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Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

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I have been involved for some years in pro-Palestinian activism, and have read innumerable books on the subject. Nonetheless, Makdisi's book presented the stark facts of Israeli occupation with such vividness that I felt I was learning them - and raging and weeping at them - for the first time. There were times when Makdisi's sober, understated account of intolerable injustice forced me to put the book down; sometimes I didn't take it up again for days - but I always did take it up again.

Makdisi has an honourable pedigree: his uncle was the late Edward Said, for several decades not alone the leading advocate of Palestinian rights in the unfriendly environment of the USA, but also one of the world's leading intellectuals and literary critics. Makdisi is American-Lebanese-Palestinian, a mixture that renders him particularly qualified to approach his painful subject from a multitude of perspectives. As professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and an expert on the poetry of English romanticism, he can hardly be caricatured by the ill-intentioned as some wild-eyed anti-Western fanatic (although given the bloodsoaked history of Western interference in the rest of the world, of which the fate of Palestine is a particularly poignant example, it's perhaps time that more conscientious Westerners adopted such "fanaticism").

"Palestine Inside Out" isn't a history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, although it necessarily incorporates much historical reflection, but an anlysis of the "facts on the ground" created by Zionism and its US and EU backers, whereby Palestinian Arabs - Muslims and Christians - are deprived of human and political rights while simultaneously being demonised for resisting this state of affairs. Makdisi sees that Israel, the US and EU (and indeed the PLO) have jointly rendered impossible the two-state solution they all profess to support. His conclusions about a political solution will be uncomfortable for those who have pre-formed views on the matter - but his premises are supplied by the aforementioned "facts on the ground", and I believe that none but the most ingrained prejudices can withstand such a marshalling of evidence.

It is on the reef of Palestine that all narratives of progress in the field of political justice come to grief, and it is Palestine that reveals most nakedly the hollowness and hypocrisy of Western rhetoric concerning democracy and the rule of international law.

"Palestine Inside Out" could be subtitled "The World Inside Out". Read it, and be inspired to protest and take action against the conditions - or against your governments' support for the conditions - that make such injustice possible.

I think one would indeed be hard pressed to find a more detailed and accurate account of the predicament faced by the Palestinians since the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent Six Day War(resulting then in the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank). Of course there have been other books(most recently, Jimmy Carter's account based on his trip to Israel)but this book is unique in presenting a true "microscopic" account of the effect of the occupation on the lives of Palestinians in the occupied lands. I occasionally found myself rather depressed by it, even angry that the Israelis could act with such brutality and callous disregard for the welfare of those they treat with such contempt(but of course they're not out to win any popularity contests as both this and their historical disregard of U.N. Resolutions so amply demonstrates!).

So based on the evidence presented, Makdisi presents a clear cut solid case arguing for the desirability of having a single state instead of a two state solution to resolving the long term conflict there.

I've been studying the Israel/Palestine issue for almost 18 years now and I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territories twice and I can't recall a single book that has taught me more about the conflict than this one. Instead of focusing on history, politics, and suicide bombers as most books do, this one documents the daily occupation and how it plays out in the daily lives of Palestinians. It is absolutely appalling and eye-opening. More than once, I'm sure my jaw literally dropped open when confronted with the realities of what the occupation means. This book should undoubtedly be on the reading list of every member of Congress and every American citizen.

Most of the reviewers have already laid out the contents of Saree Makdisi's incredible narration about the illegal occupation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza. As a Jew I have long been interested and involved in the Palestine/Israel issue and feel somewhat knowledgeable about the background and the history of the Zionist project and the birth of Israel. In his important book, Makdisi spreads out before the reader in a concise and most readable form, the facts regarding the dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs by European Jews who were determined to make their homeland on the land of another people. He also lets readers see how that dispossession and the racism of the Jewish state has affected the 20% of the non-Jewish, especially Palestinian, population within Israel. This is a state that declares itself to be a "democracy" and yet 93% of the land is reserved only for its Jewish population.

Makdisi takes us into the occupied territories and Gaza. He paints a picture of a people who have been living under a brutal 41 year occupation, the longest occupation in history. What we see are a resilient Palestinian people who just by surviving are resisting Israeli attempts to make their life miserable and force them to leave.

Combining history and the present day situation, Makdisi paints a picture of the racist policies of Israel that seem to be bent on creating a Greater Israel on as much Palestinian land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible.

Not as much has been written about the fate of the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the ethnic cleansing of 1948 as has been written about the fate of the Palestinians under Israel's brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Those who remained within the Jewish state still suffer and are treated as second or third class citizens of Israel. Makdisi shows what it is like to be an Israeli Arab (the Israelis refuse to use the word Palestinian) , especially one whose family did not flee or was not driven out of Israel in 1948. Many of those people were uprooted from their villages, some of which were taken over by Jews while some 400 or more were destroyed. Many of the former residents now live in "unrecognized villages" receiving no government services. Israel is now bent on clearing out many non-Jews from Arab East Jerusalem, bulldozing Arab homes built without the permit that Israel refuses to grant to Palestinians. Makdisi tells of Palestinian students who, if they leave their home in Jerusalem to attend school elsewhere, are not permitted to return to their home. There is no such stricture on the Jews of Jerusalem.

