Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

by Saree Makdisi

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393066061
• ISBN13: 9780393066067
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Required reading for every American

Most of the reviewers have already laid out the contents of Saree Makdisi's incredible narration about the illegal occupation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza. As a Jew I have long been interested and involved in the Palestine/Israel issue and feel somewhat knowledgeable about the background and the history of the Zionist project and the birth of Israel. In his important book, Makdisi spreads out before the reader in a concise and most readable form, the facts regarding the dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs by European Jews who were determined to make their homeland on the land of another people. He also lets readers see how that dispossession and the racism of the Jewish state has affected the 20% of the non-Jewish, especially Palestinian, population within Israel. This is a state that declares itself to be a "democracy" and yet 93% of the land is reserved only for its Jewish population. Makdisi takes us into the occupied territories and Gaza. He paints a picture of a people who have been living under a brutal 41 year occupation, the longest occupation in history. What we see are a resilient Palestinian people who just by surviving are resisting Israeli attempts to make their life miserable and force them to leave. Combining history and the present day situation, Makdisi paints a picture of the racist policies of Israel that seem to be bent on creating a Greater Israel on as much Palestinian land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. Not as much has been written about the fate of the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the ethnic cleansing of 1948 as has been written about the fate of the Palestinians under Israel's brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Those who remained within the Jewish state still suffer and are treated as second or third class citizens of Israel. Makdisi shows what it is like to be an Israeli Arab (the Israelis refuse to use the word Palestinian) , especially one whose family did not flee or was not driven out of Israel in 1948. Many of those people were uprooted from their villages, some of which were taken over by Jews while some 400 or more were destroyed. Many of the former residents now live in "unrecognized villages" receiving no government services. Israel is now bent on clearing out many non-Jews from Arab East Jerusalem, bulldozing Arab homes built without the permit that Israel refuses to grant to Palestinians. Makdisi tells of Palestinian students who, if they leave their home in Jerusalem to attend school elsewhere, are not permitted to return to their home. There is no such stricture on the Jews of Jerusalem. As one of the the other reviewers wrote, this was not a book to be read without taking a break. With almost every page I pondered about the inhumanity of my fellow Jews and I was left with the sense that were I a Palestinian I would long ago have taken up arms to resist my oppressor. I am amazed that with the terrible conditions under which the Israelis force Pale

Book of the year on Israeli occupation

Saree Makdisi my not have the writing gifts of the late Edward Said but this fellow comparative lit. Prof. has written a powerful and essential book. The chapters are filled with statistics and hard facts about how Palestinians have been forced into a degraded existence that is hard to imagine. He captures the Palestinian experience in great depth, while at the same time providing good historical context along with interesting anecdotes. This is the best book I have found on the occupation. It is better than Neve Gordon's recent book. In 2009 Ilan Pappe will release his long awaited book on the occupation. I'm sure it will be excellent but Makdisi has set the bar high.

A must read for understanding the conflict

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.

Palestine Inside Out

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.

A real eye opener!

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.