Selecting Conflicts

Anti-Palestinianism infests the book from cover to cover as the author recycles every tired Zionist misconception about the Palestinians in a new disguise: the Hamas-Fatah rivalry. [...]we read that the PLO and its factions became the preeminent model for terrorism in the modern era and that violence in the name of Palestinian nationalism has led to death and destruction in nearly every territory that the Palestinians have inhabited (p. 8). Furthermore, all of this is woven into a decontextualizing and ideological approach. Because any oppressive occupational context or brutal Israeli policy against the Palestinians is ignored, the reader is left with the impression of a strange Palestinian people acting and reacting with inexplicable violence and terrorism. Pipes, one of the authors mentors, praises the book because it properly redirects the focus of Israel/Palestine studies and wonders why such a small and obscure (p. xv) population (the Palestinian people) has attracted so much international attention. Since the aim of this anti-Palestinian paradigm is to deconstruct any notion of Palestinian nationalism, identity, and coherence, both mentor and disciple attack Rashid Khalidi and his assertion of a unied Palestinian identity.