Palestine: History of a Lost Nation

By Karl Sabbagh

Book Overview

In a brilliant piece of detective work, Karl Sabbagh investigates the story of his Palestinian ancestors and through it the history of what was, and may become again, Palestine. Born the son of a Palestinian father but raised by his English mother in south London, Sabbagh was only a child when the United Nations voted in 1947 to divide Palestine into two states. Palestine and Palestinians had existed for centuries, their roots in the m lange of tribes, ethnic groups, and religions that peopled the area for thousands of years. Using his family tree as a guide, Sabbagh details how the descendants of these original inhabitants were forced from their homes into refugee settlements on the West Bank, Gaza, and dispersed around the world. Their desire to return to the land they feel is rightly theirs is at the root of an endless cycle of discord and violence between Jews and Arabs that is being fought to this day. With Palestine , Sabbagh bravely attempts both to illuminate and come to terms with his family's--and his people's--turbulent past.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802118429
• ISBN13: 9780802118424
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Learn how Palestine was seized

This publication is such a great read. Simply because it is very factual and well-referenced. It represents the truth of what had happened to Palestine up till the Nakba of 1948. And as much as it is serious and non-fiction, it can move the reader into an emotional status of connection with the events. This is a good book if you want to learn about the Zionist consipracy and their collaborators' weaved against the Palestinians and how Palestine was seized. Give it a shot.

Very informative study of Palestine

Karl Sabbagh, a writer and television producer, has produced a convincing refutation of the Zionists' biggest lie - that they took over `a land without a people'. As he recounts in detail, the Sabbagh family, like the vast majority of the Arab population, have lived in Palestine for more than 300 years. This fascinating book traces Palestine's history from 1900 to 1948 and examines the original injustice of the Zionists' theft of the land. Over the last 400 years, documented evidence proves the continuing presence of Palestinian Arabs as a large majority in the territory of Palestine. 16th-century Ottoman censuses showed that Palestine had about 300,000 inhabitants, 90% of whom were Muslim Arabs. But in the early 20th century, the British state gave crucial support to a tiny foreign political movement, Zionism, which wanted to colonise Palestine, claiming a right derived from a work of fiction. The Zionists always intended to uproot and expel the country's original inhabitants. Yet during the First World War, the British state had also promised Palestine its independence. As the Foreign Office admitted, in a secret document, "With regard to Palestine, His Majesty's Government are committed by Sir H. McMahon's letter to the Sherif on the 24th October 1915, to its inclusion in the boundaries of Arab independence." In spite of this promise, the British state, with the Balfour Declaration, gave away the Palestinian people's country to the Zionist movement. There is a long pro-Zionist tradition in the British ruling class, from Balfour to Brown, based presumably on the odd belief that the Zionists would serve the British ruling class's interests. When the British state ran Palestine under the Mandate, it allowed ever-increasing Jewish immigration. After the Second World War, the Zionist movement attacked the Palestinian majority and dispossessed them. The Zionists have maintained and extended their illegal occupation ever since, aggravating their original theft with constant aggressive wars. But of course they could never have gotten away with all this without the backing of the US and British states.

Puts a Personal Face on Ordinary Palestinians

Too often, images of Palestinians in the West are dominated by suicide bombings and terrorist groups, and their cause is not presented in a way that could lead any person to sympathize with it. This book tells the story of the Palestinians you don't see on TV-the ordinary men, women, and children who were robbed of their land by an alien group whose ancestors had been gone from that land for 2000 years. Sabbagh refutes some commonly held-but very inacurate-beliefs, such as the idea that the name "Palestine" is a 20th century invention, and the idea that Palestine was uninhabited before the Israelis came-indeed, he tells the stories of the Arabs-including his own ancestors-who lived on the land for hundreds of years before Zionism was thought up. The history moves into the 20th century, relating the stories of Sabbagh's ancestors along with a history of British control of Palestine that reveals the injustice of the Zionist idea, and its proponents to be fanatical ideologues willing to use any means-even terrorism-to advance their ideas at the expense of the Palestinian population. The book culminates with the creation of Israel and the genocide (yes genocide) conducted by the new state to rid its territory of Arabs, a tragedy described in mornfull detail by Sabbagh. Read this book-your view of the Arab-Israeli conflict will never be the same.