Customer Reviews

Palestine: A Guide

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Palestine is a thick and juicy travel book. It is rich in the arts, in architecture, in culture. It is a journey through history, through the land and the people of Palestine and Gaza - with an array of visual feasts in Azar's photography.

If you have never been to these places, this book will give substance to sound bites and media clips, and may entice you to look more closely. If you enjoy photography, travel, cultural studies, literature, conflict studies, cooking, textiles, or dancing this is the perfect book for you.

The appendices are full of information for travel as well as a listing of hotels and restaurants, as well as resources for refugees (and others) including NGO's and local community organizations.

Palestine a Guide is more than a travel book. It is a book of love and beauty.

This book was a wonderful asset during our visit to Palestine. It provided a needed historical/cultural background in a setting where history is being brutally erased by colonial powers and difficult to find. It is well documented and beautifully illustrated, I strongly recommend it!

This was an excellent guide to Palestinian culture during our travels to Palestine this summer. I highly recommend it for travel or for insight into Palestinian culture.

Shahin's words and Azar's photography make this book a treasure. They follow every day Palestinians, Palestine's historical past, and their present. A wonderful book on the culture, history, and narrative of Palestine and Palestinians.

This guide gives an honest look at travel through Israel and the West Bank for those seeking to learn about the culture, homeland, and people of Palestine.

Shahin, as expounded by Daniel Pipes, described as journalist and author, has written a most curious guidebook. The genre normally aspires to help the traveler find his way, but this one has the grander aspiration to "search for all things Palestinian--past and present--in historic Palestine." In other words, its goal is political, not touristic. The guidebook dimension is nominal with no street addresses, much less opening and closing hours, evaluations of hotels and restaurants, or other practical advice.

Perhaps the book's strangest aspect is the pretense that Israel does not exist--symbolically eliminating the Jewish state in anticipation of the PLO, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad actually doing so. Thus, Jaffa fills up a chapter of twenty pages while the vastly larger city of Tel Aviv is barely mentioned, and then through gritted teeth. On the other hand, what Shahin refers to as the "massive and horrific" Wall (always with a capital "W") has a chapter of its own.

Conceptualized as a propaganda tool, the guidebook contains more than its share of inaccuracies. The first page falsely informs that "Palestine is a Holy Land to Muslims." The assertion that "archeologists have yet to verify the historic existence" of the Temple of Solomon is laughable nonsense. And Lord Balfour was hardly "of Jewish descent."

More surprising are the candid assertions that spring up between the tired anti-Zionist tropes. Palestinians are said to include Jews as well as Muslims and Christians, a rare inclusion. The comparison of Palestinians in Jordan to Jews in the United States got me thinking. "Many Lebanese blamed the PLO and its policies for the destruction of their country" must have slipped in when someone was not looking. And one sentence required three readings before I could believe my eyes, stating that the Arab population of Palestine grew in the 1930s partly because "the British and Jewish capital infusion to the country created jobs." That's a thesis, first articulated by Joan Peters (and forwarded in the Middle East Quarterly by Fred Gottheil) that anti-Zionist elements vehemently deny.

As I say, it's a curiosity, an artifact unique to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

For those who wish for a world without Israel or Jews, this is the guide for you. All the land between the Jordan River and Med. Sea is called Palestine, in effect wiping Israel off the map. Iran would be proud!