Jonathan Cook is an experienced journalist based in the Galilean town of Nazareth in the present state of Israel. He previously worked for a number of British as well as major international newspapers. His book on the ‘disappearing of Palestine’ as it currently seems to be getting subsumed by the present state of Israel, is phenomenally packed with information on the Israel-Palestine conflict and makes a highly interesting read indeed. Cook’s long years of staying within the Palestinian/Arab areas of the state of Israel has meant that he is well familiar with the terrain across which he travels.
Cook starts his book with the political analysis of a piece he wrote for the International Herald Tribune in April-May 2003 about the so-called ‘security’ Apartheid Wall, the massive fortress like ‘de-facto’ border structure that had then started to snake its way across the Palestinian Territories. The editors of the paper, dominated by the world-view of the New York Times hesitated considerably before agreeing to publish the piece. Cook was arguing that the Wall which at the time was just being built, was purely a strategic initiative of the Israelis to maximise the amount of Palestinian land that they were able to annex as part of any future peace deal with the Palestinian people. This then created a massive stir with reams of letters being written to the paper protesting its publication of the Cook article. His motive in including this was to show how difficult it is to publish on Palestinian issues in the mainstream Western and in particular the US-controlled media.
Part one is made up of four chapters that seek to lay the stage for the later part of the book that consists of a collection of articles. The first couple of chapters seek to lay the groundwork as regards Israel’s policy towards the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. Jon Cook’s first chapter deals with the way in which the Palestinian people of the Holy Land were dispossessed from their land by the Zionist colonists. Cook tries to make it clear in this chapter that the main preoccupation of the Zionists with the Palestinian people was to get rid of as many of them as possible from the land.
The author describes how it was Israeli policy towards the Palestinian people within the state of Israel during the pre and post-1967 period that laid the groundwork for the further condemnation and exploitation of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. Cook refers to the recently published book by Shlomo Sand that seeks to debunk the myth that today’s Israeli Jews are the descendents of the Palestinian Jews of yore who were exiled by the Romans in 70 AD. Cook clearly traces in his initial essay the method that the Zionists used to deprive the Palestinian people of their land and home in the present state of Israel. Cook’s genius lies in his ability to integrate the various strands of Israeli policy towards the Palestinian people into a coherent plan of strategy that denotes the aims and motives of the Israeli state and machinery towards the Palestinians. Cook’s second chapter in this book traces the innovative legal and other ways in which the Palestinian people were disinherited of their inheritance in the land. He reveals how the main aim of the Zionists in the land of Palestine was always their desire for more land. Cook describes in detail how the courts in Israel have routinely authorised all actions of the military authorities in their dealings with the Palestinian populace of the Occupied Territories. His second chapter also deals with how the nascent Israeli state took all possible steps to ensure that they widened and broadened the new state’s borders at the expense of the Palestinians and the neighbouring Arab states. He also describes in some detail how the Israelis have gone to great lengths to ensure their control and dominance of the Palestinian people and their territories. He quotes from Raja Shehadeh to show how over 1,000 military orders have been passed by the Israeli Occupation Administration in the Territories curtailing almost all aspects of life for the Palestinian people of the land (p. 62). As he so aptly describes, two systems of administration were set up in the territories, one to control the Palestinian people and the other to pave the way for the eventual settlement of the Palestinian Territories with Jewish settlers.
Chapter 3 deals with Israel’s obsession with the land and the policies of the state that resulted in the confiscation of so much of Palestinian land for the benefit of the state and its Jewish residents. In particular, he raises the issue of settler collusion with the judicial process in Israel to rid the Palestinian people of their land. Chapter 3 provides us with a frightening snapshot of what could happen to all the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories given the propensity of the settler groups to grab as much land as possible from them. Jonathan Cook is very concerned about the slow annexation of the West Bank to the state of Israel, ‘dunam by dunam,’ to quote from the terminology that he employs. Cook refers to how Israel is a settler-colonialist state as opposed to a ‘traditionally’ colonialist state. He questions what Zionism must actually mean to the vast majority of the people of the ‘Holy Land.’ Cook does not spare any issue in his critique of the entire gamut of issues usually involving Israel and the world. Jonathan cook’s book is first and foremost a memoir of life and events as they have taken place in Israel-Palestine over the last sixty years or so since the establishment of the state of Israel.
Chapter 4 is dedicated to an analysis of the disappearing Palestinian polity from the state of Israel. It is the rather bulkier prologue to the previous chapter carrying on the argument used by Israelis to systematically deprive the Palestinian people of their land and means of livelihood in the Occupied Territories. He defines the term ‘politicide’ to describe how the Palestinian people are being denied an existence within their own state. Cook reveals the classically colonialist methods employed by the Israeli state to control the Palestinians and in particular their propensity to opt for the ‘divide and rule’ policy. He also goes into detail about the resumption of the so-called ‘Jordanian option,’ the oft-expressed and recurring desire on the part of some Israeli as well as Arab commentators for a solution to the Palestinian problem to be found in collaboration or in collusion with the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan. He also reveals in this chapter the extent of Israeli dependence on the raw materials and resources of the West Bank, in particular water, to the extent that it is well nigh impossible for the Israelis to separate themselves from the ‘mountain aquifer’ that lies under the West Bank of Palestine. He provides some horrifying statistics such as the fact that some 87% of all Gazans were living below the poverty line in 2007, which amounted to a tripling of the percentage that was in 2000 (p. 125). He quotes in this context the statement by Karen Koning AbuZayd, the commissioner-general of the UN refugee agency UNRWA that ‘Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and-some would say-encouragement of the international community.’
