The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction [Hardcover]

William A. Cook (Editor)

Book Description

Release date: June 15, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0230100376 | ISBN-13: 978-0230100374

The Plight of the Palestinians: a Long History of Destruction is a collection of voices from around the world that establishes in both theoretical and graphic terms the slow, methodical genocide taking place in Palestine beginning in the 1940s, as revealed in the Introduction. From Dr. Francis A. Boyle’s detailed legal case against the state of Israel, to Uri Avnery’s “Slow Motion Ethnic Cleansing,” to Richard Falk’s “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” to Ilan Pappe’s “Genocide in Gaza,” these voices decry in startling, vivid, and forceful language the calculated atrocities taking place, the inhumane conditions inflicted on the people, and the silence that exists despite the crimes, nothing short of state-sponsored genocide against the Palestinians.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The Plight of the Palestinians turned out to be an essential read, and a full and authoritative discourse. It offers a grim and detailed story of suffering and the “slow motion genocide”, which is important in order to appreciate the harshness of the Palestinian experience. The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction spreads the seeds of understanding, which is so essential to any meaningful and lasting change.”--The Jordan Times

“In his collection of thirty-two articles by almost as many authors…William Cook provides a devastating assessment of Zionist violence against Palestinians. Relentlessly told are one atrocity after another, one act of deception after another, one broken treaty after another, one surprise attack after another, one policy reversal after another--all of which are described with both effective immediacy and an adequate sense of historic context.”--Atlantic Free Press

About the Author

William A. Cook is Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California where he served for 13 years as Vice President for Academic Affairs before assuming his faculty position in 2001. Prior to coming to California, he served as a Dean of Faculty, Chair of Department of English and faculty member at institutions large and small, public and private in four eastern states. He is an activist and a writer for numerous Internet publications including Counterpunch, Pacific Free Press in British Columbia, Dissident Voice and Information Clearing House, serving as senior editor for MWC News out of Canada, and contributing editor at the Palestine Chronicle, the Atlantic Free Press in the Netherlands, and the World Prout Assembly, his polemics against the Bush administration and the atrocities caused by Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert in Israel, now our 51st state, have been spread around the Internet world and translated into French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Italian. Cook also serves on the Board of the People’s Media Project, interviews on radio and TV in South Africa, Canada, Iran and the United States and contributed for five years yearly predictions to the Hong Kong Economic News. This volume follows his Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied: The Rape of Palestine and continues his scourge against the hypocrisy, deceit, and destructive policies that have characterized American mid-east policy and its destructive alliance with the Zionist forces that have turned Israel into an apartheid state determined to destroy the Palestinian people. In addition to his polemics, he writes plays (The Unreasoning Mask, co-authored with his wife, D’Arcy, and The Agony of Colin Powell), satires (see “Advancing the Civilized State: Inch by Bloody Inch” in The Rape), and poetry (Psalms for the 21st Century). His most recent fictional work creates a morality tale based upon real life figures that haunt our lives, The Chronicles of Nefaria.  

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (June 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0230100376
• ISBN-13: 978-0230100374
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,549,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Dr. Gideon Polya's review submitted by editor November 4, 2010

By Bill

Format:Hardcover

This review published in MWC News, July 25, 2010
Gideon Polya, Ph. D.
The Plight of the Palestinians. A Long History of Destruction", edited by Professor William A. Cook (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010) is a collection of articles about the ongoing Palestinian Genocide by about 3 dozen variously eminent humanitarian writers from around the world.
I have been resolutely writing about the Palestinian Genocide and the immense injustice to the Palestinian people for many years. The essence of this atrocity is that in 1880 there were about 500,000 Indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine and about 25,000 Jews in Palestine, of whom about half were Jewish immigrants. In 1917 the British betrayed the Arab people by promising Palestine as a Homeland for Jews in the hope (not to be realized) that the Russian Zionists would succeed in keeping Russia in the First World War. However the 1917 Balfour Declaration had a condition that there was to be no detriment to either Jews or Indigenous Palestinians - a condition to be grossly violated by racist British, racist American and racist Zionist perfidy. In 1948 0.8 million Palestinians were driven from their homes by racist Zionist terrorists (the 1948 Nakba) to be followed by a further 1967 Nakba in which a now nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel seized all of the Holy land plus parts of Lebanon and Syria and Egypt, imprisoning several million more Palestinians.

The last 43 years has seen a worsening Palestinian Genocide by Apartheid Israel: post-invasion non-violent and violent excess deaths total 0.3 million; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths total 0.2 million; refugees total 7 million; 85% of West Bank Christian Palestinians have fled; 1.5 million Occupied Palestinians (50% children, 75 % women and children) are abusively imprisoned in what the Catholic Church has described as Israel's Gaza Concentration Camp; 2 million Occupied Palestinian (50% children, 75 % women and children) are abusively imprisoned in dwindling West Bank Bantustans in what heroes in the fight against South African Apartheid have called Apartheid conditions; 1.5 million Palestinian Israelis suffer under highly discriminatory, race-based Apartheid laws; Apartheid Israel deliberately murders over 6,000 Occupied Palestinians each year (mostly children), with about 90% dying from racist Zionist-imposed deprivation and 10% being violently killed (for details see "Palestinian Genocide":[...]

