This is the book I should write a review on most, but I have not, days after finishing it. “How do I write a review for this book?” “Maybe I just don’t.” The voices bantered in my head. However, I found it was my duty to write a review to encourage everybody to open this book and read its entirety. Extremely well documented, insatiably researched, Ilan Pappe writes the Nakba down like he was there witnessing it. 20% of the book is just the mere research alone that he embarked upon for the book.

Learning about Palestine and its history is our duty to the world as a whole. Palestine cannot afford anymore hesitancy from the West, and doesn’t stand a chance against the anti-Arab messaging of the media machine. Ilan Pappe wrote this for us, for the ones who not only do not understand, but cannot understand.

10/10 a book that must be shared widely. Read it in chunks, you need a good stomach to read in detail what the Zionists and JNF inflicted upon the Palestinians.

An important record of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to add to the accounts of Palestinians themselves (some first hand accounts are included in this book as well). The author is an Israeli historian so I assume he had access to Israeli historical documents that Palestinian historians do not, adding to the importance of this record. Diary entries by Ben-Gurion and records of communications between various Israeli politicians and military personnel demonstrate the clear intent to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. The apathy and inaction of the British, who could have saved countless Palestinian lives but chose to simply leave “Mandatory Palestine”, is also discussed. It’s shameful that this ever happened and even more shameful that it continues today.

Simply put: you NEED to read this to grasp the full horror of the situtation in Levant.

Reading different perspectives on the establishment of Israel gives you whiplash. In one book the Israelis are indigenous people reclaiming their land from the ruins of the Arab empire using sheer guts and resilience, surrounded by people who want to destroy them. In the next, they're genocidal monsters and painfully white and the Palestinians are the poor, brown indigenous people ergo good. You can tell where the sympathies of the author lie by this definition of who is indigenous and where everyone stands on the oppressor/oppressed axis because that's the framing device that the rest of the narrative will hinge on.
Pappé is definitely in the "Israel Bad" camp, so no Arab atrocities are mentioned and if there's ever hint they have acted with impropriety it is waved away as self defence or retribution. There's obviously a case to answer here and other historians have picked holes in the facts, but I think I have the most sympathy with someone who, in a review of the book referred to the creation of Israel as a Caesarian birth. That seems a pretty good comparison since something good was born (Israel itself) but holy shit, as this book shows, it wasn't a relaxing pool birth with scented candles and whalesong.