Simple action, 02 Jan 2009
There is never a dull moment in this book. From the starting page, which opens with a full scale battle, to the last, which reminisces on life after Al Amarah, it is incredibly interesting and exciting. Even during the ceasefire the book is gripping. Sgt. Mills combines action and good ol' British humour to make a winning story, devoid of any political messages. The one thing it did to on that ground, however, was reinforce my faith in our military. Having thought that men were dieing for no reason in Iraq, this stark realisation of what life is really like in a regime under someone like Muqtada al Sadr convinced me that at least some of what our government does there has a point.

it's real, 31 Dec 2008
The best book to date on the Iraq war from the soldier's view on the ground

Fantastic Read...you wont put it down!, 30 Dec 2008
This is one of the best accounts of modern day soldiering and the pressures they are under on a day to day basis.

I can definitely recommended this book if you are looking for a realistic and frank account of what happens in modern warfare.

some peace keeping tour, 29 Dec 2008
sniper one is a must read for any fan of military memoirs, sgt dan mills doesnt waste any time at all launching straight into the action, indeed as soon as they arrive in iraq they find themselves in contact after contact with every patrol, the writing really delivers, explaining every detail of modern british army equipment and slang effectively, he manages to pull you straight in alongside the regiment under siege.
the fact that the besieging enemy though there was a regiment of sas holed up in cimic house, speaks volumes about the ferocity and bravery of the british regiment, whom sgt mills has most definitely placed on the map. i actually found it quite shocking how unreported the actions detailed in the book were, and can understand why the mod would want to play them down, to maintain the illusion of peace, but if you were in any doubt as to the capabilities of the modern british army then look no further.

Easily the best book I've ever read, 08 Dec 2008
Not that I read a lot of books, but I wasn't able to put this one down. A gripping account of what our boys are actually doing out there, at times my heart was beating out of chest as I flipped pages over as quickly as I could to find out what happened next. Very well written and a must read, even if, just to get an insight on what actually goes on out there. Our boys are doing us proud.

Simple action, 02 Jan 2009
There is never a dull moment in this book. From the starting page, which opens with a full scale battle, to the last, which reminisces on life after Al Amarah, it is incredibly interesting and exciting. Even during the ceasefire the book is gripping. Sgt. Mills combines action and good ol' British humour to make a winning story, devoid of any political messages. The one thing it did to on that ground, however, was reinforce my faith in our military. Having thought that men were dieing for no reason in Iraq, this stark realisation of what life is really like in a regime under someone like Muqtada al Sadr convinced me that at least some of what our government does there has a point.

it's real, 31 Dec 2008
The best book to date on the Iraq war from the soldier's view on the ground

Fantastic Read...you wont put it down!, 30 Dec 2008
This is one of the best accounts of modern day soldiering and the pressures they are under on a day to day basis.

I can definitely recommended this book if you are looking for a realistic and frank account of what happens in modern warfare.

some peace keeping tour, 29 Dec 2008
sniper one is a must read for any fan of military memoirs, sgt dan mills doesnt waste any time at all launching straight into the action, indeed as soon as they arrive in iraq they find themselves in contact after contact with every patrol, the writing really delivers, explaining every detail of modern british army equipment and slang effectively, he manages to pull you straight in alongside the regiment under siege.
the fact that the besieging enemy though there was a regiment of sas holed up in cimic house, speaks volumes about the ferocity and bravery of the british regiment, whom sgt mills has most definitely placed on the map. i actually found it quite shocking how unreported the actions detailed in the book were, and can understand why the mod would want to play them down, to maintain the illusion of peace, but if you were in any doubt as to the capabilities of the modern british army then look no further.

Easily the best book I've ever read, 08 Dec 2008
Not that I read a lot of books, but I wasn't able to put this one down. A gripping account of what our boys are actually doing out there, at times my heart was beating out of chest as I flipped pages over as quickly as I could to find out what happened next. Very well written and a must read, even if, just to get an insight on what actually goes on out there. Our boys are doing us proud.

Massive, meticulous and magisterial, 03 Nov 2008
Probably one of the few books to which the overused `tour de force' can rightly be applied, Fisk's massive tome is as thorough an exploration of the labyrinthine twists and turns of recent Middle East history as you could hope to find. From the Armenian genocide and mandate Palestine to the Iran/Iraq war and meetings with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains, Fisk leaves no stone unturned in his examination of how the failures of Western policy and Arab/Muslim infighting alike have shaped the region's destiny. He rides shotgun with the Russian army on patrol in Afghanistan; gets caught up in bombardment on the frontline in the Iran-Iraq war; and `returns to sender' fragments of American Hawkeye missile used by the Israeli army to destroy a civilian military ambulance in Lebanon: whatever subject he tackles here, Fisk is never dull. From time to time he bludgeons the reader with a welter of detail and the sheer force of his argument, but he is fired by a righteous anger at the deceit, duplicity and sheer failure to learn the lessons of history that would be sad - if only their consequences weren't so deadly.

angry, 22 Sep 2008
By gum is this man angry. I took six months to read this book last year (nad yes it was worth it). Each time I opened it I sunk slightly further into depression as I understood more of the evil man does to man in the name of an ideal, or imperial self-interest, or tribal loyalty, or religious fealty, or a sense of post-colonial national inferiority.

I would recommend that anyone who expresses half an interest in what motivates bright young men (usually) with a future before them to fly aircraft into tall buildings to read this book.

It will depress you. It will enlighten you.

Robert Fisk, of all western journalists, has the moral authority to carry off a book like this. He has lived through most of the post-World War II horrors in this region.

My only (albeit slight) criticism is the lack of photgraphs - you can access some on his web-site, but it would be illuminating to see in pictures some of the episodes his words desribe.

Please read this - it will help you understand the complexities facing our government and 'brave boys' in Afghanistan and Iraq right now. But for the grace of God...

Wide-ranging, if biased, view of the Middle-East, 07 Sep 2008
The job of a journalists arguably has two functions; to report on what is going on in the world and to explain why it is happening. Robert Fisk does a fairly good job fulfilling the first role. In his thirty years of reporting from the Middle-East he managed to be at most of the scenes of conflict and upheaval. The "why," however, is really where he falls down. Here he tends to take the sort of infantile approach favoured by someone like George Galloway. He takes the simplistic view, believing that all this conflict can be simply traced to the West. And by the West he means the USA, Israel of course and things like the settlement imposed by Western countries like Britain and France on the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.

At times, this bias reaches a ludicrous level. Take this exert:

" In Lebanon in the mid-1980s, in Algeria and then Bosnia, our protection as neutral correspondents had disintegrated. We were abducted, murdered because we were Westerners or because we were regarded as combatants. Two months before I was beaten at Kila Abdulla, I had attempted to interview a Muslim cleric in a village mosque outside Peshwar. " Why are you taking this kaffir into our mosque?" a bearded man had shouted at the mullah. I conducted the interview outside the building. But I was a kaffir. So was Pearl. So, it seemed, were we all. Where did it all go wrong?
I have always believed the rot started in Vietnam..."

This is classic Fisk. He manages to go from one anti-Western tirade, to another, without managing to notice that, in the middle he gives substantial evidence that there are other people in the world with prejudiced, totalitarian mindsets, people who are not Western. But he finds himself strangely reluctant to criticize them. Why? Does he take the patronizing approach that only the West can be criticized?

This is one of the great weaknesses of this book. An informed observer would know that Arabs are indigineous to one country in the world, the Arabian peninsula, now known as Saudi Arabia. Virtually every county which became Arabic ( or indeed Islamic) became so due to military invasion. This huge exercise in Arab Imperialism should be kept in mind, if only to put in perspective the endless accusations of imperialism Fisk charges the West with. And this is not simply a matter of historical, academic interest. The ideology which fuelled these conquests, Islamism, is being revived, in fact, it never really went away.

At times, this book creates the illusion that it is well-researched. For instance, he quotes missile serial numbers with great accuracy but I recall that elsewhere he tells you that the first sentence of the Koran is " There is no G_d but G_d and Muhammad is his prophet."
This is the Shahadaah, the Islamic declaration of faith. Actually the opening is known as the Fatiha; something totally different. A howler on this scale shows how little Mr Fisk knows about Islam.

Anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that The Koran is not in chronological order; chronologically, the first lines of the Qur'an are in sura 96. In fact, the suras of the Koran can be very clearly divided into two groups. The first date from the Meccan phase of Muhammed's career when he was simply a preacher. The second date from the Medinna period when he became a military and political leader.


I am not the only one to notice Mr Fisk's capacity for factual inaccuracy.
Take , Efraim Karsh , author of "Islamic Imperialism: a history,"

In his review of "The Great War for Civilization: The conquest of the Middle-East," he states

" It is difficult to turn a page of The Great War for Civilisation without encountering some basic error. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not, as Fisk has it, in Jerusalem. The Caliph Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, was murdered in the year 661, not in the 8th century. Emir Abdallah became king of Transjordan in 1946, not 1921, and both he and his younger brother, King Faisal I of Iraq, hailed not from a "Gulf tribe" but rather from the Hashemites on the other side of the Arabian peninsula. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, not 1962; Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed by the British authorities, not elected; Ayatollah Khomeini transferred his exile from Turkey to the holy Shiite city of Najaf not during Saddam Hussein's rule but fourteen years before Saddam seized power. Security Council resolution 242 was passed in November 1967, not 1968; Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, not 1977, and was assassinated in October 1981, not 1979. Yitzhak Rabin was minister of defense, not prime minister, during the first Palestinian intifada, and al Qaeda was established not in 1998 but a decade earlier. And so on and so forth."

