RECENT BOOKS DISPOSSESSING REFUGEES The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem, by Nur

The title of this book is somewhat mis-leading. It is in part a book about the Israeli “politics of denial, ” as its title promises, but it also exposes even more forcefully, and to my mind more importantly, the Israeli pol-itics of dispossession. The two, denial and dispossession, of course, are intertwined. Those who dispossess are powerful enough to erase their crimes from their own and others ’ official narratives. The chapters on denial are part of a new field of inquiry for this prolific historian. One chapter is devoted to the beginning of the struggle against denial of the 1948 nakba in Israel, through the works of both the new historians and the professional Palestinian historiographies that appeared more or less at the same time. A later chapter examines thoroughly the way denial of the 1948 ethnic cleansing has been perpetuated by the peace efforts since 1967. The epilogue calls for a future peace in Palestine based on Israeli acknowledgment of the 1948 ethnic cleansing and the restitution of its victims’ rights, through the implementation of UN resolution no. 194 and the right of return. The rest of the book is, to my mind, one of the first, and definitely one of the most successful, attempts to present the Zionist and Israeli politics of dispossession through the years. Masalha earlier wrote a sort of trilogy: His first book dealt with the 1948 expulsion (Expulsion of the Palestinians, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); his second book examined transfer plans in the State of Israel well into the 1990s (