Customer Reviews

A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is a history of Palestine, and of Palestinians, since 1840 up to the beginning of the second Intifada. It only gives a few hints on Jewish colonization - as if this was not the most important subject. Even if the book is written by an Israeli Jew, it recounts not the history of Israel, but of Palestine, not of Zionism but of ordinary Palestinians.
The author is very sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative. In a way, this gives the idea that very much of the debate for and against Zionism is quite an intra-Jewish question (as if it were a sort of a family-problem).
Ilan Pappe succeeded in his job. His work is based on the knowledge of anthropological, social-religious questions, such as: How do groups build their own identities using national or religious narratives? His diagnoses of how groups invent themselves thanks to religions, and of what Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism mean, are careful and precise.
All the relevant facts are expounded, but this is not the principal interest of the book. I do not believe this is going to be the first text someone reads on the Israel/Palestine question - this means that who reads already knows the principal facts and the most important dates. The most interesting facts are expounded with an eye on what they meant for the most deprived strata of society (for example: how were Sephardi Jews "accepted" in Israel? Who bore the brunt of racism, in Israel and in the Occupied Territories?).
The book ends with an eye of the future: will the war between Israel and Palestine end, without an end to Israeli colonization? Will it end, before Israel recognizes what 1948 meant, for Palestine and Palestinian refugees?

Pappe, the intellectually courageous Israeli "New Historian," has written a superb history for general readers. What's unusual about this book is (1) its attempt to present the histories of both peoples, (2) its effort to get outside the potted nationalist narratives of both peoples, and (3) its profound solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggles against expulsion and occupation. As Pappe says, "This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized, not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied and not the occupiers; and sides with the workers not the bosses. He feels for women in distress, and has little admiration for men in command."

Pappe locates the struggle for land at the very center of this narrative, and he does not hesitate to call the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 an act of "ethnic cleansing," proceeding under the aegis of the Zionist "Plan D," which systematically drove 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their villages. At the same time, he notes the chronically ineffective Palestinian leadership, from the clan rivalries of Palestinian "notables" that made any unified resistance to British and Zionist encroachments impossible, to the top-down rule of the Palestinian Authority, which cooperated in the disaster of Oslo and sidelined average, suffering Palestinians in Israel, under occupation, and in exile. He notes the complexities of opinion and experience among Jews in Palestine and Israel, including those early Zionists who hoped from the beginning for a binational secular state, and the Mizrahi or Arab Jews, who faced considerable discrimination at the hands of Ashkenazi or European Jews. And with a realistic but hopeful eye on Palestine's future, he highlights what "The Urge for Co-habitation" in Mandate Palestine, and even in Israel. He finds resources for hope in the history of his own Haifa during the 1920s, when it "became the site of the most exciting experience of class solidarity and bi-national, or even a-national cooperation." For instance, Jewish workers and Arab workers (Palestinian, Syrian, and Egyptian) came together in the first Palestinian trade union, which united workers in the railway, telegraphic, and postal services against their British employers.

Pappe's keen, historians' eye for the complexities of lived experience on both sides is particularly welcome today, when reductive scholar-warriors like Benny Morris are willing to present Palestine's past and future as a conflict between Zionist "civilization" and Arab-Islamic "barbarism," and when Ariel Sharon seems to see a wall of concrete tombstones festooned with guard towers as Israel's last best hope.

This is a history of Palestine and its inhabitants from Ottoman rule to the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000. It complements, but does not replace, Avi Shlaim's superlative, and presciently titled, book `The Iron Wall'.

Palestine's British rulers tried from 1918 to get the two peoples to build a British protectorate, but failed. After the British allowed a division of the unitary economic system in 1929, Jewish leaders built up an independent, privileged Zionist enclave. They mobilised the Jews by intensifying enlistment, imposing coercive taxes, preventing emigration and encouraging immigration.

In the 1948 war, the Zionist leaders, under the cover of a war of national liberation against the British Empire and its puppet Arab royals, expelled most Palestinians from their homes. Pappe writes of the Zionists' military Plan D's two aims: "the first being to take swiftly and systematically any installation, military or civilian, evacuated by the British. ... The second, and far more important objective, of the plan was to cleanse the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible." Atrocities carried out by Zionist forces, including the massacres at Dir Yassin and Balad al-Shaykh, forced 690,000 Palestinians to flee under threat of death.

Decades of partition and occupation followed. Now Israel is building yet more illegal settlements, blockading the Palestinians (causing 50% unemployment), manning an electric fence around the Gaza Strip, abusing people at checkpoints, demolishing houses, assassinating at will, conducting mass arrests, torturing detainees, and building a wall dividing the West Bank from Israel. In the last three years, Israeli forces have killed 2,750 Palestinian civilians, and Palestinian suicide bombers have killed 892 Israeli civilians.

