thorough and broad information

this book really opened my eyes to the colonial roots of current world issues and covers aspects of language, cartography, politics, ancient history and the involvement of different European cultures in the Middle East.. excellent read for those trying to understand history away from colonial bias.

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Eye opening, erudite history

A great book of the history of Palestinian peoples across the ages. The final chapters detail the cultural appropriations that produced a national Israeli identity out of a diverse group of Jewish people that had entirely different cultural and ethnic origins, with Zionism as the glue to this project.

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fantastic

thorough and well-researched. a must-have for anyone interested in the history of the Palestine or the Levant/middle east generally

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Interesting, compelling, necessary, but sadly not that engaging

A hard one to rate, this, largely because I'm not sure there's anything new here. But then, that's basically the whole point.

The premise - which is really pretty much impossible to argue with - is that Palestine / Israel has been continuously populated for thousands of years, with substantial continuity of population, language, place names, and culture. Up until the last century, that is. Even the name Palestine (and its variants - remember the Biblical Philistines?) has proved remarkably resilient.

In addition, as the final couple of chapters detail, there is little hard historical or archaeological evidence for an established Jewish presence on the area, even back when the old Kingdom of Israel was meant to have existed. And, finally, the founders of the Zionist project kinda knew this - albeit I suspect they would have claimed that this evidence was deliberately destroyed - and so set out to create their own historical and cultural myths.

None of this should, really, be controversial. The fact that it has become so is doubtless why the author spends so long laying out quite granular, fairly repetitive examples of how something called Palestine (or similar, as much of the emphasis is on the evolution and continuity of etymology) was acknowledged by observers, travellers, and others throughout history.

This means much of the books is effectively made up of what amounts to lists of references - and in some cases, actual lists. Which makes it rather less engaging than I'd hoped - but a potentially very useful reference book.

It's also reminded me that I've still not read Edward Said's classic book on Palestine, written over 40 years ago now. Maybe one for later in the year.

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Unfortunately Really poorly narrated

I downloaded this book as it seemed to be another alternative perspective to the Palestine situation - unfortunately it’s so hard to listen to I am really struggling

Whilst there is undoubtedly interesting content here I have tried multiple times and just can’t listen more than 20 mins at a time

Sorry to be negative but it’s disappointing

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