Actually Fisk denies that he wrote that Jesus was born in Jerusalem and I must admit I didn't spot this. There are other mistakes, for instance, he states that Saladin was an Arab Warrior, when actually he was a Kurd. Fisk almost gives the impression that he has covered every major conflict in the Middle-East for the last thirty years. But where is the coverage of the ongoing slaugher in Darfur, for instance? Fisk's critics accuse him of factual inaccuracy and ideological bas and, I have to say, this book bears this out.


Whodunnit story of the middle east, 17 Jul 2008
I was reading this book on Christmas Day and a friend of mine noticed me doing this and remarked jokingly "have you worked out who did it yet?" I replied yes, you meet the guy who did it in the first chapter. The rest of the book is an examination of why.
The guy who did it is, of course, Osama bin-Laden and Fisk details his three meetings with him pre September 11th. As might be expected, he's analysed his interviews with hindsight to see if there was any indication he missed that might indicate what was being planned. There were some indications, but who could have believed that he was serious or doing other than boasting? Fisk printed his interviews with Osama bin-Laden before September 11th and they elicited no stir of opinion - nobody took his threats seriously or figured he'd be able to carry them out.
The rest of the book details why he did it. The history of pretty much every country in the middle east and an examination of how the west was and is complicit in shaping the problems that afflict the region now. Much of this Fisk tries to connect to his father, who fought in the first world war when the boundaries and spheres of influence that define the middle east today were set up. I get this - it's not hard to see - but I think he fails to connect his father explicitly to these events (he was only a soldier, after all, not a policymaker or diplomat) and these sections don't gel that well - Fisk is trying to come to some accommodation with his dead father, some closure with his father's death, which is all very well but sort of private, IMO.
But the rest of the book is well worth reading. A country by country account of the middle east (with the exception of Lebanon, as he's covered that in detail in another book) starting with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, going through The Gulf Wars, the Armenian Genocide, Israel, Algeria, etc. and ending with the American invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. Full circle.
Definitely worth reading. Sort of long, but you can read each chapter separately.

Thought provoking - a must read book, 16 Jun 2008
This is a mightily impressive book, though in no way an easy read. It's not just the size (nearly 1,300 pages) it's the unrelenting horror that Fisk decribes. Ongoing decriptions of the inhumanity and evil he has encountered either directly or from eye witness testiment makes it a painful read right upto the end of the book.
In the book Fisk takes through a history of the Middle East conflicts he has covered as a journalist in the past 30 years from the Soviet invasion of Afgahnistan through to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, including the Iran-Iraq war, Iraeli-Palistinian conflict, Algeria and also including a chapter on the Armenian genocide. Throughout there is a reference back to historical events that have shaped the conflict and this is interwoven with a personal history of his parents and especially Fisk's journey to find out more about his father and his service at the end of the 1st World War.
This though, is no straight historical account, Fisk is constantly giving his viewpoint. He pulls no punches and his utter contempt for the corrupt and despotic regimes in the region is only beaten by his ongoing contempt of the involvement of the West in the region (and specifically America's support of Israel). He expertly and consistently shows up the hypocrisy and the self serving power politics, and the awful results it has on the populations of the region. It is this that makes the book, giving it power and is what sets you thinking. At the end of it you cannot fail to have changed some of your views, or to feel more passionately about the issues (you'll listen more carefully to the next news bulletin from Gaza or the West Bank). I for one, though, cannot agree with all that he says and the arguments he makes. It is very easy to point out all the time where people have made mistakes, taken the wrong decisions (whether the motive was good or bad). It's altogether more difficult to praise people having to make difficult decisions when there can never be an bloodless outcome, or to suggest the best way forward. This is where I feel Fisk doesn't deliver. At the end of the book I knew the true horror of the conflicts, the problems and the suffering there is. What I didn't have any sense of was what's the best way forward. I would have hoped that a man of Fisk's integrity, intelligence and knowledge of the area could have given his thoughts and ideas on this. I think he could have given us some hope, but the end I couldn't find any.
Neverless, this beats an pure narrative account of the recent history of the Middle East, it draws you in, makes you empathise and feel involved. It makes you think and makes you care, and that is no small achievement.

Simple action, 02 Jan 2009
There is never a dull moment in this book. From the starting page, which opens with a full scale battle, to the last, which reminisces on life after Al Amarah, it is incredibly interesting and exciting. Even during the ceasefire the book is gripping. Sgt. Mills combines action and good ol' British humour to make a winning story, devoid of any political messages. The one thing it did to on that ground, however, was reinforce my faith in our military. Having thought that men were dieing for no reason in Iraq, this stark realisation of what life is really like in a regime under someone like Muqtada al Sadr convinced me that at least some of what our government does there has a point.

it's real, 31 Dec 2008
The best book to date on the Iraq war from the soldier's view on the ground

Fantastic Read...you wont put it down!, 30 Dec 2008
This is one of the best accounts of modern day soldiering and the pressures they are under on a day to day basis.

I can definitely recommended this book if you are looking for a realistic and frank account of what happens in modern warfare.

some peace keeping tour, 29 Dec 2008
sniper one is a must read for any fan of military memoirs, sgt dan mills doesnt waste any time at all launching straight into the action, indeed as soon as they arrive in iraq they find themselves in contact after contact with every patrol, the writing really delivers, explaining every detail of modern british army equipment and slang effectively, he manages to pull you straight in alongside the regiment under siege.
the fact that the besieging enemy though there was a regiment of sas holed up in cimic house, speaks volumes about the ferocity and bravery of the british regiment, whom sgt mills has most definitely placed on the map. i actually found it quite shocking how unreported the actions detailed in the book were, and can understand why the mod would want to play them down, to maintain the illusion of peace, but if you were in any doubt as to the capabilities of the modern british army then look no further.

Easily the best book I've ever read, 08 Dec 2008
Not that I read a lot of books, but I wasn't able to put this one down. A gripping account of what our boys are actually doing out there, at times my heart was beating out of chest as I flipped pages over as quickly as I could to find out what happened next. Very well written and a must read, even if, just to get an insight on what actually goes on out there. Our boys are doing us proud.

Massive, meticulous and magisterial, 03 Nov 2008
Probably one of the few books to which the overused `tour de force' can rightly be applied, Fisk's massive tome is as thorough an exploration of the labyrinthine twists and turns of recent Middle East history as you could hope to find. From the Armenian genocide and mandate Palestine to the Iran/Iraq war and meetings with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains, Fisk leaves no stone unturned in his examination of how the failures of Western policy and Arab/Muslim infighting alike have shaped the region's destiny. He rides shotgun with the Russian army on patrol in Afghanistan; gets caught up in bombardment on the frontline in the Iran-Iraq war; and `returns to sender' fragments of American Hawkeye missile used by the Israeli army to destroy a civilian military ambulance in Lebanon: whatever subject he tackles here, Fisk is never dull. From time to time he bludgeons the reader with a welter of detail and the sheer force of his argument, but he is fired by a righteous anger at the deceit, duplicity and sheer failure to learn the lessons of history that would be sad - if only their consequences weren't so deadly.

angry, 22 Sep 2008
By gum is this man angry. I took six months to read this book last year (nad yes it was worth it). Each time I opened it I sunk slightly further into depression as I understood more of the evil man does to man in the name of an ideal, or imperial self-interest, or tribal loyalty, or religious fealty, or a sense of post-colonial national inferiority.

I would recommend that anyone who expresses half an interest in what motivates bright young men (usually) with a future before them to fly aircraft into tall buildings to read this book.

It will depress you. It will enlighten you.

Robert Fisk, of all western journalists, has the moral authority to carry off a book like this. He has lived through most of the post-World War II horrors in this region.

My only (albeit slight) criticism is the lack of photgraphs - you can access some on his web-site, but it would be illuminating to see in pictures some of the episodes his words desribe.

Please read this - it will help you understand the complexities facing our government and 'brave boys' in Afghanistan and Iraq right now. But for the grace of God...

Wide-ranging, if biased, view of the Middle-East, 07 Sep 2008
The job of a journalists arguably has two functions; to report on what is going on in the world and to explain why it is happening. Robert Fisk does a fairly good job fulfilling the first role. In his thirty years of reporting from the Middle-East he managed to be at most of the scenes of conflict and upheaval. The "why," however, is really where he falls down. Here he tends to take the sort of infantile approach favoured by someone like George Galloway. He takes the simplistic view, believing that all this conflict can be simply traced to the West. And by the West he means the USA, Israel of course and things like the settlement imposed by Western countries like Britain and France on the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.

