Palestine Inside Out or Mengele

Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

Author: Saree Makdisi

How the "peace process" has made life impossible for ordinary Palestinians.

This book is not about suicide bombers. Tending one's fields, visiting a relative, going to the hospital: for ordinary Palestinians, such everyday activities require negotiating permits and passes, curfews and closures, "sterile roads" and "seam zones"—bureaucratic hurdles ultimately as deadly as outright military incursion.

Not since the late Edward Said has there been such an articulate Arab voice on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In devastating detail, Saree Makdisi reveals how the "peace process" institutionalized Palestinians' loss of control over their inner and outer lives. He shows how Israel's massive concrete walls going up around Gaza and the West Bank isolate communities from their lands, their livelihoods, and each other. Through eye-opening statistics and day-by-day reports, we learn how Palestinians have seen their hopes for freedom and statehood culminate in the creation of abject "territories" comparable to open-air prisons.

Anyone surprised at Arab anger or the election of Hamas must read this book. 33 photographs, 12 maps.

Publishers Weekly

In chronicling Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories-from road blocks to curfews, economic chaos to health care crises-UCLA professor Makdisi sketches a powerful, relentlessly heartbreaking account of a reality few Westerners know. According to Makdisi, the global media rarely covers the "routine" destruction of the occupation; rather than assessing the hermetic sealing of the Gaza Strip or the slicing up of West Bank communities for the sake of Israeli settlements, the media focuses on violence-eclipsing the "deadly effects of the Israeli apparatus of bureaucracy and control." Makdisi unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians, Israeli or Palestinian, and acknowledges the many Israelis working toward conflict resolution (indeed, much of his data comes from Israeli human rights organizations), but his scholarship occasionally fails when surveying Israeli society: Jews who fled Arab lands don't generally consider themselves "Arab Jews," for instance, and Zionism is a 19th-century nationalist movement, not a reaction to the Holocaust. Yet this doesn't detract from the urgency of Makdisi's work. The combined weight of personal stories of abject suffering, harsh statistics (in the past seven years, Israeli military operations have killed 854 Palestinian children) and facts on the ground make Makdisi's case that the occupation is destroying the Palestinian people, and possibly any chance for peaceful coexistence. (May)

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Kirkus Reviews

An intense look at the difficult daily existence of people who are often little more than pawns in a bigger chess game. A half-Palestinian Christian who grew up in Beirut, Makdisi (English and Comparative Literature/UCLA; William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, 2002, etc.) combines interviews with average citizens and a detailed history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even those not supportive of the Palestinian cause may be affected by the author's stark descriptions of the restrictions on liberty that he asserts are a hallmark of the Israeli occupation. A Palestinian man describes how guards punished him when he and his family tried to get into a shorter line while going through a border crossing on the West Bank: "I did not lose consciousness, but the many blows I suffered completely disoriented me. The two soldiers . . . punched and kicked me all over my body." Occasionally the quotations run too long and begin to ramble, decreasing their effectiveness, and the narrative sometimes awkwardly straddles the line between academic and general-interest text. The author rarely discusses underlying reasons for Israeli actions, such as the ongoing threat of suicide bombers and the stated desire of some Palestinian leaders to destroy Israel. In his extensive discussion of Israel's creation and the concomitant displacement of many Palestinians, he impugns the motives of Zionists and their allies throughout Western Europe and rarely displays the empathy for the Israelis that he asks people to show for the Palestinians. Makdisi dismisses the efforts of some Israeli and Western leaders to resolve the conflict and create a Palestinian homeland (e.g., the 2000 Camp Davidcompromise rejected by PLO leader Yasser Arafat) as both insincere and insufficient. Those looking for a moving and humane account of the lives of Palestinians will be rewarded, but readers expecting an evenhanded assessment will be disappointed. Agent: Melanie Jackson/Melanie Jackson Agency

Table of Contents:

Maps

Author's Note

Introduction 1

Outsides 15

Insides 95

Outside In 153

Inside Out 209

Coda 263

Acknowledgments 299

Notes on Sources 303

Notes on Statistics 329

Index 345

See also: Trasformandosi in un responsabile matrice: Un metodo di valori facente concorrenza

Mengele: The Complete Story

Author: Gerald Posner

Examines the notorious Nazi's life.