"Nablus: an architectural history" by Nasser Arafat

It’s been very exciting to get my first look at the real, in-the-flesh version of my good friend Naseer Arafat’s architectural history of Nablus. It’s a huge and beautiful book, 300 pages long and in coffee-table format, and comes in both Arabic and English editions, packed with images of this wonderful, historical city (probably my favourite in Palestine). I’ve been helping Naseer with the English text for the book since 2009, and it’s been a fascinating journey, learning about Nablus itself but also the development of architecture in Palestine, its interrelationship with society, and details such as Arabic architectural terminology. At the moment the book is available via Naseer’s organisation in Nablus and is on sale at the Educational Bookshop and American Colony Hotel bookshopin East Jerusalem, but obviously we hope to find a way to distribute it more widely.

A particularly exciting aspect of the publication is that the book has been printed in Nablus itself, so as well as raising awareness about the history of the city, it helps to support its economy.

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Nablus was "the center of everything": interview with architect Naseer Arafat

http://electronicintifada.net/content/nablus-was-center-everything-interview-architect-naseer-arafat/12267

Daryl Meador 

The Electronic Intifada 

Nablus 

12 March 2013

Nablus was once a center for commerce and science. Naseer Arafat

  (Naseer Arafat)

Palestinian architect Naseer Arafat has dedicated much of his life and work to the restoration and preservation of buildings in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus. Last year, his extensive research and work came to fruition as Nablus, City of Civilizations, an impressive and extensive architectural and historical survey of the ancient city.

Through twelve detailed units, the book describes Nablus’ long history, from the Canaanite era to the second intifada, when many of its historical buildings were demolished or damaged during the Israeli invasion. Historical photographs, maps and building plans describe the many architectural treasures of the city. Beyond this, through oral stories, Arafat includes a social history that breathes life into the city as it exists today.

Published in Nablus by the Cultural Heritage Enrichment Center, the book is available in Arabic and English. Arafat recently spoke to The Electronic Intifada contributor Daryl Meador.

Daryl Meador: Can you speak a little bit about your history and relationship with Nablus and architecture?

Naseer Arafat: It’s the city where I live; I was born here. The relationship with architecture was built by the stories I got from my parents. They lived in a big house, 675 square meters, three floors; it was demolished by the British in 1938. So not only my parents, but my aunts and uncles from both sides were all living together in that house. My aunt, whenever the house was mentioned, she would sadly remember the moment when, with her hair wet, she was tossed out of the house into the street, and the British blew it up.

Also, my father’s uncle all the time spoke about the visitors who would come to the house because he was selling costumes and clothes out of it. Visitors would stay in the guest part of the house for three days, fed and hosted.

So that memory of the place, of the building, made me always imagine the size of the house and the situation of my family in it. I sadly connected this with loss, especially because where I live now is in a house that is in the garden of the old house. The old house is partially now a garden and partially a street where I used to walk every day. I would imagine which part of the house I was walking on. So that was the passion towards an ancient house and what it meant to my family.

I studied architecture at Birzeit, and volunteered to bring visitors to the university on tours in Nablus. After that I worked as an architect responsible for the national register of historical buildings in Palestine. This enabled me to discover Nablus as a treasured place with an urban fabric, with monuments. This was not known to me before. The more I worked in the city, walked through the alleys and streets, I discovered the richness of it.

Then as I worked, I decided I would write something about the city. I started collecting data and photographs, maps — whatever I could collect on the city.

DM: What kind of resources did you use?

NA: At that time I went to the Rockefeller museum in Jerusalem and saw documents and old photos of Nablus. Later I went to study restoration at York University and I visited what is called the Palestine Exploration Fund, which is a small association off Oxford Street in London. There I found huge old photographs of Nablus printed on glass.

I managed to collect unique photographs from the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, which is the French antiquities school. I managed to collect photos from Istanbul, the archive of the Sultan Abd al-Hamid II, from Berlin, the antiquities department and the Mandate Museum in London. At all these places I could find old photos of Nablus and use some for the book.

