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294 of 349 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A much needed dose of reality, February 28, 2002
One of the biggest problems with trying to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict is finding an unbiased account of it. There seems to be no definitive work on the subject that would completely satisfy an open-minded observer, not that there seem to be many of those. Try reading through the reviews of this book or any other book about the subject on Amazon and what you'll see is an almost complete polarisation of views with little or no middle ground. Watching the news media doesn't help much either, as the origins of what is going on are never explained and it's significant that both sides of the conflict think that the media is biased against them. This book is not an attempt to give a full account of the Israel-Palestine conflict, in fact it presupposes that the reader already has some knowledge about the recent history of the middle-east; instead the author sets out to challenge the validity of certain widely accepted beliefs about the conflict and in doing so makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing (and semingly never ending) debate about it. Accepting "official" Israeli history as fact involves accepting certain Zionist arguments as being true. For instance we are often told that there was never really any such thing as "the Palestinians", that the area which now comprises the state of Israel was largely an unoccupied wilderness when Zionists started to colonise it and that many of those Arabs who did in fact become refugees during the first Israeli-Arab war were actually recent immigrants. Because of this, the argument goes, the Jews have a greater right to the land than the Arabs, thus justifying the establishment of the Israeli state. Similarly we are asked to believe that although the first Israeli-Arab war created 700000 Arab refugees, this mass exodus was not caused by any premeditated or systematic campaign of expulsion, but was the result of "Arab orders" broadcast over the radio or perhaps, in the view of "new historians" like Benny Morris, mainly due to flight from Israeli aggression or the threat of it. The conquest of Israel is portrayed as being a defensive action against Arab attack and all Israel's subsequent border wars and military actions as necessary retaliations of a victim state. The problem with all this is that some of it is actually quite difficult to swallow and the central aim of Finkelstein's book is to see how well such tenets of Israeli history stand up to rigorous examination. To facilitate his analysis the author refers to and discusses at length influential works on various aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict (Joan Peters' "From time immemorial", Benny Morris' "Birth of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-49", Anita Shapira's "Land and power" and others) and time after time he shows that the "official" version of Israeli history can ony be arrived at by a very careful and highly selective interpretation of evidence, statistical data and the historical record. The book is worth buying for the second chapter alone, in which "From time immemorial" is comprehensively and definitively exposed as a hoax and a fraud. On the other hand, there is praise for the "new historians", although as Finkelstein ably points out, Morris' valuable attempt to deconstruct the Zionist whitewash of the refugee issue is too cautious by far based on his own evidence. Anyone seriously interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict would gain from reading this book and I strongly recommend it, but it's not the whole story by any means. For a diametrically opposed view of the same events, try reading "Fabricating Israeli history: the new historians" by Efraim Karsh. Or try sampling the work of Benny Morris to see what Karsh is complaining about. My personal view is that Finkelstein gets closer to the truth than a "new historian" like Morris and that Karsh and reactionaries of his ilk are the Zionist equivalent of King Canute. But that's just my opinion. You'll have to do a lot more reading to try to achieve a full understanding of this complex set of issues....
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