize those villages to "motivate" the Arabs to leave. Dynamiting houses with the occupants inside was quite effective as was shooting through windows.
There are those who think that any ad motion of guilt will lead to the destruction of Israel miss the point. The Truth and Reconciliation committee in SA has led to peace. Could not the Israelis admit some guilt and start on the road to peace? Admitting guilt will take away some of the fire that the Jihadist's use to fan the flames of their hatred.
Honest dialogue by both sides is what is sorely needed if we are to see peace in our lifetimes.
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