The US state massively subsidises the Israeli state. Bush fully backs Sharon the career terrorist: ten days after assuming the Presidency, Bush told the National Security Council, "We're going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the Mideast conflict. We're going to tilt it back towards Israel."

US and EU interference have inflamed, not resolved, the conflict. Outside attempts to achieve a solution by backing one people against another will always fail.

Ilan Pappe is often referred to as a "revisionist" historian from Israel. His work published in 2004, "A History of Modern Palestine," shows him instead to be "an historian." As nearly every likely reader of the book appreciates, at the point of its publication there were at best only one or two other histories of modern Palestine deserving of the name, all but lost among a torrent of mythology and polemic. Pappe's work is supported by background sources in Arabic, Hebrew, English and at least two other languages.

That said, "A History of Modern Palestine" is best understood as a work in progress. Its 268 pages of main text in the paperback edition are far too few for such a ambitious topic. Its research apparatus includes endnotes, bibliography, glossary and chronology, but their lack of coordination makes them difficult to use in a paper format. Endnotes and glossary should have been running footnotes.

The content of "A History of Modern Palestine" relating to periods before 1940 is based largely on tertiary sources; it is cool and disappointing. Pappe apparently knows more than he says, but what he says often leaves out people and culture. No person becomes any more than a cardboard character or a point in time. Periods after 1940 become warmer in detail, but they too are usually reduced to summaries lacking context and associations. A reader who does not already know most of what Pappe knows will find it difficult to learn what Pappe knows.

if you do want in depth about the land of palestine... here you have one on your shelf.

A 'New history' in the best tradition of this work of knowledge. Most of the information here is pretty well known and their isn't much revelation. One small issue is the title. The actual title should be 'Two lands, one people' since that is the actual reality today. Their were never actually two peoples in the same land, even in the much maligned and reviled 'Mandate' period.

Of course, typically, this book frames the conflict as one between 'Jews and Arabs' when their are many more layers to the fabric of the diverse mosaic that is the holy land. Their were inter-Jewish struggles of Revisionists against Zionists against the Orthodox. And within the Palestinian camp their are equal divisions between the Bedouin, the fundamentalists, the socialists and the effendis. Not to mention the Druze.

Seth J. Frantzman

Pappé is the odd man out among the so-called New Historians. Unlike his colleagues, who pretend to base their anti-Israel writings on recently declassified documents from the British Mandate period and the first years of Israeli independence, Pappé is an unabashed "relativist" for whom historical research is a backward-looking projection of political attitudes and agendas regardless of actual facts. Aside from his doctoral dissertation, subsequently published as Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-51,[1] Pappé's books are not based on archival documentation, preferring secondary (and deeply prejudiced) sources that aim at vindicating the Palestinian "narrative" of the conflict. He himself explains this in the introduction to A History of Modern Palestine:

My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.

This unabashed acknowledgment of personal bias and open political partisanship comes from a diehard ideologue who views Zionist and Israeli history as "more than a century of colonization, occupation, and dispossession of Palestinians." The equation of Zionism with colonialism, the cornerstone of Pappé's historical narrative, has been a staple of Arab propaganda since the early 1920s. Almost as predictable is the portrayal of Arabs and Palestinians as the hapless victims of this alleged foreign invasion.

Publication of A History of Modern Palestine by a prestigious academic press is a sad testament to the pervasive politicization of Middle Eastern studies where the dividing line between academic scholarship and unadulterated propaganda has been blurred, if not erased.

Even by the skewed standards of this field of studies, Pappé's latest book ranks in a class of its own. Not only does it add no new facts or ideas to the anti-Israel literature, but the sloppiness of its research astounds. It contains countless factual errors and inaccuracies. Yasir Arafat's birthplace is Cairo and not Jerusalem. The U.N. Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) presented its report on August 31, 1947, not on November 29. Deir Yasin is a village near Jerusalem, and not in Haifa. Lawrence of Arabia had nothing to do with the Anglo-Hashemite correspondence that led to the "Great Arab Revolt" of World War I. Further, this correspondence was initiated by the Hashemites not by the British. Pappé even misspells the official English transliteration of President Weizmann's first name (Chaim, not Haim).

More serious is the book's consistent resort to factual misrepresentation, distortion, and outright falsehood. Readers are told of events that never happened, such as the nonexistent May 1948 Tantura "massacre" or the expulsion of Arabs within twelve days of the partition resolution. They learn of political decisions that were never made, such as the Anglo-French 1912 plan for the occupation of Palestine or the contriving of "a master plan to rid the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible." And they are misinformed about military and political developments, such as the rationale for the Balfour declaration:

Without Russia, there was very little hope of successfully surrounding Germany with a ring of enemy states, a strategy it was hoped would cause Germany to surrender. The British government expected that Russian Jews would become the agents of pro-British propaganda that would persuade the tsarist government to come out clearly in support of the Allies' effort to subjugate Germany.

