Rating: 
Summary: A much needed dose of reality
Review: One of the biggest problems with trying to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict is finding an unbiased account of it. There seems to be no definitive work on the subject that would completely satisfy an open-minded observer, not that there seem to be many of those. Try reading through the reviews of this book or any other book about the subject on Amazon and what you'll see is an almost complete polarisation of views with little or no middle ground. Watching the news media doesn't help much either, as the origins of what is going on are never explained and it's significant that both sides of the conflict think that the media is biased against them. This book is not an attempt to give a full account of the Israel-Palestine conflict, in fact it presupposes that the reader already has some knowledge about the recent history of the middle-east; instead the author sets out to challenge the validity of certain widely accepted beliefs about the conflict and in doing so makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing (and semingly never ending) debate about it. Accepting "official" Israeli history as fact involves accepting certain Zionist arguments as being true. For instance we are often told that there was never really any such thing as "the Palestinians", that the area which now comprises the state of Israel was largely an unoccupied wilderness when Zionists started to colonise it and that many of those Arabs who did in fact become refugees during the first Israeli-Arab war were actually recent immigrants. Because of this, the argument goes, the Jews have a greater right to the land than the Arabs, thus justifying the establishment of the Israeli state. Similarly we are asked to believe that although the first Israeli-Arab war created 700000 Arab refugees, this mass exodus was not caused by any premeditated or systematic campaign of expulsion, but was the result of "Arab orders" broadcast over the radio or perhaps, in the view of "new historians" like Benny Morris, mainly due to flight from Israeli aggression or the threat of it. The conquest of Israel is portrayed as being a defensive action against Arab attack and all Israel's subsequent border wars and military actions as necessary retaliations of a victim state. The problem with all this is that some of it is actually quite difficult to swallow and the central aim of Finkelstein's book is to see how well such tenets of Israeli history stand up to rigorous examination. To facilitate his analysis the author refers to and discusses at length influential works on various aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict (Joan Peters' "From time immemorial", Benny Morris' "Birth of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-49", Anita Shapira's "Land and power" and others) and time after time he shows that the "official" version of Israeli history can ony be arrived at by a very careful and highly selective interpretation of evidence, statistical data and the historical record. The book is worth buying for the second chapter alone, in which "From time immemorial" is comprehensively and definitively exposed as a hoax and a fraud. On the other hand, there is praise for the "new historians", although as Finkelstein ably points out, Morris' valuable attempt to deconstruct the Zionist whitewash of the refugee issue is too cautious by far based on his own evidence. Anyone seriously interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict would gain from reading this book and I strongly recommend it, but it's not the whole story by any means. For a diametrically opposed view of the same events, try reading "Fabricating Israeli history: the new historians" by Efraim Karsh. Or try sampling the work of Benny Morris to see what Karsh is complaining about. My personal view is that Finkelstein gets closer to the truth than a "new historian" like Morris and that Karsh and reactionaries of his ilk are the Zionist equivalent of King Canute. But that's just my opinion. You'll have to do a lot more reading to try to achieve a full understanding of this complex set of issues....
Rating:
Summary: tearing boldly through a wall of Zionist apologetics
Review: People in the U.S. are familiar with an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that often bears little resemblance to the one that takes place in the Middle East, that serious scholars have long recognized. This book examines apologetics and refutes the often absurd arguments they involve (notably, that the Palestinians didn't exist before Zionism).
The added chapter on Oslo is particularly important. People think the Palestinians destroyed it - in fact, there was nothing to destroy. Oslo increased settlements and deepened the occupation, and was supposed to do exactly that. The Second Intifada came from a situation in which two states no longer even seemed a possibility, as Israelized as the West Bank had become.
Finkelstein's thesis on 1979-Camp David is the weakest part: if the 1973 war were the cause of Israel's abandonment of the Sinai, then why did it take six years? Yet, Sinai-for-peace was offered in 1971 by Jarring and accepted by Egypt, so I can see no good alternative explanation for Israel's change of heart.
