A review by reads2cope
A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Esther Farmer, Sarah Sills

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