This book is not about suicide bombers. Tending one's fields, visiting a relative, going to the hospital: for ordinary Palestinians, such everyday activities require negotiating permits and passes, curfews and closures, "sterile roads" and "seam zones"'"bureaucratic hurdles ultimately as deadly as outright military incursion.

Not since the late Edward Said has there been such an articulate Arab voice on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In devastating detail, Saree Makdisi reveals how the "peace process" institutionalized Palestinians' loss of control over their inner and outer lives. He shows how Israel's massive concrete walls going up around Gaza and the West Bank isolate communities from their lands, their livelihoods, and each other. Through eye-opening statistics and day-by-day reports, we learn how Palestinians have seen their hopes for freedom and statehood culminate in the creation of abject "territories" comparable to open-air prisons.

Anyone surprised at Arab anger or the election of Hamas must read this book.

"In chronicling Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories — from road blocks to curfews, economic chaos to health care crises — UCLA professor Makdisi sketches a powerful, relentlessly heartbreaking account of a reality few Westerners know. According to Makdisi, the global media rarely covers the 'routine' destruction of the occupation; rather than assessing the hermetic sealing of the Gaza Strip or the slicing up of West Bank communities for the sake of Israeli settlements, the media focuses on violence — eclipsing the 'deadly effects of the Israeli apparatus of bureaucracy and control.' Makdisi unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians, Israeli or Palestinian, and acknowledges the many Israelis working toward conflict resolution (indeed, much of his data comes from Israeli human rights organizations), but his scholarship occasionally fails when surveying Israeli society: Jews who fled Arab lands don't generally consider themselves 'Arab Jews,' for instance, and Zionism is a 19th-century nationalist movement, not a reaction to the Holocaust. Yet this doesn't detract from the urgency of Makdisi's work. The combined weight of personal stories of abject suffering, harsh statistics (in the past seven years, Israeli military operations have killed 854 Palestinian children) and facts on the ground make Makdisi's case that the occupation is destroying the Palestinian people, and possibly any chance for peaceful coexistence." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

In his author's note, Makdisi (English and comparative literature, U. of California at Los Angeles) recalls hearing the name Occupied Palestine as a child in geography class, but not being told what "occupied" meant. Unfortunately, that is too often the case, especially in the media, but even in much of the academic literature, but here Makdisi offers a valuable corrective. He weaves a broad explanation of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza from the 1967 war through its institutionalization under various "peace accords" (set in the context of Israeli determination to establish a state defined by Jewish nationalism) together with, perhaps more importantly, a detailed examination of the everyday impacts of the varying levels of Israeli occupation policies, whether they be the "Separation Barrier" or "Apartheid Wall" cutting off Palestinians from their lands and neighbors, the networks of Jewish-only roads and Israeli army checkpoints making travel and commerce ever more difficult for Palestinians, the house demolitions, the restrictions on travel to and from the territories, the use of permits to limit the right of Palestinians to live in Jerusalem, the effective embargo of food and medicines to Gaza, or Jewish settler and Israeli military violence against Palestinians. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

How the "peace process" has made life impossible for ordinary Palestinians.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He lives in Los Angeles, California.