I listened to an audio version of Except for Palestine nearly a year ago and let me just start by saying this – it was not an easy book to finish. Admittedly, I do have a tendency to be overly comfortable with a long list of DNFs, but there are reasons. In my early semesters as a student I really looked up to the work of Marc Lamont Hill, but as time moved on and my own stance as a diasporic Palestinian got increasingly more bold and disconnected from US hegemony (ALSO hegemony in discourse regarding resistance and political agendas of the diaspora), I started being less impressed. All that said, let’s get into this specific book.

Throughout the book, Lamont Hill elaborates on the history of US American politics with regards to Palestine. He deconstructs common misconceptions, construed for misunderstandings and popularized false premises, like that freedom for Palestinians must lead to subjugation of Israelis or the false exceptionalization of Palestinian refugees inheriting refugee status from their parents that led to the belief that defunding or criminalizing UNRWA would affect the reality of refugees being able to insist on their legally enshrined Right to Return. So often he is just about to say something radical, and then calls the legal organization Adaleh “Israel-based”. That Adalah is the first Palestinian run legal center in Israel (for reasons) doesn’t seem to matter as much as strengthening the democratic character of the settler colonial state. So much so, that liberal zionist stances are placed right next to Palestinian positions, while peaceful ways of resistance are strongly praised. I want to be very clear and say that this book is not only about Americans but -for- US Americans. I personally don’t care much about polling Americans on a land my family had to leave. We cannot afford to keep centering American emotion about injustice.

I think the intentions that went into writing this book were good. Fortunately, I’ve never had to deal with major publishers attempting to make my words so appealing that their success as “radical” thought would digestible enough for near success under capitalism. But maybe no one has to do that, and maybe, just maybe, we need to consider very strongly if softening the blow for success makes that success at all worthwhile.