Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean

This was a difficult book to review and I was tempted not to give it any rating. Obviously I have but this rating only reflects my reading experience and thoughts about how the book fulfilled my expectations based on the summary.

What I expected from the book was a socio-political history of Palestine that would help this American understand more about the region and the conflicts. What I got was a reflection on Palestinian cultural, linguistic, religious, and a bit of agricultural history. Specifically, the book was an argument about how that Palestinian history is not just overlooked but overwritten by more dominant narratives, notably Israeli.

I cannot profess to fully understand or appreciate or verify the considerably detailed work show more that the author did to recover some of these Palestinian histories. At times the histories seem well researched and sourced. They were interesting. At other times historical conclusions appeared very anecdotal, circumstantial, and coincidental. The charitable reading of the more poorly sourced arguments is that the lack of evidence and scholarship IS the evidence of colonization and cultural erasure, but that feels a little dubious to me. Also, I am suspicious of argumentation attempting to show how a dominant socio-political order critiqued for being based on a faulty exegetical interpretation of religious texts can be proven faulty by a different exegetical reading of the same texts that seem (to me!) based on just as many suppositions, assumptions, and guesses.

Does the author have a point about cultural and linguistic erasure? I don't know ... probably. I'm convinced that there is some of that going on here. But the issue is bigger and more complicated in a way that this book just doesn't really touch upon. show less