Publication Date:  2024
This review essay introduces two books by Mitri Raheb which ground the contemporary predicament of Palestine in its historical and structural context. Raheb challenges the uncritical historical, theological, and ethnographic narratives regarding Palestine and its peoples. He delves into the history of Palestine showing it to be much older than the history of the Bible, and "Israel." This version of history challenges the Eurocentric and deliberate misrepresentation and misreading of the bible by the traditional Christian theology, and variety of Christian and Jewish Zionists. As battleground between various empires for colonization, occupation, and control. Palestine as a multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural land has survived the violence of competing empires and their theological constructs. The “Settler Colonial” design, however which began in the twentieth century with its own dehumanizing and demonizing language and analogies against the natives of Palestine is a refined version of the same script used by the Western colonial empires against Native Americans, and Africans, among others. Read More