At times, this bias reaches a ludicrous level. Take this exert:

" In Lebanon in the mid-1980s, in Algeria and then Bosnia, our protection as neutral correspondents had disintegrated. We were abducted, murdered because we were Westerners or because we were regarded as combatants. Two months before I was beaten at Kila Abdulla, I had attempted to interview a Muslim cleric in a village mosque outside Peshwar. " Why are you taking this kaffir into our mosque?" a bearded man had shouted at the mullah. I conducted the interview outside the building. But I was a kaffir. So was Pearl. So, it seemed, were we all. Where did it all go wrong?
I have always believed the rot started in Vietnam..."

This is classic Fisk. He manages to go from one anti-Western tirade, to another, without managing to notice that, in the middle he gives substantial evidence that there are other people in the world with prejudiced, totalitarian mindsets, people who are not Western. But he finds himself strangely reluctant to criticize them. Why? Does he take the patronizing approach that only the West can be criticized?

This is one of the great weaknesses of this book. An informed observer would know that Arabs are indigineous to one country in the world, the Arabian peninsula, now known as Saudi Arabia. Virtually every county which became Arabic ( or indeed Islamic) became so due to military invasion. This huge exercise in Arab Imperialism should be kept in mind, if only to put in perspective the endless accusations of imperialism Fisk charges the West with. And this is not simply a matter of historical, academic interest. The ideology which fuelled these conquests, Islamism, is being revived, in fact, it never really went away.

At times, this book creates the illusion that it is well-researched. For instance, he quotes missile serial numbers with great accuracy but I recall that elsewhere he tells you that the first sentence of the Koran is " There is no G_d but G_d and Muhammad is his prophet."
This is the Shahadaah, the Islamic declaration of faith. Actually the opening is known as the Fatiha; something totally different. A howler on this scale shows how little Mr Fisk knows about Islam.

Anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that The Koran is not in chronological order; chronologically, the first lines of the Qur'an are in sura 96. In fact, the suras of the Koran can be very clearly divided into two groups. The first date from the Meccan phase of Muhammed's career when he was simply a preacher. The second date from the Medinna period when he became a military and political leader.


I am not the only one to notice Mr Fisk's capacity for factual inaccuracy.
Take , Efraim Karsh , author of "Islamic Imperialism: a history,"

In his review of "The Great War for Civilization: The conquest of the Middle-East," he states

" It is difficult to turn a page of The Great War for Civilisation without encountering some basic error. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not, as Fisk has it, in Jerusalem. The Caliph Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, was murdered in the year 661, not in the 8th century. Emir Abdallah became king of Transjordan in 1946, not 1921, and both he and his younger brother, King Faisal I of Iraq, hailed not from a "Gulf tribe" but rather from the Hashemites on the other side of the Arabian peninsula. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, not 1962; Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed by the British authorities, not elected; Ayatollah Khomeini transferred his exile from Turkey to the holy Shiite city of Najaf not during Saddam Hussein's rule but fourteen years before Saddam seized power. Security Council resolution 242 was passed in November 1967, not 1968; Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, not 1977, and was assassinated in October 1981, not 1979. Yitzhak Rabin was minister of defense, not prime minister, during the first Palestinian intifada, and al Qaeda was established not in 1998 but a decade earlier. And so on and so forth."

Actually Fisk denies that he wrote that Jesus was born in Jerusalem and I must admit I didn't spot this. There are other mistakes, for instance, he states that Saladin was an Arab Warrior, when actually he was a Kurd. Fisk almost gives the impression that he has covered every major conflict in the Middle-East for the last thirty years. But where is the coverage of the ongoing slaugher in Darfur, for instance? Fisk's critics accuse him of factual inaccuracy and ideological bas and, I have to say, this book bears this out.


Whodunnit story of the middle east, 17 Jul 2008
I was reading this book on Christmas Day and a friend of mine noticed me doing this and remarked jokingly "have you worked out who did it yet?" I replied yes, you meet the guy who did it in the first chapter. The rest of the book is an examination of why.
The guy who did it is, of course, Osama bin-Laden and Fisk details his three meetings with him pre September 11th. As might be expected, he's analysed his interviews with hindsight to see if there was any indication he missed that might indicate what was being planned. There were some indications, but who could have believed that he was serious or doing other than boasting? Fisk printed his interviews with Osama bin-Laden before September 11th and they elicited no stir of opinion - nobody took his threats seriously or figured he'd be able to carry them out.
The rest of the book details why he did it. The history of pretty much every country in the middle east and an examination of how the west was and is complicit in shaping the problems that afflict the region now. Much of this Fisk tries to connect to his father, who fought in the first world war when the boundaries and spheres of influence that define the middle east today were set up. I get this - it's not hard to see - but I think he fails to connect his father explicitly to these events (he was only a soldier, after all, not a policymaker or diplomat) and these sections don't gel that well - Fisk is trying to come to some accommodation with his dead father, some closure with his father's death, which is all very well but sort of private, IMO.
But the rest of the book is well worth reading. A country by country account of the middle east (with the exception of Lebanon, as he's covered that in detail in another book) starting with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, going through The Gulf Wars, the Armenian Genocide, Israel, Algeria, etc. and ending with the American invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. Full circle.
Definitely worth reading. Sort of long, but you can read each chapter separately.

Thought provoking - a must read book, 16 Jun 2008
This is a mightily impressive book, though in no way an easy read. It's not just the size (nearly 1,300 pages) it's the unrelenting horror that Fisk decribes. Ongoing decriptions of the inhumanity and evil he has encountered either directly or from eye witness testiment makes it a painful read right upto the end of the book.
In the book Fisk takes through a history of the Middle East conflicts he has covered as a journalist in the past 30 years from the Soviet invasion of Afgahnistan through to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, including the Iran-Iraq war, Iraeli-Palistinian conflict, Algeria and also including a chapter on the Armenian genocide. Throughout there is a reference back to historical events that have shaped the conflict and this is interwoven with a personal history of his parents and especially Fisk's journey to find out more about his father and his service at the end of the 1st World War.
This though, is no straight historical account, Fisk is constantly giving his viewpoint. He pulls no punches and his utter contempt for the corrupt and despotic regimes in the region is only beaten by his ongoing contempt of the involvement of the West in the region (and specifically America's support of Israel). He expertly and consistently shows up the hypocrisy and the self serving power politics, and the awful results it has on the populations of the region. It is this that makes the book, giving it power and is what sets you thinking. At the end of it you cannot fail to have changed some of your views, or to feel more passionately about the issues (you'll listen more carefully to the next news bulletin from Gaza or the West Bank). I for one, though, cannot agree with all that he says and the arguments he makes. It is very easy to point out all the time where people have made mistakes, taken the wrong decisions (whether the motive was good or bad). It's altogether more difficult to praise people having to make difficult decisions when there can never be an bloodless outcome, or to suggest the best way forward. This is where I feel Fisk doesn't deliver. At the end of the book I knew the true horror of the conflicts, the problems and the suffering there is. What I didn't have any sense of was what's the best way forward. I would have hoped that a man of Fisk's integrity, intelligence and knowledge of the area could have given his thoughts and ideas on this. I think he could have given us some hope, but the end I couldn't find any.
Neverless, this beats an pure narrative account of the recent history of the Middle East, it draws you in, makes you empathise and feel involved. It makes you think and makes you care, and that is no small achievement.


A real eye opener, 13 Jul 2008
A real eye opener.

This book may be a little difficult for some to come to terms with and for others even more difficult to accept. It is something that has been placed in the psyche of us in Europe after the horrors of the holocaust that any criticism of the state of Israel or Zionism is equal to anti semitism. That the state of Israel was created out of the ashes of the second world war in order to provide a safe and free land for Jews the world over and a place of return for the Jews to their historical homeland.

This book dispels the myth. Pappe rather presents the establishment of the state of Israel as being not only created by men whose ideology was every equal of the extreme nationalism that European Jews had suffered under but also created out of the ethnic cleansing of the native population of that land, the Palestinians.

Pappe begins his book by providing us with with definitions of ethnic cleansing quoting from the United Nations amongst others. unfortunately his use of wikipedia, an 'encyclopedia' by his own admissions is edited by anyone in order to further his argument greatly diminishes his own introduction. While he may choose to use this in his own words to gauge public opinion on how genocide and ethnic cleansing is defined the fact that wikipedia is more of a soap box for anyone with a grudge makes the website frankly worthless.

According to Pappe, ethnic cleansing is something that requires planning and pre-thought before execution and in the first few chapters Pappe documents how Zionist leaders wrote up maps of Palestinian areas, their populations and numbers. Pappe is also quick to point out however, how some Palestinian leaders were only too happy to sell off land to Zionist settlers believing that the greater threat to their land was the colonialism of the British. For some, the Zionists were the poor of Europe and offered little threat, little were they to know that these people would be one and the same who orchestrated their own extinction from their own lands.

Pappe goes on to examine the execution of the Zionist plans of forced expulsion of Palestinians under threats of murder, how the response of Arab militias resulted in further excuses for Zionist outrages on civilian populations. Pappe gives examples of Palestinian villages of both Christian and Muslim who were wiped from the map. Further examples of man (Defined as aged between 10 and 50) being separated from their women folk and executed. Examples of mass rape, destruction of Churches, Mosques, orchards are also given.

