Kirkus Reviews

One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse



Peace does not require that both sides share an “agreed narrative” of what happened in 1948, as some commentators have suggested. But, Abunimah urges, “It is unacceptable for a Palestinian to draw on his history of oppression and suffering to justify harming innocent Israeli civilians,” just as it is for an Israeli to use the idea of a covenant between God and Abraham to force Palestinians out of their ancestral home. Indeed, he adds, the success of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and of Belgian federalism has not hinged on agreed narrative; “changing society,” he writes, “does not require us to forget or revise the past.”