Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Norman G. Finkelstein

Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict Reviews

• 
  Carlos

  This is by far the best political-science book I have ever read, and especially considering that is on such a controversial topic and one on which so much has already been written. What surprised, and pleased, me most about the book was Finkelstein’s style to use another author’s book as a foil to discuss aspects that he thinks they got wrong. This was absolutely fascinating to me because it accomplished two aims at once: it introduces the reader to what the opposing side has to say and it also shows on what crucial facts it is that the author disagrees with them. Similarly, Finkelstein goes deep into the history and mythos of Zionist to show just how deplorable it was to modern sensibilities and yet, how, similar it was to the mythos of the US’ formative years. Lastly, because US-policies have so closely aligned with Israel’s, it was incredibly new to hear what the opposition has to say and I have to admit that Finkelstein makes a great argument and makes the reader question the myth of the “outrageous” hatred that Palestinians have against Israel.
• 
  John Millard

  Similar in nature to other works by Chomsky (he helped with this book a bit) this book seems well documented and logically presented. True Israel has had many problems since it's birth and concordant with those problems has been the issue of admitting actions and dealing with fall out from the international community. This day and age is much more like living under a microscope then any other time in history. Other peoples similar issues with culpability are discussed briefly and it is clear that this book is more about a human issue then one of Israel or any other nation for that matter. I would pose that right now the whole of humanity is in a situation where we are avoiding the issue of Global Warming. For years we (most of us anyway) has realized the ludicrous nature of a healthy economy (the faster you burn up natural resources and pollute the healthier your economy is). Like a smoker who is avoiding the obvious conclusion of his continued activity we humans are hiding our heads in the sand. Israel is using force and so is the United States and others who wield power. That might be just human nature; the beast within which must have a voice. If so we will probably perish or at least be left wallowing in our own filth as our planet heats up to a point of not being able to grow our crops which sustain us. This book is enlightening and informative and a significant read for anyone connected to the Israeli/Arab conflict (I raised two Jewish boys from my first Jewish wife). The kind of obfuscation of rhetoric that garnered a long shelf life in the past will not fly under today's scrutiny of bytes. All peoples must find a more open and honest way of dealing with each other in many arenas or I fear we are doomed to an early death much like that of the chain smoker (yea, I quit about 16 months ago).
• 
  Peter

  This is an absolutely essential book for anyone even vaguely interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Though Finkelstein's tone can often be unnecessarily strident, his research is impeccable.
• 
  Antony Monir

  This guy is ruthless. He actually uses facts and logic to destroy ppl’s arguments to a point that it’s sad. In fact, he is so thorough in destroying people that the book got boring at some points. Like straight up pages after pages of him enumerating the errors of other authors. If you want to read a book exposing myths that have been perpetuated by important writing regarding the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the book for you. This guy is a menace I wouldn’t wanna start a fight with him he’d find out my deepest secrets and expose me. Final rating : 4/5
• 
  Sarah

  "Polemical" is right. And, if I'm being honest, that's why I read Finkelstein's works--something about his scathing sarcasm and his righteous fury is just so much fun for me to read. And he will pull no punches and spare no feelings when it comes to exposing the two things he seems to hate most: hypocrisy and bad scholarship.
  
  So yeah, I enjoyed this book. I particularly enjoyed the analysis of Zionism and the absolute crushing of Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial. If you're interested in the Israel/Palestine conflict, and you don't mind a little scholarly ranting, I would definitely recommend this book.
• 
  Candace

  "We are beautiful: but we must shoot to kill- but not before we go through an agonizing search of our own tormented soul"
  
  This quote and hundreds more are woven in this book, of understanding the truth and lies that surround the Israel-Palestine conflict.
  
