Contested Land, Contested Memory

[Roberts’s] writing has academic credibility and personal appeal. If that sounds unlikely, it is. Only a writer as good as Roberts could make it work—but work it does, as it proceeds to unravel Israel’s paradoxical political identity.

Embassy

The author significantly contributes to the historiography of 1948, particularly in her presentation of the lesser-known experiences of displaced Palestinians who remained in what became Israel after the war.

Electronic Intifada

A short review such as this cannot do justice to a book which narrates in rich detail the history of the Jews in Europe leading to the founding of the State of Israel and its impact on the local population of Palestine. The discussion of identity, statehood and the role of narrative give a context for the sources of the conflicts and their continuation.

Jewish Renaissance

. . . Roberts provides an engaging introduction to the significance of collective memory in Israeli and Palestinian education, geography, and law. What results is a diverse anthology of the ways these divergent memories affect the current culture and conflict.

Mondoweiss.net

Roberts’s formal arguments have a lapidary quality that makes them appear nearly self-evident. I thought more than once, “I knew that. She’s got that just right, and I couldn’t say it better.”

America: The National Catholic Review

Contested Land, Contested Memory is a work that disinters Israel’s buried history concealed in the collective psyche that ignores the past. It also shatters the assumed periodization of this conflict as originating in 1967 and highlights instead how the 1948 war and a Zionist ideology of ethnic nationalism contributed to this conflict.

Journal of Palestine Studies

This remarkable book is, to my knowledge, the first detailed analysis of the oppression inflicted upon the Palestinians by the Israeli government … that has been welcomed by Jewish organizations and prominent Jewish scholars.

THE ECUMENIST: A Journal of Theology, Culture, and Society