But Russia was a member of the Triple Entente coalition with Britain and France from the time of the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 and so needed no encouragement to join the war three years later, least of all by its despised and persecuted Jewish minority. In fact, it was hoped that the Zionist movement, by virtue of its perceived connections to the Bolshevik movement, would help keep communist Russia in the war.

Pappé claims that Theodor Herzl "attempted to enlist British help in installing a temporary Jewish state (i.e., one that would eventually be moved to Palestine) in British Uganda, an offer which was seriously considered by some in Whitehall," only to have his plan foiled by Weizmann. In fact, it was British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, not Herzl, who conceived of the East Africa idea. Nor was the "Uganda plan" foiled by Herzl's opponents, least of all Weizmann. Herzl narrowly got the plan passed by his last Zionist Congress in 1903, overriding the opposition of such Zionist leaders as Menahem Ussishkin and Yehiel Chlenov; it was only after Herzl's death in July 1904 that the idea was unceremoniously buried.

A final example of Pappé's distortion concerns the tidal wave of Arab violence that immediately followed the U.N. partition vote in November 1947. On the day after the vote, a spate of Arab attacks left seven Jews dead and scores more wounded. Shooting, stoning, and rioting continued apace in the following days. The consulates of Poland and Sweden, both of whose governments had voted for partition, were attacked. Bombs were thrown into cafes, Molotov cocktails were hurled at shops, a synagogue was set on fire. On December 3, at the instigation of the Palestinian leadership, a large mob ransacked the new Jewish commercial center in Jerusalem, looting and burning shops and stabbing and stoning whomever they happened upon. The next day, some 120-150 armed Arabs attacked Kibbutz Efal, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, in the first large-scale attempt to storm a Jewish village.

Ignoring this heavily documented historical record, Pappé whitewashes this violence as intra-communal clashes "activated by hotheaded youth on both sides." He even makes the mind-boggling claim that this violence had been triggered by the Haganah. Like so much else in A History of Modern Palestine, this is a falsehood.

Does Pappé count on the ignorance of the general reader to accept it? Does he expect his peers to give him a pass? That Cambridge University Press purveys this disgraceful work suggests that they just might. It also symbolizes the crisis in Middle East studies.

Efraim Karsh is director of the Mediterranean Studies Programme at King's College, University of London, and editor of the quarterly journal Israel Affairs. He is the author of Arafat's War: the Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest (Grove Press, 2003).

[1] New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988.

This is a work that pretends at objectivity, but is written with a clear agenda in mind. Pappe totally identifies with the Palestian Arab cause, and places the major onus for the conflict on the Jews of Israel. Thus he slants the major historical and political realities, in which the Jews have five times agreed to a peace plan based on partition while the Arabs have insistently refused to accept the Jews right to a state of their own. Pappe underplays the persistent and systematic Arab violence and terror which have been at the heart of the conflict from its beginning. He mistells the story of the 1947-1948 war minimizing the Arab agression, the calls of the leaders of Arab states for Palestinians to temporarily abandon their homes , so that invading Arab armies would be able to kill Jews more freely. He underplays the countless initiatives made by Israelis from all walks of life to live in peaceful relations with the Arabs. And does not really put the conflict into the context of the pan- Arabic, Islamic fundamentalist, and Arab nationalist processes which perpetuate the conflict even today.
This is Revisionist History at its worst, a distorting and ignoring of the factual and objective reality in order to promote a ' cause' . That cause is disguised and misrepresented in the work.
For Pappe as anyone who reads carefully will see is calling for a Jewish state which ceases to be Jewish in any meaningful way, and eventually becomes an Arab dominated one , in which its Arab minority will eventually become its majority. Pappe's analysis is one which aims to help bring about the destruction of Israel.
Is it surprising then that most Israelis consider him to be both a hypocrite and a traitor?

Ilan Pappe, has taken the history of israel and changed it to fit his revisionist dialogue and prpomte an anti Israel agenda. He uses information that cannot be documented, has decided on a one state solution and essentially calls for the elimination of the state of Israel, while he lives on a goverment salary, and is protected by the very soliders that he demonizes. He should be filed un "fiction" in the libraries.

This simply isn't history. In real life, people do things for reasons. Historians explain what happened and (to some extent) why. That is how they are able to infer as yet unknown details and even predict future attitudes and acts. Pappe gets plenty of facts wrong, but his biggest failing is to ascribe incorrect or even impossible motives to many of the people of the region.

This book is propaganda masquerading as history.