Palestine: History of a Lost Nation

by Karl Sabbagh

Overview

“[Sabbagh’s] memoir offers a vital yet unfamiliar perspective on the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a heartfelt, judicious invitation to dialogue.” —Publishers Weekly

Palestinians feature regularly in news headlines, but their country is much less known. In this humane and deeply compelling book, Karl Sabbagh traces Palestine and Palestinians from their roots in the mélange of tribes, ethnic groups, and religions that have populated the region for centuries, and describes how, as a result of the interplay of global power politics, the majority of Palestinians were expelled from their home to make way for the new Jewish state of Israel. Palestine: A Personal History offers a sympathetic portrait of the country’s rich heritage as well as evidence of the long-standing harmony between Arabs (Muslim and Christian) and the small indigenous Jewish population in Palestine.  Karl Sabbagh has written both a transporting narrative and a meditation on a region that remains a flashpoint of conflict—a story of how past choices and actions reverberate in the present day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802143501
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	01/21/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	378,625
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Illustrations     ix
Acknowledgements     xii
Prologue     1
Ancient Palestine     11
'The First King of Palestine'     26
Daher's Decline     39
Palestine in the Nineteenth Century     52
Travellers' Tales     69
Bible Stories     83
Balfour and Friends     97
A Letter to Lord Rothschild     108
Picking up the Peace     123
Mandate     138
Into the 1920s     153
Hostile Acts     169
Commissions Galore     183
Peel and Partition     198
'Lion-cub of Arabdom'     216
Love and War     229
Displaced Persons     241
UNSCOP and Robbers     252
The UN Vote, 29 November 1947     265
The End of History     275
Palestine Lost     294
Epilogue     317
Further Reading     327
Notes     330
Index     351

Editorial Reviews

Sabbagh, a writer and television producer of English and Palestinian descent, combines his family history and the political history of Palestine, tracing what he forcefully argues is the much misunderstood story of the resistance and dispossession of 700,000 Arab Palestinians in the face of a European-centered Zionist movement. Sabbagh has a colorful family past to draw on, as the son of Isa Sabbagh, a well-known voice on the BBC's Arab Service in the 1940s and a direct descendant of Ibrahim Sabbagh, unsavory chief minister to Daher al-Omar, a local 18th-century ruler labeled "First King of Palestine." But the personal narrative serves a larger purpose: to underscore the continuity of a predominantly Arab Palestinian presence and culture going back centuries (in contrast to Zionism's biblical claims to the same land). While the narrative also uncovers a century of ill treatment and injustice meted out to Palestinians, Sabbagh emphasizes the long-standing harmony between Arabs (Muslim and Christian) and the small indigenous Jewish population in Palestine, including many acts of solidarity amid growing tensions. Carefully researched and engaging, his memoir offers a vital yet unfamiliar perspective on the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a heartfelt, judicious invitation to dialogue. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Son of a British mother and a Palestinian father, London-bred journalist Sabbagh investigates his Middle East family roots to help clarify violence. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Sabbagh (A Rum Affair, 2000, etc.) argues that, before 1948, Palestine was not an empty desert just waiting for Jewish settlement. It was home to thriving Palestinian communities. From the earliest moments of the Zionist movement, charges Sabbagh, Zionists have claimed that Palestine was virtually uninhabited before Jews returned in the early 1900s. To the contrary, "Palestine was a small but complex society," comprising a highly-educated middle class, agricultural workers and peasants. Including many stories about his own family, Sabbagh traces Palestinian history since the 18th century, and he amply chronicles the violence that unsurprisingly erupted between Jews and Palestinians in the years after the Balfour Declaration. Few Westerners come off well. FDR, for example, is quoted as proposing that "we" simply move one Arab family out for every Jewish family moved into Palestine: "There are a lot of places to which you could move the Arabs. All you have to do is drill a well, because there is this large underground water supply, and we can move the Arabs to places where they can really live." Most fascinating is Sabbagh's analysis of late-19th- and early-20th-century travelers' reports, which, when they gestured toward Palestinians at all, portrayed them as uncivilized nomads. Explicitly invoking Edward Said, Sabbagh contends that Westerners' depictions of Palestine were marred by Orientalism and cannot be taken at face value. In establishing that Palestinians constituted Palestine's majority population before 1948, Sabbagh draws from a diverse array of sources, including many Western, Jewish and Israeli accounts. But the author devotes insufficient energy to explaining why Palestinianopposition to increasing Jewish settlement was so ineffective, and he fails to fully establish that the myth of an empty Palestine has much purchase today. A powerful and often graceful polemic that leaves some questions unanswered.

Kirkus Reviews