Rating:
Summary: tearing boldly through a wall of Zionist apologetics
Review: People in the U.S. are familiar with an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that often bears little resemblance to the one that takes place in the Middle East, that serious scholars have long recognized. This book examines apologetics and refutes the often absurd arguments they involve (notably, that the Palestinians didn't exist before Zionism).
The added chapter on Oslo is particularly important. People think the Palestinians destroyed it - in fact, there was nothing to destroy. Oslo increased settlements and deepened the occupation, and was supposed to do exactly that. The Second Intifada came from a situation in which two states no longer even seemed a possibility, as Israelized as the West Bank had become.
Finkelstein's thesis on 1979-Camp David is the weakest part: if the 1973 war were the cause of Israel's abandonment of the Sinai, then why did it take six years? Yet, Sinai-for-peace was offered in 1971 by Jarring and accepted by Egypt, so I can see no good alternative explanation for Israel's change of heart.
Rating: 
Summary: The research fits the agenda
Review: The best thing I can say about this book is that it is well written. Finkelstein approaches his analysis with a definite agenda, and never loses his focus. His analysis of From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters seems objective but since I haven't read Peters yet, I'm probably not the best judge. It seems that all too often, rather than looking to actual historical events for substantiating his thesis, he often resorts to whatever random quotes of Zionist theory (sometimes quite obscure) that happen to fit his argument. If he focused more on what people actually did rather than what some people said, his task of dispelling Zionist "myths" would be much more challenging. One should not touch this book with a ten-foot pole without having read a more comprehensive historical text such as Howard Sachar's A History of Israel.
Rating: 
Summary: Total propaganda for Arafat's point of view - worthless
Review: This book could as well be written by Arafat or any other [...] trying to justify their crimes. Spin, omissions and just plain lies. This book gives new meaning to the word bias. Skip it, unless you cust crave more of the left leaning anti Israeli propaganda.
Rating:
Summary: Dispels the Myths of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts
Review: This book is a crushing blow to the popular literature on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using meticulous documentation of the hoax of Joan Peter's From Time Immemorial to Michael Oren's Six Day War, Dr. Norman Finkelstein gives us the truth of whats really going on in the region. He shows the Zionist intent from the very beginning about how the partition is but a temporary solution to an eventual conquest of all of Palestine. Detractors of the book probably never read this book and cling to the popular myths of the conflict.
Rating:
Summary: Dispels the Myths of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts
Review: This book is a crushing blow to the popular literature on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using meticulous documentation of the hoax of Joan Peter's From Time Immemorial to Michael Oren's Six Day War, Dr. Norman Finkelstein gives us the truth of whats really going on in the region. He shows the Zionist intent from the very beginning about how the partition is but a temporary solution to an eventual conquest of all of Palestine. Detractors of the book probably never read this book and cling to the popular myths of the conflict.
Rating:
Summary: Exception - Lucid, hard-hitting. An essential read
Review: This book is a meticulous exposition of the multitude of
propaganda theories that have been peddled as truth, and are now accepted as the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is concise and very well researched. An
essential read for anyone who is interested in the history of this conflict.
Rating:
Summary: Honest and Courageous Book
Review: This book is a welcome relief from the pro-Israeli propaganda that one is forced to endure time and time again. This is a brave, honest, and remarkably knowledgeable author. I recommend reading his book titled The Holocaust Industry as well. Of course, as expected, the Israel apologists relinquishing any sense of moral responsibility or decency, attack and malign the author for honestly dealing with the ugliness of the Israeli occupation and its racist policies in the Middle East. But these types of Israeli apologists have as much credibility and moral integrity as the defenders of the apartheid regime of South Africa. For them, the suffering of Palestinians counts for nothing. When I was in Israel I was shocked by how people talked about Arabs as if they are subhuman, and worth nothing. It was then that this book became a personal and gruesome reality. I read the response published in the Commentary, which is a journal dedicated to absolving Israel of all its sins, and it was sickening. Read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Substitutes politics for scholarship
Review: This book is simply propaganda without any genuine content. It consists of a set of mostly irrelevant and inaccurate attacks that serve to misrepresent pro-Zionist writings. And that is a shame for potential readers who might want to get a picture of what antizionists actually want, what complaints they may have, and what truly motivates them.
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