I also collected family photos. From some families you have photos of their houses and there was an Austrian researcher who came to Nablus in ‘96, and took photos of all of the houses in Nablus. So I managed to find some photos of houses destroyed by the Israelis in 2002. This was very emotional for the people whose houses were lost.

Two soap factories which were demolished, I managed to find photos of these as well. And by chance I was able to survey one factory before it was demolished, so its plan and façade are in the book.

DM: Does the book discuss the Israeli invasion and destruction?

NA: Yes it does. What the Israelis are doing to Nablus and the old city has been continuous since the occupation started. So the book is not just architectural; it starts with an architectural description, but also has social, political, economical, cultural interpretations of the buildings described. This is, I think, what makes the book special. I am an architect, so the starting point of my research and writing was architecture. But architecture is just a building, and it is a rigid description to just talk about the look and materials of a building. I felt that the richness of the building is the social life of the building, maybe the economical life of the market, also the cultural livelihood of the fabric.

So whenever there was a linked story to a building, I never hesitated to write it.

DM: And how did you find the stories?

NA: From people. Especially elderly people, I interviewed many of them. And they told me real stories.

DM: What are some examples of the personal stories linked to buildings?

NA: There are so many — one of them is about a mufti, he had the highest seat in Islam, who was from Nablus, appointed by the Ottomans. The British commander in Nablus wanted to meet the community leaders in Nablus. This man made an appointment to meet the sheikh. The reception is always downstairs and the house is above, all the time. So he gathered community leaders of Nablus to meet the guy, and when they were waiting, the mufti was nervously walking and not relaxed. People were asking what was wrong with him. All of the sudden, he went upstairs to his house.

The people were surprised because this is not the way you receive your guests, but they couldn’t have a word with him; he was upstairs in his house. The British commander came, they called upon the mufti and he came down and had a chat and the people left.

But the Nabulsis still didn’t understand, and they asked the mufti why he did that. He said, “Guys, if I was sitting and waiting for the guest, when he came I would have to stand up to respect and welcome him. But I went up, and when he came I came down to him, and he stood up for me. That’s how we should receive the occupier.”

Another story that is very nice is related to what we call in modern times, gender-sensitive issues. In one of the Turkish baths, if you look at the sides of the main hall there is a higher stage where people sit. When I surveyed this in 1992 — I was a student then — there used to be couches, fancy and relaxing seats, not like the stones on the other side. It indicated that this was a special place for people to sit.

The wife of the judge in Nablus, which was the highest position in town, she wanted to have a bath here. The lady who looks after the guests told her “Madam, you can’t sit there, this is only for VIPs, you are not allowed to sit there.” The wife of the judge left angry and didn’t have a bath.

She told her husband, and as the story goes he slapped the table, and he said “I will show them.” What can we expect from the most powerful person in town? He built a special bath for his wife. And he built a tunnel in between his house and the bath so that the bath is only reserved for her, and so that no one can see her when she leaves.

DM: Does the bath still exist?

NA: Yes, and it’s called al-Qadi; it means “the Judge” bath. It is used as a sweets factory now, not as a bath.

130312-nablus-clock-tower.jpg

An inscription on the Ottoman clock tower in Nablus’ old city.

 (Naseer Arafat)

DM: The book features poems that are inscribed on buildings in Nablus. Are those common on all historical buildings?

NA: Every monument in Nablus, and some of the houses, have a written inscription which most of the time is a poem. This poem is the most honest documentation of the building date. So I managed to read some, [and] copy what others have read from what were lost.

From the poems I could calculate when the building was built. In Arabic, every letter has a corresponding number — alif is one,ba is two, etc. So if you take the letters of the last phrase of the poem, and you find the equivalent number of each letter and sum them up, you get the year that each building was built. It is a brilliant way of writing a poem.

