Older books – Current Affairs/Politics
This page contains details of books previously listed on the Recently Published Books page. Books are listed in alphabetical order of the author. All the books were published in 2014 or later; earlier books previously listed on this page can be found here.
CURRENT AFFAIRS/POLITICS
Matthew Abraham: Out of bounds: Academic freedom and the question of Palestine (2014)
Ali Abunimah: The battle for justice in Palestine (2014)
Yossi Alpher: No end of conflict: Rethinking Israel-Palestine (2016)
Yaacov Bar Siman Tov: Justice & peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (2014)
Yael Berda: Living emergency: Israel’s permit regime in the West Bank (2017)
Max Blumenthal: The 51 day war: Ruin and resistance in Gaza (2015)
Bjorn Brenner: Gaza under Hamas: From Islamic democracy to Islamist governance (2016)
Michael Buergermeister: Gaza: A philosophical dictionary (2015)
Gregg Carlstrom: How long will Israel survive: The threat from within (2017)
Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappé: On Palestine (2015)
Marwan Darweish & Andrew Rigby: Popular protest in Palestine: The uncertain future of of unarmed resistance (2015)
Khaled Diab: Intimate enemies: Living with Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land (2014)
Haidar Eid (Ed.): Countering the Palestinian Nakba: One state for all (2017)
Kareem Estefan (Ed.): Assuming boycott: Resistance, agency and cultural production (2017)
Richard Falk: Palestine’s Horizon: Toward a just peace (2107)
Ru Freeman (Ed.): Extraordinary rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine (2015)
Caroline Glick: The Israeli solution: A One-State plan for peace in the Middle East (2014)
Alon Gratch: The Israeli mind: How the Israeli character shapes our world (2015)
Aeyal Gross: The writing on the Wall: Rethinking the international law of Occupation (2017)
Yifat Gutman: Memory activism: Reimagining the past for the future in Israel/Palestine (2016)
Jeff Halper: War against the people: Israel, the Palestinians and global pacification (2015)
Ibrahim Hewitt (Ed.): Israel and Gaza: Behind the media veil (2014)
Mya Guarnieri Jaradat: The Unchosen: The lives of Israel’s new others (2017)
Jewish Voice for Peace: On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the struggle for justice (2017)
Keith Kahn-Harris: Uncivil wars: The Israel conflict in the Jewish community (2014)
Adi Kuntsman & Rebecca Stein: Digital militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the social media age (2015)
Philip Leech: The state of Palestine: A critical analysis (2016)
Mark LeVine & Mathias Mossberg: One land: Israel and Palestine as two parallel states (2014)
Shourideh Molavi: Stateless citizenship: The Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel (2014)
Emily McKee: Dwelling in conflict: Negev landscapes and the boundaries of belonging (2016)
Yonatan Mendel: From the Arab Other to the Israeli Self: Palestinian culture in the making of Israeli national identity (2016)
Cary Nelson & Gabriel Noah Brahm (Eds.); The case against academic boycotts of Israel (2014)
Padraig O’Malley: The Two-State delusion (2015)
Mohammed Omer: Shell-shocked: On the ground under Israel’s Gaza assault (2015)
Ilan Pappe (Ed.): Israel and South Africa: The many faces of apartheid (2015)
Julie Peteet: Space and mobility in Palestine (2017)
Dave Rich: The Left’s Jewish problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel & Anti-Semitism (2016)
William Robinson & Maryam Griffin (Eds.): We will not be silenced: The academic repression of Israel’s critics (2017)
Nadim Rouhana: Israel and its Palestinian citizens: Ethnic privileges in the Jewish State (2017)
Michael Sandford (Ed.): The Bible, Zionism and Palestine: The Bible’s role in conflict and liberation in Israel-Palestine (2016)
Michael Sfard: The Wall and the Gate (2018)
Keren Sharvit & Eran Halperin (Eds.): A Social Psychology perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (2016)
Raja Shehadeh: Language of war, language of peace: Palestine, Israel & the search for justice (2015)
Ella Shohat: On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and other displacements (2017)
Jon Soske & Sean Jacobs (Eds.): Apartheid Israel: The politics of an analogy (2015)
Thomas Suarez: State of terror (2016)
Marcelo Svirsky: After Israel: Towards cultural transformation (2014)
Helga Tawil-Souri & Dina Matar (Eds.): Gaza as metaphor(2015)
M.Turner & O.Shweiki (eds.): Decolonising Palestinian political economy: De-development and beyond (2014)
Matthew Vickery: Employing the enemy: The Story of Palestinian labourers on Israeli Settlements (2017)
Dov Waxman: Trouble in the tribe: The American Jewish conflict over Israel (2016)
Eyal Weizmann & Fazal Sheikh: The conflict shoreline: Colonization as climate change in the Negev desert (2015)
Bill Williamson: Place is the passion: Reframing the Israel/Palestine conflict (2016)
Yeshua-Lyth, Ofra: Politically incorrect: Why a Jewish state is a bad idea (2016)
Matthew Abraham: Out of bounds: Academic freedom and the question of Palestine (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, paperback, £19.95)
Publisher’s description: Academic freedom is a key element of the academic enterprise in the U.S. However, it does not seem to exist when scholars seek to advocate on behalf of Palestinian self-determination. This unique work examines how the knowledge-power nexus is shaping the discourse around the Israel-Palestine conflict and restricting academic freedom. Beginning with a discussion of American Zionism, the work proceeds to explain why scholars working on the question of Palestine are often denied standard academic freedom. This is supported by prominent cases, such as Norman G. Finkelstein’s denial of tenure, the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia University, and Mearsheimer and Walt’s book, The Israel Lobby. The work of Edward Said and Noam Chomsky are also discussed and the book concludes with recommendations for protecting intellectual freedom to those seeking to critically pursue the question of Palestine.