  Perhaps, the most disturbing truth and grand scheme of this conflict and human weakness... is simply that, we are all flesh and blood.... require the same essentials for living and thriving.... and yet, throughout history, there are groups of people who think that they are the divine prince's of fake, invented royalty.... and any means, to obtain and sustain that imaginary kingdom.
• 
  Kevin

  A devastating rebuttal of the ludicrous notion (still floating around in some quarters of the US) that Palestine was largely unpopulated when confronted with Zionist colonization, and a powerful analysis of the conflict as a whole.
• 
  Michal Lipták

  Includes the famous and justified trashing of
  From Time Immemorial, and critical distillation of other such studies dripping with hypocricy. At points, Finkelstein's fury is almost unbearable, the best example being the point after he presents tearful humanist soliloquies of Israeli soldiers after 1967 war, traumatized that Arabs "forced" them to "hate them":
  
  

  We have seen that, for Shapira, the ethos exemplified in
  The Seventh Day morally redeemed labor Zionism. Yet (1) its practical moral significance was nil, and (2) the same ethos informed Nazism.

  
  
  He then proceeds with extensive quotes of repulsive figures such as Hoess, concerning how they abhored what happened in Auschwitz, how Final Solution was forced on them, or how the condemned wanton sadism. The analogy strikes me as far over the top, though it's difficult to dismiss it completely, coming from a child of survivors of Majdanek and Auschwitz.
  
  In any case, the overall feel of Finkelstein's book is that of Israel being a land beyond looking glass, where notions of right and wrong, of victim and oppressor, are inverted. This inverted land is Israel as it exists Western liberal consciousness. To point to the most glaring point - after reading this and other books on Six Day War, it strikes me as utterly incomprehensible how can a blatant war of conquest be such universally (mis)understood as defensive war.
  
  Or how can Golda Meir's famous quote about "being forced to kill Arab children" circulate widely and not be condemned as admission of murder of innocent civilians, but - on contrary - be seen as admission of tragic fate which elicits sympathy for the killer!
  
  Simply put - once again - Israel is colonial regime. As colonial regime, it's both fascinating since it displays power and ingenuity, and is morally reprehensible as all colonial regimes are. One could argue that the colonization of Palestine is not more reprehensible than colonization of Americas or Australia or - for example - Belgian Congo, which had clearly genocidal consequences. One could also have sympathy for Zionist cause in lights of utter horrors of anti-Semitism - not only its culmination in Holocaust, but its overall prevalence in Europe for centuries. But even though one may admit that the presence of 20th century framework of human rights mitigates potential colonial excesses, it doesn't make it especially enlightened. In post-WWII framework we know that only just solution is decolonization. That doesn't mean uprooting of settlers anywhere - but it does mean eschewing colonial framework and its hierarchies.
  
  Schizophrenia of authors analyzed in this book is easily solved as soon as the matter of Israel and Palestine, too, is approached consistently within this post-WWII axiological configuration. With one's eyes fixed on justice, there'll be no contradiction.
• 
  Samantha

  Searing and concise, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict challenges the pro-Israeli narrative of the titular conflict in no uncertain terms. Chapter by chapter it demolishes the basic tenets of Israel's "official" history (I. e., that Palestine was not meaningfully "inhabited" before Jewish migration, that Israel did not "expel" the Palestinians from their homes in 1948, that Israel's aggression towards it's neighbors is essentially defensive, etc) and puts the popular and scholarly accounts of that history, and their methods, under severe scrutiny. Of course, the "critical" or "dissenting" view of the Israel-Palestine conflict is not only espoused by a few isolated voices in the wilderness. (Avi Schlaim's The Iron Wall is a particularly notable example.) Image and Reality shows that Israel from its founding has been a de facto colonizing power, and has never intended to live side-by-side with the indigenous Arab population. As with many accounts of this nature, there's a lot to be angry about here, from Israel's frequent "doubling down" on aggressive measures when offered any kind of compromise with the Palestinians or with neighboring countries, to the US's reflexive siding with Israel regardless of its actions. However, it seems at times here that the tone is a bit too angry, that Finkelstein delights a bit too much in taking down the subjects of his critiques. His analysis is incisive if harsh. As this was originally published in 1995, I found it interesting that Finkelstein held a rather dim view of the Oslo peace process, particularly given today's realities.
• 
  Guy H

  Full disclosure: I only read Chapters 1 and 3 of the 1995 edition.
  
