This is an excellent look at the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the 1990s until 2005.

Very dishonest book
This book full of bigotry & lies. Even hard to read it to the end...

Very dishonest book
This book full of bigotry & lies. Even hard to read it to the end...

Reveals without passion how the "no-matter-what" variety of support for Israel causes immense human suffering.
This book should be required reading for anyone who equates disagreement with the genocidal policies of Israel with anti-Semitism.

I had to keep reminding myself that this book is a recent work. And that it was not written in, say, Berlin in 1942. The book is indeed propaganda against human rights. Nowhere in this volume did I see any suggestion that there ought to be a place in the world for human rights for mere Jews. I wonder if the authors would permit human rights for, say, Pagans?

Israel is awfully land-poor. But the Jews decided to settle for the UN partition, which gave them rather little land, preferring that to nothing. Beinin and Stein challenge this, noting that while Jews (who had been to a great extent prevented from moving to the Levant) were only about one-third of the population of the Mandate in 1947, they were granted 55% of the land. And that's why the Arabs rejected the UN proposal! Get real. Would the Arabs have accepted the proposal had they obtained the Negev rather than the Jews? Of course not.

The authors do not like the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. They can't stand it when Jews defend themselves against Arab aggression, implying that self-defence is merely a sly Jewish trick. Golly, one has to wonder what these writers will be saying if the Arabs ever make the mistake of fighting folks other than Jews.

There's also plenty of love for thugs such as Arafat, and for those who took over the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. As well as for the thugs of Jenin. Listen to this:

"The events in Jenin refugee camp in April 2002 are another striking example of the international community's readiness to turn a blind eye to Israel's brutal excesses."

It would be hard to write a more dishonest sentence than the one I just quoted. Israel was almost superhuman in its willingness to lose soldiers in order to avoid unnecessary Arab civilian casualties. And it was blamed for such casualties anyway, as the media greatly exaggerated the number of deaths there.

There are boasts that the International Criminal Court does not like the Israeli separation barrier. Well, what is next? Boasts about Germany's anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s? A prayer that international law will give the Ku Klux Klan the right to murder Blacks? And there are comments about the idea that there ought to be a "binational state" in the Levant (presumably one that will get rid of human rights for Jews there). That sounds somewhat reactionary to me. Again, I have to wonder what is next, perhaps a call to reinstitute slavery for Blacks?

This book was written by fellow humans, that's true, and it makes me ashamed to be a human being.