Customer Reviews

An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel

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If there was one book I would like to put in every library in America - it would be this book! I would have to say that this books is the most complete book I have ever read in explaining clearly what is wrong with the occupation and how absolutely awful it really is. Both anecdotally and with facts and figures, the book lays out in very clear and concise terms what is wrong with the whole Oslo process and post Oslo negotiations and what is wrong with the kind of two-state solution Israel and the U.S. are trying to foist off on the Palestinians.

To those who are not familiar with Jeff Halper's work; Professor Halper is Professor of Anthropology at Tel Aviv University and he is founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition.

Please allow me to quote from the first paragraph of the first chapter of this excellent book:

Quote:

"I first became aware of being an "Israeli in Palestine" on July 9, 1998, the day my friend Salim Shawamrch calls "that black day in my life and the life of my family." On that day the bulldozers of Israel's Civil Administration, its military government in the West Bank, demolished his home for the first time. It was an act so, unjust, so at odds with the ethos of the benign, democratic, Jewish Israel fighting for its survival I had absorbed on "my side" of the Green Line that it was inexplicable in any terms I could fathom. It had nothing to do with terrorism or security. It was not an act of defense or even keeping Palestinians away from Israeli settlements or roads. It was purely unjust and brutal. As the bulldozer pushed through the walls of Salim's home, it pushed me through all the ideological rationalizations, the pretexts, the lies and the bullshit that my country had erected to prevent us from seeing the truth: that oppression must accompany an attempt to deny the existence and claims of another people in order to establish an ethnically pure state for yourself."


Many people are under the absolutely false impression that most house demolitions are demolitions of the homes of suspected terrorist. Actually 95% of home demolitions are done ostensibly on the ground that the homes were built or extended without building permits. And the occupations authorities and even the civil authorities inside Israel rarely grant building permits to Palestinians either in the Occupied Territories or even within Israel itself, no matter how drastic the housing shortage is. Most Palestinians on both sides of the green line who have the means and the desire to build a house, spend thousand of dollars in fees and fines and wait years and years only to have their permits denied again, again and again.

Professor Halper's opinions are much more nuanced than some would presume. Dr. Halper actually supports the the two-solution and does not particularly favor the single state or binational state solution although he is favorable to their democratic principles. Dr. Halper does not describe himself as either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist. In fact he is quite favorable to the whole concept of cultural Zionism - the Hebrew cultural revival and renaissance; but not political Zionism which he views as an idea rooted in outmoded 19th Century Eastern European "ethnocratic" nationalism. His main point is that for there to be long term peace in the region, Israel must move beyond an ethnocratic, "state for the Jews' and become a real multi-ethnic, multi-religious modern democracy that is a state for all of its citizens.

Another point Dr. Halper emphasizes is that Israel must completely move away from the whole confrontational, " Iron Wall" approach to the Arab and Muslim world and seek full integration into the region. His long term picture is a situation in which Israel eventually becomes part of an EU type configuration with their neighbors. His actual view is a two-state solution that hopefully can evolve into a binational state in an economic and political community with their neighbors. This would be among other things a way to help resolve the refugee problem. The right of return would be far more acceptable to Israelis if Palestinians who chose to live in Israel would either be citizens of a Palestinian state or of neighboring countries. The issue of settlers would be completely different if those Israelis who chose to live within a Palestinian state would remain Israeli citizens but living as equals in the West Bank, East Jerusalem or the Gaza - which would be far more acceptable to Palestinians if the settlers were living as equals and they - the Palestinians also had the right to live in Israel. And of course the whole issue of Jerusalem would be put on an entirely different level.

A few decades ago Australia moved away from the concept of being a western outpost in Asia - to recognizing that their own viability and long term survival required Australia to seek integrating into East Asia and become a vital part of the East Asian family of nations. It's hard to imagine today, but only in the 60's Australia had a "white Australia" policy which essentially only welcomed White-Christians as citizens. NO amount of military power and prowess can out muscle geography and demographics forever. Dr. Halper challenges everyone to move from the "Iron Wall" - either we win and they lose or they lose and we win paradigm to a win/win paradigm.