DM: And they are included in the book?

NA: All of the poems are included with a photo and a copy of the text of the poem.

DM: Can you say one final thing about why Nablus is unique, historically and architecturally?

NA: There is a lot to say about Nablus. I would say that Nablus, at the time that it was built as an Islamic city, during the Mamluk Ottoman period, it was the center of everything. It was the capital of trade. The city was well known for its powerful economy that attracted not only the plans for making the olive oil soap from Jordan, but also the costumes that were exported to Europe and exhibited during the Ottoman period.

The fields of Nablus were where olive trees and cotton plants were planted, because we have four water springs and cotton needs a lot of water.

Also, it was the center of science. Students from Azhar [University] in Egypt would come study in Nablus. There were four schools in the old city of Nablus.

In modern history, before Israeli occupation, there were four buses leaving Nablus every morning — one to Beirut, one to Damascus, one to Jerusalem, and one toAmman. Every morning. My father used to say he would arrive in Damascus before shops opened. The Hijaz train, which took pilgrims from Palestine, Jordan and Syria to Saudi Arabia, started from Nablus. So I could say simply, Nablus was the center of everything for the neighboring countries. You could say it is a unique city.

Daryl Meador is a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who is currently living and volunteering in Nablus.

Unfree in Palestine Registration, Documentation and Movement Restriction

by  Nadia Abu-Zahra, Adah Kay

http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745325279

Based on first-hand accounts and extensive fieldwork, Unfree in Palestine reveals the role played by identity documents in Israel’s apartheid policies towards the Palestinians, from the red passes of the 1950s to the orange, green and blue passes of today.

The authors chronicle how millions of Palestinians have been denationalised through the bureaucratic tools of census, population registration, blacklisting and a discriminatory legal framework. They show how identity documents are used by Israel as a means of coercion, extortion, humiliation and informant recruitment. Movement restrictions tied to IDs and population registers threaten Palestinian livelihoods, freedom of movement and access to basic services such as health and education.

Unfree in Palestine is a masterful expose of the web of bureaucracy used by Israel to deprive the Palestinians of basic rights and freedoms, and calls for international justice and inclusive security in place of discrimination and division.

About The Authors

Nadia Abu-Zahra is Assistant Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Ottawa. She is currently on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and has worked across the Middle East, Asia, and Central America. She is the author of 12 articles and book chapters on mobility in Palestine.

Adah Kay is Honorary Visiting Professor at Cass Business School, City University, London. An anthropologist and urban planner, she has worked in local government, universities and UK NGOs. During 2002-6 she lived and worked in the West Bank. She is the co-author of Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children (Pluto, 2004).

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“PALESTINIANS IN ISRAEL” Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy

By Ben White   Pluto Press  2012

    

Review by Abe Hayeem

Palestine News   Autumn 2012

Ben White, in this indispensable handy companion to his earlier book on Israeli Apartheid,  has distilled with forensic research from volumes of evidence, the myth of Israel’s claim to be a European style democracy. His wry and lucid commentary, under several headings, highlights the absurdity and paradoxes of Israel’s laws fabricated to institutionally discriminate against Palestinians’ true equality as Israeli citizens. Israel is in reality an ethnocracy, giving pre-eminence to its Jewish citizens. Palestinians are given inferior status as a favour rather than a right, with some trappings of democracy.

Especially in the fields of land and home ownership, labyrinthine and Kafkaesque laws like the Absentee Property Law, expropriated the bulk of land from Palestinians in 1947/48, prohibiting Palestinian ‘citizens’ from living in 93% of Israel. Apart from seven sub-standard Bedouin townships, there has never been a new Arab town planned, in comparison with hundreds of towns for Jewish Israelis, which, in law deter Palestinians from living in them.

