Heading Toward a Second Nakba

 

  "No one wanted to kill those children

along with one of their teachers. Israeli
rescuers and soldiers who finally
reached the accident site did their best
to save the injured. But the central point
of Thrall’s narrative is that this disaster,
like today’s ongoing violence in the
Palestinian territories in general, was
a predictable, even inevitable, outcome
of the occupation system in its quotidian
forms. It is a regime of state terror
whose raison d’être is the theft of Palestinian
land and, whenever possible, the
expulsion of its Palestinian owners. I
have seen this system in operation over
the course of the past twenty- odd year

One of the mysteries attendant on
Israel’s decades- long occupation
of the Palestinian West Bank (and indirectly
of Gaza) is that relatively few
people know that reality for what it is.
Mainstream Israelis by and large don’t
want to know, though the West Bank
is only a few miles from the big Israeli
cities. Outside of Israel, an efficient
smokescreen created by the Israeli
government has largely hidden that
reality from the world. Those who do
know it well, from the inside, are Palestinians
living under the occupation
and human rights and peace activists,
both Israeli and Palestinian, who are
regularly present there."

READ REVIEW BY DAVID SCHULMAN