I've been studying the Israel/Palestine issue for almost 18 years now and I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territories twice and I can't recall a single book that has taught me more about the conflict than this one. Instead of focusing on history, politics, and suicide bombers as most books do, this one documents the daily occupation and how it plays out in the daily lives of Palestinians. It is absolutely appalling and eye-opening. More than once, I'm sure my jaw literally dropped open when confronted with the realities of what the occupation means. This book should undoubtedly be on the reading list of every member of Congress and every American citizen.

I have been involved for some years in pro-Palestinian activism, and have read innumerable books on the subject. Nonetheless, Makdisi's book presented the stark facts of Israeli occupation with such vividness that I felt I was learning them - and raging and weeping at them - for the first time. There were times when Makdisi's sober, understated account of intolerable injustice forced me to put the book down; sometimes I didn't take it up again for days - but I always did take it up again.

Makdisi has an honourable pedigree: his uncle was the late Edward Said, for several decades not alone the leading advocate of Palestinian rights in the unfriendly environment of the USA, but also one of the world's leading intellectuals and literary critics. Makdisi is American-Lebanese-Palestinian, a mixture that renders him particularly qualified to approach his painful subject from a multitude of perspectives. As professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and an expert on the poetry of English romanticism, he can hardly be caricatured by the ill-intentioned as some wild-eyed anti-Western fanatic (although given the bloodsoaked history of Western interference in the rest of the world, of which the fate of Palestine is a particularly poignant example, it's perhaps time that more conscientious Westerners adopted such "fanaticism").

"Palestine Inside Out" isn't a history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, although it necessarily incorporates much historical reflection, but an anlysis of the "facts on the ground" created by Zionism and its US and EU backers, whereby Palestinian Arabs - Muslims and Christians - are deprived of human and political rights while simultaneously being demonised for resisting this state of affairs. Makdisi sees that Israel, the US and EU (and indeed the PLO) have jointly rendered impossible the two-state solution they all profess to support. His conclusions about a political solution will be uncomfortable for those who have pre-formed views on the matter - but his premises are supplied by the aforementioned "facts on the ground", and I believe that none but the most ingrained prejudices can withstand such a marshalling of evidence.

It is on the reef of Palestine that all narratives of progress in the field of political justice come to grief, and it is Palestine that reveals most nakedly the hollowness and hypocrisy of Western rhetoric concerning democracy and the rule of international law.

"Palestine Inside Out" could be subtitled "The World Inside Out". Read it, and be inspired to protest and take action against the conditions - or against your governments' support for the conditions - that make such injustice possible.

everybody knows that the zionists have destroyed the peaceful palestinian community and replaced it with a violent police state intent upon extermination of the indigenous inhabitants of the so called holy land. this book details the sixty plus years of jewish inhumanity and criminality towards all people who are not part of their exclusionary cabal, including jews who don't agree with the concept of a jewish only state. the whole edifice is base upon lies and will soon be over. long live palestine!

This is an excellent account of personal stories of
individual Palestinians living in the territories.
For instance, the book begins with Sam Bahour- a
Palestinian who was told to leave the West Bank
by the State of Israel through the prism of the
Palestinian Authority. Sam recounts renewing a
number of personal visas over a period of time.

According to the author, the Israeli military
must give its permission for work permits in order
for Palestinian farmers to grow crops on the land
on the west side. Approximately 40% of the West Bank
is subject to an Israeli infrastructure and the military.

According to the UN Rapporteur on Human Rights, Israel
continues to build walls along the West Bank. In the
future, the Israelis will be able to stop communication
between the Palestinians by simply closing strategic
bridges and tunnels. Currently, there is a wall under
construction circa Jerusalem.

The book is replete with heart rendering pictures of
Palestinians importuned on long lines at checkpoints
together with extensive traffic jams. Overall, the work
presents a side of Palestinian life not well known
in the Americas or elsewhere for that matter.

The reader is left in a bind. That is, how could the
predicament be remedied? Ostensibly, these checkpoints
are in response to routine bus bombings and numerous
acts of disobedience by the radical Jihad and others.

Checkpoints and walls can come down when the requisite
trust has been earned on both sides. This process can
happen in response to peace and quiet as a prelude to
tearing down walls. I was struck by the long lines on
the roads and checkpoints. Alternatively, mass
transportation might be a better solution. i.e. monorails
Monorails travel overhead thereby obviating the necessity
for checkpoints.

At the heart of the matter is an unequivocal acceptance
of Israel's right to exist, as well as Palestinian rights
to self determination. Over time, the parties simply
must learn to live together (however hard this is to do) !