Currently, in its drive to further ‘Judaise’ the Negev and Galilee, in effect continuing the Nakba of 1948, the Bedouin are being driven from the unrecognized villages like Al-Araqib, using draconian laws. In this process of ‘de-Arabisation’, Jewish settlers are even infiltrating Arab neighbourhoods in the mixed cities like Jaffa and Acre, parallel to events in East Jerusalem and Bedouin areas of the Hebron Hills in Area C. This is all to counteract the ‘demographic threat’, using extreme force and dispossession, to ‘ensure the homogeneity of Jewish national identity, free from Palestinians with a collective identity.’

Further chapters detail the vast inequalities in provision of education, civic and social services. The unequal legal regime, backed by military brutality was exemplified by the deliberate shooting of Palestinians in the October 2000 protests in solidarity with the Intifada, where the IDF escaped justice. A whole new tranche of discriminatory laws further erode any freedoms.

The paranoid fears of equality are expressed by MK David Rotem :“I am not ashamed that I want to maintain this country as a Jewish and democratic state. In your way there would be no state. Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, not a state of all its citizens.”

Ben’s talent at unearthing damning quotations, reveals the sheer unabashed racism of not only today’s far-right MKs, but of Israel’s founding fathers. His concluding chapter links the situation of Palestinians on both sides of the green line, and asks us to consider the only scenario that can change the current situation of relentless colonization by ‘re-imagining the Jewish and Palestinian presence in Palestine/Israel and a future based on a genuine co-existence of equals, rather than ethno-religious supremacy and segregation’.

From PALESTINE TO ISRAEL: A Photographic Record of Destruction & State Formation 1947-50

by Ariella Azoulay      translated by Charles S. Kamen                                    

Pluto Press 2011

"Arabs Fleeing" from IDF and Defensive Archives                                                        Photographer not identified.

Review in Palestine News       Winter 2012        by Abe Hayeem

The events that led to the violent foundation of the Israeli state are wrapped in layers of mythology and propaganda, which are still being promoted and advocated today.

Ariella Azoulay’s fascinating book and recent exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms in west London, combines detailed research and analysis of the history and politics of the whole period that preceded the Partition of Palestine before 1947 and the succeeding years. It lifts the lid off the prevailing mythology, using photographs mainly from the Haganah archives, hidden for more than six decades, and provides a revealing new commentary on them. By its pioneering methodology of using a ‘civil imagination’ and re-interpretation, it rejects the nationalist narrative that the photographs are meant to portray to the Israeli public in concealing the unfolding disaster it created, and reconstructs the reality of the ‘Nakba’ that was caused to the Palestinians.

Until today, Israelis in general were encouraged to think of the events that happened to the Palestinians as a ‘catastrophe from their point of view’. Azoulay’s intention by revealing the truth of the events hidden by the photographs’ banal original captions, is to lift their ‘colonial aphasia’- the difficulty in generating the appropriate vocabulary to the appropriate events, concepts and things - and use the proper understanding of these events that affected both peoples, as a way to formulate a new reality that would bring about a move towards  eventual reconciliation.

The UN resolution that created the partition of Palestine in 1947, designed only by the Zionist leadership and the UN, was vehemently opposed by most of the country’s Arab inhabitants of 90 percent of the land who were never consulted, and ‘not an insignificant number of Jews.’ The Palestinians were not wanted in the new state that was declared, and the Zionist leadership and its enforcers, the Haganah, were bent on erasure of the Palestinian presence and the physical evidence of their habitation, agriculture and customs. Their war crimes included the  destruction of  hundreds of beautiful villages and towns, including large parts of Ramle, Lydda, Jaffa, Haifa and Beersheba, reducing them to rubble, which the new Jewish immigrants from Europe helped to move, level and use as a base to rebuild new homes, if not taking over the ones that were retained, after the inhabitants were expelled.

In a typical photograph, as Azoulay comments. “the official caption that reads ‘Beit Sha’an abandoned’ doesn’t serve to display for us a town abandoned, rather than one whose inhabitants are to be returned, a town that no longer belongs to those who built it or who until yesterday lived there. It refers to the achievement that created a ‘valley that’s entirely Jewish’ “.

