Book Review: A History of Modern Palestine

By Jim Miles
PalestineChronicle.com

A History of Modern Palestine – Second Edition. Ilan Pappe. Cambridge University Press, N.Y. 2006. 361 p.

"Without an exact replication of events, the facts will always present a bias, but by choosing from a broader range of information and looking at the “alternative narratives” a more accurate approximate representation of the truth can be made. Pappe’s general view is highly sympathetic to the Palestinian people, recognizing the general trend of Zionist goals acting as a colonial and occupying force in Mandatory Palestine (itself “the façade of an independent state that was in fact a colony”).

Within that framework several themes are clearly evident throughout the history of Palestine. These include the over-riding objective of Jewish land occupation, the dual colonialism of Britain and the Zionists over the Palestinians, followed by that of the Israelis, and concomitant with that, the rise of American support for that colonialism and occupation. Other patterns emerge, including the severe nature of Jewish retaliation for Palestinian guerrilla actions, as they grew with “ferocity and brutality…often out of all proportion.” This has carried through into the recent Lebanon war and the ongoing displacement of Palestinians inside the prison-based Bantustans that the remaining Palestinian territory has become. Militarism as a part of the national culture emerged in 1936, well before the Mandate ended, and negated any form of real negotiative stance except as a diversion to the real purpose of gaining more land.

War obviously created a huge return in land possession and parallel dispossession of the Palestinian people. In 1948, 370 villages were “wiped out” that led to the “almost complete disappearance” of rural Palestine. Terror, forced evacuations, murder, genocide, and the physical erasure of the villages were applied systematically, after which the Zionists moved in to occupy and rename them, the latter “as part of an attempt to prevent future land claim to the villages.”

The other narrative is the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians under military rule with arbitrary laws, restricted movement, the creation of ongoing settlements throughout the Westbank, the arrests, harassment, torture of the people and the destruction of the infrastructure of their remnant society. More recently, these methods operated under Sharon’s so called Peace Plan and later Bush’s Roadmap to Peace, neither of which provided anything authoritative as a basis to constructively work from, but provided a smokescreen for the ongoing dispossession of Palestinian land."

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This and other books are on the list of recommended books, link is on the right.
Molly