When reading this book you will stare into the face of an evil so disturbing it is not recognizable as human. The sheer hatred and malice of official Israeli government policy toward the indigenous people of Palestine exists on a scale not even duplicated in Nazi Germany.
People in the west only think they know what racism, belief in racial superiority and ethnic cleansing/genocide is. These concepts have been taken to a level by the Israeli government that even apartheid South Africa would have envied and are made all the more insidious because they are being carried out under cover of the stalling tactic known as the "peace process".
The author does not draw conclusions for the reader, this is a book about facts and Palestinian daily life (and death) under official Israeli government policy.
If every American read this book and understood what billions of our tax dollars (annually) in the form of so-called "aid" are supporting there would be hell to pay in Washington and Tel Aviv.
This book will make you sick, it will make you cry and it will scare the be-jesus out of normal minded people to see the depths of depravity, inhumanity, and evil that can lurk in the hearts of a people consumed with their own superiority and determination to be separate and set apart from their fellow human beings.
The state of Israel is NOT a democracy. It is an apartheid terrorist state executing holocaust on an innocent people whom it does not believe has a right to exist. I repeat, Israel is not a democracy. It puts Nazi Germany to shame for it's acts of inhumanity, terrorism and war crimes against the Palestinian people for the crime of being non-jews. Even Nazi Germany was not allowed to practice it's evil for 60 years!

FINAL REVIEW of 15 June 2008

I was moved and outraged by the cancellation of the author's appearance at the Politics & Prose bookstore, which shall never--in consequence--receive my custom. However, the benefit is that the author received space in the Washington Post, and the idiocyof the Politics & Prose management may well have done more good than bad as a result.

I have one word that summarizes my feelings after reading this book:

FURY

The other word, now in vogue in Egypt, is

ENOUGH

The author, an American with both Lebanese and Palestinian heritages, is a scholar of English literature. His book is NOT a polemic. His book is an elegant essay on reality, perhaps the finest work I have ever been privileged to read on this topic, with notes, maps, and statistics of the first order.

The author does NOT seek to damn the Israelis, only to demonstrate, in calm reasoned well-documented language, that the Israelis have become the Nazis of our era, and that their ghettoization of Palestine, with gates, roadblocks, checkpoints, and walls, has become the atrocity of all atrocities in our time.

The opening insight grabs me: like Gandhi, the author sees that Palestine and Israel are one in spirit. He nails the Israeli objective: to occupy as much sacred land as possible, without regard to other peoples, religions, historic rights, or common perceptions of justice.

Gandhi had it right in the first place: the English were idiots to divide India. Similarly, Palestine is a Holy Land for all of us, and if the Israeli's cannot accept Gandhi's vision, then it is time we imposed it on them--there could be no better expenditure of $250 billion a year than in occupying Palestine, knocking down the fascist walls, and restoring the nature of that land to green and goodness, while making Jerusalem an international city similar to the Vatican, but open to all faiths.

I am completely fed up with ideological zealots, both left and right. Israel is clearly the enemy of peace in the Middle East, and an obstacle to progress there. I support the author's view, that a single holy state is needed, one that does not allow the Israelis to be the Gestapo of our time. More to the point, I agree with the author with respect to the inhumanity, immorality, indignity, and fiscally fatal inconvenience being imposed by the Israelis on the Palestinians.

This is where the book shines brightly: it is a meticulou8sly documented, ably presented catalogue of the day to day atrocities committed by the Israeli "police state" against individual Palestinians, families, and small businesses. Kafka could not have done better, but in this case, the author is not making it up. It is real, and it is a genocidal crime against humanity, day after day after day.

I have read many books, and a number on the Middle East, and I can only conclude that this book is totally extraordinary for the following reasons:

1) Multicultural perspective
2) Pragmatic review of the consequences of Israeli Gestapo tactics
3) Fullsome use of statistics to demonstrate Israeli atrocities against "day to day" Palestinian life and families
4) Timely--the era of state terror is over. It is time for We the People, including Palestinians and Jews, to rise up and dismember governments that cheat us, steal from us, and misrepresent us.

For perspectives that completely support the author's views as described in his article (I have posted a summary review of each):

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
Web of Deceit: The History of Western complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (American Empire Project)
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State

I have also published (free online, in superb low-cost hardback on Amazon), COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, the first in a series from Earth Intelligence Network.

The bottom line of all of the above books is that governments are dysfunctional, corrupt, and cannot deal with complexity and adversity. We the People need to revitalize participatory democracy and stop waging war. Peace and prosperity for all seven billion can be achieved for one third the price we pay now for war. A strategy of peace is a strategy that will create infinite wealth.

