On February 1, 2010, The Free Gaza Movement opened an Amazon account with eight of the best books and novels written about Palestine since Edward Said’s brilliant memoir, Out of Place was released in 1999. These books seldom see the light of Oprah or get a display in bookstores. The authors are Palestinian, Israeli and Jewish and all write about the dispossession and ongoing ethnic cleansing of a people who have paid a heavy price for the founding of the state of Israel.
Each book costs between $10.00 ad $20.00, and you not only support wonderful authors and passionate storytellers, but 15% of every sale will go to help keep our boats afloat.
Please consider buying as gifts and as support for Palestine. Go to www.freegaza.org, and on the home page in the lower left-hand corner is the Amazon link. Click on any book, and its description, cost and details will be there.
For your consideration, we have copied some of the information about eight diverse books and listed them from most recent back to 1999.
Gaza Beneath the Bombs, Sharyn Lock The Israeli offensive in Gaza was described by Amnesty international as "22 days of death and destruction." Sharyn Lock's eye-witness account brings home the horror of life in Gaza beneath the bombs.
Lock went to the Gaza strip as volunteer, thinking the greatest danger she faced was sneaking past the Israeli sea blockade in a fishing boat, but soon after her arrival Israel attacked Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants by land, air and sea. With others from the International Solidarity Movement, Lock volunteered with Palestinian ambulances, assisting them as they faced overwhelming civilian casualties. Her candid and dramatic blog from Gaza gave the world an insight into the conflict that the mainstream media -- unable to enter Gaza – couldn’t provide and a view of a people who face their oppression not only with courage but with humor.
My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, A Novel, Ramzy Baroud More than a tribute to his father, this book is a chronicle of the bravery and resiliance of the Palestinians of Gaza. Seen through his father’s eyes as he became a refugee fleeing to Gaza from his home in what is now Israel, the book haunts the reader about what could have been.
As Noam Chomsky writes about this novel, “Ramzy Baroud's sensitive, thoughtful, searching writing penetrates to the core of moral dilemmas that their intended audiences evade at their peril. Few are spared his perceptive eye, and only the morally callous will fail to respond to his pleas to look into the mirror honestly, to question comforting beliefs that protect us from facing our elementary responsibilities, and to act to remedy the terrible misery and injustice that he exposes to our view, as we surely can." -- Noam Chomsky
Mornings in Jenin, A Novel, Susan Abulhawa In this richly detailed, beautiful and resonant novel examining the Palestinian and Jewish conflicts from the mid-20th century to 2002, Abulhawa gives the terrible conflict a human face. The tale opens with Amal staring down the barrel of a soldier's gun—and moves backward to present the history that preceded that moment. In 1941 Palestine, Amal's grandparents are living on an olive farm in the village of Ein Hod. Their oldest son, Hasan, is best friends with a refugee Jewish boy, Ari Perlstein as WWII rages elsewhere.
But in May 1948, the Jewish state of Israel is proclaimed, and Ein Hod, founded in 1189 C.E., was cleared of its Palestinians... and the residents moved to Jenin refugee camp, where Amal is born. Through her eyes we experience the indignities and sufferings of the Palestinian refugees and also friendship and love. Abulhawa makes a great effort to empathize with all sides and tells an affecting and important story that succeeds as both literature and social commentary.
Witness in Palestine, A Jewish-American woman in the Occupied Territories, Anna Baltzer Anna Baltzer, a young Jewish American, went to the West Bank to discover the realities of daily life for Palestinians under the occupation. What she found would change her outlook on the conflict forever. She wrote this book to give voice to the stories of the people who welcomed her with open arms as their lives crumbled around them. For eight months, Baltzer lived and worked with farmers, Palestinian and Israeli activists, and the families of political prisoners, traveling with them across endless checkpoints and roadblocks to reach hospitals, universities, and olive groves.
Baltzer witnessed firsthand the environmental devastation brought on by expanding settlements and outposts and the destruction wrought by Israel s separation barrier, which divides many families from each other, their communities, their land, and basic human services. What emerges from Baltzer's account is a compelling and inspiring description of the trials of daily life under Israeli occupation.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe, In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe does not mince words, accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity beginning in the 1948 war for independence, and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet, in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units led by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the "architect of ethnic cleansing."
The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948-49 was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. Framing his argument with accepted international and UN definitions of ethnic cleansing, Pappe follows with an excruciatingly detailed account of Israeli military involvement in the demolition and depopulation of hundreds of villages, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants. Pappe argues that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today, and calls for the unconditional return of all Palestinian refugees and an end to the Israeli occupation. Without question, Pappe's account will provoke ire from many readers; importantly, it will spark discussion as well.
Married to Another Man, Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine, Ghada Kharmi, Two rabbis,visiting Palestine in 1897observed that the land was like a bride,"beautiful,but married to another man". By which they meant that, if a place was to be found for Israel in Palestine,where would the people of Palestine go? This is a dilemma that Israel has never been able to resolve. No conflict today is more dangerous than that between Israel and the Palestinians. The implications it has for regional and global security cannot be overstated. The peace process as we know it is dead and no solution is in sight.
Nor, as this book argues, will that change until everyone involved in finding a solution accepts the real causes of conflict, and its consequences on the ground. Leading writer Ghada Karmi explains in fascinating detail the difficulties Israel's existence created for the Arab world and why the search for a solution has been so elusive. Ultimately,she argues that the conflict will end only once the needs of both Arabs and Israelis are accommodated equally. Her startling conclusions overturn conventional thinking-but they are hard to refute.
The Lemon Tree, An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East, Sandy Tolan, Tolan offers listeners an easy-to-follow journey through a maddeningly stubborn conflict that has infused global politics since the 1940s. Based on his 1998 NPR documentary, Tolan personalizes the Arab-Israeli conflict by tracing the intertwined lives of a Palestinian refugee named Bashir Al-Khairi and a Jewish settler named Dalia Eshkenazi Landau. The pair is connected through a stone home in Ramla, now part of Israel. Built in the 1930s by Bashir's father, the Al-Khairi family was forced to flee during the violent formation of Israel in 1948. The Eshkenazis, Holocaust survivors from Bulgaria, became the new owners.
After 1967's Six Day War, Bashir showed up and Dalia invited him in and began an intense dialogue that's lasted four decades. Tolan's evenhanded narration imparts the passion of both sides without slipping into impassioned delivery. One of Tolan's most moving passages chronicles Dalia’s 20-mile trip to Ramallah to visit Bashir. Their seemingly simple conversation, rendered with just the right amount of heart, crystallizes and humanizes the positions of each side.
Out of Place, A Memoir, Edward Said, Those expecting an account of Said's intellectual development will be disappointed; apart from the final 50 pages, which deal with Said's education at Princeton and Harvard, Out of Place is, as Said himself says, primarily "a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world, my early life."
It is this carefully disclosed record that accounts for Said's deeply ambivalent relationship with both his family and the Palestinian cause. Composed in the light of serious illness, Out of Place is an elegantly written reflection on a life that has movingly come to terms with "being not quite right and out of place."
--
Greta Berlin
www.freegaza.org
