Partial and polemical, but of interest to students of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel and Palestine will never be at peace, writes French journalist Cypel, until Israel acknowledges that “the occupation is the terrain on which terrorism prospers, borne along by desire for liberation.”
There is much else to understand, writes Cypel, who keeps up a running argument with historian Benny Morris and other Israeli intellectuals throughout. One is a massacre of Palestinian civilians that occurred a week after Israel’s declaration of independence; the alleged organizer went on to become the assistant secretary of the Ministry of Defense, and the deaths at Tantura went largely unremembered until a “student historian whose methodology is sometimes faulty and often confused” began to look into the matter. Another point requiring airing, Cypel argues, is the fact that Israeli independence, which came about as a result of UN Resolution 181, theoretically has a twin: The General Assembly recommended that Palestine be divided into two co-equal states, one Arab and the other Jewish, that would cooperate economically. “This resolution,” Cypel writes, “has never, to my knowledge, appeared in its entirety in Hebrew.” It has probably not been widely circulated in Arabic either, and, though he is inclined to blame Israeli intransigence above other causes, Cypel acknowledges that Israeli wrongdoing has often been matched by actions on the other side, such that two fundamentally ethnocentric national movements—both “late on the level of political mentality”—are now dancing together, each wishing the other would disappear. This will likely not happen, of course, and Cypel, like everyone else, comes up short when it comes to offering answers. He is rather better at describing large-scale trends within Israeli society, including ever-increasing Americanization, which some Israelis consider a welcome alternative to old-fashioned Zionism. He is also good when it comes to describing the political failings of Palestinian Authority under Arafat, which did little to improve matters.
Partial and polemical, but of interest to students of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59051-210-4
Page Count: 548
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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