Saree Makdisi

In July of last year I went to Palestine as a solidarity volunteer. In my time there, I saw early morning raids by Occupation soldiers, got pushed around and gassed by those same soldiers are demonstrations, saw friends attacked and arrested, and saw the blight of settlements and the Wall firsthand. That said, this book was still a difficult read. Not because it was poorly written, but because it presents such a sweeping summary of the long-running oppression of the Palestinians.

Makdisi presents the struggle of the Palestinian people in an accessible 5 part format: looking at the West Bank, Gaza, Palestinians within Israel, a history of the occupation of Palestine by Zionists, and a discussion of the situation within the Occupied Territories in 2007 and possible ways forward. All of this is delivered smoothly and concisely, through the stories of Palestinians, anecdotes, and facts and observations from the UN and Israeli peace organizations among others. Most of the book is focused on the mundane nature of the Occupation that rarely appears in the press, such as the arbitrary and excruciating nature of checkpoints, the calculated and heartbreaking methods Israel uses to deny family unification to Palestinians.

In the past, I've struggled to think of books to recommend to people unfamiliar with the Occupation. This book has solved that problem. It is well-written, concentrates on powerful examples to illustrate larger points and follows them with facts from outside observers, and has an exhaustive and readable section for sources and further reading. And for those already familiar with the conflict, you may just take away a thing or two yourself!… (plus d'informations)

This is a pretty damning indictment of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Palestine Inside Out is a slow read not because the prose is dense (though it is occasionally a little awkward and the eye does tend to skim over the statistics lists at times), but because there's only so much one can read about the deliberate slaughter of children before having to put the book down. There's one particular case which Makdisi documented, of a group of Jewish Israeli schoolchildren spitting on and stoning their Arab Israeli counterparts—children, stoning one another; imagine how one instills that much hatred at so young an age—that turned my stomach. Makdisi makes a powerful case for the impossibility of a two state solution, drawing parallels between modern Israel and Apartheid-era South Africa. Rather, he argues, if there is to be any hope of a democratic, peaceful solution which respects the rights of all peoples, ethnicities and faiths, then a single state is the only answer: "mutual and domestic cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis is not only feasible; it offers the only alternative, the real hope for peace in the long run"… (plus d'informations)