The author’s commentary, often in elegant, challenging and intriguing prose, that replaces the existing bland and often misleading euphemisms in the archive photographs, exquisitely captures the nightmare of the expulsions, the mood and feelings of the dispossessed, and the casual arrogance of the dispossessors. It makes one feel a witness to the events which unfold in these haunting, surrealistic tableaux. The pictures depict the corralling of the refugees behind barbed wire enclosures, the long queues directed out of emptying villages, the buses employed to move them to Jordan, Lebanon, and Gaza across newly established lines that once were open land or borders. Then followed the registering of refugees in locations they were allowed to stay but still confined to ghettoes, all these were ‘mechanisms of subordination’ and then socialization carried out with pre-planned ruthlessness.

Much of this has ironic echoes of what is still continued with the Occupation today, with the matrix of control, the identity cards, the checkpoints and the Separation Wall in the West Bank, the dispossession of the Bedouin in the Negev and the West Bank, and the house evictions and demolitions in East Jerusalem.

 Azoulay describes the events between 1947 and 1950, and subsequently, as “a civil malfunction - the way citizens relate to the man-made disaster in whose continuing reproduction and preservation they participate.” This original book is an indispensable tool to unraveling the dystopia created by the Israeli state and illuminates the way to a new future of justice and hope.

-----------------------------------------------------

Ariella Azoulay directs the Photo-Lexic Project at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of a number of books on Photography including 'the Civil Contract of Photography(2008) and 'Civil Imagination: A Political  Ontology of Photograohy(2012). 

***********************************************************************************

The Forgotten Palestinians – Ilan Pappe Book Review

09/02/2011
The Forgotten Palestinians – Book Review
By Khalil Nakhleh

http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=17078

 (The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel.
Ilan Pappe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00574LV0W/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb

 No doubt, hundreds if not thousands of articles, reports and books have
been written about the Palestinians in Israel, "the forgotten
Palestinians", in Arabic, English and Hebrew, during the last sixty
some years. To my knowledge, this is the first time a major,
mainstream, US academic university press publishes a comprehensive and
sympathetic narrative of the Palestinians in Israel, with a focus on
their evolving Palestinianhood, by a well respected anti-Zionist,
Israeli Jewish historian.

Is this a notable change, where after sixty-three years of the
destruction and decimation of their society and identity, and official
insistence that they should be relegated to a hybrid, artificial, and
rootless group of people, dubbed as "Arabs in Israel", or
"non-Jewish minorities", there is, seemingly, a Western academic
cognizance and affirmation of their Palestinian genealogy and identity?
Basically, yes. In part, I believe, this has to do with the erudite
scholarship and credible academic record of Ilan Pappe (the author of
this book). But, in large part, it has to do with the relentless and
cumulative academic, intellectual and political challenge mounted,
particularly over the last 20-30 years, by Palestinian intellectuals and
activists citizens of Israel (1), which rendered dubious Israel's
historical and cultural claims, as they re-affirmed, simultaneously, in
no uncertain terms, the Palestinian identity of this minority—their
self-identity, and its historical and cultural connectivity to the
larger Palestinian body.

This is an important book about the nearly 1.4 million "forgotten
Palestinians" who are the remnants of the indigenous Palestinians
who lived in the land of Palestine until it was decimated by the Zionist
settler-colonial onslaught in 1947/1948, and who continue to live today
within the artificially-created Jewish-Zionist state of Israel.

This is not a traditional book review. It is an interactive reading of
Ilan's book, where I deliberated virtually with him about the
overall subject, during my careful reading of the book, which I utilize
now as a stepping stone. However critical certain aspects of this
reading may appear, it must be kept in mind that it's coming from a
friendly (not hostile) corner. I focus here only on few aspects.

