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Rating: 
Summary: Do Not Buy; Said and Chomsky are Pathetic
Review: Any book that includes articles by Edward W. Said and Noam Chomsky is NOT worth buying. Save your money.
Rating: 
Summary: A compelling historical, human, and legal case
Review: I have read many topics on the issue of the Arab and Israeli Conflict and only few of them have been written as well as this book with all the facts. Personally, I enjoyed the book only because I have read numerous books with the pro-Israeli views and this is the first I have read that was pro-Palestinian. It was very interesting to see how both sides contradict each other and debate without even speaking. I also did not know much of what was happening to Palestinians thanks to American media and the lack of their portrayal of such topics, however this book was excellent in explaining such things.
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Summary: Clear, fair and balanced approach to Palestinian plight
Review: Many will unfairly denounce this book simply for virtue that it does not show Israel in a purely positive light. However, this book is well-timed as it contains much revisionist history about the Arab-israeli conflict. For example, the Israeli government in 2002 finally declassified documents that showed that the Mossad funded and helped create Hamas to destabalize the PLO and fragment the Palestinians with a "homegrown, religious alternative." Shimon Peres has come forward and testified to this and it is undisputed fact.
This book in no way favors the Palestinians. It gives equal time to discussing the sycophantic leaders who have allowed Arafat to stay in power and disrupt the peace process at nearly every turn. The main purpose of this book, though, is to provide a clear argument for the sake of evaluating the possibility of the refugees returning to their lands in Israel. It discusses very eloquently through several articles how such a return would actually work to the advantage of both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. This book is a major-policy read, so you won't find much propaganda. This book is not for the lightly attentive. There are many details and a lot of governmental and diplomatic language involved. Not for the light reader.
This book also contains one of the last articles that renowned academic and Nobel Peace Prize winner Edward Said wrote before he lost his battle to lukemia this past year. Edward Said was most noted as the man who propounded the theories of Orientalism and Occidentalism.
If you wish to gain a better understanding for what viable options there are to solve the current Arab-Israeli conflict, read this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Palestinian case
Review: Nur Masalha in chapter 2 writes that Plan D was implemented in early 1948, officially implying the clearing and expulsion of Palestinian villages and villagers. Maslah goes through some of the 100 or so massacres by the Hagannah. For example he quotes the account of soldiers in Moshe Dayan's batallion about the massacre of 80-100 people at Al-Dawayma in October 1948. Safsaf, Oct. 1948, several dozen men dumped in a well and shot; hundreds massacre by Palmach, elite strike force of Hagannah, then hundreds more in forced march of inhabitants to Arab army lines; 70 Arab detainees massacred May 1948 at Ayn Zaytun. Hula, October 1948, Shmuel Lahis murdered perhaps up to 80 villagers he was gaurding in this Lebanese village (Masalha does not mention that Lahis later became secretary general of the Jewish agency and was amnestied after recieving a seven year prison sentence for this crime and was given a liscence to practice law by the Israeli legal council on the ground the his act carried no stigma). Masalha writes this to show that massacres were a big part of the policy of the mainstream Hagannah; not simply those of the "dissident" Irgun and Stern Gang. Masalha continues with a discussion of the explusion of thousands of Azame tribesmen from 1949 to 1956. He notes that Northern commander Yitzhak Rabin, which like his role in the Lydda and Ramle expulsion of 1948 as Palmach commander, he recounted in his memoirs his using the cover of the Suez war in October 1956 to expel thousands of Israeli Arabs in Northern Israel to Syria. It happened one day after the Kafr Qassem massacre. Wadie Said discusses the abysmal treatment of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, where they have little chance of employment or getting the social services given to other Lebanese. They must even build their houses in their camps in ramshackle manner so as not to make them permanent. The reason given is that the government insists that the they don't want to give up the Palestinian right of return to their homes in Palestine by integrating them into their society