As Professor Halper points out, integration into the region is for the Israelis not simply a matter of idealism or multiculuralism. It is a matter of viability and even survival. And as Professor Halper points out in his book, the one real power the Palestinians have is that they - the Palestinians are the gatekeepers of Israel's acceptance and integration into the Middle East.

Professor Halper's main point in discussing the two-state solution which he does support - is that the type of two-state solution currently being cooked up for the Palestinians is an nonviable apartheid arrangement that will not bring independence, peace, justice or security or acceptance into the region. It must be vigorously opposed.

Professor Halper has goes into great detail in his book and he has written elsewhere about how the whole system of how settlements, bypass roads, walls, tunnels, borders controls and infrastructure completely dissect the entire West Bank and Occupied Territories into a system of economically and politically nonviable cantons which make political and economic independence absolutely impossible and creates a Matrix of Control over virtually every aspect of their lives.

You can also read more about how this Matrix of Control operates in the real world at this website:

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The book goes into far more details of the on-the ground realities


I cannot recommend this book enough. Some have asked, "what can be done to really help the Palestinians and improve their situation while recognizing that only a full end to the occupation is the real answer?" This is a hard question to answer considering that it does not look likely that a full end to the occupation is coming any time soon. In 1996 Professor Halper took this question to numerous Palestinians. What can we do to help that can both thwart the occupation and contribute to its demise while at the same time doing something productive that helps Palestinians in their day to day lives? That is when he joined with others in founding The Israeli Committee Against House Demolition.

For a Youtube interview with Jeff Halper - bottom of the page:

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Website for the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition:
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Jeff Halper, a Jewish Israeli peace activist, lays out in devastating detail the horrors of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This book is so well documented, it seems impossible to refute. It's really difficult to read. Not that it's difficult to UNDERSTAND... not at all. But what Israel has done -- and continues to do -- to the Palestinians is so atrocious, it actually hurts me to read it.

This book is CHOCK-FULL of unbelievable facts and statistics that demonstrate the utter complexity, completeness and cruelty of the "Matrix of Control" that Israel maintains over the Palestinians. I would like to quote just one section. It will give you an idea of how devastating the occupation is for the Palestinians:

"The [Jewish-only] settlement blocs are consciously built atop the [occupied] West Bank aquifers from which Israel draws about 30 percent of its water in violation of international law, which prohibits an Occupying Power from utilizing the resources of an occupied territory. Indeed, 80 percent of the water resources of the West Bank and Gaza are under Israeli control, and a full 80 percent of the water coming from the West Bank goes to Israel and its settlements. Only 20 percent is allocated to its 2.5 million Palestinian inhabitants, and they receive none of the water pumped from the Jordan River. As for consumption, the settlers use six times more water per capita than Palestinians. Per capita water consumption in the West Bank for domestic and urban use (drinking, washing, consumption by public institutions, watering parks, and so on) is only 60 liters per person per day, far below the minimum water consumption of 100 liters per person per day recommended by the World Health Organization; Israelis consume 350 liters per person per day. Mekorot, the Israeli water carrier, which controls all the water of the country, allocates 1,450 cubic meters of water per year to each settler, while a Palestinian receives only 83. Around 215,000 Palestinians living in 270 West Bank villages have no running water at all. The destruction of Palestinian wells and water mains, which has intensified with the construction of the ["separation"] wall over the main aquifers, creates months of water shortages, while the need to purchase water from Israeli tank trucks, costing $3 during the rainy season and up to $8 in the dry months, is beyond the financial resources of the impoverished population. As a final blow, Palestinians are forbidden to collect rainwater in open reservoirs."

The Israeli state is absolutely brutal in its treatment of the Palestinians... of this there can be no doubt. Another thing Halper makes painfully clear is that Israel has no intentions of negotiating a contiguous, viable and truly sovereign Palestinian state. It has already established "facts on the ground" that preclude such an entity.