As one of the the other reviewers wrote, this was not a book to be read without taking a break. With almost every page I pondered about the inhumanity of my fellow Jews and I was left with the sense that were I a Palestinian I would long ago have taken up arms to resist my oppressor. I am amazed that with the terrible conditions under which the Israelis force Palestinians to live, so few Palestinians have done that.

I was also left with the desire to see that any Israeli and anyone else who supports the occupation forced to live for at least a year or more under the same terrible situation as do the Palestinians. They should be made to give birth at checkpoints, be humiliated at checkpoints that do less to protect Israelis and more to humiliate and frustrate Palestinians, have their homes and fruit trees bulldozed, risk being shot by a trigger happy Israeli soldier, watch their land and water resources stolen by another people, and be treated by their occupiers as subhumans. Most people would not stand for this type of treatment and I suspect that a lot of those folks would not be as peaceful as they expect the Palestinians to be.

It is more than obvious that many Israelis and their supporters would like the Palestinians to just pack up and leave so that Jews can take over what is left of the Palestinian lands. But, having been driven from their homes more than once, the Palestinians are not going to do that. Israel has a choice. They must either become an official apartheid state, ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their lands, withdraw completely from the illegally occupied territories or become a state of all the people with equal rights for all.

I prefer the latter alternative.

This is a book that should be mandatory reading for every member of Congress and by every American. I will be giving a copy of this book to my member of Congress.

Saree Makdisi has done an outstanding job in telling the whole world what is really going on in the Middle East contrary to what we normally read in the newspapers and what the T.V. tells us on a daily basis. I have read a few books before on this subject like; "Beyond Chutzpah" (beyond insolence) by Norman G. Finkelstein, "The Ethnic cleansing of Palestine" by Ilan Pappe, "The Case Against Israel" by Michael Newmann and a few more. All these authors are Jewish but they have a heart for the suffering of the Palestinian people who have been displaced from their homeland.
There are more than 4 million refugee Palestinian people living in the surrounding countries like Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the ones who never left are experiencing the most diabolical maquiavelian, brutal occupation in ther hands of Israel thanks to our corrupt Congress and high ranking officials.

This thoroughly researched portrayal of what it is like for people to live under the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza will anger, frustrate, perhaps appall the reader. Story follows story, told in reportorial style tinged with dismay, of deplorable circumstances. In among these is sound and valuable analysis of how Israel has injured itself while injuring others. If there is any one culprit it is the IDF; what a terrible thing it is to be a soldier caught where many an Israeli young person is trying to deal with the fear and the distress in the minds and hearts of both Israelis and Palestinians. And what humiliation dogs the footsteps of virtually all Palestinians, and rends the hearts of a large minority of Jews in America as in Israel, given the pattern of Israeli policy and administration. No-one wins, and one wonders how the human spirit can regain anything like nobility in this interminible struggle among Jew, Christian and Muslim. But we'd better know what Makdisi has to tell us.

Saree Makdisi my not have the writing gifts of the late Edward Said but this fellow comparative lit. Prof. has written a powerful and essential book. The chapters are filled with statistics and hard facts about how Palestinians have been forced into a degraded existence that is hard to imagine. He captures the Palestinian experience in great depth, while at the same time providing good historical context along with interesting anecdotes. This is the best book I have found on the occupation. It is better than Neve Gordon's recent book. In 2009 Ilan Pappe will release his long awaited book on the occupation. I'm sure it will be excellent but Makdisi has set the bar high.

FINAL REVIEW of 15 June 2008

I was moved and outraged by the cancellation of the author's appearance at the Politics & Prose bookstore, which shall never--in consequence--receive my custom. However, the benefit is that the author received space in the Washington Post, and the idiocyof the Politics & Prose management may well have done more good than bad as a result.

I have one word that summarizes my feelings after reading this book:

FURY

The other word, now in vogue in Egypt, is

ENOUGH

The author, an American with both Lebanese and Palestinian heritages, is a scholar of English literature. His book is NOT a polemic. His book is an elegant essay on reality, perhaps the finest work I have ever been privileged to read on this topic, with notes, maps, and statistics of the first order.

The author does NOT seek to damn the Israelis, only to demonstrate, in calm reasoned well-documented language, that the Israelis have become the Nazis of our era, and that their ghettoization of Palestine, with gates, roadblocks, checkpoints, and walls, has become the atrocity of all atrocities in our time.

The opening insight grabs me: like Gandhi, the author sees that Palestine and Israel are one in spirit. He nails the Israeli objective: to occupy as much sacred land as possible, without regard to other peoples, religions, historic rights, or common perceptions of justice.

Gandhi had it right in the first place: the English were idiots to divide India. Similarly, Palestine is a Holy Land for all of us, and if the Israeli's cannot accept Gandhi's vision, then it is time we imposed it on them--there could be no better expenditure of $250 billion a year than in occupying Palestine, knocking down the fascist walls, and restoring the nature of that land to green and goodness, while making Jerusalem an international city similar to the Vatican, but open to all faiths.