"The Plight of the Palestinians. A Long History of Destruction", edited by Professor William A. Cook, is a timely anthology in which outstanding, anti-racist, humanitarian scholars (many of them Jewish) describe the horrible reality of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide that is a blot on Jewry and a blot on Humanity.

The book begins with an Acknowledgment of collaborators, writers, journals and of writers whose works were offered but could not be included in this collection. The editor then provides a series of succinct Biographies of the various authors (that are provided in an even more succinct form below). The scholarly accounts of what is described throughout the book as the ongoing Palestinian Genocide are prefaced by an Introduction, "The Untold Story of the Zionist Intent to Turn Palestine into a Jewish State" by William A. Cook (Professor of English at the University of La Verne, Southern California, USA). The remainder of the book is composed of separate chapters with similarly self-explanatory titles by particular authors, each chapter deriving from an article previously published in various media.

I will not review the book as such (notably because I am one of the authors) except to say that the authors are all defenders of human rights throughout the world; that I feel greatly honoured to be in the company of such eminent anti-racist, humanitarian scholars and writers; and that Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity - we must follow the example of that noble Palestinian of 2,000 years ago, the Good Samaritan, who saved the savagely beaten Jew, and resolve that, like the Good Samaritan, we cannot walk by on the other side. It must be noted that many of the book's contributors are Jewish and following the example of the Good Samaritan in standing up for the brutally maltreated Palestinians.

The book cover summarizes the contents thus: "The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction is a collection of voices from around the world that establishes in both theoretical and graphic terms the slow, methodical genocide taking place in Palestine beginning in the1940s, as revealed in the Introduction. From Dr Francis A. Boyle's detailed legal case against the state of Israel to Uri Avnery's "Slow motion ethnic cleansing", Richard Falk's "Slouching towards a Palestinian Holocaust", and Ilan Pappe's "Genocide in Gaza", these voices decry in startling, vivid and forceful language the calculated atrocities taking place, the inhumane conditions inflicted on the people, and the silence that exists despite the crimes - nothing short of state-sponsored genocide against the Palestinians."

I have simply set out below the various chapters of the book below, with the chapter number, author, key author biographical details, article, title and date of original publication..

I- The Human Tragedy

1. Steve Lendman (BA Harvard, MA, University of Pennsylvania; former marketing research analyst with large US corporations; progressive US economist, writer and broadcaster; coordinator with Professor Michel Chossudovsky, University of Ottawa, Canada, of the Center for Global Research, Canada), "Israel's Slow Motion Genocide in Occupied Palestine", (11-26-2008).

2. Dr Gideon Polya (BSc, University of Tasmania, PhD, Flinders University; Australian biochemist and academic, La Trobe University; progressive writer on war , genocide, human rights and the climate emergency; author of "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds", "Body Count,. Global avoidable mortality since 1950" and "Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History"), "Ongoing Palestinian Genocide", (3-6-2008).

3. Chris Hedges (Pulitzer Prize-winning US journalist, author, war correspondent and foreign correspondent for major US newspapers; currently senior fellow at The Nation Institute; 2002 Amnesty International Award for Human Rights journalism; taught at Columbia, New York and Princeton Universities; author of "American Fascists" and other books) , "The Lessons of Violence", (1-28-2008).

4. Karen Koning AbuZayd (BSc, De Pauw University, Indiana, MA , McGill University, Montreal; lectured at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda and Juba University, Sudan; worked for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for 19 years; commissioner-general for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA) since 2005), "This Brutal Siege of Gaza Can Only Breed Violence", (1-23-2008).

5. Sonja Karkar (founder and president of the Melbourne-based Women for Palestine; cofounder of Australians for Palestine (AFP); editor of AFP News; publishes extensively about the plight of the Palestinians and maintains websites dedicated to telling the world about Palestine and the Nakba), "The Weeping Olive Trees of Palestine Weep", (9-4-2007).

6. Professor Richard Falk (BS, University of Pennsylvania, LLB, Yale University; JSD, Harvard University; Emeritus Professor in International Law, Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara; served on UN Human Rights Inquiry Commission for the Palestine Territories and many other important bodies; famed author of 37 books) , "Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust", (6-29-2007).

7. Patrick Cockburn (Middle East correspondent of The Independent; formerly wrote for the Financial Times; author of several books, notably "The Occupation: War, Resistance and Daily Life in Iraq" and co-author of "Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession"; awarded the 2004 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Reporting and the 2009 Orwell Prize for Journalism; writes extensively for various media) , "Gaza Is a Jail; Gaza Is Dying", (9-7-2006).

8. Dr Paul Craig Roberts (graduate, Georgia Institute of Technology, PhD, University of Virginia; assistant secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and famed as the Father of Reaganomics; economist and nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate; former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service; a top US journalist in mainstream and alternative media) , "The Shame of Being an American", (7-22-2006).

9. Andrea Howard (a psychiatric case manager in the central US; she has organized for local and national organizations focussing on social justice issues), "Israeli Immunity for Genocide", (7-3-2006).

10. Paul de Rooij (Dutch mathematicians, economist and writer based in London, UK; a committed activist for the Palestinians since the First Intifada, he has written extensively for "alternative" media `including Z magazine, Agenda, Counterpunch, Arab Media Internet Network , Miftah and various media research journals) , "Palestinian Misery in Perspective", (6-3-2004).

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