I haven't quite finished the book yet, but it seems obvious to me that what Israel wants to do, vis-a-vis the Palestinians, is to make life so intolerable for them in the Occupied Territories that they will give up their dreams (and their rights!) and leave their homeland.

If you really want to understand what is going on in the Middle East, PLEASE read this book. Halper is a genius at explaining what Israel is doing... and why.

I have just finished reading Jeff Halper's An Israeli in Palestine and found it almost impossible to put down.
Halper has laid out the history of the establishment of the Zionist state in an easy to read manner although what he has written is not easy to digest.
As an American Jew who once staunchly supported Israel, I am horrified at how that state came into being with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians who had been on the land for many generations. Halper quotes early and later Zionist leaders who acknowledge that with a large Arab population there could not be a Jewish state. He shows how the dispossession of the Palestinians was accomplished. this included the destruction of at least 500 Palestinian villages and taking the lands of the Arabs who remained, many of whom now live in what Israel calls unrecognized villages which lack electricity, roads and water supplies.
Halper has coined a more apt word for Israel than "democracy." Israel, he says, is an ethnocracy run for the benefit of the 70% Jewish population. In Israel today Arabs are barred from living on 93% of the land and, while they pay the same taxes, they do not get the same services. I wonder how America's Jews would feel if, in this so-called "Christian" nation we were barred from living on 93% of the land. I imagine that we would fight like hell against such blatant discrimination.
But it is in the Occupied Territories that Israel has committed the greatest sins. Since 1967 Israel has demolished at least 18,000 Palestinian homes. Palestinians cannot build new homes without permits but the irony is that the permits are rarely, if ever, granted to Palestinians who must pay large fees for the "privilege" of applying. When the permits are turned down the Palestinians, who are in dire need of housing, will build without the permit. Sooner or later it is likely that the bulldozers will arrive to destroy the house and everything in it. Jewish built homes built without permit are never bulldozed.
It is interesting to note that the Palestinian who last week overturned a bus in Jerusalem with a bulldozer was the victim of an Israeli bulldozer that demolished his home a few years ago.
Halper points out that Israel has for years avoided any chance of making peace with the Palestinians if that peace meant giving up the land and water resources it had already stolen. In the paperback version of the book he devotes six pages to listing all the opportunities for peace at which Israel thumbed its nose.
Halper makes it abundantly clear that what Israel wants is as much land and resources as possible with as few Palestinians as possible on that land. That is not a formula for peace.
This is a book that I wish would be read by every American whose tax dollars go to support the apartheid Israeli system. I wish that it would be read by every member of Congress who, if they were not too cowed by AIPAC, might just get up and say "Not one penny more."

This book is packed full of information that rarely sees the light of day in the United States. It has credibility because it is written by a patriotic Jewish Israeli citizen, and thus difficult to dismiss by Zionists and their American "lobby". It offers a clear-headed honest assessment of an injustice that is seldom if ever grasped by poorly informed Americans who get their information from the mainstream media.

The author, Jeff Halper, was born to Jewish parents in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1946 where he absorbed the progressive values of a liberal Jewish-American upbringing. He became involved with the civil rights movement and the anti-Viet Nam War protests of the 1960s, and carried these values with him when he emigrated to Israel in 1973 and earned his doctorate degree in anthropology.

In his early academic career Dr. Halper fully identified with a Zionist view of Jewish history, but his contact with educated intelligent Palestinian students soon brought him to question the traditional narrative and a gradual realization that this tiny state has cloistered itself from an honest confrontation with the realities of a brutal occupation of another people. But it was not until he witnessed first-hand the gratuitous demolition of the home of Palestinian friends that he was transformed from a well-meaning but passive observer to a committed activist against Israel state brutality and spearheaded the formation of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).