  The bulk of the book consists of cherry picking sources and facts that fit an anti-Israel agenda, while ignoring anything that complicates that narrative. Finkelstein is correct in saying that official Zionist documents must be evaluated with a critical eye, but Finkelstein's method is uncritical in the opposite direction. He takes the stance that anything that a Zionist has ever said cannot be trusted unless, of course, that Zionist leader or publication is saying something damning to the pro-Israel argument.
  
  Finkelstein appears ill-fitted for the task of separating image from reality. All of his arguments are from selected secondary sources. He never quotes primary sources unless he found them quoted in a secondary source. This leads me to think that Finkelstein never examined any primary sources for himself and almost certainly does not know Arabic or Hebrew.
  
  Other oddities of the book include false dichotomies, putting words into other scholars' mouths, comparisons of the Palestinian exodus to the Holocaust, conclusions that do not follow from stated premises, retrofitting events that happened in the 1920s and 1930s into the context of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, treating Zionists as though they were a homogeneous group of fascists, and fabricating false information.
• 
  Oleg Yuzvik

  I have only read 6% of the book (Kindle version) but it was enough to see that the author has a personal agenda and clearly lacks objectivity. Reading the book feels like participating in an argument where the author yells his facts on you and tries to persuade you by any means that his position is right. This is not what I expected from this book. I thought it would give me an impartial perspective on the subject but it failed to do so. If you look for an objective analysis of the conflict - look elsewhere.
• 
  Seth

  If you want to understand the conflict between Israel and her neighbors, you need this book -- it's as simple as that.
• 
  Farouk Abu Alhana

  It's a great book and dispels many of the pervading myths and lies about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it can get a little tedious to read a times due to the amount of details Finkelstein gives.
• 
  Umer Iftikhar

  'The most comprehensive book on the Palestine-Israel issue.' - Noam Chomsky
• 
  Mona Dennaoui

  It took a while to read it cause life + intense book, but finally finished! This is not your typical handbook about the Palestine-Israel situation that would just throw common knowledge at you, instead the author chooses to critically analyse famous studies on the subject (zionist ones and non-zionist) such as Peter's "From time immemorial" and Benny Morris' "Birth". Finkelstein also takes on Abba Eban's discourse, an Israeli diplomat who is authoritative on foreign affairs.
  Every Zionist lie, every fraud, Finkelstein tackles them with facts. For example, Joan Peter's study (saying this one is a fraud is a euphemism) basically states how Palestinians were never on this land before the Jews and how they came from mass immigration. Finkelstein deconstructs such arguments by redirecting the reader towards databases. To add to this, the book is full of side notes that give needed additional information, which is one more reason why this book is intense. It is also intense because it definitely is not for people who just started learning about the situation. Indeed, you will find an acronym for such organization here, an event that is not discussed in details in the book but is necessary to understand the point there. It is much easier to understand the content of this book if one knows more about Palestinian politics for instance, especially when it comes to understanding the Oslo agreements and how Palestine "agreed" upon it though most Palestinians were against it.
• 
  Sabrarf

  Must-read book about the conflict! Very well articulated. I should admit it was harder than any other books I read about the conflict. It took me longer than usual since there are references to other books which you have to know a little bit to fully understand it.
• 
  Tatiana

  If you've ever wanted to see what a footnote takedown looks like, or what footnotes are for, you should read this. I was looking for a primer on the conflict, but as a bonus I got to watch him meticulously pull apart other books on the subject.
• 
  Salwa

  I think this is an indispensable read to anyone interested in knowing (almost) everything about the middle east conflict, from the end of the British mandate to the 1995 Oslo agreement.
  I have never tried reading "serious" books before, but this was definitely a nice experience. Very well written, it guides you through the history of the region, as objectively as one can do, denouncing all the lies that we have been told throughout the years.
  I liked the very methodic and clear way the author had of unveiling the truth. I would be interested in checking out some of the quotations he used, some of them just seemed too revolting to be true.
  I remain baffled by some of the things I read, I had no idea how insane this whole thing really was.
  
• 
  l

  When Finkelstein has a point, he really goes all in. It's all kinds of impressive, really.