Reviews

A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Esther Farmer, Sarah Sills

virginia_vex's review against another edition

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

thursdayleroux's review

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

maestro_cerrotorcido's review

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense slow-paced

4.5

If you are someone who is new to the occupation of Palestine and don't like reading academic works on history, I think this is a great book to start with. It has a short history of the occupation and then it is a culmination of stories and poems from Palestinians and anti-zionist Jews.

clovelatte's review

challenging dark informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

madding78's review

challenging informative medium-paced

5.0

berkls2's review

challenging emotional informative inspiring medium-paced

4.5

reads2cope's review

4.0

The beginning was very well explained history, but it didn’t say anything new and so took me a while to get through. Once I got to the stories, I found the book harder to put down.

That said, these pieces became very jarring to whiplash between personal stories of displacement, murdered friends and family, destroyed homes, arrests without charges, abuse at checkpoints, and more, with a slow awakening to the truth of Zionism and the emotional difficulties that presented in a Zionist family or community. One of the most confusing was Talia Baurer, who explained she didn’t join her schools chapter of Students For Justice In Palestine because she was insecure about not knowing enough about the issues, then visited Israel again and had her eyes fully opened on a trip to the West Bank, as well as watching the destruction of “Operation Protective Edge” online, and so returned to co-found a Jewish Voice For Peace chapter at her university. I am so curious why she felt that she needed to be a founder when SJP already existed there and she had even considered joining the semester prior. I was even more confused when she wrapped up her piece saying, “As a white Jew in the United States, I must enter into this struggle following the leadership of Palestinian people who face the horrors of occupation, oppression, and apartheid every day in Palestine and Israel.” Wouldn’t that mean joining existing groups, rather than founding your own?

In another stark example, David Bragin explains how he could not see Palestinians as human until he visited a Christian Palestinian village and people invited him into their homes. Of course, we need to fight against dehumanization of Arabs and especially Palestinians that is so baked into Western culture, but I wonder if articles like these are helpful to the readers, or more helpful to the writers.

I didn’t keep great records as it took me a few months to get it back from the library and read again, but some favorites I remember were from: HALA ALYAN, DORGHAM ABUSALIM, NAOMI SHIHAB NYE, ROSALIND PETCHESKY, LAMA KHOURI, RIHAM BARGHOUTI

marcymurli's review against another edition

5.0

This is such a significant collection. From Noura Erakat's forward to essays by Palestinian Jews who are from Palestine before the Zionist colonization of the land. This collection of poetry, photos, essays, and oral histories are compiled beautifully to demonstrate the relationship between Zionism and those who have been subjected to the ideology - Palestinians and Jews alike. It's a critical tool for those who want to work against the apartheid regime.

howdyhoward's review against another edition

4.0

I didn't expect the first almost 30% of this book to be a history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, but I'm really glad it was included. This was one of the most succinct and scorching accounts I've read and it taught me a lot about Jewish immigration to Israel/Palestine, especially the treatment of racialized Jews who were used to bolster the Jewish population and then discarded and mistreated because they were not Ashkenazi. This collection is worth it for this history section alone and it brought my enjoyment of it up significantly.

The introduction/history as well as the appendices and timelines at the back take up approximately 50% of this already very short book, leaving only about 90 pages for 30 essays, stories, and poems. This meant that many of the essays were quite short and to me felt surface level. I wish a lot of the essays had taken more time to expand their points and dig deeper. My favorite essays by far were the few that were longer than just a few pages. I think this collection suffered from being so short, and should either have included less authors, or simply allowed for a longer collection altogether.

degeneratefromnj's review

reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

This is geared more for Jews questioning zionism or against it and perhaps trying to look for ways to help other people figure out how to escape that brainwashing/ideology. I don’t know if there’s a point to read this for any other audience unless they’re curious or lacking perspective, in which case I would direct them straight to explicitly Palestinian works.