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Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean, by Basem L. Ra‘ad. London and New York: Pluto Press, 2010. xiii + 218 pages. Notes to p. 243. Bibliography to p. 254. Index to p. 272. $32.00 paper, $95.00 cloth. Reviewed by Keith W. Whitelam Palestine suffered a strange fate in the twentieth century. It became detached from much of its history. It was as though Palestine only came into being with the British Mandate, as though the growth of towns, the shift in villages, or the population movements of three millennia before had nothing to do with this “modern” Palestine. It was as if many earlier periods had been cut adrift from the history of Palestine. This truncating of Palestine’s history was brought to a head by the social and political upheavals that followed the Zionist immigrations into Palestine from the nineteenth century onward, was secured with the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, and has become firmly entrenched in popular, political, and scholarly perceptions of the region ever since. This collection of linked essays by Basem L. Ra‘ad attempts to reinstate the continuity of the region with its ancient cultures as a response to the ways in which Western scholars and politicians, and the Zionist movement in particular, have appropriated regional cultures for their own use. After a lengthy introduction that examines the ways in which the people of Palestine, ancient and modern, have been devalued and dispossessed, a series of separate essays examines how sacred sites, place names, customs (including food, art, currency, and costumes), language, religion, and history have been appropriated and misrepresented. Much of the information that Ra‘ad presents is well known and debated in contemporary scholarship. For instance, the continuities he presents, with great insistence, between indigenous religions and the development of monotheism in the region are widely known and accepted. The fact that the Hebrew Bible preserves the syncretistic nature of worship in such passages as Deuteronomy 32:8–9, where Israel’s deity Yahweh is part of a pantheon ruled by El the Most High (El Elyon), or that there is archaeological evidence that shows Yahweh being worshipped alongside a female deity is known to most students in the field. Similarly, the construction of a sacred geography by Western scholars and its appropriation by the Zionist movement to “hebraize” the map of Palestine, eliminate Palestinian place names, and thereby colonize the present and the past is detailed in works such as Meron Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 (University of California, 2002). However, it is the cumulative nature of the argument within a personally engaged narrative, sprinkled with anecdotes and experiences from his own life, that gives Ra‘ad’s account its resonance, urgency, and power. He is at his most effective in examining and exposing the politics of language and translation. The common classification of languages—particularly based on script—is an effective strategy that keeps “the cultures of the region separate and discontinuous from each other, especially in relation to the continuity of the past with the present Arab region” (p. 42). His focus on the sound system of languages highlights the similarities between Ugaritic and Arabic, suggesting that Arabic is not a late intruder into the region from 638 c.e. onward, following the Arab-Muslim conquests. Similarly, the insidious practice of using Hebrew square script to transcribe inscriptions in different languages (Moabite, Phoenician) or the invention of terms such as “Hebraeo-Philistine” devalues other languages, magnifies the importance of Hebrew, and bolsters Zionist claims to the ancient past. The other distinctive and crucial theme is what Ra‘ad terms “self-colonization.” Although it is important to constantly challenge the weight of dominant scholarship, it is equally important to challenge how Palestinians have accepted and internalized these dominant views so that they repeat them and in effect perform acts of self-colonization. This prevents the development of an effective Palestinian scholarship that produces alternative narratives of the past that stress their continuities with the region. “To come out from under the shadow of centuries and many-layered constructions,” he urges, “will require a work of rediscovery and reinterpretation. . . . [The people] need to employ their whole history more usefully in forming the crucial elements of their identity and self-understanding” (p. 46). Ra‘ad highlights the need to construct a coherent total history that details cultural continuities and the full extent of the Palestinian presence from prehistoric times to the present. Along with other important work in the field, this volume provides the justification and urgency for such a task. The continuing abuse of the past to dispossess a people and persecute them in the name of “democracy” and “civilization” is not an issue that can be ignored by scholars as though their work is immune from its worldly affiliations. Yet the construction of an integrated history of Palestine, how the rhythms of the past continue into the present, is a task that is still to be realized.