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A review by jiujensu
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation by Saree Makdisi
informative
sad
slow-paced
5.0
This is from 2008 and in any other topic, it might be obsolete - the recommendation might be to read the more recent books. And we do need to read the most recent stuff.
But! This older book is still very valuable. The older ones usually give a lot more detail around the time of their publishing than a recent work might. Even if you just read the last chapter and coda, you could get a concise history of what everyone always views as the complicated conflict. I would say it's not so complicated as it is a lot of US/Israeli lies to debunk - there's a lot of ground to cover and racism to unpack if you use official US policy as your starting point. But the whole problem is Zionists looked at Argentina and Palestine, chose Palestine, were unhappy there were people already there and looked for ways to get rid of them (from before 1917 to the present).
I was initially intimidated by this one, so I put off reading it. There are a lot of numbers and sometimes numbers are harder to conceive of than the individual stories. Don't worry, there are individual accounts by Palestinians, soldiers, academics, and human rights officials. The brutality of the everyday violence of occupation is illustrated in brilliant detail.
This book sets the record straight. People (USians) always - get the origin of the conflict wrong; blame the Palestinians for losing in "war" in '48 instead of the ethnic cleansing it actually was; blame Arafat for not being a partner for peace despite talks; never addressing the injustices - occupation, apartheid, return of refugees; wrongly conflate Hamas and Hezbollah and wrongly ascribe their goal as Islamist instead of resistance to occupation; allow Israel to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians as policy but the second Palestinians kill one Israeli, statehood, refugees' return, freeing political prisoners, etc is ALL off the table + Israel is allowed to retaliate against the resistance to occupation, meaning it inflicts double violence and has the West's support.
I thought it was also interesting in that it addressed why the US population persists in quoting Israeli propaganda. Until about the time of the book, only scholarly articles and books by academics contained the necessary debunking. I think since that time, more accessible things have been written for the general public. I suppose you could credit social media too. It's a shame that the answers we needed to combat Zionist lies that still persist today were hidden in the ivory tower for so long.
But! This older book is still very valuable. The older ones usually give a lot more detail around the time of their publishing than a recent work might. Even if you just read the last chapter and coda, you could get a concise history of what everyone always views as the complicated conflict. I would say it's not so complicated as it is a lot of US/Israeli lies to debunk - there's a lot of ground to cover and racism to unpack if you use official US policy as your starting point. But the whole problem is Zionists looked at Argentina and Palestine, chose Palestine, were unhappy there were people already there and looked for ways to get rid of them (from before 1917 to the present).
I was initially intimidated by this one, so I put off reading it. There are a lot of numbers and sometimes numbers are harder to conceive of than the individual stories. Don't worry, there are individual accounts by Palestinians, soldiers, academics, and human rights officials. The brutality of the everyday violence of occupation is illustrated in brilliant detail.
This book sets the record straight. People (USians) always - get the origin of the conflict wrong; blame the Palestinians for losing in "war" in '48 instead of the ethnic cleansing it actually was; blame Arafat for not being a partner for peace despite talks; never addressing the injustices - occupation, apartheid, return of refugees; wrongly conflate Hamas and Hezbollah and wrongly ascribe their goal as Islamist instead of resistance to occupation; allow Israel to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians as policy but the second Palestinians kill one Israeli, statehood, refugees' return, freeing political prisoners, etc is ALL off the table + Israel is allowed to retaliate against the resistance to occupation, meaning it inflicts double violence and has the West's support.
I thought it was also interesting in that it addressed why the US population persists in quoting Israeli propaganda. Until about the time of the book, only scholarly articles and books by academics contained the necessary debunking. I think since that time, more accessible things have been written for the general public. I suppose you could credit social media too. It's a shame that the answers we needed to combat Zionist lies that still persist today were hidden in the ivory tower for so long.