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Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination - Book Review
by Jim Miles
Palestine Chronicle

The story of Palestine is poorly represented in western media, generally taken out of context and generally - as a strong cohort to the lack of context - with a strong bias in favour of the Israeli perspective. That perspective in short is that of Arab terrorist aggression against the ‘democratic’ Israeli state, the victim. There is an increasing library of well written material that denies that simplistic view and ties it into the longer course of Zionist history. A new addition to this library, “The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination” provides a concise, clear, and valuable summary... More > to the context.

It highlights the Zionist intent to deny the Palestinians their lands and their democratic rights, using several methods of persuasion. The argument of the Arab people being “barbarians” and lacking in “modernity” is accompanied by the even more illusory position that the land was essentially unoccupied. The corollary is that from the biblical perspective, the land belonged to the Jewish people, a belief that provided much sanctimonious support from western countries. From that, the Palestinians were consistently denied the right of self-determination, regardless of the fine sounding rhetoric of the League of Nations and the various committees and commissions that worked on the problem.

Jeremy Hammond has provided an excellent precis of the many letters, commissions, agreements, and discussions that occurred prior to the nakba. Well referenced, using original source material, his theme is well supported. His “goal here is to dispel a number of persistent myths about the conflict and establish through examination of the historical record that its root cause is the rejection by Zionist Jews, Great Britain, the United States, and even the United Nations of Arab Palestinians’ right to self-determination.” From that thesis, “must follow rejection of the view that the violence is inevitable and there can be no solution.”

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