Halper divides his book into 4 sections. In the first he discusses Comprehending Oppression, triggered by the message of the bulldozers, which had destroyed over 18,000 Palestinian homes by 2007. He analyzes the disinterest ("living in a bubble") of most Israelis to the evils of Palestinian oppression occurring right under their noses and ascribes this to a careful official framing of historical facts to fit the Zionist narrative, combined with a desire to just get along with their own lives. For example, the term "occupation" of Palestinian territory has been erased from Israeli history books and substituted by euphemisms like "disputed territories", town and city names have been "Judaised", the Green Line as the basis for a just solution has disappeared from popular discourse, and the notion that this Middle Eastern territory was a "land without people for a people without land" at the time of early Jewish colonization conflicts with the reality that over 600,000 Arabs populated this land at the beginning of the British Mandate after WWI.

According to Halper the underlying Israeli cultural orientation arises out a "tribal nationalism" acquired in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, deeply reinforced by the memory of the Holocaust. This has led to a construct he labels "ethnocracy", which is in clear contrast to the claim of Israel as the only "democracy" in the Middle East, because this "democracy" applies only to its Jewish inhabitants . He convincingly argues that this is a recipe for continued turmoil and Israeli insecurity.

In a section labeled Sources of Oppression, Halper elaborates on Zionist ideology and how the leadership has carefully framed a narrative of Jews as virtuous victims, that the "Arabs" are an uncivilized group with whom there can be no political solution, and thus priority is placed on personal security in a volatile region. This Manichean mindset ("we win- they lose") prevents any possibility of a just two-state solution because it denies any vision of a viable and fully sovereign Palestinian state, when all the vehicles of power are wielded by Israel with the support of its American patron. The core frames of this ideology are that Israel is fighting for its very existence, that it is the weak party in this struggle, that the central issue is Palestinian terrorism, that there is no occupation, and therefore that no political solution is possible. He describes in relentless detail the systematic dispossession (nishul) of the Palestinian population into enclaves, a Palestinian "Bantustan", under the guise of a "two-state solution".

In the third section Halper describes in detail a Matrix of Control, whereby Israel pursues its longstanding goal of total annexation and control of a land inhabited by nearly 5 million Palestinians. The Israelis have imposed tools such as zoning laws, obscure bureaucratic regulations preventing new Palestinian home construction, and permits for the uprooting of olive orchards and the creation of "nature preserves" preventing Palestinians from cultivating their traditional farmlands. Orwellian rules prevent Palestinian legal redress for these arbitrary dispossessions. Economic restrictions have reduced Palestinian manufacturing to 10% of its former total resulting in unemployment rates of 49% in the West Bank and over 70% in Gaza. Israel has appropriated most of the water from aquifers beneath Palestinian enclaves. Free movement of the Palestinian population is circumscribed by expanding Jewish settlements, military checkpoints, a separation wall encroaching well beyond the 1967 boundaries into the occupied territories, and arbitrary home demolitions, all woven into the reality of "facts on the ground" rendering any viable Palestinian entity a chimera. The gradual squeezing of the Palestinians into ever shrinking enclaves (Bantustans) is likened by Halper to an open air prison, an Apartheid reality, in total disregard of the Geneva conventions to protect human rights.

This section of the book takes the reader on a historical journey through several stages of Jewish occupation beginning with the early Zionist visions of the late 19th century in Europe through WWI and the Balfour Declaration. This is followed by the British Mandate, the active immigration movements of the 1930s which corresponded to German oppressions in Europe, the partition of Palestine by the UN in 1947, the 1948 War of Independence which caused massive Palestinian ethnic cleansing and resulted in the occupation of 78% of the original British Mandate, the Six Day war of 1967 which expanded Jewish occupation to the entire territory of Palestine, the Lebanon war leading to the first Intifada, various peace negotiations, Oslo, the Camp David talks and the vacuity of the so-called "generous offer" declined by Arafat in 2000 leading to the second Intifada, and to 9/11 and the ascension to power of the neo-conservatives in the United States and paltry failed efforts to broker a viable two state solution. A critical but little discussed element is the Bush Administration's 2004 tacit approval of Israel's annexation of West Bank settlements, locking the two-state "Road Map" concept into a permanent "transitional" Phase II with "provisional borders".

