Customer Reviews

A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples

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Professor Pappe has bravely attempted to pull together a history of Palestine that admits to bad faith on the part of the founders of Israel, and he finds some possibility for reconciliation between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Many people who think that they already know the truth will find much to dislike in this book. People who are willing to admit the humanity of the other side and the failings of their own will find a lot to like in this text.
However, for those looking for a basic introduction to the history of this area, this is NOT your book. Professor Pappe assumes a great deal of background knowledge on the reader's part. This is a challenging text. It shows, among many other things, a history of spontaneous cooperation between ordinary Jews and Moslems and how the leadership of the two groups undermined that cooperation for their own selfish ends. Professor Pappe gives us all some reason to hope that real history can provide a place for reconciliation.

This book corrects myths about the very, very early days of Zionism in Palestine, and continues to the current time. A must read for anyone with the slightest interest in how the Middle East is exploding, literally, every day. Peg McCormack

A History of Modern Palestine is a thoroughly enlightening, in-depth, unbiased analysis of the land that is known now as Israel and the Occupied Territories. It's important to note, before getting into the review, that in mainstream US and Israeli discourse, "unbiased" means falsely equivocating the behavior of two parties as if they share equal power and equal responsibility for the course of events in the region, which is simply not true. Pappe analyzes significant developments in the region in context, emphasizing the great chain of cause and effect that is often left out of discussions of the issue.

Pappe is an Israeli professor of history who offers a captivating attempt to unite both the Zionist and Palestinian nationalist narratives and reconcile them with what has actually happened. The writing is dense and academic, but highly readable. He occasionally goes off on tangents discussing various theories and models that professional historians use, applying them to the subject matter or examining how other historians have applied or misapplied them, but other than that, I found it highly accessible.
The book begins around 1850 in Ottoman Palestine, discussing the social structures of the people who lived there and setting the stage for the conflict that developed during the 20th century. The rise of Zionism in Europe is chronicled, and its ensuring slow migration of Jews to Palestine from the 1880s onward. Pappe examines how Palestinian social structure was initially affected by this immigration, as well as by integration with the European economy.

Significant time is devoted to the interwar period of the British Mandate, and how Zionism developed, centralized its civil and military institutions, and established goals for the future Jewish State during that time. Following the second world war, Pappe examines the UN establishent of Israel, including the ethnic cleansing, expulsion, and murder carried out by the Zionists against Palestinians in the months prior to the official birth of Israel in May of 1948.

The remainder of the book discusses the rise of Palestinian resistance and the increasingly brutal Israeli suppression, the 1967 war and subsequent occupation of the rest of ex-Mandate Palestine by the Israelis, the 1973 war, beginnings of the peace process in the 1970s, the Israeli invasions of Lebanon, the first Intifada, the rise of post Zionism in Israel, the Oslo accords, the rise of suicide terrorism, and the degeneration back into violence that has engulfed the region in the early 2000s.

Throughout the history, Pappe often pauses to discuss what the Zionist or Palestinian mythology has to say about a given issue, comparing it to how the other side perceived events and to what actually happened.

If you are a die hard Zionist, you probably won't like this book. I was raised Jewish and attended Hebrew night school for many years, and the Zionist narrative I was provided is starkly at odds with historical realities. I felt Pappe treated both sides fairly, pointing out shortcomings and never moralizing or judging. However, as I suggested at the beginning, there is no false equivocation. Israeli bloodshed and violence vastly exceeds Palestinian, and much of the Palestinian violence is a direct result of their economic, political, and military oppression and exploitation by a vastly more powerful Israeli society. He also documents the radicalization of Palestinian resistance, culminating in the rise of extremist movements like Hezbollah and Hamas, resulting from increasing Israeli oppression and failure to address the fundamental issues of the conflict. Throughout his treatment of the peace process, Pappe, documents how Israelis continued to undermine peace efforts with military intervention and illegal settlement expansion, slowly eroding the chances that a peaceful solution could occur.

Pappe also does not generalize each side. Much time is spent examining the various factions within Israeli and Palestinian society, investigating their origins, ideologies, and motivations. I was particularly struck with his dissection of the class structure of Israeli society and explanation of how poorly Arab jews and even Holocaust survivors were treated.

I noticed that some critical reviewers accuse Pappe of making up the Tantura massacre. He notes in the book that evidence for the massacre was recently uncovered by a student at his university who published a dissertation on the subject. Upon pressure from Israeli authorities, the student retracted his dissertation, and then later retracted the retraction. Pappe notes that a variety of Israeli professors and himself reviewed the work and the evidence and found it satisfactory.

Final thoughts: excellent read for anyone who wants an open minded, comprehensive, and systemic analysis of the events that brought Israel and Palestine to their present impasse, and the obstacles that their societies must come to terms with if the conflict is to be resolved.

Note: it seems most positive reviewers of books that are critical of Zionism or the state of Israel are attacked as anti semites. I just wanted to say that I come from a Jewish family and I have nothing for or against Jews or Arabs. Questioning the policies of the abstract state of Israel, or of my own country, do not mean I hate or wish ill upon it's people. I am in favor of all people on all sides of the conflict finding solutions that address fundamental causes, and living dignified, un-oppressed, unexploited lives.

A very informative book. I'm much interested in, and concerned about, the subject. Ilan Pappe's book sets "a" / the history of modern Palestine as I heard from people who had lived in Palestine before 1948, and who were landlords and land owners, or else simple peasants. Though at times it seems pro-Palestinian, (therefore some would hastily say "anti-Jew") in fact the book does but pick up facts on how the Zionist project was to take over the land whatever price it might have cost (probably to flee the horror they experienced in Europe at the time): destruction of villages, terrorizing people so as they'd leave their houses and land or else proceed to ethnic cleansing, in the etymplogical sense of the term, that is. Ilan Pappe wonders, also as he develops much more in detail in his "Ethic Cleansing of Palestine", how the Zionists could have performed such a project, called at the time "Delta Plan", knowing what they had themselves suffered during the Second World War in Europe! No mistake about Pappe's "Jewishness": he never denies the legitimity of the State of Israel and always refers to Israel and Palestine at one and the same time, even defining what's Israel (politically) and what's Palestine (historically). Therefore he never denies the existance of the State of Israel. He only puts forward, and supplies references to historical documents as memoires and archives, the fact that Zionism had played a destructive role in Palestine. Both books are excellent and I very much recommend them for those interested in the subject.

This book is a sad example of revisionist history gone badly wrong. Pappe's perspective is a legitimate one to take - part of his argument is the oft-heard "Israelis stole Palestinian land" thesis. However Pappe fails to back up his ideas with any legitimate facts. Yasir Arafat was born in CAIRO, not Jerusalem. He "invents" the Tantura Massacre, which no major Israeli or Palestinian histories have EVER cited before his book. This is a book frought with unannounced bias and a sincere lack of good research (at certain points Pappe even cites himself in "works not yet published"). This is at best a poorly researched attempt to present the Palestinian arguments, and at worst a farce of lies.