The Book and the Author

Ilan writes as an astute and knowledgeable observer, and as a
sympathetic occasional participant in some of the developments he
narrates. Thus his narrative of the evolving Palestinian identity in
Israel over the past sixty some years, emerges considerate, sensitive,
honest, and anti-Zionist, written in total solidarity with Palestinian
dilemmas, and with deep understanding of these dilemmas. Furthermore, it
is a gentle narrative reflecting, in my view, Ilan's personality, as
I know it.

He focuses not only on official policies, but on the complexity of the
daily life of the Palestinians, and how they struggle and manage to live
it, in a hegemonic Jewish Zionist state that insists with recurring
persistence on not seeing them. By its nature, Ilan states, "this
book aims to present a people's history as far as possible and
therefore the magnifying glass is cast more on the Palestinians than on
those who formulated and executed the policies towards them" (p.13).
At times, however, I felt an inadvertent inclination on Ilan's part,
to grant those "who formulated and executed the policies ...",
i.e., the Israeli Jewish Zionist structure, and the ideology that
propelled them into control (e.g., Zionism, p.266), an unnecessary
charitable and humane understanding.

Be this as it may, this is, nevertheless, a painful narrative of the
evolution of my people's persistent dispossession and unrelenting
attempts at their exclusion and elimination. And how they learned to
survive under an oppressive system of control that always maneuvered to
expel them from their homeland, or, temporarily, forcing them to
co-exist as unequal under its hegemony.

At the same time, it is an Israeli Jew narrating painfully about the
sins that his state and consecutive governments committed, and persist
in committing, against the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the
land. In contrast, if I, as a Palestinian Arab member of that
community, were to write such a narrative it would have emerged more
furious and less tolerant narrative of the Jewish Zionist majority that
has been in direct oppressive control of my people for well over half a
century!

The Oslo Accords and Their Impact

Ilan described correctly the impact of the Oslo Accords on the
Palestinian minority in Israel in the following words:

"What emerged was not that the community was unique in comparison to
other Palestinian groups but rather that it had a unique problem.
Zionism was the exceptional factor, not being a Palestinian in
Palestine, or what used to be Palestine. The strong affirmation of the
connection to the country and not to the state was the end product of a
long internal Palestinian analysis of the predicament, crisis and nature
of the community, which was followed by a prognosis and a kind of action
plan for how to deal with the crisis being a national indigenous
minority within the Jewish state. ... [T]he community went from a very
hopeful and assertive period, 1995 to 2000, into a very precarious and
dangerous existential period after 2000 and until today ... (pp.195-196;
emphasis added)."

I assert, however, that the concerns of the "forgotten
Palestinians" in terms of the "predicament" and the identity
of the community, as "a national indigenous minority within the
Jewish state", started being driven home with the events culminating
in the eruption of "Land Day" in 1976. Clearly, those concerns
were not formulated with the same clarity then, as it became post the
"2000 earthquake" (P.229 ff). Nevertheless, although the book
presents a fairly detailed discussion of the circumstances leading to
"Land Day", the connection was not made as strongly, or as
organically, as it should have been made with what has been termed
"hubbet October" in 2000, and all the evolving events following
that. I would have liked to see a deeper analysis about this
connection.

If my claim is valid, and since I can say with certainty that Ilan
recognizes this connection between the mid-seventies and today, why then
was more focus placed on the "2000 earthquake"? Largely, I
believe, it's an issue of the availability of public and
academically credible analyses and articulation of these concerns and
predicaments post 2000, which were made available in English and Hebrew,
primarily. The emergence of a substantial group of political and
educated elites among the Palestinians in Israel over the last thirty
some years made this feasible.

Although I agree with the generalization that:

"The political and educated elites of the Palestinians in Israel
lost all beliefs in `coexistence', liberal Zionist discourse or
a future of change within the present parameters of the Jewish state
(p.240)."

