Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential book, outrageously overpriced in the US, March 9, 2009
This book is the first to focus on an essential aspect of Israel's conduct of its nearly 42 year brutal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. One cannot comprehend Israel's behavior toward the Palestinian people it holds under its control without the information in this book. What a shame, then, that it is so outrageously overpriced in the United States.
I buy the great majority of my books from Amazon, but in this case I paid about one third the Amazon price by ordering the book from a UK seller via abebooks.com. I strongly recommend this book, but I do not recommend buying it from a U.S. source.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful journalism, May 25, 2009
Mr. Cook starts off the book by examining the foundations of the Jewish state. 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes in 1948 because of ethnic cleansing by Israel. Cook notes that this ethnic cleansing plan, "Plan Dalet" was approved by the Zionist leadership in Tel Aviv in March 1948. Both sides committed atrocities in the 1948 conflict but the Zionists committed several dozen massacres at minimum. Cook writes that the Deir Yessin massacre did not actually kill 250 Arabs but around 100 and that Begin exaggerated the number killed so as to sow terror in Palestinians.. Cook notes that, in the midst of the ethnic cleansing of Lydd and Ramla, forces under the command of Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin massacred about 170 Palestinian males who had taken shelter in the Dahamish mosque in Lydd. Thousands of Israeli Arabs were quietly expelled from their homes in the 1948-56 period. Cook writes that an attempt to create a pretext to expel the Israeli Arab inhabitants of the Iron Triangle, called Operation Hafarferet,had to be called off after the massacre of 47 Israeli Arabs by the Israeli border police at Kafr Qassem.
Israeli Arabs, i.e. non-Jews, make up a fifth of Israel's citizenry. Yet non-Jews are effectively excluded from owning or receiving leases on 93 percent of the land within Israel's pre-1967 borders. They are barred from many job categories because of Jewish racism and numerous barriers limit their access to higher education. Israeli Arabs are forced to use the vast majority of the land allotted to them for residential purposes. They have very little access to land to build new housing or start new businesses--Israeli local and regional government planning bodies make sure that they do not. . Israeli Arabs have the right to vote and Cook extensively discusses the fear of Israeli elites that their high birthrate might lead them to use the ballot box to overturn the racist foundations of the Israeli state. Cook quotes an article from one of Israel's leading newspapers, Ma'ariv, in early 2007 which reported that Prime Minister Olmert discussed with Shin Bet officials the need to target Israeli Arab leaders and organizations that engage in the "subversion" of advocating the elimination of Israel as a Jewish supremacist state.
Cook notes that all Israeli policy in the occupied territories since 1967 can be explained by the desire to make life so miserable for Palestinians, killing them and destroying their economic existence, that they will gradually leave the territories and Jews can take all the land. He quotes Moshe Dayan privately explaining in the 1970's that Palestinians would be made to live "like dogs" and hopefully they would be encouraged to leave the occupied territories. Israel refused to allow the Palestinian economy to develop after 1967. Large amounts of Palestinian land were confiscated, including communal farm land. Cook notes that the Swedish branch of Save the Children reported that 10,000 children suffered broken bones caused by Israeli soldiers in the first two years of the first Intifada. In 1988, a prominent settler leader named Pinchas Wallerstein chased around some Palestinian children with a firearm, killing one and wounding another. Cooks notes that Wallerstein said he was not exercising self-defense but attempting to teach the children about the supremacy of Jewish authority in the holy land. He was sentenced to 4 months community service. Similarly, in 2002, as the Israeli army looked on, Jewish settlers attacked the West Bank village of Yanun, forcing the inhabitants to flee as they fired on homes, poisoned the village wells and killed the villagers' livestock. The settlers often have carte blanche to engage in racist terror against Palestinians.
Cook quotes from a report authored by an Israeli defense ministry advisor, General Baruch Spiegel, in 2005. The Speigel report stated that a third of the 120 Israeli settlements in the West Bank were on land that was confiscated from Palestinian landowners in the following manner. The Israeli army would seize the land for "security" purposes and then quietly hand off the land for settlement to civilian Israeli settlers, not uncommonly religious fascists. The number of Israeli settlers during the Oslo "peace process" (1993-2000) doubled in the occupied territories, as Yasser Arafat's clique enriched themselves policing Palestinian population centers. The US and successive Israeli governments pretended that they were making substantial gestures toward Palestinian rights. Actually what they did was consolidate Palestinians into scattered population centers whose territorial contiguity was broken up by Jewish settlements and Jew-only bypass roads, with Israel controlling the aquifers and agricultural land of the Jordan Valley. Israel, since its occupation of the West Bank began, has stolen almost all the water of the West Bank for its citizens and settlers, making it extremely difficult for Palestinians to get water, much less clean water. It was this state of affairs that was offered to the Palestinians as a "state" by Ehud Barak in 2000, notes Cook. For all the horrible screaming about Barak's "generous" offer and Arafat's satanic motives in rejecting it, the fact that Barak offered Arafat a "state" of isolated Bantustans was confirmed, according to Cook, by written guidelines that Ha'aretz, Israel's leading newspaper, reported was provided to Olmert before the Annapolis summit in 2007.