Another interesting point is the Arab-Israeli war which Pappe defines as a 'phony war' Pointing out that Jordan had no intention of defending Palestinians rather in protecting its agreed annexation of the West Bank. How the poorly armed and trained Arab armies were no match for the Zionist forces due to the Egyptians while large in numbers (Swelled by the Muslim brotherhood whose lack of any military training made them more a liability than help) The Syrians lack of modern arms, the Lebanese whose numbers were so small they were more concerned with holding onto their own land and Iraqis. Most of these forces were tied down by their own political leaders who had no intentions of seeing them defend the Palestinian people.

I believe it was Robert Fisk in his book 'Pity the nation' who once pointed out the irony of the victims of genocide often being the most enthusiastic perpetrators of it. It is interesting that most of the criticism of this book is that it is 'anti semitic' (Strange considering the author is Jewish!) and reminds me of how Serbs would point out the massacres that were committed against their people in World War 2 by Croatian militias as though that somehow justifies the slaughter of thousands in Bosnia and Kosovo. Similarly Zionists use the holocaust to deflect war crimes in Lebanon and the ethnic cleansing of an entire people in Palestine.

Thankfully Pappe has brought this to the worlds attention in a book that while filled with information that will be shocking and disturbing is also clear and easy to read.




Brilliant book, 07 May 2008
It took courage to write this book and puts Ilan Pappe in the same category as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn lived in a different time and place; however his exposure of an unjust system with a manipulated history had significant impact on changing it.

During the past century a number of milestones have been put in place including the formation of the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. These define the standards to which we are expected to adhere (or be judged by) in both peace and war. We cannot compare what was acceptable behaviour in biblical times, ancient empires or the middle ages with a 20th Century ethnic cleansing.

If Pappe's book contributes towards peace in the Middle East through truth and reconciliation, then may history remember him well. He will have achieved what the United Nations and the world's leading superpower failed to do.


How A Racist State Was Formed., 27 Mar 2008
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population. He meticulously (and painfully) reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they intiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave.

Israel's official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbours; that Zionist leaders were willing to accept UN resolution 181 of November 1947, which called for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, but that it was the Palestinians who rejected that plan; and that the Palestinians became refugees when they "voluntarily" fled their homes to make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry out what they called a "second Holocaust" against Jews.

Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel's "founding fathers." These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian population. Pappé details how these Israeli "heroes" executed the plan in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years.

Zionist leaders drew up Plan D, or dalet in Hebrew. These leaders ordered their militias and gangs to start implementing Plan D only hours after the UN issued resolution 181 in November 1947. The long nightmare for the Palestinians would only get worse. Zionist militias began to attack and expel villagers with or without provocation inside lands allocated to either the Jewish or Arab state.

Declassified Israeli military archives confirm that the Zionist militias carried out at least thirty-seven large-scale massacres in that period. Some of the worst massacres and rape cases took place in villages such as Deir Yassin.

By the spring of 1949, Israel had conquered up to 80 percent of historic Palestine. It expelled 800,000 Palestinians, or 75 percent of the native Arab population, from their homeland, turning them into refugees and preventing them from coming back at the end of the war. The founding fathers had finally succeeded in securing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.

Excellent and essential reading.


The begining of a disaster., 03 Mar 2008
Anyone wishing to understand the roots of the Arab Israeli conflict from an historical perspective must read this book. Pappe presents an alternate course of events that lead up to the creation of the state of Israel and to me at least he seems to have hit on a vein of truth and one that, if a fraction is true, makes for depressing reading. What is really upsetting is that there is little hope of any improvement for the Palestinian people whilst the other versions on the story are presented as the sole historic truth.

The REAL history of the Israeli state, 02 Nov 2007
An excellent and meticulously researched historical text.
The level of cold, calculated brutality and unprovoked savagery used against a largely peaceful peasant population usually offering little or no resistance, a population quite unprepared for a war, who were usually just 'going about their business', is absolutely shocking. As is the clinical pre-planning and ruthless, cold efficiency with which the plan was then carried out. It is no exaggeration to compare what happened with the Nazi push into the Baltic states and Russia in the early 1940's.
The reality of what actually happened during the years 1948-49, compared with the 'official' Israeli version, is astonishing. This is a subject I have had an interest in for some considerable time now, but despite my interest and knowledge of the subject, I was not prepared for the detail. The unnecessary nastiness and inhumanity of the jewish forces, is really hard to come to terms with.
It is also interesting to compare the present day horror and outrage that is expressed at the actions of a 'suicide bomber' with events in early 1948 [when there was no war]. The Stern Gang and Hagana routinely threw bombs into CIVILIAN Palestinian gatherings and blew up houses with all the occupants asleep inside, often killing scores of people, simply to terrorise the population into fleeing Palestine.
I am also deeply ashamed of the role [or non-role] played by the British forces, with one or two notable exceptions, [and the Bevin Government] who, until May 1948, were still officially charged with upholding law and order in Palestine.
Anyone who still buys the notion that the events at Quana, the murder of the UN workers [despite hours of telephone conversations], the very high civilian casualty rates during the 2006 push into Lebanon, the deaths on the beach in Gaza and so on, were all REALLY accidental, should read this book. This particular brand of terror is long established practice by the Israelis.
In fact, it is hard to understand how most of our media and politicians, people who have chosen to make a career informing the rest of us about what goes on, in and around the world, seem remarkably oblivious to this information. Well, there are no excuses now are there ?
I am not sure how anyone could [intelligently] argue that this is 'a piece of anti-zionist fiction' as one of your reviewers suggests, it is far too factually based and closely referenced. It IS a testament to the power of the Israeli lobby and their campaign of distortion and misinformation that we are still presented by most of the media for most of the time the image of Israel as the victim in the Middle East. Now THAT is a piece of PRO-zionist fiction. Excellent, though disturbing book.

Simple action, 02 Jan 2009
There is never a dull moment in this book. From the starting page, which opens with a full scale battle, to the last, which reminisces on life after Al Amarah, it is incredibly interesting and exciting. Even during the ceasefire the book is gripping. Sgt. Mills combines action and good ol' British humour to make a winning story, devoid of any political messages. The one thing it did to on that ground, however, was reinforce my faith in our military. Having thought that men were dieing for no reason in Iraq, this stark realisation of what life is really like in a regime under someone like Muqtada al Sadr convinced me that at least some of what our government does there has a point.

it's real, 31 Dec 2008
The best book to date on the Iraq war from the soldier's view on the ground

Fantastic Read...you wont put it down!, 30 Dec 2008
This is one of the best accounts of modern day soldiering and the pressures they are under on a day to day basis.

I can definitely recommended this book if you are looking for a realistic and frank account of what happens in modern warfare.

some peace keeping tour, 29 Dec 2008
sniper one is a must read for any fan of military memoirs, sgt dan mills doesnt waste any time at all launching straight into the action, indeed as soon as they arrive in iraq they find themselves in contact after contact with every patrol, the writing really delivers, explaining every detail of modern british army equipment and slang effectively, he manages to pull you straight in alongside the regiment under siege.
the fact that the besieging enemy though there was a regiment of sas holed up in cimic house, speaks volumes about the ferocity and bravery of the british regiment, whom sgt mills has most definitely placed on the map. i actually found it quite shocking how unreported the actions detailed in the book were, and can understand why the mod would want to play them down, to maintain the illusion of peace, but if you were in any doubt as to the capabilities of the modern british army then look no further.

Easily the best book I've ever read, 08 Dec 2008
Not that I read a lot of books, but I wasn't able to put this one down. A gripping account of what our boys are actually doing out there, at times my heart was beating out of chest as I flipped pages over as quickly as I could to find out what happened next. Very well written and a must read, even if, just to get an insight on what actually goes on out there. Our boys are doing us proud.

Massive, meticulous and magisterial, 03 Nov 2008
Probably one of the few books to which the overused `tour de force' can rightly be applied, Fisk's massive tome is as thorough an exploration of the labyrinthine twists and turns of recent Middle East history as you could hope to find. From the Armenian genocide and mandate Palestine to the Iran/Iraq war and meetings with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains, Fisk leaves no stone unturned in his examination of how the failures of Western policy and Arab/Muslim infighting alike have shaped the region's destiny. He rides shotgun with the Russian army on patrol in Afghanistan; gets caught up in bombardment on the frontline in the Iran-Iraq war; and `returns to sender' fragments of American Hawkeye missile used by the Israeli army to destroy a civilian military ambulance in Lebanon: whatever subject he tackles here, Fisk is never dull. From time to time he bludgeons the reader with a welter of detail and the sheer force of his argument, but he is fired by a righteous anger at the deceit, duplicity and sheer failure to learn the lessons of history that would be sad - if only their consequences weren't so deadly.

angry, 22 Sep 2008
By gum is this man angry. I took six months to read this book last year (nad yes it was worth it). Each time I opened it I sunk slightly further into depression as I understood more of the evil man does to man in the name of an ideal, or imperial self-interest, or tribal loyalty, or religious fealty, or a sense of post-colonial national inferiority.

