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All too often, historians and scholars
write about war from a comfortable distance. Readers do not feel
the pain of families driven from their homes by invading armies.
We do not hear children scream in terror when their siblings
and parents are murdered in front of them. Human suffering is
just another episode in a war-torn world.
In The
Second Palestinian Intifada, Ramzy Baroud defies such polite
conventions by taking readers on a journey into the heart of
the Palestinian peoples' struggle to survive war, massacres,
assassinations, poverty, and exile.
A prominent writer, scholar,
historian, and editor, (Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts
of the Israeli Invasion), Mr. Baroud grew up in a poverty-stricken
refugee camp. He lived among Palestinians who grew old holding
the rusted keys to homes confiscated by the Israeli government.
His own grandfather kept hope alive by listening to the radio,
believing that one day he would hear the call to return to his
beloved olive orchards and the only way of life he and his ancestors
had ever known. Instead, the author's grandfather died hearing
the sounds of an army determined to destroy the will of the Palestinian
people.
Ramzy Baroud was a high school
student in Gaza when the first Palestinian Intifada broke out
on December, 1987. At the time, he writes, .grief stricken residents
of my Gaza refugee camp were consumed with other more worldly
matters; would they eat today, would they find clean water, would
they seize their long-awaited freedom? In spite of these concerns,
Palestinians rose together against an illegal and relentlessly
brutal occupation. Writes Baroud:
It was an awesome awakening
which forced all parties that had traditionally laid claim to
the Palestinian struggle to relinquish their stake. Ordinary
Palestinians took to the streets, defying the Israeli army and
articulating a collective stance that echoed a seemingly eternal
commitment across the generations.
Ramzy Baroud does not romanticize
violence. He simply states, without rancor and with a quiet passion,
what it is like to live, not year after year, but decade after
decade, watching children go hungry and suffer brain damage from
malnutrition, watching the Israeli army harass, insult, disappear,
and murder friends and family; watching, perhaps most tragically,
young men and women blow themselves to pieces in crowded Israeli
cafes. Baroud wants readers to understand the reasons behind
these attacks, but he argues that suicide bombers mimic the indiscriminate
brutality of the occupation.
Palestinians who resist the
occupation suffer terrible consequences, but they are not alone.
An Israeli sniper in the Jenin refugee wounded Ian Hook, a United
Nations coordinator. Mr. Hook bled to death when the IDF refused
to permit an ambulance to take him to a hospital. On the same
day Hook was murdered, Israeli soldiers shot and wounded a twenty-three
year-old Irish activist, Caoimhe Butterly, who was standing in
the line of fire between the IDF and Palestinian children. On
March 16, American peace activist Rachel Corrie was attempting
to keep an Israeli bulldozer driver from destroying a house in
the Rafah refugee camp south of Gaza City. Rachel was wearing
a florescent orange vest and calling through a megaphone, but
the driver deliberately ran her over, then reversed his machine
and ran back over her body again. Commentators in the United
States called Rachel stupid, while the pro-Israeli crowd claimed
that she was offering protection to a gang of terrorists.
The Second Palestinian Intifida
chronicles the crimes that former Prime Minister Arial Sharon
and many other Israeli politicians have committed against the
Palestinian people. But these details are less important, really,
than the questions the author poses time and again in this book:
Why does the United States continue to fund the expropriation
of Palestinian land? Why have a succession of U.S. administrations
supported Israel's illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank?
How could it be that the lives of Palestinian children are so
much less important than their counterparts in Israel?
Writing about the Camp David
accords, the author points out that Israel did not place a legitimate
offer on the table. On the contrary, according to Palestinian
intellectual, Hanan Ashrawi, Israeli negotiators failed to present
a written proposal to their counterparts in the Palestinian delegation.
The offer, touted by the American media as a reasonable settlement,
was for the occupied territories to be cut into three cantons,
separated by Israeli military zones and Israeli-only bypass roads,
of the continuous presence of illegal settlements, and of Israel's
domination over Occupied East Jerusalem
This is not a book for those
who want surface, sanitized, accounts of the Palestinian Diaspora.
Ramzy Baroud is committed to truth telling, and his new book
will undoubtedly disturb, shock, and outrage his readers. One
can only hope that those who claim to love and support the state
of Israel will not only read, but study, this important book.
Not to make anyone feel ashamed, but so that even Israel's most
ardent supporters will understand that no nation can brutalize,
indeed terrorize, an innocent people forever.
The Second Palestinian Intifada
is available in many gift shops across the US and Europe, and
can be obtained from Amazon.com, plutobooks.com, and other online
venues.
Fred A. Wilcox is an associate professor in the writing
department at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. He is the editor
and author of many books. He has spent his entire adult life
writing and teaching about war and nonviolence. His book: Waiting
for an Army To Die, was chosen by the American Library Association
as among its "most notable books" in two categories.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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