Other essays include an examination of the legal charges against Azmi Bishara and reflections on the fate of Palestinian Christians. In another essay, he travels along with a group of Israeli Jewish women who hang around Israeli checkpoints in an attempt to deter Israeli soldiers from engaging in their usual activities of humiliating, abusing and beating Palestinians at the checkpoints. He discusses the largely bogus scare about the "new anti-Semitism" allegedly raging in Europe (see his endnotes for elaboration on a few of the points).
The economic strangulation of the people of Gaza has intensified since 2006, what with the periodic military bombardment of civilian infrastructure and agricultural land, has reduced Gaza to the worst destitution levels of Sub-Saharan Africa.
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2 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Cook's at it again, May 1, 2009
Jonathan Cook, the anti-semite and professional Israel basher, has now written his third book containing nothing but vitriol, huge distortions, and a complete lack of context and objectivity in relation to Israel.
Indeed, the author appears to be a bit of a crank, being completely obsessed with Israel. Apart from the three books he has written all being about Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians/Arabs, he also has a website which is exclusively dedicated to bashing Israel. And if that's not enough, he even lives in Israel, ostensibly for the purpose of being able to see the situation first hand. Given that his entire life is devoted to Israel bashing, one wonders what the author would do if Israel didn't exist. Needless to say, for readers wanting so much as an ounce of objectivity, books by Cook are to be avoided like the plague.
The basic premise of this book is as follows: Despite the Palestinians accepting the UN partition of what was then British Mandate Palestine in 1947 by UN Resolution 181 and desiring to live peacefully side by side Israel in the two state solution, the wicked Israelis have systematically continued to occupy more and more Palestinian land, with Palestinian resistance being solely attributable to Israel continuing to expand beyond its internationally recognised borders.
What a load of tosh.
As anyone who knows anything about this dispute knows all too well, the Palestinians (not to mention the whole of the Arab world) violently rejected - and continue to reject - the creation of Israel, and ever since its creation have fought a ruthless terrorist war to destroy it. In the words of Hamas' Charter, which, as critics of Israel are forever pointing out, was democratically elected by Gazans:
'Israel exists and will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it...'.
Apparently, the likes of Cook expect Israel to do one of two things:
- Make peace with those who seek to 'obliterate' it
- Sit on its hands and allow Palestinians (not to mention other terrorist groups like Hizbollah) perpetrate suicide bombings and fire rockets with impunity
Strange as it may seem, Israel has chosen the third option, which is to take all action necessary to provide security to its citizens.
Inevitably, due to Israel's tiny size, this necessarily involves annexing Palestinian land, as quite simply, Israel is not defensible in its internationally recognised borders.
As Hizbollah and Hamas have both clearly demonstrated, even in its expanded borders, Israel is still highly susceptible to even primitive rockets. Now imagine Israel had smaller borders and Hamas/Hizbollah had more sophisticated rockets...
Then there's the fact that when Israel withdrew from occupied land (Southern Lebanon in 2000; Gaza in 2005), rather than gaining peace, it had rockets fired at it from the very land from which it had withdrawn. Which makes it rather obvious why Israel is so loathe to withdraw from the West Bank.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that Israel should continue to expand its settlements in the West Bank. Too the contrary, I am opposed to such a policy. However, there are clear security based reasons, albeit not recognised by international law, why Israel has occupied and built settlements in the West Bank.
And speaking of international law, what right do the Palestinians and critics of Israel have to invoke international law when they reject the most fundamental principle of international law governing the Israel-Palestine conflict, namely, Israel's right to exist?
The reality is that there can never be a two state solution. The only practical hope of ending this tragic conflict is the three state solution, entailing Gaza becoming part of Egypt, and the West Bank, or part thereof, becoming part of Jordan.
Jonathan: May I make a suggestion? Having flogged to death the topic of Israel and its relationship with the Palestinians/Arabs, I have a suggestion for the topic of your next book. I recommend you write a book about how the Jews are behind the financial crisis currently sweeping the world. There are two clear reasons why the Jews had the motive to bring about the collapse of the world's economy:
- Reduce the power of Iran through decimating the oil price
- Cause Western leaders (Barak Obama in particular) to focus their time and energies on their economies rather than devoting time to the Israel-Palestine conflict
Surely you have noticed the incredible coincidence that as soon as it appeared that Obama - believed by many to be reasonably symapthetic to the Palestinian cause - was likely to be elected in late 2008, the financial crisis suddenly moved into overdrive. And what caused the crisis to reach these new depths? The sudden collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank with significant Jewish ownership and control. Hardly a coincidence.
So there we have it, means, motive, and opportunity. Not to mention timing. Surely enough material for your highly fertile mind to weave together a compelling story.
Of course, you should make absolutely no mention of all the non-Jewish bankers who were heavily involved in bringing about the financial crisis. Nor should you make any mention of the fact that Jews have lost their jobs/fortunes in the same proportion as everyone else. In writing the book, you should continue your well established form of argument whereby any and all facts - irrespective of how strongly they contradict your views - are completely ignored.
As we know, the Jews have been blamed for numerous recessions/depressions in the past, so why should this one be any different? The only difference on this occasion is the motive, as noted above.
May I also suggest that before writing this book, first carefully read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to ensure you incorporate all of its key themes. Then again, you are probably already extremely familar with the Protocols.
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