I would recommend that anyone who expresses half an interest in what motivates bright young men (usually) with a future before them to fly aircraft into tall buildings to read this book.

It will depress you. It will enlighten you.

Robert Fisk, of all western journalists, has the moral authority to carry off a book like this. He has lived through most of the post-World War II horrors in this region.

My only (albeit slight) criticism is the lack of photgraphs - you can access some on his web-site, but it would be illuminating to see in pictures some of the episodes his words desribe.

Please read this - it will help you understand the complexities facing our government and 'brave boys' in Afghanistan and Iraq right now. But for the grace of God...

Wide-ranging, if biased, view of the Middle-East, 07 Sep 2008
The job of a journalists arguably has two functions; to report on what is going on in the world and to explain why it is happening. Robert Fisk does a fairly good job fulfilling the first role. In his thirty years of reporting from the Middle-East he managed to be at most of the scenes of conflict and upheaval. The "why," however, is really where he falls down. Here he tends to take the sort of infantile approach favoured by someone like George Galloway. He takes the simplistic view, believing that all this conflict can be simply traced to the West. And by the West he means the USA, Israel of course and things like the settlement imposed by Western countries like Britain and France on the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.

At times, this bias reaches a ludicrous level. Take this exert:

" In Lebanon in the mid-1980s, in Algeria and then Bosnia, our protection as neutral correspondents had disintegrated. We were abducted, murdered because we were Westerners or because we were regarded as combatants. Two months before I was beaten at Kila Abdulla, I had attempted to interview a Muslim cleric in a village mosque outside Peshwar. " Why are you taking this kaffir into our mosque?" a bearded man had shouted at the mullah. I conducted the interview outside the building. But I was a kaffir. So was Pearl. So, it seemed, were we all. Where did it all go wrong?
I have always believed the rot started in Vietnam..."

This is classic Fisk. He manages to go from one anti-Western tirade, to another, without managing to notice that, in the middle he gives substantial evidence that there are other people in the world with prejudiced, totalitarian mindsets, people who are not Western. But he finds himself strangely reluctant to criticize them. Why? Does he take the patronizing approach that only the West can be criticized?

This is one of the great weaknesses of this book. An informed observer would know that Arabs are indigineous to one country in the world, the Arabian peninsula, now known as Saudi Arabia. Virtually every county which became Arabic ( or indeed Islamic) became so due to military invasion. This huge exercise in Arab Imperialism should be kept in mind, if only to put in perspective the endless accusations of imperialism Fisk charges the West with. And this is not simply a matter of historical, academic interest. The ideology which fuelled these conquests, Islamism, is being revived, in fact, it never really went away.

At times, this book creates the illusion that it is well-researched. For instance, he quotes missile serial numbers with great accuracy but I recall that elsewhere he tells you that the first sentence of the Koran is " There is no G_d but G_d and Muhammad is his prophet."
This is the Shahadaah, the Islamic declaration of faith. Actually the opening is known as the Fatiha; something totally different. A howler on this scale shows how little Mr Fisk knows about Islam.

Anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that The Koran is not in chronological order; chronologically, the first lines of the Qur'an are in sura 96. In fact, the suras of the Koran can be very clearly divided into two groups. The first date from the Meccan phase of Muhammed's career when he was simply a preacher. The second date from the Medinna period when he became a military and political leader.


I am not the only one to notice Mr Fisk's capacity for factual inaccuracy.
Take , Efraim Karsh , author of "Islamic Imperialism: a history,"

In his review of "The Great War for Civilization: The conquest of the Middle-East," he states

" It is difficult to turn a page of The Great War for Civilisation without encountering some basic error. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not, as Fisk has it, in Jerusalem. The Caliph Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, was murdered in the year 661, not in the 8th century. Emir Abdallah became king of Transjordan in 1946, not 1921, and both he and his younger brother, King Faisal I of Iraq, hailed not from a "Gulf tribe" but rather from the Hashemites on the other side of the Arabian peninsula. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, not 1962; Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed by the British authorities, not elected; Ayatollah Khomeini transferred his exile from Turkey to the holy Shiite city of Najaf not during Saddam Hussein's rule but fourteen years before Saddam seized power. Security Council resolution 242 was passed in November 1967, not 1968; Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, not 1977, and was assassinated in October 1981, not 1979. Yitzhak Rabin was minister of defense, not prime minister, during the first Palestinian intifada, and al Qaeda was established not in 1998 but a decade earlier. And so on and so forth."

Actually Fisk denies that he wrote that Jesus was born in Jerusalem and I must admit I didn't spot this. There are other mistakes, for instance, he states that Saladin was an Arab Warrior, when actually he was a Kurd. Fisk almost gives the impression that he has covered every major conflict in the Middle-East for the last thirty years. But where is the coverage of the ongoing slaugher in Darfur, for instance? Fisk's critics accuse him of factual inaccuracy and ideological bas and, I have to say, this book bears this out.


Whodunnit story of the middle east, 17 Jul 2008
I was reading this book on Christmas Day and a friend of mine noticed me doing this and remarked jokingly "have you worked out who did it yet?" I replied yes, you meet the guy who did it in the first chapter. The rest of the book is an examination of why.
The guy who did it is, of course, Osama bin-Laden and Fisk details his three meetings with him pre September 11th. As might be expected, he's analysed his interviews with hindsight to see if there was any indication he missed that might indicate what was being planned. There were some indications, but who could have believed that he was serious or doing other than boasting? Fisk printed his interviews with Osama bin-Laden before September 11th and they elicited no stir of opinion - nobody took his threats seriously or figured he'd be able to carry them out.
The rest of the book details why he did it. The history of pretty much every country in the middle east and an examination of how the west was and is complicit in shaping the problems that afflict the region now. Much of this Fisk tries to connect to his father, who fought in the first world war when the boundaries and spheres of influence that define the middle east today were set up. I get this - it's not hard to see - but I think he fails to connect his father explicitly to these events (he was only a soldier, after all, not a policymaker or diplomat) and these sections don't gel that well - Fisk is trying to come to some accommodation with his dead father, some closure with his father's death, which is all very well but sort of private, IMO.
But the rest of the book is well worth reading. A country by country account of the middle east (with the exception of Lebanon, as he's covered that in detail in another book) starting with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, going through The Gulf Wars, the Armenian Genocide, Israel, Algeria, etc. and ending with the American invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. Full circle.
Definitely worth reading. Sort of long, but you can read each chapter separately.

Thought provoking - a must read book, 16 Jun 2008
This is a mightily impressive book, though in no way an easy read. It's not just the size (nearly 1,300 pages) it's the unrelenting horror that Fisk decribes. Ongoing decriptions of the inhumanity and evil he has encountered either directly or from eye witness testiment makes it a painful read right upto the end of the book.
In the book Fisk takes through a history of the Middle East conflicts he has covered as a journalist in the past 30 years from the Soviet invasion of Afgahnistan through to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, including the Iran-Iraq war, Iraeli-Palistinian conflict, Algeria and also including a chapter on the Armenian genocide. Throughout there is a reference back to historical events that have shaped the conflict and this is interwoven with a personal history of his parents and especially Fisk's journey to find out more about his father and his service at the end of the 1st World War.
This though, is no straight historical account, Fisk is constantly giving his viewpoint. He pulls no punches and his utter contempt for the corrupt and despotic regimes in the region is only beaten by his ongoing contempt of the involvement of the West in the region (and specifically America's support of Israel). He expertly and consistently shows up the hypocrisy and the self serving power politics, and the awful results it has on the populations of the region. It is this that makes the book, giving it power and is what sets you thinking. At the end of it you cannot fail to have changed some of your views, or to feel more passionately about the issues (you'll listen more carefully to the next news bulletin from Gaza or the West Bank). I for one, though, cannot agree with all that he says and the arguments he makes. It is very easy to point out all the time where people have made mistakes, taken the wrong decisions (whether the motive was good or bad). It's altogether more difficult to praise people having to make difficult decisions when there can never be an bloodless outcome, or to suggest the best way forward. This is where I feel Fisk doesn't deliver. At the end of the book I knew the true horror of the conflicts, the problems and the suffering there is. What I didn't have any sense of was what's the best way forward. I would have hoped that a man of Fisk's integrity, intelligence and knowledge of the area could have given his thoughts and ideas on this. I think he could have given us some hope, but the end I couldn't find any.
Neverless, this beats an pure narrative account of the recent history of the Middle East, it draws you in, makes you empathise and feel involved. It makes you think and makes you care, and that is no small achievement.


A real eye opener, 13 Jul 2008
A real eye opener.

This book may be a little difficult for some to come to terms with and for others even more difficult to accept. It is something that has been placed in the psyche of us in Europe after the horrors of the holocaust that any criticism of the state of Israel or Zionism is equal to anti semitism. That the state of Israel was created out of the ashes of the second world war in order to provide a safe and free land for Jews the world over and a place of return for the Jews to their historical homeland.

This book dispels the myth. Pappe rather presents the establishment of the state of Israel as being not only created by men whose ideology was every equal of the extreme nationalism that European Jews had suffered under but also created out of the ethnic cleansing of the native population of that land, the Palestinians.

