other book comments
Dear Mazin Qumsiyeh,
I am reading Canaan these days and what a brilliant piece of scholarship! I am praising it in front of all the networkers I know in the world and I am thrilled. Thanx for writing it. Just recommended Canaan to Professor Glenn D. Paige in Hawaii , see http://www.anis-online.de/pages/_22-ebene/ton12.htm whose important book on "Nonkilling Political Science" is also translated into Arabic by now. He was asking me whether Palestinians could relate to his notion of nonkilling and I said yes.
Tahiyaat min Anis fi Almaniya
Anis Hamadeh
Oststraße 15
59065 Hamm - Germany
Tel.: +49/ (0)2381 / 436 69 76
Email: anis@anis-online.de
Web: www.anis-online.de
English: www.anis-online.de/index_engl.htm
Arabic: www.anis-online.de/index_arab.htm
Web(2): www.virtual-palestine.org
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From: Anis Hamadeh
To: redaktion@faz.de ; redaktion@sueddeutsche.de ; redaktion@welt.de ; diezeit@zeit.de ; redaktion.ausland@nzz.ch
Cc: redaktion@freitag.de ; redaktion@jungewelt.de ; infotsp@tagesspiegel.de ; chefred@taz.de ; feuilleton@fr-aktuell.de
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 12:10 AM
Subject: Anfrage Buchrezension Israel/Palästina (Qumsiyeh, Canaan)
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
heute fragte mich Professor Mazin B. Qumsiyeh aus den USA, ob ich nicht eine Rezension zu seinem Buch „Sharing the Land of Canaan. Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle“ (2004) schreiben wolle, wo ich doch so begeistert davon bin. Ich sagte: Gern, nur sei die deutsche Presse leicht zögerlich (ich verwendete das Wort „reluctant“), wenn es um Dinge wie die Einstaatlösung geht. Allerdings ist es ein wirklich außergewöhnlich gelehrtes und ehrlich progressives, zudem betont moderates, vor allem pragmatisches Buch, was selbst unser Außenminister nicht bestreiten könnte. Und nicht einmal von einem Muslim. Vielleicht übersetze ich Canaan sogar, wer weiß, erst mal lese ich es durch. Tun Sie es doch auch und überzeugen Sie sich.
Wünscht jemand von Ihnen, dass ich eine Rezension darüber schreibe? Ich würde es auch so machen, dass es für Sie zu verantworten ist. Oder war es schon gelaufen in Deutschland und der Schweiz, ich wüsste nicht.
Siehe: http://www.qumsiyeh.org/sharingthelandofcanaan/
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Anis Hamadeh
Oststraße 15
59065 Hamm - Germany
Tel.: +49/ (0)2381 / 436 69 76
Email: anis@anis-online.de
Web: www.anis-online.de
English: www.anis-online.de/index_engl.htm
Arabic: www.anis-online.de/index_arab.htm
Web(2): www.virtual-palestine.org
Anis Online is a journalistic art website in German, English, and Arabic with about 1001 pages. It contains music, poetry and prose, essays, children's stories, satires, interviews, media reviews, Palestiniana, Orient Online, drawings, an Elvis page, and a lot more.
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Sharing the Land of Canaan reviewed (With Virginia Tilley's book) negatively in Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle by Leon Cohen Sept 30 2005
Of the one-state solution authors, Qumsiyeh appears to be the more energetic advocate. He spoke about the topic in Milwaukee twice last year, at the Green Party convention and at UW-Milwaukee. That difference is audible in the tone of the two books. Tilley strives to be scholarly and reasoned; and she has more thorough documentation for her statements. She even makes a few attempts (though woefully inadequate) to try to present some of the Jewish/Zionist point of view, if only to dismiss it.
……
Both denounce as racist Israel’s Law of Return, which grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew who comes to Israel to claim it. Neither sets this law into the historical context of the Jewish experience of Nazi Germany, when, out of hostility or indifference, countries the world over closed their borders to endangered Jews.….Neither takes seriously modern Arab and Muslim expressions of hatred for Jews and Judaism as well as of Israel. Both claim that Israel provoked the 1967 Six Day War, dismissing or not referring to the Arab world’s fevered genocidal rhetoric at the time. Both use the most inflammatory terms to describe Israel and Zionism — “racist,” “settler-colonial,” “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid” — and never consider how those concepts actually apply more justly and accurately to the Arab/Muslim world.
Ultimately, both are people who, consciously or otherwise, find Jewish faith, apprehensions, fears, well-being, safety and ultimately lives to be expendable or, at best, worth putting at risk in the name of human rights and democracy in the abstract.……
It is telling that while both Tilley and Qumsiyeh devote pages to the issue of water in the West Bank and how Israel and Jewish settlements have been wresting control of it away from Palestinian Arabs there, Dershowitz’s book doesn’t discuss this topic at all.
So if both of these solutions are inadequate, based as they are on different denials of reality and different inflictions of unacceptable suffering – what is left? Must we endure a status quo of periods of fighting and terrorism alternating with periods of truce and half-hearted negotiations, a grim muddling through to see which side ultimately can outlast the other? Or can only one more big Arab-Israel war settle things once and for all? I do not have the wisdom or insight enough to know. But I do understand enough to know that nobody else has them either, certainly not the authors of any of these books. Perhaps we can only hope that they are all wrong; that some yet undreamed solution is out there, if it can only be discovered and accepted.
Review by Leon Cohen in the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle
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