Ilan Pappé is the Jewish Israeli historian who wrote The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, about the 1948 Nakba.

And this book, The Biggest Prison on Earth, is its sequel; explaining the detailed history of the Israel’s treatment of the occupied Palestinian territories in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza from the 1950s until now.

And it was a lot. Holy crap.

To put it simply, Pappé demonstrated how the Israeli government’s motivation has been to a) annex as much Palestinian (and neighbouring) territory as possible—without b) having to incorporate the millions of Palestinian Arabs living there as full Israeli citizens. Through different occupation strategies; plus ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or a mixture of both.

What complicates this explanation, and why this book is SO DENSE 😅 is that each area has a unique history of occupation. But also, each area involves an ‘internal’ discussion about how best to conquer, occupy, manage, and annex it—along with an ‘external’ discussion meant to justify that occupation.

Or, what Pappé describes as, “marketing the policies in one way, while carrying them out in exactly the opposite way.”

Pappé has a particular style. A very measured, no stone left unturned, let the facts speak for themselves style. More than that, he’d rather quote the letters, meeting minutes, and speeches of Israeli officials themselves than paraphrase things in his own words. And the result is… freaking overwhelming tbh.

But I think this book’s detailed-ness is its strength. And it has made me appreciate why there are no neat-and-tidy infographics or lectures that easily explain how exactly the different territories are being occupied and how we got here.