Part II of the book includes a selection of essays prepared by the Author over the last couple of years and added to this book with respect to their topical significance. Each chapter in this section is a collection of several different essays, published at different times in the author’s writing history and appended according to relevance. Chapter 5 deals with the meaning of Zionism from an Israeli point of view. A full section of this chapter is devoted to the veteran Palestinian-Israeli human rights campaigner and long-term MK (Member of the Israeli Knesset-parliament) Azmi Bishara. Bishara along with other so-called ‘radical’ Palestinians within the state of Israel has been either hounded into exile or imprisonment by the Zionist authorities on the pretext of state security. Cook reveals the rationale behind the agreement behind the Israeli authorisation of the Oslo Accords. He tellingly reveals the dangers of the widespread racism that is prevalent among Israel’s Russian minority against the Arab people of Palestine. In particular, he focuses on Avigdor Lieberman, the political leader of the overwhelmingly East European recent migrants to the state of Israel.
Chapter 6 is dedicated to an analysis of Israel’s pervasive system of occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Cook evocatively portrays the life of the Palestinian people under occupation. He details this through the work of Machsom Watch, the Israeli NGO that has made its duty to monitor the checkpoints that have sprung up across the OT’s. He tellingly ‘embeds’ himself with Machsom Watch thereby enabling him to really witness at first hand what is going on in the Palestinian Territories, especially as regards Israeli treatment of Palestinian civilians at checkpoints.
Chapter 7 deals with the complicity of the Western and Israeli Human Rights groups in the refusal to adequately question the state of Israel as regards their actual motives in the Occupied Territories. He contrasts the differing peace visions of veteran Israeli peaceniks like Uri Avnery and David Grossman, but categorises them both as very much part of the so-called ‘Zionist’ peace camp that seeks to make peace with the Palestinians very much on Israel’s own terms. He goes on to criticise the efforts of human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) as been too focussed on maintaining a parity of reporting between Israeli and Palestinian human rights violations, instead of clearly analysing who is the aggressor and who is the victim in the current (as well as historical) context in Israel-Palestine. He critiques how both the West and Israel actively categorise the whole of Hamas as a Palestinian militant outfit without making any leeway for the fact that the organisation possesses not only a paramilitary wing, but also a political wing as well as a network of welfare charities. This is a denial of the fact that radical groups do have multiple identities the way that, for example, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had, with its political wing called Sinn Fein (p. 202-203).
Chapter 8 details the steps taken by Israeli authorities to muzzle the mainly Western media in the Occupied Territories. Cook is very critical of the way that mainly Western media outlets have functioned in reporting from the Occupied Territories. He describes in details the steps taken by Israel to prevent any news and political affairs reporting from the Occupied Territories that goes against the strategic aims and ambitions of the Jewish state. He describes how Israel has managed to stifle almost all forms of critical reporting from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by aggressive controlling policies aimed at just eliminating the Palestinian viewpoint from the media picture altogether. He also criticises the extent to which the big US media outlets determine the thrust of journalism from the region and influence the reporting of other national journalists such as those from the UK.
Chapter 9 deals with the impact of the oft-mentioned Israeli accusations of anti-Semitism against the Europeans. The Israeli state always promotes accusations of anti-Semitism, whenever there was a desire on their part to transfer blame for various Zionist policies in the Middle East onto the heads of the Muslim (ironically Semitic Arab) people of the region. Jonathan Cook refers to the situation of Palestine’s Christians many times removed as a minority within the state of Israel as well as in the Palestinian Territories. He documents the activist profile of the Palestinian Christians of the Holy Land as being a particular thorn in the side of the authorities in the state of Israel. Palestinian Christians, like all Levantine Christians have always been socially and religiously more closer to the West than the vast majority of their Muslim brethren thereby making their tendency to migrate in search of better pastures to the West more marked than the other. He relates how the state of Israel has encouraged the migration of Christians from Israel as well as the Palestinian Territories in the hope that their departure will make the field clearer for the Zionists to pursue their struggle with Palestinian Muslims for the historic land of Palestine to the bitter end.
The final chapter deals with the arguments for and against a two-state solution in the Occupied Territories. Cook details the facts on the ground that emphasise how impossible the two-state solution is at the moment from an Israeli point of view. He ends the book with an impassioned call to all concerned that obviously the main enemy is Zionism and not the state of Israel per se, and therefore by discrediting Zionism, one could lay the foundation for the eventual solution of the Israel-Palestine imbroglio as ‘without Zionism, the obstacle to creating either one or two states will be finally removed.’ (p. 251).