The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years

The Palestinian friends Finkelstein made during his numerous visits to the occupied territories are not the terrorists and stone-throwing thugs of news stories, but hardworking, sensitive family men and women who want only to live in freedom and with respect. ""History will not forgive what was done to the innocent people of Palestine,"" his friend Moussa tells him after the 1993 Oslo agreement. ""We lost everything because everyone was against us. Even our leadership."" Finkelstein can be sententious, especially when he compares the Palestinians to the Cherokee Nation, and when he explores the double standard with which the international community views Israel and the Palestinians. But as the son of Holocaust survivors, he brings a unique perspective to his subject; he sees the intifada as analogous to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and Yitzhak Shamir's reaction to the death of civilians on a bus overturned by a vengeful Gazan as similar to that of Josef Goebbels's to the incident that provoked Kristallnacht. Taken out of context, it's appalling, but Finkelstein is trying to show the Palestinians as victims of an arbitrary, senseless and cruel Israeli government whose actions are designed to ""reduce them to despair and force them to go away."" (Dec.)