It's time for America the Beautiful to be honest and open again. I totally embrace the idea of an international occupation of the Holy Land, with Jerusalem as an international city, the Israeli's stuffed back in their box, and a 50-year occupation that fully integrates Palestine and Israel and Lebanon, while providing both an international and a regional guarantee of dignity and justice for all in this sacred land.

The Israelis have dishonored God, dishonored man, and dishonored faith. They have become a modern holocaust unto themselves. For this they are damned by this author's bearing witness, as a people, absent a public uprising or international intervention.

FINAL REVIEW of 15 June 2008

I was moved and outraged by the cancellation of the author's appearance at the Politics & Prose bookstore, which shall never--in consequence--receive my custom. However, the benefit is that the author received space in the Washington Post, and the idiocyof the Politics & Prose management may well have done more good than bad as a result.

I have one word that summarizes my feelings after reading this book:

FURY

The other word, now in vogue in Egypt, is

ENOUGH

The author, an American with both Lebanese and Palestinian heritages, is a scholar of English literature. His book is NOT a polemic. His book is an elegant essay on reality, perhaps the finest work I have ever been privileged to read, with notes, maps, and statistics of the first order.

The author does NOT seek to damn the Israelis, only to demonstrate, in calm reasoned well-documented language, that the Israelis have become the Nazis of our era, and that their ghettoization of Palestine, with gates, roadblocks, checkpoints, and walls, has become the atrocity of all atrocities in our time.

The opening insight grabs me: like Gandhi, the author sees that Palestine and Israel are one in spirit. He nails the Israeli objective: to occupy as much sacred land as possible, without regard to other peoples, religions, historic rights, or common perceptions of justice.

Gandhi had it right in the first place: the English were idiots to divide India. Similarly, Palestine is a Holy Land for all of us, and if the Israeli's cannot accept Gandhi's vision, then it is time we imposed it on them--there could be no better expenditure of $250 billion a year than in occupying Palestine, knocking down the fascist walls, and restoring the nature of that land to green and goodness, while making Jerusalem an international city similar to the Vatican, but open to all faiths.

I am completely fed up with ideological zealots, both left and right. Israel is clearly the enemy of peace in the Middle East, and an obstacle to progress there. I support the author's view, that a single holy state is needed, one that does not allow the Israelis to be the Gestapo of our time. More to the point, I agree with the author with respect to the inhumanity, immorality, indignity, and fiscally fatal inconvenience being imposed by the Israelis on the Palestinians.

I have read many books, and a number on the Middle East, and I can only conclude that this book is totally extraordinary for the following reasons:

1) Multicultural perspective
2) Pragmatic review of the consequences of Israeli Gestapo tactics
3) Fullsome use of statistics to demonstrate Israeli atrocities against "day to day" Palestinian life and families
4) Timely--the era of state terror is over. It is time for We the People, including Palestinians and Jews, to rise up and dismember governments that cheat us, steal from us, and misrepresent us.

For perspectives that completely support the author's views as described in his article (I have posted a summary review of each):

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
Web of Deceit: The History of Western complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (American Empire Project)
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State

I have also published (free online, in superb low-cost hardback on Amazon), COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, the first in a series from Earth Intelligence Network.

The bottom line of all of the above books is that governments are dysfunctional, corrupt, and cannot deal with complexity and adversity. We the People need to revitalize participatory democracy and stop waging war. Peace and prosperity for all seven billion can be achieved for one third the price we pay now for war. A strategy of peace is a strategy that will create infinite wealth.

It's time for America the Beautiful to be honest and open again. I totally embrace the idea of an international occupation of the Holy Land, with Jerusalem as an international city, the Israeli's stuffed back in their box, and a 50-year occupation that fully integrates Palestine and Israel and Lebanon, while providing both an international and a regional guarantee of dignity and justice for all in this sacred land.

The Israelis have dishonored God, dishonored man, and dishonored faith. They have become a modern holocaust unto themselves. For this they are damned as a people, absent a public uprising or international intervention.

Edit of 11 June 2008. Got book. Chapter headings are cryptic, great maps at the end, good index, the author is a professor and also a frequent commentator for Los Angeles Times, my favorite after the Boston Globe (NYT became an Israeli propaganda mill long ago--Judith Miller as the very low standard). Will read and review this coming week-end. This strikes me as the kind of book that needs its own website with color maps and easy interaction among Arabs, Palestinians, Israelis, and other parties, with real world casualty and budget information as a baseline. Once I review the book, I will delete this material and probably revise the links list. I urge one and all to buy this book and join in the discussion.

Edit of 9 June 2008 to add two slides (vulnerability of US supply line from Kuwait, Syrian equities; and Hezbollah-Iranian response to a nuclear strike) and comment: US White House and Israeli leaders are over the cliff morally and intellectually--they are blind to ground truth. The only thing that will save Israel is a one-state solution with a 50 year occupation *and investemnt* that yields two generations grown from 0-50 in enforced peace.

