Joseph Massad - The Persistence of The Palestinian Question (2006)

The Persistence of The Palestinian Question (2006)

The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, Massad's second book, was published in 2006 by Routledge.

The Persistence of the Palestinian Question analyzes Zionism and Palestinian nationalism from a variety of angles, including race, gender, culture, ethnicity, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and nationalist ideology. Massad's analysis of the discourse on terrorism in the introduction deals with the dynamics of power relations between Zionism and the Palestinians and traces the history of Zionist and Israeli violence which the British called "terrorism" in Palestine before 1948 and after, while his title chapter on the persistence of the Palestinian question argues that the Palestinian and the Jewish questions are one and the same and that "both questions can only be resolved by the negation of anti-Semitism, which still plagues much of Europe and America and which mobilizes Zionism’s own hatred of Jewish Jews and of the Palestinians."

The book has received praise from scholars Ilan Pappé and Ella Shohat as well as from Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi. Shohat praised the book as a "timely and engaging volume" that "makes an invaluable contribution to the ongoing debate over Zionism and Palestine." Pappé saw the book as a "courageous intellectual exercise" and as "a thought provoking book that forces us to reverse our conventional images and perceptions about Palestine's history and future."

Other scholars situated the book’s contribution in relation to European history and to the work of Edward Said. University of Pennsylvania political science professor Anne Norton wrote:

"Massad's brilliant and scholarly work is profoundly illuminating not only for the history of Palestine and the discourses surrounding it, but for the history of Europe and the United States and, finally, as an account that raises compelling theoretical questions."

In his review in Nations and Nationalism, Israeli scholar Ephraim Nimni wrote that "like his intellectual mentor, Massad reminds us of a long and honourable tradition of Jewish Intellectuals who could only envisage the solution to the Jewish Question through universal emancipation. It seems that Massad, and the late Edward Said, are existential Diaspora Jews of the old kind...The book is also fastidiously referenced, showing the erudition of the author and his command of the voluminous Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as the classics of Jewish history".