In the fourth section entitled Overcoming Oppression, Halper discusses possible solutions, and here he is not sanguine. He directly addresses the obstacle of terrorism by pointing out the hypocrisy of Israel's false distinction between individual terrorist acts such as suicide bombings employed by Palestinians while dismissing state sponsored terrorist acts utilized by Israeli armed forces, since the latter lack the element of "intention", but which have resulted in far more innocent deaths.

In the short term the "two-state" solution might provide a stepping stone but is filled with obstacles. Essentials include: 1) the right of return of Palestinian refugees, or just compensation as a substitute. 2) removal of all Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. 3) self-determination for a viable and sovereign Palestinian people. 4) an independent Palestinian state on 1967 borders, or a negotiation approximating these borders.

Ultimately demographics will force Israel to come to terms with the reality that it must either be a Jewish state or a democratic state, but it cannot be both. Thus an ultimate solution will be either a bi-national single state (such as Canada) or some form of inclusive confederation leading ultimately to incorporation into the larger Middle East. Ethno-nationalism must be abandoned as it already has been in the West, and the double-standard of a religio-ethnocracy acceptable for Israel while denied for the Palestinians is untenable. Thus far world governments have been unwilling to address this problem honestly and therefore Halper believes the burden must fall on NGOs such as various peace groups to bring pressure to bear for change. In the long run the outcome will define whether Israel joins the world community of democratic nations or will end in tragedy for the Jewish people.

An Israeli in Palestine is a powerful book. It should be mandatory reading for American citizens who share much responsibility for what has happened and who remain largely oblivious to the facts. Not mentioned as such but a looming threat is a true conflict of civilizations between Islam and the West if this festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not resolved soon.

I just finished this book tonight. I couldn't put it down, and read it in three evenings. Jeff Halper does a great job. He is on the scene when his Palestinian friend's house is demolished by Israeli troops (he calls it his "conversion experience"), and throws himself on the ground in front of the bulldozer. His journey to understand this event takes him (and us) through politics, history, Israeli society. It is complex, as all real history and politics is. An important book.

Jeff Halper is a prophetic Israeli Jew who dares to speak truth to power, in Israel, to Jews all over the world, and to all those seek peace and justice among the Israelis and Palestinians based on truth. and actual "facts on the ground".

Watching from half a world away as recent events unfolded in Israel on the evening news, I was struck by the plight of the Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Territories and wondered if it would be possible to find a balanced discussion of their situation when so much hatred exists on both sides of the conflict. The fact that this book succeeds in doing so is made even more remarkable by the fact that it is written by an Israeli citizen and academic who by his own admission was previously oblivious to the true nature of the Palestinian experience. Jeff Halper is obviously a man of courage and conviction, who writes with the passion of someone enlightened by a transforming insight. In his case, the insight was catalyzed by the destruction of a Palestinian colleague's home. Trying to understand this event led him to a new understanding of the dynamics of the Palestinian-Israeli situation that he found astonishing, as did I.

Unfortunately, as he points out, his rush to disseminate his message at times required him to write his manuscript in airports between meetings, and it shows. There are grammatical and syntax errors on almost every page. This is not enough to distract from his message, however, and could almost be considered charming in the way it reflects his zeal for substance over style.

One drawback to having the situation explained by an insider is that he sometimes takes local knowledge for granted: I'm sure every Israeli knows about the Green Line and the details of the First and Second Intifadah, but nowhere are these terms explained for the rest of us. Then there are the favorite terms of the author, such as bantustan and Matrix of Control, that are used so repeatedly throughout the book as to become almost irritating. For some reason, these terms are not defined until well after their first use, probably another artifact of rushed editing.

The author's courage and compelling revelations outweigh any literary deficiencies. It deserves five stars for presenting a constructive and informative analysis of such a fraught subject.