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Jonathan Cook

Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair Paperback – November 15, 2008

by Jonathan Cook (Author)

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This book claims that Palestine is fast disappearing and fulfilling the objectives of Israel's founding fathers. Over many decades, Israel has developed and refined policies to disperse, imprison and impoverish the Palestinian people, in a relentless effort to destroy them as a nation. It has industrialized Palestinian despair through ever more sophisticated systems of curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs. Cook analyzes how Israel has transformed the West Bank and Gaza into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, creating a lucrative "defense" industry by pioneering the technologies needed for urban warfare, crowd control and collective punishment.

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Zed Books
Publication date

November 15, 2008
Dimensions

5.44 x 0.68 x 8.51 inches
ISBN-10

1848130317
ISBN-13

978-1848130319
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Jonathan Cook
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jonathan Cook is the only western journalist to be based in Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian people in Israel. He was previously a staff journalist on the Guardian and Observer newsletters, and has also written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Times, Le Monde diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Al-Ahram Weekly, Counterpunch and Aljazeeria.net. He is the author of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (2006) and Israel and the Clash of Civilisations (2008).

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Zed Books; illustrated edition (November 15, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1848130317
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1848130319
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.44 x 0.68 x 8.51 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,985,619 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,233 in Human Rights Law (Books)
- #2,496 in Israel & Palestine History (Books)
- #3,368 in Middle Eastern Politics

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Jordan

GREAT Book!

Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2011

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Most important work by the exceptional, award winning [...] author Jonathan Cook.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Award for Journalism in June 2011. As covered on the Israeli Occupation Archive ([...]

[Start of quote]

Jonathan Cook, whose work appears regularly on the pages of the IOA, was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Award for Journalism.

The award citation reads: "Jonathan Cook's work on Palestine and Israel, especially his de-coding of official propaganda and his outstanding analysis of events often obfuscated in the mainstream, has made him one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East."

Indeed. As regular readers of Jonathan Cook's work already know, Cook's analysis puts today's events in an historical context that never fails to decipher the power interests behind the news. His knowledge of Palestinian and Israeli history; his insightful, astute coverage; and his commitment to justice result in unparalleled reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Occupation, and the life of Palestinians under Israeli rule, both within and outside of the 1967 borders.

[End of quote]

Source: [[...]

This book details the history and reality of Palestinian dispossession by Israel: the thoroughly planned and carefully executed campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by Israel over decades in which Palestine keeps shrinking and Greater Israel grows even greater.

An essential text for the understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel's Occupation and the dimming prospects for peace and resolution.

Most highly recommended!

14 people found this helpful

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Chris

Powerful journalism

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2009

Verified Purchase

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.

70 people found this helpful

Helpful

marilyn selim

I didn't get to read the whole book

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2011

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I originally got this book through the library and read one and a half chapters before it had to go back. It was enough though to make me realize that it was worth buying and digesting slowly and thoughtfully. I won't get into the geo-political reasons to read this because that would open up too much backlash from shortsighted/blinded/brainwashed persons. As it happens, my daughter and a friend visited at Christmas time when my purchased copy arrived. The friend went home with the book. If I don't get it back, that's OK. I will be purchasing another for myself.

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

Howard B. Lenow

Another Amazing Book by Jonathan Cook

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2010

Verified Purchase

If you want to understand, truly understand, what is going on inside Israel and what life is truly like for Palestinian citizens of Israel, you shoud read this book. NO one understands the intricacies of the Israeli's government's systematic and institutionalized discrimination against its Palestinian citizens like Mr. Cook.

23 people found this helpful

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john randall

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 31, 2016

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Sad and compelling.

Siegfried Ueberlacheer

Grossartiges, unverzichtbares Buch zum Verständnis des Elends der geschundenen Palästinenser

Reviewed in Germany on July 18, 2017

Verified Purchase

Dieses Buch ist eine ausserordentlich profunde Beschreibung auf welcher (völkerrechtswidrigen) Grundlage der zionistische Staat Israel entstand und welches Elend dieser Landraub und die Vertreibung und Beraubung der ursprünglichen arabischen Bevölkerung durch vorwiegend europäische Einwanderer (mit erfundener Legende) für die Vertriebenen bedeutete und bedeutet! Man müsste dieses Buch in alle Sprachen der UNO übersetzen und allen europäischen und USA-amerikanischen skrupellosen Politikern, die diesen zionistischen Verbrechern schmeicheln, zum lesen aufzwingen. Weiters sollte man dieses grossartige, informative Werk im Geschichtsunterreicht der Mittelschulen und Hochschulen zwingend besprechen!

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Newman

Required reading

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 3, 2011

Verified Purchase

This really is a well written book, I read it in two days, in all my spare moments.
If you want to understand how we got to where we are in Palestine/Israel, then please read this book. It deserves to have a wide readership. It quashes many of the accepted "facts" surrounding the history of the region, and sheds much needed light on the real underlying policy of the Israeli government. There are also many examples of what it actually means to be a Palestinian living under Israeli occupation.

After reading this, I understand more fully why a true two state solution is not going to happen, and why a one state solution is even less likely. This work really undermines so much of the pro Israel/zionist propaganda that is unfortunately most peoples only source of information. More power to your elbow Mr Cook !

17 people found this helpful

André W.

Apartheid State strikes again with Canada's help!

Reviewed in Canada on July 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

It tells in great disgusting detail how CANADA PARK in the Apartheid State was created with funding support from Lilly-white Canada.

Sistagaga

Une présentation claire: pourquoi et comment la Palestine disparaît

Reviewed in France on November 21, 2014

Verified Purchase

On entend chaque jour des informations sur Israêl et la Palestine.
Jonathan COOK donne du sens, de la logique à tout cela. Il montre comment chaque évènement s' imbrique dans une seule logique. Dès les débuts du sionisme et plus encore dès la fondation d' Israël, les juifs impliqués n' avaient qu' un but la créations du Grand Israël au mépris des droits des Palestiniens et le leur existence même. "Les Palestiniens n' existent pas." disait Golda-Meir.

Tous les coups sont permis: d' abord la violence et la terreur puis la colonisation, les destructions, l' emprisonnement, le harcèlement et pire encore, les bombardements de Gaza. L' auteur met en lumière la destruction systématique des élites intellectuelles ou économiques palestiniennes. Un seul but : qu'ils s' en aillent mais surtout que le monde entier soit dupe et tienne les Palestiniens pour responsable de leur malheur.
.
La conclusion est pessimiste, Israël finira par radicaliser la résistance palestinienne, une menace sérieuse dans le contexte du Moyen-Orient d' aujourd' hui. Vu la clarté de l' exposé, on serait porté à croire Jonathan Cook.

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