Customer Reviews

Palestine: A Personal History

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Too often, images of Palestinians in the West are dominated by suicide bombings and terrorist groups, and their cause is not presented in a way that could lead any person to sympathize with it. This book tells the story of the Palestinians you don't see on TV-the ordinary men, women, and children who were robbed of their land by an alien group whose ancestors had been gone from that land for 2000 years. Sabbagh refutes some commonly held-but very inacurate-beliefs, such as the idea that the name "Palestine" is a 20th century invention, and the idea that Palestine was uninhabited before the Israelis came-indeed, he tells the stories of the Arabs-including his own ancestors-who lived on the land for hundreds of years before Zionism was thought up. The history moves into the 20th century, relating the stories of Sabbagh's ancestors along with a history of British control of Palestine that reveals the injustice of the Zionist idea, and its proponents to be fanatical ideologues willing to use any means-even terrorism-to advance their ideas at the expense of the Palestinian population. The book culminates with the creation of Israel and the deportations conducted by the new state to rid its territory of Arabs, a tragedy described in mornfull detail by Sabbagh. Read this book-your view of the Arab-Israeli conflict will never be the same.

This is a very good account. It is also a good reflection of the Zionist movement. This is a movement that is even opposed by some well-meaning jews. In essence, it is nothing but a terrorist movement that managed to find itself a state (Israel) on the ruins and misery of another; through cunning deceipt of the world, and complicity from some western nations. This state that prides itself on being the only democracy in the region allows itself to starve and bombard women and children under the guise of protecting its citizens; and not only that, it even wants them to stop defending themselves against the transgressor and to also stop digging tunnels to fetch essentials from a neighbouring country. The fascinating thing is that the world is watching in denial and when pressed they just passively agree with the war mongers.

I had been expecting something of a more scholarly and dispassionate nature. The author, Karl Sabbagh, demonstrates having done quite a bit of research, but is clearly not a historian and is highly biased. An example of this bias occurs as early in the book as the title: Palestine, History of a Lost Nation. Within the first several chapters, Sabbagh states outright that Palestine was never a nation, and that even the name Palestine is historically a vague geographic designation. He acknowledges sources that cite the Moslems as having a long-standing hatred of the Jews, but he fails to make the connection that that could be a major motivation for the past 60-plus years of violence. He spends chapters making a case that the land belongs to the region's Arabs because of their majority presence in the 18th and 19th centuries, but he makes no similar case concerning the Jews since the 1920's and 1930's. He recognizes that indigenous Jews lived in the now-Arab strongholds of Nablus and Ramallah, but he does not address their displacement. All in all, a one-sided diatribe based on biased versions of historical facts.

This publication is such a great read. Simply because it is very factual and well-referenced. It represents the truth of what had happened to Palestine up till the Nakba of 1948. And as much as it is serious and non-fiction, it can move the reader into an emotional status of connection with the events. This is a good book if you want to learn about the Zionist consipracy and their collaborators' weaved against the Palestinians and how Palestine was seized.

Give it a shot.

This is a very well written book by a very good author. The discussion of his own family history is especially well done. However, as is almost always the case when a Palestinian writes of the events leading to the 1948 partition of Palestine (and the founding of the State of Israel), Sabbagh is very selective in his presentation of the facts and what transpired. He always presents the Arab Palestinians as committing acts of violence against the Jews of Palestine in response to Jewish actions, and never accepts responsibility for the actions initiated by Arabs against the Jews.

The most glaring omission is a total lack of reference to the 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries, people who were forced from their homes to a much greater degree than were the Palestinian Arabs. Jews were massacred in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and other Arab countries during the period of Sabbaghs narrative and most were forced to leave by abandoning all of their property. Virtually the entire Jewish population of the Middle East fled (between 1947 and 1968), with the majority taken in as citizens of the new State of Israel. Few Arab authors ever mention this, as it raises the question of why the Arab countries have kept the Palestinian Arabs in refugee camps to this very day in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. A more truthful account would raise questions like: Why is it to this day that a Palestinian Muslim (unlike any other Muslim) is not allowed to become a citizen of Saudi Arabia?