I have ordered this book and will provide a summative review next week-end.

I was moved and outraged by the cancellation of the author's appearance at the Politics & Prose bookstore, which shall never--in consequence--receive my custom.

Gandhi had it right in the first place: the English were idiots to divide India. Similarly, Palestine is a Holy Land for all of us, and if the Israeli's cannot accept Gandhi's vision, then it is time we imposed it on them--there could be no better expenditure of $250 billion a year than in occupying Palestine, knocking down the fascist walls, and restoring the nature of that land to green and goodness, while making Jerusalem an international city similar to the Vatican, but open to all faiths.

I will summarize the high points of this book next week-end, but as a ranking reviewer who is almost exclusively focused on non-fiction, I urge as many as possible to buy, read, and share this book.

For perspectives that completely support the author's views as described in his article (I have posted a summary review of each):

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
Web of Deceit: The History of Western complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (American Empire Project)
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State

I have also published (free online, in superb low-cost hardback on Amazon), COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, the first in a series from Earth Intelligence Network.

The bottom line of all of the above books is that governments are dysfunctional, corrupt, and cannot deal with complexity and adversity. We the People need to revitalize participatory democracy and stop waging war. Peace and prosperity for all seven billion can be achieved for one third the price we pay now for war. A strategy of peace is a strategy that will create infinite wealth.

I am totally fed up with rabid Zionists and their neo-con cronies that lied to us 935 times while Dick Cheney committed 25 documented impeachable offenses and Congress (both parties) abdicated its Article 1 responsibilities. I recommend this book as a first step in understanding that everything we have learned or been told about achieving Middle East peace is a lie from cretins who have been paid to lie. ENOUGH!

It's time for America the Beautiful to be honest and open again.

Edit of 9 June 2008 to add two slides (vulnerability of US supply line from Kuwait, Syrian equities; and Hezbollah-Iranian response to a nuclear strike) and comment: US White House and Israeli leaders are over the cliff morally and intellectually--they are blind to ground truth. The only thing that will save Israel is a one-state solution with a 50 year occupation *and investemnt* that yields two generations grown from 0-50 in enforced peace.

I have ordered this book and will provide a summative review next week-end.

I was moved and outraged by the cancellation of the author's appearance at the Politics & Prose bookstore, which shall never--in consequence--receive my custom.

Gandhi had it right in the first place: the English were idiots to divide India. Similarly, Palestine is a Holy Land for all of us, and if the Israeli's cannot accept Gandhi's vision, then it is time we imposed it on them--there could be no better expenditure of $250 billion a year than in occupying Palestine, knocking down the fascist walls, and restoring the nature of that land to green and goodness, while making Jerusalem an international city similar to the Vatican, but open to all faiths.

I will summarize the high points of this book next week-end, but as a ranking reviewer who is almost exclusively focused on non-fiction, I urge as many as possible to buy, read, and share this book.

For perspectives that completely support the author's views as described in his article (I have posted a summary review of each):

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
Web of Deceit: The History of Western complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (American Empire Project)
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State

I have also published (free online, in superb low-cost hardback on Amazon), COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, the first in a series from Earth Intelligence Network.

The bottom line of all of the above books is that governments are dysfunctional, corrupt, and cannot deal with complexity and adversity. We the People need to revitalize participatory democracy and stop waging war. Peace and prosperity for all seven billion can be achieved for one third the price we pay now for war. A strategy of peace is a strategy that will create infinite wealth.

I am totally fed up with rabid Zionists and their neo-con cronies that lied to us 935 times while Dick Cheney committed 25 documented impeachable offenses and Congress (both parties) abdicated its Article 1 responsibilities. I recommend this book as a first step in understanding that everything we have learned or been told about achieving Middle East peace is a lie from cretins who have been paid to lie. ENOUGH!

It's time for America the Beautiful to be honest and open again.

I think one would indeed be hard pressed to find a more detailed and accurate account of the predicament faced by the Palestinians since the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent Six Day War(resulting then in the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank). Of course there have been other books(most recently, Jimmy Carter's account based on his trip to Israel)but this book is unique in presenting a true "microscopic" account of the effect of the occupation on the lives of Palestinians in the occupied lands. I occasionally found myself rather depressed by it, even angry that the Israelis could act with such brutality and callous disregard for the welfare of those they treat with such contempt(but of course they're not out to win any popularity contests as both this and their historical disregard of U.N. Resolutions so amply demonstrates!).

So based on the evidence presented, Makdisi presents a clear cut solid case arguing for the desirability of having a single state instead of a two state solution to resolving the long term conflict there.