The Biggest Prison on Earth

Reviewed by: Chowdhury Mueen Uddin – London UK

Published by: London: One World Publications, 2017, 304pp. ISBN: 978-1851685875.

The dedication of the book reads, “To the Palestinian children, killed, wounded and traumatized by living in the biggest prison on earth.” The rest of the book depicts the plight of the Palestinian children sentenced to such unimaginable life of persecution by the apartheid terror-state of Israel and its Western partnersin- crime. Although published five years ago, the book strikes a more powerful cord now that the massacres committed by the Israelis is close to thirty thousand children (perhaps more by the time this review is published) for no fault of their own.

Ilan Pappé, a noted Jewish critic of Israel, is described by prominent journalist John Pilger as, “Israel’s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian”. In this book, Pappé is continuing with this heart-breaking story, where he left off in his earlier book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. The current book begins at ‘‘the university on the Hill’’ (the Hebrew University) on the Givat Ram or the Hill of Ram, where academics and bureaucrats from as early as 1963, long before the actual occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, “worked out the fine detail of the system… upheld it for all those years and… perfected its operation.” He writes, “as the wardens of this largest prison on earth, they are constant abusers, dehumanizers and destroyers of the Palestinian rights and lives.” The author uses ‘occupation’ rather uneasily, because the term ‘occupation’ is a temporary means of securing a territory following armed conflict or war but in this case ‘temporality’ is not part of the story, unlike all other known occupation, here it is a “totality of control exercised by the occupier,” a kind of occupation exercised only on a group of people “designated for elimination or genocide.” This is what Patrick Wolfe brilliantly describe as “the logic of elimination of the native” because “settler colonialism is a structure not an event.”