I maintain that this was abundantly and inherently felt in the aftermath
of the savage Zionist attack on the indigenous lands in Galilee by
official "security" apparatuses of the Jewish state, twenty-five
years earlier, although not publically articulated in academic language.
It was very clear then that "[t]he police legitimized in its own
eyes and in the eyes of the public the killing of demonstrators
[Palestinian citizens] as part of its response" (p. 239).
Furthermore, it was very obvious, then, "the full support the
Israeli media gave the police and the lack of any sympathy or solidarity
with the victims and their families" (p. 239).

In addition to the issue of the availability of `public
articulation', mentioned above, there is the concomitant rise of
academic, activists, human rights defenders, etc, NGOs that were allowed
legally to register following the Madrid Peace Conference in the early
nineties, and which were responsible, largely, for the `public
articulation' literature. These NGOs became legitimate funding
targets by transnational funding agencies, including NGOs, governments,
corporate companies, etc. This phenomenon, in itself, begs deeper
analysis, which, I maintain, it did not receive in this book, and when
it did (e.g., p. 217 ff), the analysis was very accommodating and
uncritical.

The `Vision Documents'

I agree with Ilan that the `Vision Documents', which were
produced over a period of 3-4 years at the beginning of the twenty-first
century, by the Palestinian political and intellectual elite in Israel,
were ground breaking documents, and that "the Palestinian community
had taken the initiative itself and adopted the language of the
indigenous people versus the settler state" (p. 254). I maintain,
however, that the Palestinian community in Israel was positing in these
documents a more fundamental position, in which they were reaffirming
their Palestinianhood and rejecting Zionist hegemony over their land and
lives, with some degree of variance from one document to another.(2)
This explains why these documents were declared by the entire spectrum
of Israeli public opinion as "a statement of war" (p. 253).

Conclusions of the Book

It is extremely important to refocus our attention, strategically, to
the core and important conclusions of the book. In the concluding
chapter—the Epilogue, under the title "the Oppressive
State", Ilan stressed that:

1. [T]he worst aspect of the minority's existence is that its daily
and future fate is in the hands of the Israel secret-service apparatuses
(P.265);
2. It seems that in the last few years ... the Jewish state has given up
on the charade of democracy ... and ... has escalated its oppression of
the minority in an unprecedented manner (P.266);
3. [W]e expect either escalating state violence against the
Palestinians, wherever they are, or further oppressive legislation (P.
274; emphasis added);
4. [T]he history of this community, despite the endless Israeli efforts
to fragment the Palestinian people and existence, was still an organic
part of the history of the Palestinian people (P. 200; emphasis added).

A note that can never be final ...

My conclusion from the above is crystal clear: the lesson that we should
learn is to actively resist all attempts by the enemies of the
Palestinian people, including the current Palestinian ruling elite
structure, to fragment the Palestinian people and existence, and to
re-institute and revive our struggle for a FREE, JUST, EQUAL, and
DEMOCRATIC Homeland.

All Palestinians must read this book. All Jews—Zionists and
anti-Zionists alike, who express concern about justice and human rights
for the Palestinians, must read this book.

- Dr. Khalil Nakhleh, a Palestinian anthropologist, independent
researcher and writer, who for the last three decades has sought to
generate People-Centered Liberationist Development in Palestine. He is
working on a book, Development Ltd: The Role of Capital in Impeding
People-Centered Liberationist Development, expected to be ready for
publication in 2011. He contributed this article to
PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: abusama@palnet.com <mailto:abusama%40palnet.com>
<mailto:abusama@palnet.com <mailto:abusama%40palnet.com> > .

Notes:

(1) A cursory look at the "bibliography" section provides ample
support to this statement, keeping in mind, however, that numerous
sources are omitted here, as well as all the relevant sources in Arabic.
(2) Please refer to my book, The Future of the Palestinian Minority in
Israel, Ramallah: MADAR, the Palestinian Center for Israeli Studies ,
2008, (Arabic).