Does the Land Remember Me?

Does the Land Remember Me?

Author: Aziz Shihab

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2011-09-30

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 081565054X

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Summoned by his dying mother, Palestinian-born Aziz Shihab returns to the homeland he and his family fled as refugees decades earlier: to a Palestine reclaimed by Israelis and to a country no longer that of his youth in a nation whose estate has been challenged by history. This gripping book chronicles that month-long journey. Part memoir, part travelogue, it reveals the complexities of leaving behind such the past and coming to grips with its abandonment. With his sharp ear for dialogue and with a journalist’s eye, Shihab records and considers, sometimes with fond humor, the Palestinian psyche. Family meetings brim with soothing time-honored ritual and cultural blindness. Pungent street anecdotes resonate with profound themes like human rights, land dislocation, and poverty. Shihab’s stories of departure and return, loss of land and reconnection provide enriching insights into the depth and intricacy of Palestinian culture and history and its legacy of displacement.


The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Author: Ilan Pappe

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-09-01

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1780740565

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The book that is providing a storm of controversy, from ‘Israel’s bravest historian’ (John Pilger) Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking work on the formation of the State of Israel. 'Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history.' NEW STATESMAN Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East. *** 'Ilan Pappe is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.' JOHN PILGER 'Pappe has opened up an important new line of inquiry into the vast and fateful subject of the Palestinian refugees. His book is rewarding in other ways. It has at times an elegiac, even sentimental, character, recalling the lost, obliterated life of the Palestinian Arabs and imagining or regretting what Pappe believes could have been a better land of Palestine.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'A major intervention in an argument that will, and must, continue. There's no hope of lasting Middle East peace while the ghosts of 1948 still walk.' INDEPENDENT


Reclaiming Israel's History

Reclaiming Israel's History

Author: David Brog

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-03-20

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1621576094

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The Real History of Israel and the Palestinians No history is so disputed as the history of Israel. Some see Israel's creation as a dramatic act of justice for the Jewish people. Others insist that it was a crime against Palestine's Arabs. Author David Brog untangles the facts from the myths to reveal the truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict. In Reclaiming Israel's History you'll learn how the Jewish people have maintained a continual presence in the Land of Israel for over 3,000 years—despite centuries of Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim persecution; how the Romans invented the word "Palestine" as a way to sever the connection between the Jewish people and their land (and how subsequent conquerors doubled down on this strategy); how modern Jewish immigration to Palestine did not displace Arabs but instead sparked an Arab population boom; and the largely untold story of how the leader of Palestine's Arabs collaborated with the Nazis to murder Jews in Europe before they could reach their ancestral homeland. You'll also learn why most of Palestine's Arabs never identified themselves as "Palestinians" until after the 1967 War; the extraordinary lengths to which Israel's military goes to protect Palestinian civilians (and the high price Israel's soldiers pay for this morality), and how the Palestinians have on separate occasions rejected Israel's offers of a Palestinian state in virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza. Brog frankly admits to Israel's "sins both large and small," but notes that in any fair-minded analysis these have been far out- weighed by Israel's commitment to Western values, including freedom, democracy, and human rights. Honest, provocative, and timely, especially given rising anti-Semitism and the aggressive delegitimization of Israel, David Brog's Reclaiming Israel's History is the book for every reader who wants to understand what is really happening in the Middle East.


The Only Language They Understand

The Only Language They Understand

Author: Nathan Thrall

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2017-05-16

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1627797092

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In a myth-busting analysis of the world's most intractable conflict, a star of Middle East reporting argues that only one weapon has yielded progress: confrontation. Scattered over the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea lie the remnants of failed peace proposals, international summits, secret negotiations, UN resolutions and state-building efforts. The conventional story is that these well-meaning attempts at peacemaking were repeatedly thwarted by the use of violence. Through a rich interweaving of reportage, historical narrative and forceful analysis, Nathan Thrall presents a startling counter-history. He shows that Israelis and Palestinians have persistently been marching toward partition, but not through the high politics of diplomacy or the incremental building of a Palestinian state. In fact, negotiation, collaboration and state-building--the prescription of successive American administrations--have paradoxically entrenched the conflict in multiple ways. They have created the illusion that a solution is at hand, lessened Israel's incentives to end its control over the West Bank and Gaza and undermined Palestinian unity. Ultimately, it is those who have embraced confrontation through boycotts, lawsuits, resolutions imposed by outside powers, protests, civil disobedience, and even violence who have brought about the most significant change. Published as Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza reaches its fiftieth year, which is also the centenary of the Balfour Declaration that first promised a Jewish national home in Palestine, The Only Language They Understand advances a bold thesis that shatters ingrained positions of both left and right and provides a new and eye-opening understanding of this most vexed of lands.


