Customer Reviews

Refugees in Our Own Land : Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem

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Few are the works that have given the personal touch to what it means to be living under the ugliest forms of occupation of modern times: The Israeli Occupation of West Bank and Gaza. Ms. Hamzeh's work is one of such works. Her diaries give a face to the people who are suffering on a daily basis faced with what an Apartheid-like situation - those people are the Palestinians who are being dispossessed and forced to live as refugees in their own land. Ms. Hamzeh's diaries and the additional essays give the personal touch and the political situation in the form of Oslo agreement that is shown to be nothing more than a mask that was intended all along to squeeze the Palestinians out of their land.
This book should be recommended reading to students of Politics who risk losing sight of what it means to live under Occupation while reading Academic oriented works, and this book should be displayed as a testimony by all peace loving people against Violence and Racism and pure Murder that is being applied against Palestinians on a daily basis.

I'd love to find a book by a book by a Palestinian that truly seeks peace. This is not such a volume.

Beginning from the preface, which in hysterical tones accuses Israel of committing genocide, to the last pages, this is a book loaded with code-words calling for Israel's destruction. It's full of "humiliation," "murder," "genocide," and the like.

Had those things actually been perpetrated by Israel, I would be first in line to condemn them. But even the United Nations has concluded that Israel has not committed genocide, in Jenin, or anywhere else. As for murder, it seems that the only murder is taking place by Palestinians against Israeli civilians, and that whosoever amongst Palestinians has been killed has died either in battle, in the line of fire, or by accident, for which Israel has apologized. When, on the other hand, was the last time a Palestinian leader actually sought an end to suicide bombings, because they are evil, not because they are inexpedient.

My biggest problem with this book is that for most of the events that Hamzeh reports, she relies on hearsay. There has been no scientific or objective attempt to verify the information, much less the veracity of the sources. Even that might be all right, had the reporter not assumed an hysterical tone. But Hamzeh is so willing to believe everything nasty she hears about Israel or Israelis, or Jews for that matter, that nothing escapes unscathed.

I want peace, but books like this one--filled with blame and outright hatred--do nothing to promote it.

--Alyssa A. Lappen