Pappe begins his book by providing us with with definitions of ethnic cleansing quoting from the United Nations amongst others. unfortunately his use of wikipedia, an 'encyclopedia' by his own admissions is edited by anyone in order to further his argument greatly diminishes his own introduction. While he may choose to use this in his own words to gauge public opinion on how genocide and ethnic cleansing is defined the fact that wikipedia is more of a soap box for anyone with a grudge makes the website frankly worthless.

According to Pappe, ethnic cleansing is something that requires planning and pre-thought before execution and in the first few chapters Pappe documents how Zionist leaders wrote up maps of Palestinian areas, their populations and numbers. Pappe is also quick to point out however, how some Palestinian leaders were only too happy to sell off land to Zionist settlers believing that the greater threat to their land was the colonialism of the British. For some, the Zionists were the poor of Europe and offered little threat, little were they to know that these people would be one and the same who orchestrated their own extinction from their own lands.

Pappe goes on to examine the execution of the Zionist plans of forced expulsion of Palestinians under threats of murder, how the response of Arab militias resulted in further excuses for Zionist outrages on civilian populations. Pappe gives examples of Palestinian villages of both Christian and Muslim who were wiped from the map. Further examples of man (Defined as aged between 10 and 50) being separated from their women folk and executed. Examples of mass rape, destruction of Churches, Mosques, orchards are also given.

Another interesting point is the Arab-Israeli war which Pappe defines as a 'phony war' Pointing out that Jordan had no intention of defending Palestinians rather in protecting its agreed annexation of the West Bank. How the poorly armed and trained Arab armies were no match for the Zionist forces due to the Egyptians while large in numbers (Swelled by the Muslim brotherhood whose lack of any military training made them more a liability than help) The Syrians lack of modern arms, the Lebanese whose numbers were so small they were more concerned with holding onto their own land and Iraqis. Most of these forces were tied down by their own political leaders who had no intentions of seeing them defend the Palestinian people.

I believe it was Robert Fisk in his book 'Pity the nation' who once pointed out the irony of the victims of genocide often being the most enthusiastic perpetrators of it. It is interesting that most of the criticism of this book is that it is 'anti semitic' (Strange considering the author is Jewish!) and reminds me of how Serbs would point out the massacres that were committed against their people in World War 2 by Croatian militias as though that somehow justifies the slaughter of thousands in Bosnia and Kosovo. Similarly Zionists use the holocaust to deflect war crimes in Lebanon and the ethnic cleansing of an entire people in Palestine.

Thankfully Pappe has brought this to the worlds attention in a book that while filled with information that will be shocking and disturbing is also clear and easy to read.




Brilliant book, 07 May 2008
It took courage to write this book and puts Ilan Pappe in the same category as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn lived in a different time and place; however his exposure of an unjust system with a manipulated history had significant impact on changing it.

During the past century a number of milestones have been put in place including the formation of the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. These define the standards to which we are expected to adhere (or be judged by) in both peace and war. We cannot compare what was acceptable behaviour in biblical times, ancient empires or the middle ages with a 20th Century ethnic cleansing.

If Pappe's book contributes towards peace in the Middle East through truth and reconciliation, then may history remember him well. He will have achieved what the United Nations and the world's leading superpower failed to do.


How A Racist State Was Formed., 27 Mar 2008
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population. He meticulously (and painfully) reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they intiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave.

Israel's official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbours; that Zionist leaders were willing to accept UN resolution 181 of November 1947, which called for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, but that it was the Palestinians who rejected that plan; and that the Palestinians became refugees when they "voluntarily" fled their homes to make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry out what they called a "second Holocaust" against Jews.

Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel's "founding fathers." These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian population. Pappé details how these Israeli "heroes" executed the plan in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years.

Zionist leaders drew up Plan D, or dalet in Hebrew. These leaders ordered their militias and gangs to start implementing Plan D only hours after the UN issued resolution 181 in November 1947. The long nightmare for the Palestinians would only get worse. Zionist militias began to attack and expel villagers with or without provocation inside lands allocated to either the Jewish or Arab state.

Declassified Israeli military archives confirm that the Zionist militias carried out at least thirty-seven large-scale massacres in that period. Some of the worst massacres and rape cases took place in villages such as Deir Yassin.

By the spring of 1949, Israel had conquered up to 80 percent of historic Palestine. It expelled 800,000 Palestinians, or 75 percent of the native Arab population, from their homeland, turning them into refugees and preventing them from coming back at the end of the war. The founding fathers had finally succeeded in securing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.

Excellent and essential reading.


The begining of a disaster., 03 Mar 2008
Anyone wishing to understand the roots of the Arab Israeli conflict from an historical perspective must read this book. Pappe presents an alternate course of events that lead up to the creation of the state of Israel and to me at least he seems to have hit on a vein of truth and one that, if a fraction is true, makes for depressing reading. What is really upsetting is that there is little hope of any improvement for the Palestinian people whilst the other versions on the story are presented as the sole historic truth.

The REAL history of the Israeli state, 02 Nov 2007
An excellent and meticulously researched historical text.
The level of cold, calculated brutality and unprovoked savagery used against a largely peaceful peasant population usually offering little or no resistance, a population quite unprepared for a war, who were usually just 'going about their business', is absolutely shocking. As is the clinical pre-planning and ruthless, cold efficiency with which the plan was then carried out. It is no exaggeration to compare what happened with the Nazi push into the Baltic states and Russia in the early 1940's.
The reality of what actually happened during the years 1948-49, compared with the 'official' Israeli version, is astonishing. This is a subject I have had an interest in for some considerable time now, but despite my interest and knowledge of the subject, I was not prepared for the detail. The unnecessary nastiness and inhumanity of the jewish forces, is really hard to come to terms with.
It is also interesting to compare the present day horror and outrage that is expressed at the actions of a 'suicide bomber' with events in early 1948 [when there was no war]. The Stern Gang and Hagana routinely threw bombs into CIVILIAN Palestinian gatherings and blew up houses with all the occupants asleep inside, often killing scores of people, simply to terrorise the population into fleeing Palestine.
I am also deeply ashamed of the role [or non-role] played by the British forces, with one or two notable exceptions, [and the Bevin Government] who, until May 1948, were still officially charged with upholding law and order in Palestine.
Anyone who still buys the notion that the events at Quana, the murder of the UN workers [despite hours of telephone conversations], the very high civilian casualty rates during the 2006 push into Lebanon, the deaths on the beach in Gaza and so on, were all REALLY accidental, should read this book. This particular brand of terror is long established practice by the Israelis.
In fact, it is hard to understand how most of our media and politicians, people who have chosen to make a career informing the rest of us about what goes on, in and around the world, seem remarkably oblivious to this information. Well, there are no excuses now are there ?
I am not sure how anyone could [intelligently] argue that this is 'a piece of anti-zionist fiction' as one of your reviewers suggests, it is far too factually based and closely referenced. It IS a testament to the power of the Israeli lobby and their campaign of distortion and misinformation that we are still presented by most of the media for most of the time the image of Israel as the victim in the Middle East. Now THAT is a piece of PRO-zionist fiction. Excellent, though disturbing book.

Brilliant, 30 Dec 2008
Inspirational and engrossing, it feels genuine and provides an insight into life in the East, in a refreshing way when we're saturated in the UK with one sided news reports.

Keep it up Joe Sacco and those like him...

Brilliant, harrowing, unflinching. Oh, and sometimes it's really funny. But only sometimes., 21 Dec 2008
Joe Sacco's earliest work in comics is some of the funniest and most extravagantly over-the-top graphic work this writer has ever read. I have been an on-again, off-again reader of comics since I was a kid, starting - like so many UK/Irish boys who were young in the 70s - with simple stuff like "Battle" and "Action", rediscovering the power of the drawn panel in the late 80s with things like Frank Miller's "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns", and the work of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, and being lucky enough to surf the wave of amazing creativity that reared up in the 90s with titles like Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" and Grant Morrison's fabulously unhinged run of "Doom Patrol".

So I didn't come to Joe Sacco's work as someone who had never read a comic before. I knew that comics didn't necessarily involve girls with enormous breasts and guys who could, like, break guns in half with their mind (to paraphrase "Mystery Men"). I had also read a little about the Arab-Israeli conflict, so I wasn't even totally unaware of what Sacco was talking about.

Nevertheless, "Palestine" knocked my socks off. Part of Sacco's genius as a journalist/writer/artist is that he puts himself into the frame - a small, rather anxious American with Lennon glasses and an unusually wide mouth, who gets into arguments with sexy Israeli girls about the occupied territories and the right of return but who still can't help wondering if he's got a chance of getting laid.

Sacco's earlier work is collected in the laugh-out-loud hilarious "Notes from a Defeatist", which followed something like a maturation from Sacco the chronicler of grungy punk bands to Sacco the struggling, self-doubting, worry-wart artist increasingly troubled by politics and injustice. "Palestine" is of necessity a dark and worrying book. The high spirits of his earlier work are gone, but he is recognisably the same guy: older, more curious about the world around him and more willing to let the people around him tell their stories in their own way. One of these is a Palestinian joke, involving a CIA man, a KGB man and a Shin Bet (Israeli domestic security) man. I won't retell it here because it's too good to spoil, but Sacco's version of it is both hilarious and terrifying.