Healing the Land and the Nation

Healing the Land and the Nation

Author: Sandra M. Sufian

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 0226779386

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A novel inquiry into the sociopolitical dimensions of public medicine, Healing the Land and the Nation traces the relationships between disease, hygiene, politics, geography, and nationalism in British Mandatory Palestine between the world wars. Taking up the case of malaria control in Jewish-held lands, Sandra Sufian illustrates how efforts to thwart the disease were intimately tied to the project of Zionist nation-building, especially the movement’s efforts to repurpose and improve its lands. The project of eradicating malaria also took on a metaphorical dimension—erasing anti-Semitic stereotypes of the “parasitic” Diaspora Jew and creating strong, healthy Jews in Palestine. Sufian shows that, in reclaiming the land and the health of its people in Palestine, Zionists expressed key ideological and political elements of their nation-building project. Taking its title from a Jewish public health mantra, Healing the Land and the Nation situates antimalarial medicine and politics within larger colonial histories. By analyzing the science alongside the politics of Jewish settlement, Sufian addresses contested questions of social organization and the effects of land reclamation upon the indigenous Palestinian population in a decidedly innovative way. The book will be of great interest to scholars of the Middle East, Jewish studies, and environmental history, as well as to those studying colonialism, nationalism, and public health and medicine.


The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

Author: Rashid Khalidi

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1627798544

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A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.


Wake Up and Reclaim Your Humanity

Wake Up and Reclaim Your Humanity

Author: Richard Forer

Publisher:

Published: 2020-08-19

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9781735588049

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Wake Up and Reclaim Your Humanity tells the true story of a lifelong supporter of Israel who underwent a remarkable spiritual awakening in which he realized he was as much Muslim or Christian as Jew and as much Palestinian as Israeli or American. Existential fear and confusion, the hallmarks of separate identities, were transformed into compassion and clarity and an unequivocal vision of the roots of suffering spontaneously arose. Recognizing that endless conflict only leads to alienation from our true selves, this book encourages readers to look at the documented history of the Israel-Palestine tragedy and get in touch with how they view and interpret that history. It offers readers a path that leads to freedom from false beliefs, enemy images, and the illusion of identity to equal rights for all people and a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis. "An astonishing and groundbreaking commentary, Wake Up and Reclaim Your Humanity is the first book EVER written that explains the root cause of the Israel-Palestine tragedy. Wrestling with the question, "why do normally decent people, who ordinarily believe in justice, support indecency and injustice?", this book provides answers that are critical to a deeper understanding of the human condition and profoundly clarifying in their ability to alleviate the confusion that has permeated the subject for generations. " -J.J. Hebert, #1 Amazon Bestselling Author


Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine

Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine

Author: Chiara De Cesari

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1503609391

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In recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. These efforts to reclaim and assert Palestinian heritage differ significantly from the typical global cultural project: here it is people's cultural memory and living environment, rather than ancient history and archaeology, that take center stage. It is local civil society and NGOs, not state actors, who are "doing" heritage. In this context, Palestinian heritage has become not just a practice of resistance, but a resourceful mode of governing the Palestinian landscape. With this book, Chiara De Cesari examines these Palestinian heritage projects—notably the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Riwaq, and the Palestinian Museum—and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites they mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state. Through their rehabilitation of Palestinian heritage, these organizations have halted the expansion of Israeli settlements. They have also given Palestinians opportunities to rethink and transform state functions. Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine reveals how the West Bank is home to creative experimentation, insurgent agencies, and resourceful attempts to reverse colonial violence—and a model of how things could be.