I am completely fed up with ideological zealots, both left and right. Israel is clearly the enemy of peace in the Middle East, and an obstacle to progress there. I support the author's view, that a single holy state is needed, one that does not allow the Israelis to be the Gestapo of our time. More to the point, I agree with the author with respect to the inhumanity, immorality, indignity, and fiscally fatal inconvenience being imposed by the Israelis on the Palestinians.

This is where the book shines brightly: it is a meticulou8sly documented, ably presented catalogue of the day to day atrocities committed by the Israeli "police state" against individual Palestinians, families, and small businesses. Kafka could not have done better, but in this case, the author is not making it up. It is real, and it is a genocidal crime against humanity, day after day after day.

I have read many books, and a number on the Middle East, and I can only conclude that this book is totally extraordinary for the following reasons:

1) Multicultural perspective
2) Pragmatic review of the consequences of Israeli Gestapo tactics
3) Fullsome use of statistics to demonstrate Israeli atrocities against "day to day" Palestinian life and families
4) Timely--the era of state terror is over. It is time for We the People, including Palestinians and Jews, to rise up and dismember governments that cheat us, steal from us, and misrepresent us.

For perspectives that completely support the author's views as described in his article (I have posted a summary review of each):

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
Web of Deceit: The History of Western complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (American Empire Project)
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State

I have also published (free online, in superb low-cost hardback on Amazon), COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, the first in a series from Earth Intelligence Network.

The bottom line of all of the above books is that governments are dysfunctional, corrupt, and cannot deal with complexity and adversity. We the People need to revitalize participatory democracy and stop waging war. Peace and prosperity for all seven billion can be achieved for one third the price we pay now for war. A strategy of peace is a strategy that will create infinite wealth.

It's time for America the Beautiful to be honest and open again. I totally embrace the idea of an international occupation of the Holy Land, with Jerusalem as an international city, the Israeli's stuffed back in their box, and a 50-year occupation that fully integrates Palestine and Israel and Lebanon, while providing both an international and a regional guarantee of dignity and justice for all in this sacred land.

The Israelis have dishonored God, dishonored man, and dishonored faith. They have become a modern holocaust unto themselves. For this they are damned by this author's bearing witness, as a people, absent a public uprising or international intervention.

Makdisi has written an outstanding book in, "Palestine Inside Out". It provides subjective accounts of individuals who have been affected by the invasion and apartheid-like tactics. The stories are tragic, well developed and written, and provide sufficient detail. Interspersed between the stories can be found objective data - numbers of Israelis killed, numbers of Palestinians killed, numbers of gates and miles of walls ... These data are not presented in a cogent or logical manner. The purpose of the book is to, I presume, capture the attention of the world community to the plight of the Palestinians. As I read this book, I kept finding myself asking, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Which came first, the military invasion and checkpoints, the Palestinian bombers, the Israeli confiscation of land and subjecting the Palestinian people to a second rule of law, the western colonial powers promises to the Palestinians and to the Jewish people of land to be shared as one country but that couldn't be shared given the Zionist ideals. Sad state of affairs that could have been resolved amicably by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain ... without bloodshed and saving hundreds of billions of dollars ... but, we've gotta save face now. Excellent book that comes strongly recommended! Solid A.

Saree Makdisi's book is meant to be accessible. It is intended to start with mundane yet harsh realities of occupation that readers might at first ascribe to Israeli bureaucratic indifference and excessive concern for security. Bit by bit, however, the reader discovers that the imposed misery is actually part of a systematic plan for the destruction of Palestinian society. By the end of the book, Makdisi has demonstrated that the plan began long before the establishment of the state of Israel, and has proceeded methodically to the present, with the complicity of the United States and other backers.

Along the route, the reader will be astonished at her own reaction, from irritation to indignation to anger and fury, and finally a compulsion to act against the injustice. That is the author's plan, and it works well for the most part. If there is one book about Palestine that policy makers and staff should read, this is probably it.

The book is not without its flaws, however. One is that the author's illustrative use of personal stories is highly effective, but diminishes progressively throughout the book. It should have been maintained, even at the cost of lengthening the book.

Of equal concern is the author's syntax. Unfortunately, parenthetical remarks - often with multiple embeddings of phrases, or in serial succession, with the subject and the verb separated by considerable content - are far too common. (The preceding sentence is a mild example of such.) Unfortunately, this style slows the reading and makes it less accessible than the author intended. Fortunately, the author's other writing skills compensate for this flaw, making the work still one of the more readable ones on the topic.

There is little that is new for those who have been active in the Palestinian human rights movement, but this book is meant for a wider audience that is still trying to understand. Nevertheless, the presentation of facts, arguments and stories, is eye-opening, to the extent that even the veteran Haaretz reporter Gideon Levy was compelled to say, "Palestine Inside Out is a moving and thought-provoking account of Palestinian daily life under the occupation. After twenty years of covering the conflict I still found myself shocked." Gideon speaks for me, as well.