but they are more likely actually concerned about tipping the precarious confessional balance in favor of Sunni Muslims. Said gives an instructive incident from September 1995, when Gadaffi expelled all Palestinian workers from Libya as a way of protesting the peace process but the Lebanese government insisted those coming from Lebanon couldn't return but had to reapply for a passport even though Lebanese law said they didn't need to. Noam Chomsky that the U.S. supported Israel's rejection of Sadat's offer to recognize Israel in return for the Sinai in February 1971. When the Arab states and the PLO supported a resolution in January 1976 calling for adding a Palestinian state to resolution 242, promising to let Israel live in peace and security, the U.S. vetoed it but a month before Israel had engaged in a "preventive" bombing of Beirut, killing 57 civillians in Beirut to let the security council know what it thought while it was deliberating. Salman Abu Sitta presents his scheme for possibly resettling refugees within Pre-1967 Israel. He reasons that there is alot of land available seeing as how only 14 percent of Israeli Jews live on 78 percent of the land. The refugees for instance could fit right in to their former homes in the Galilee which is already majority Arab anyway. In the Negev there is lots of space. Most of the Kibbutzim, which are mostly bankrupt in the area could easily be replaced by Arab farmers. However Israeli policy as crafted by Sharon and Rafi Eitan as ministers in Netanyahu's government in the late 90's has been to sell off the Kibbutz land i.e. former Palestinian land at exhorbitant prices to be shared with the former Kibbutzers to developers who will build houses for Jewish immigrants. Jan Abu Shakrah gives a fascinating overview of the situation of the Arab Jews that came to Israel following that country's creation. In Iraq, she writes, there was no official discrimination but many Jews faced employment discrimination and were subjected to propaganda urging them to immigrate by Israel. In 1951, to try to stop the drain on the economy caused by the flight of Iraqi Jews, the government froze all assets of those leaving, giving them two months to return, with the exception of the elderly and students. The Jewish elite of Iraq, about 5,000 stayed on probably until the nationalist upheavals and the rise of Ba'athism and continued to exercise influence, administiring the "abandoned" Jewish property. In 1950 and 51, the Mossad launched a terrorist campaign in Iraq to try to make Iraqi Jews leave. Called Operation "Ali Baba" it was written about by one of its participants, an Iraqi Jew named Naeim Giladi who established a panel to seek reparations for abandoned Jewish property, holding Israeli officials and the Iraqi officials that they colluded with and bribed accountable, along with the Western governments. She notes that it is curious that no pother is made about Jewish property in Yemen. The airlift of Jews out of there was apparently made with the agreement of that government. She also interestingly says that the Allon affair or "the mishap" as Israelis like to call it where Israel sent agents to bomb American and British cultural centers in Egypt in the Summer of 1954. with the apparent attempt to disrupt relations between Egypt and the West but Abu Shakrah claims also that it was designed to terrorize Egyptian Jews into coming to Israel.
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Summary: Whitewashing the Truth
Review: This book continues to perpetuate lies against Israel. It is a pro-Palestinian work that seeks to blame the Israel for the refugee problem and does not properly take to task the Palestinian leadership for continuing to perpetuate a culture of terror which is truly the root cause of the Palestinian condition.
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Summary: A Just and Compelling Argument
Review: This work clearly demonstrates the legality of the right of return of Palestinian refugees, as well as the moral and ethical case for such a return. It outlines clearly how the problem of the Palestinian refugees was created - by forced eviction at the gunpoints of Zionist terrorist units, the leaders of which later became many of Israel's prime ministers - and explains, through detailed examination of the historical record and of international law, the sense of justice that a right of return would create in the international community. This crucial issue, which has always been at the soul of the current conflict over Israel/Palestine, is usually overlooked in American news analyses. This book brings the issue to the fore with compelling intellectual force. No person concerned with justice, be he Jew (as I am) or Arab or of other origin, can afford to ignore it. Yossef Levinstein
Israel
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