There is an appreciative and sensitive foreword by the late Edward W. Said, but in truth the book is its own recommendation. Joe Sacco's work has the great virtue of being a purely personal response; he doesn't have the newspaper journalist's need to at least pretend to be "objective" or "balanced". This means that he lets far more information come through than somebody constrained by deadlines and copy length. Sacco is also a lot funnier and better company than Robert Fisk.

A great deal of guff has been written about the Palestinians, most of it by non-Palestinians - most of it, indeed, by Americans. Joe Sacco's "Palestine" is a distinguished exception.



Shocking, 08 Oct 2007
This was my first venture into graphic novels. All my life i've never been able to get into fiction, I'd stick to books on religion, war etc so when a friend pointed out that there are graphic novels/comics based on real events I thought I'd give it a go (I always assumed graphics novels were about fantasy figures/men in tight spandex outfits throwing balls of fire at women with blue hair)

I read "Palestine" in about 5 sittings, I read it before bed for about an hour each night until I was too tired, I couldn't put it down. Some of the interviews/reports really did shock me and I had to put it down a couple of times. Not just the stories themselves shocked me but the fact that I had no idea these events happened/are happening. Can't recommened this enough.

An important book, 07 Oct 2006
An outstanding, sensitive and compelling work. Be in no doubt, this is not a graphic novel. Sacco is a superb journalist who conveys the experiences of long-suffering Palesenians through remarkable illustrated interviews, but the illustrations serve simply to contextualise these harrowing true stories. If only this were required reading for the Bush administration...

Offers a real insight, 04 Oct 2006
This book offers an insight into the lives of the palestinians, it offers you the side of the story that is not told by the mainstream press. From what you learn about the terrible treatement of the palestinians, the israeli aggression and opression towards them one realises why they resort to such terrible things such as suicide bombing. This book instills sympathy for palestinians and automatically makes you hate all injustice in the world.

from reading this book, one cannot help to think that the israelis have only brought this on themselves, any suicide bombing (which of course is wrong) is only as a result of their inhumane ill-treatement of the palestinians, and they only have themselves to blame. Reading this book one realises the origins of the arab hatred toward the state of israel.

Simple action, 02 Jan 2009
There is never a dull moment in this book. From the starting page, which opens with a full scale battle, to the last, which reminisces on life after Al Amarah, it is incredibly interesting and exciting. Even during the ceasefire the book is gripping. Sgt. Mills combines action and good ol' British humour to make a winning story, devoid of any political messages. The one thing it did to on that ground, however, was reinforce my faith in our military. Having thought that men were dieing for no reason in Iraq, this stark realisation of what life is really like in a regime under someone like Muqtada al Sadr convinced me that at least some of what our government does there has a point.

it's real, 31 Dec 2008
The best book to date on the Iraq war from the soldier's view on the ground

Fantastic Read...you wont put it down!, 30 Dec 2008
This is one of the best accounts of modern day soldiering and the pressures they are under on a day to day basis.

I can definitely recommended this book if you are looking for a realistic and frank account of what happens in modern warfare.

some peace keeping tour, 29 Dec 2008
sniper one is a must read for any fan of military memoirs, sgt dan mills doesnt waste any time at all launching straight into the action, indeed as soon as they arrive in iraq they find themselves in contact after contact with every patrol, the writing really delivers, explaining every detail of modern british army equipment and slang effectively, he manages to pull you straight in alongside the regiment under siege.
the fact that the besieging enemy though there was a regiment of sas holed up in cimic house, speaks volumes about the ferocity and bravery of the british regiment, whom sgt mills has most definitely placed on the map. i actually found it quite shocking how unreported the actions detailed in the book were, and can understand why the mod would want to play them down, to maintain the illusion of peace, but if you were in any doubt as to the capabilities of the modern british army then look no further.

Easily the best book I've ever read, 08 Dec 2008
Not that I read a lot of books, but I wasn't able to put this one down. A gripping account of what our boys are actually doing out there, at times my heart was beating out of chest as I flipped pages over as quickly as I could to find out what happened next. Very well written and a must read, even if, just to get an insight on what actually goes on out there. Our boys are doing us proud.

Massive, meticulous and magisterial, 03 Nov 2008
Probably one of the few books to which the overused `tour de force' can rightly be applied, Fisk's massive tome is as thorough an exploration of the labyrinthine twists and turns of recent Middle East history as you could hope to find. From the Armenian genocide and mandate Palestine to the Iran/Iraq war and meetings with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains, Fisk leaves no stone unturned in his examination of how the failures of Western policy and Arab/Muslim infighting alike have shaped the region's destiny. He rides shotgun with the Russian army on patrol in Afghanistan; gets caught up in bombardment on the frontline in the Iran-Iraq war; and `returns to sender' fragments of American Hawkeye missile used by the Israeli army to destroy a civilian military ambulance in Lebanon: whatever subject he tackles here, Fisk is never dull. From time to time he bludgeons the reader with a welter of detail and the sheer force of his argument, but he is fired by a righteous anger at the deceit, duplicity and sheer failure to learn the lessons of history that would be sad - if only their consequences weren't so deadly.

angry, 22 Sep 2008
By gum is this man angry. I took six months to read this book last year (nad yes it was worth it). Each time I opened it I sunk slightly further into depression as I understood more of the evil man does to man in the name of an ideal, or imperial self-interest, or tribal loyalty, or religious fealty, or a sense of post-colonial national inferiority.

I would recommend that anyone who expresses half an interest in what motivates bright young men (usually) with a future before them to fly aircraft into tall buildings to read this book.

It will depress you. It will enlighten you.

Robert Fisk, of all western journalists, has the moral authority to carry off a book like this. He has lived through most of the post-World War II horrors in this region.

My only (albeit slight) criticism is the lack of photgraphs - you can access some on his web-site, but it would be illuminating to see in pictures some of the episodes his words desribe.

Please read this - it will help you understand the complexities facing our government and 'brave boys' in Afghanistan and Iraq right now. But for the grace of God...

Wide-ranging, if biased, view of the Middle-East, 07 Sep 2008
The job of a journalists arguably has two functions; to report on what is going on in the world and to explain why it is happening. Robert Fisk does a fairly good job fulfilling the first role. In his thirty years of reporting from the Middle-East he managed to be at most of the scenes of conflict and upheaval. The "why," however, is really where he falls down. Here he tends to take the sort of infantile approach favoured by someone like George Galloway. He takes the simplistic view, believing that all this conflict can be simply traced to the West. And by the West he means the USA, Israel of course and things like the settlement imposed by Western countries like Britain and France on the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.

At times, this bias reaches a ludicrous level. Take this exert:

" In Lebanon in the mid-1980s, in Algeria and then Bosnia, our protection as neutral correspondents had disintegrated. We were abducted, murdered because we were Westerners or because we were regarded as combatants. Two months before I was beaten at Kila Abdulla, I had attempted to interview a Muslim cleric in a village mosque outside Peshwar. " Why are you taking this kaffir into our mosque?" a bearded man had shouted at the mullah. I conducted the interview outside the building. But I was a kaffir. So was Pearl. So, it seemed, were we all. Where did it all go wrong?
I have always believed the rot started in Vietnam..."

This is classic Fisk. He manages to go from one anti-Western tirade, to another, without managing to notice that, in the middle he gives substantial evidence that there are other people in the world with prejudiced, totalitarian mindsets, people who are not Western. But he finds himself strangely reluctant to criticize them. Why? Does he take the patronizing approach that only the West can be criticized?

This is one of the great weaknesses of this book. An informed observer would know that Arabs are indigineous to one country in the world, the Arabian peninsula, now known as Saudi Arabia. Virtually every county which became Arabic ( or indeed Islamic) became so due to military invasion. This huge exercise in Arab Imperialism should be kept in mind, if only to put in perspective the endless accusations of imperialism Fisk charges the West with. And this is not simply a matter of historical, academic interest. The ideology which fuelled these conquests, Islamism, is being revived, in fact, it never really went away.

At times, this book creates the illusion that it is well-researched. For instance, he quotes missile serial numbers with great accuracy but I recall that elsewhere he tells you that the first sentence of the Koran is " There is no G_d but G_d and Muhammad is his prophet."
This is the Shahadaah, the Islamic declaration of faith. Actually the opening is known as the Fatiha; something totally different. A howler on this scale shows how little Mr Fisk knows about Islam.

Anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that The Koran is not in chronological order; chronologically, the first lines of the Qur'an are in sura 96. In fact, the suras of the Koran can be very clearly divided into two groups. The first date from the Meccan phase of Muhammed's career when he was simply a preacher. The second date from the Medinna period when he became a military and political leader.


