Karl Sabbagh's latest book is a welcome addition to a new mini-genre of works on Israel and Palestine that focus on people rather than politicians...His detective work has unearthed historical treasures such as Daher al-Omar al-Zaydani, who ran his own autonomous state of Palestine within the Ottoman empire during the 18th century, selling cotton to the French...Despite the book's subtitle, "A Personal History", much of the first half is a general history of Palestine. It would have made better reading to go straight into the Sabbaghs' family story, rather than spending time on another lengthy, partisan debunking of Jewish claims to the land...The Sabbagh family history shows the absurdity of Israel Zangwill's claim that Palestine was "a land without a people for a people without a land". Sabbagh's grandfather was a lawyer in Tulkarm. His relatives were businessmen and traders, part of an intricate web of societal links that reached across Palestine and the Levant. Palestinian Arab society was highly developed, especially in the towns and cities, with a sophisticated cultural and political life...The Palestinians were no match for the determination of the Jews. Riven by factionalism and incessant feuding, their leadership had no strategic plan to capture Palestine once the fighting started and no united military command. Sabbagh skilfully uses material extracted by Israeli historians from Israeli archives to show the dark reality of the 1948 war, which makes uncomfortable reading for those raised on the myth that the Palestinians simply ran away. But Sabbagh does not mention the pledges of Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, who promised "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre" of the Jews, which would "drive them into the sea"...
If they were so highly developed, how come they couldn't get their act together?
A state of Palestine? Or, perhaps, a small fiefdom of a warlord?
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His *grandfather*? Big whoop. My kids are the 10th generation in a row living here, and there's a branch that's got members of the 11th. So I guess all those Pali Arabs better get back where they came from and leave the land to those of us who were here first.
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