I am not the only one to notice Mr Fisk's capacity for factual inaccuracy.
Take , Efraim Karsh , author of "Islamic Imperialism: a history,"

In his review of "The Great War for Civilization: The conquest of the Middle-East," he states

" It is difficult to turn a page of The Great War for Civilisation without encountering some basic error. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not, as Fisk has it, in Jerusalem. The Caliph Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, was murdered in the year 661, not in the 8th century. Emir Abdallah became king of Transjordan in 1946, not 1921, and both he and his younger brother, King Faisal I of Iraq, hailed not from a "Gulf tribe" but rather from the Hashemites on the other side of the Arabian peninsula. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, not 1962; Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed by the British authorities, not elected; Ayatollah Khomeini transferred his exile from Turkey to the holy Shiite city of Najaf not during Saddam Hussein's rule but fourteen years before Saddam seized power. Security Council resolution 242 was passed in November 1967, not 1968; Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, not 1977, and was assassinated in October 1981, not 1979. Yitzhak Rabin was minister of defense, not prime minister, during the first Palestinian intifada, and al Qaeda was established not in 1998 but a decade earlier. And so on and so forth."

Actually Fisk denies that he wrote that Jesus was born in Jerusalem and I must admit I didn't spot this. There are other mistakes, for instance, he states that Saladin was an Arab Warrior, when actually he was a Kurd. Fisk almost gives the impression that he has covered every major conflict in the Middle-East for the last thirty years. But where is the coverage of the ongoing slaugher in Darfur, for instance? Fisk's critics accuse him of factual inaccuracy and ideological bas and, I have to say, this book bears this out.


Whodunnit story of the middle east, 17 Jul 2008
I was reading this book on Christmas Day and a friend of mine noticed me doing this and remarked jokingly "have you worked out who did it yet?" I replied yes, you meet the guy who did it in the first chapter. The rest of the book is an examination of why.
The guy who did it is, of course, Osama bin-Laden and Fisk details his three meetings with him pre September 11th. As might be expected, he's analysed his interviews with hindsight to see if there was any indication he missed that might indicate what was being planned. There were some indications, but who could have believed that he was serious or doing other than boasting? Fisk printed his interviews with Osama bin-Laden before September 11th and they elicited no stir of opinion - nobody took his threats seriously or figured he'd be able to carry them out.
The rest of the book details why he did it. The history of pretty much every country in the middle east and an examination of how the west was and is complicit in shaping the problems that afflict the region now. Much of this Fisk tries to connect to his father, who fought in the first world war when the boundaries and spheres of influence that define the middle east today were set up. I get this - it's not hard to see - but I think he fails to connect his father explicitly to these events (he was only a soldier, after all, not a policymaker or diplomat) and these sections don't gel that well - Fisk is trying to come to some accommodation with his dead father, some closure with his father's death, which is all very well but sort of private, IMO.
But the rest of the book is well worth reading. A country by country account of the middle east (with the exception of Lebanon, as he's covered that in detail in another book) starting with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, going through The Gulf Wars, the Armenian Genocide, Israel, Algeria, etc. and ending with the American invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. Full circle.
Definitely worth reading. Sort of long, but you can read each chapter separately.

Thought provoking - a must read book, 16 Jun 2008
This is a mightily impressive book, though in no way an easy read. It's not just the size (nearly 1,300 pages) it's the unrelenting horror that Fisk decribes. Ongoing decriptions of the inhumanity and evil he has encountered either directly or from eye witness testiment makes it a painful read right upto the end of the book.
In the book Fisk takes through a history of the Middle East conflicts he has covered as a journalist in the past 30 years from the Soviet invasion of Afgahnistan through to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, including the Iran-Iraq war, Iraeli-Palistinian conflict, Algeria and also including a chapter on the Armenian genocide. Throughout there is a reference back to historical events that have shaped the conflict and this is interwoven with a personal history of his parents and especially Fisk's journey to find out more about his father and his service at the end of the 1st World War.
This though, is no straight historical account, Fisk is constantly giving his viewpoint. He pulls no punches and his utter contempt for the corrupt and despotic regimes in the region is only beaten by his ongoing contempt of the involvement of the West in the region (and specifically America's support of Israel). He expertly and consistently shows up the hypocrisy and the self serving power politics, and the awful results it has on the populations of the region. It is this that makes the book, giving it power and is what sets you thinking. At the end of it you cannot fail to have changed some of your views, or to feel more passionately about the issues (you'll listen more carefully to the next news bulletin from Gaza or the West Bank). I for one, though, cannot agree with all that he says and the arguments he makes. It is very easy to point out all the time where people have made mistakes, taken the wrong decisions (whether the motive was good or bad). It's altogether more difficult to praise people having to make difficult decisions when there can never be an bloodless outcome, or to suggest the best way forward. This is where I feel Fisk doesn't deliver. At the end of the book I knew the true horror of the conflicts, the problems and the suffering there is. What I didn't have any sense of was what's the best way forward. I would have hoped that a man of Fisk's integrity, intelligence and knowledge of the area could have given his thoughts and ideas on this. I think he could have given us some hope, but the end I couldn't find any.
Neverless, this beats an pure narrative account of the recent history of the Middle East, it draws you in, makes you empathise and feel involved. It makes you think and makes you care, and that is no small achievement.


A real eye opener, 13 Jul 2008
A real eye opener.

This book may be a little difficult for some to come to terms with and for others even more difficult to accept. It is something that has been placed in the psyche of us in Europe after the horrors of the holocaust that any criticism of the state of Israel or Zionism is equal to anti semitism. That the state of Israel was created out of the ashes of the second world war in order to provide a safe and free land for Jews the world over and a place of return for the Jews to their historical homeland.

This book dispels the myth. Pappe rather presents the establishment of the state of Israel as being not only created by men whose ideology was every equal of the extreme nationalism that European Jews had suffered under but also created out of the ethnic cleansing of the native population of that land, the Palestinians.

Pappe begins his book by providing us with with definitions of ethnic cleansing quoting from the United Nations amongst others. unfortunately his use of wikipedia, an 'encyclopedia' by his own admissions is edited by anyone in order to further his argument greatly diminishes his own introduction. While he may choose to use this in his own words to gauge public opinion on how genocide and ethnic cleansing is defined the fact that wikipedia is more of a soap box for anyone with a grudge makes the website frankly worthless.

According to Pappe, ethnic cleansing is something that requires planning and pre-thought before execution and in the first few chapters Pappe documents how Zionist leaders wrote up maps of Palestinian areas, their populations and numbers. Pappe is also quick to point out however, how some Palestinian leaders were only too happy to sell off land to Zionist settlers believing that the greater threat to their land was the colonialism of the British. For some, the Zionists were the poor of Europe and offered little threat, little were they to know that these people would be one and the same who orchestrated their own extinction from their own lands.

Pappe goes on to examine the execution of the Zionist plans of forced expulsion of Palestinians under threats of murder, how the response of Arab militias resulted in further excuses for Zionist outrages on civilian populations. Pappe gives examples of Palestinian villages of both Christian and Muslim who were wiped from the map. Further examples of man (Defined as aged between 10 and 50) being separated from their women folk and executed. Examples of mass rape, destruction of Churches, Mosques, orchards are also given.

Another interesting point is the Arab-Israeli war which Pappe defines as a 'phony war' Pointing out that Jordan had no intention of defending Palestinians rather in protecting its agreed annexation of the West Bank. How the poorly armed and trained Arab armies were no match for the Zionist forces due to the Egyptians while large in numbers (Swelled by the Muslim brotherhood whose lack of any military training made them more a liability than help) The Syrians lack of modern arms, the Lebanese whose numbers were so small they were more concerned with holding onto their own land and Iraqis. Most of these forces were tied down by their own political leaders who had no intentions of seeing them defend the Palestinian people.

I believe it was Robert Fisk in his book 'Pity the nation' who once pointed out the irony of the victims of genocide often being the most enthusiastic perpetrators of it. It is interesting that most of the criticism of this book is that it is 'anti semitic' (Strange considering the author is Jewish!) and reminds me of how Serbs would point out the massacres that were committed against their people in World War 2 by Croatian militias as though that somehow justifies the slaughter of thousands in Bosnia and Kosovo. Similarly Zionists use the holocaust to deflect war crimes in Lebanon and the ethnic cleansing of an entire people in Palestine.

Thankfully Pappe has brought this to the worlds attention in a book that while filled with information that will be shocking and disturbing is also clear and easy to read.




Brilliant book, 07 May 2008
It took courage to write this book and puts Ilan Pappe in the same category as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn lived in a different time and place; however his exposure of an unjust system with a manipulated history had significant impact on changing it.

During the past century a number of milestones have been put in place including the formation of the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. These define the standards to which we are expected to adhere (or be judged by) in both peace and war. We cannot compare what was acceptable behaviour in biblical times, ancient empires or the middle ages with a 20th Century ethnic cleansing.

If Pappe's book contributes towards peace in the Middle East through truth and reconciliation, then may history remember him well. He will have achieved what the United Nations and the world's leading superpower failed to do.


How A Racist State Was Formed., 27 Mar 2008
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population. He meticulously (and painfully) reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they intiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave.

Israel's official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbours; that Zionist leaders were willing to accept UN resolution 181 of November 1947, which called for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, but that it was the Palestinians who rejected that plan; and that the Palestinians became refugees when they "voluntarily" fled their homes to make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry out what they called a "second Holocaust" against Jews.

Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel's "founding fathers." These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the lea