Reviews: American Association of University Professors
Electronic Intifada
Ali Abunimah: The battle for justice in Palestine (Haymarket, 2014, paperback, £12.99)
Publisher’s description: Efforts to achieve a “two-state solution” have finally collapsed, and the struggle for justice in Palestine is at a crossroads. As Israeli society lurches toward greater extremism, many ask where the struggle is headed. This book offers a clear analysis of this crossroads moment and looks forward with urgency down the path to a more hopeful future.
Reviews: Counterpunch
Palestine Chronicle
Yossi Alpher: No end of conflict: Rethinking Israel-Palestine (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, £24.95)
Publisher’s description: Yossi Alpher, a veteran of peace process research and dialogue, explains how Israel got into its current situation of growing international isolation, political stalemate, and gathering messianic political influence. He investigates the inability of Israelis and Palestinians to make peace and end their conflict before suggesting not “solutions” (as there is no current prospect for a realistic comprehensive solution), but ways to moderate and soften the worst aspects of the situation and “muddle through” as Israel looks to a somber bi-national future. Alpher argues that a sober reassessment is long overdue in the way the West looks at the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. He submits that we have to stop talking about “the peace process” as if it still seriously exists, that 20 years of the Oslo process have failed for very substantial reasons that the professional peacemakers ignore at their risk, and that Israel is more likely to sink into a single-state reality than to remain truly “Jewish and democratic.” Yet, his is a non-ideological, no nonsense book. Israel will not disappear, will not become impoverished, and will still find strategic partners.
Reviews: Executive Magazine
Hadassah Magazine
Yaacov Bar Siman Tov: Justice & peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Routledge, 2014, paperback, £27.99)
Publisher’s description: In this book, the late Prof. Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov argues that the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process so far has been mainly the result of the inability of both sides to reach an agreed formula for linking justice to peace. The issues of justice and injustice are focused mainly on the outcomes of the 1947-1949 first Arab-Israeli War and specifically in the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The conflicting historical narratives of the two sides regarding the question of responsibility for the injustice done to the Palestinians turn the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a classic case of linking the issues of justice and peace.Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov maintains that the narratives of justice and injustice in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have proved to be formidable barriers to peace. Hence, he recommends that justice should be compromised for the sake of peace. The link between justice and peace is an important issue requiring both sides’ attention, but, given the wide and currently unbridgeable gap separating the two sides, it should be postponed to the phase of reconciliation rather than being included in the process of conflict resolution. The two-state solution is endorsed as the best and practical solution and as a first step for a “just peace” in this conflict, to be followed by reconciliation.
Reviews: none yet available
Yael Berda: Living emergency: Israel’s permit regime in the West Bank (Stanford University Press, 2017, paperback, £10.99)
Publisher’s description: In 1991, the Israeli government introduced emergency legislation canceling the general exit permit that allowed Palestinians to enter Israel. The directive, effective for one year, has been reissued annually ever since, turning the Occupied Territories into a closed military zone. Today, Israel’s permit regime for Palestinians is one of the world’s most extreme and complex apparatuses for population management. Yael Berda worked as a human rights lawyer in Jerusalem and represented more than two hundred Palestinian clients trying to obtain labor permits to enter Israel from the West Bank. With Living Emergency, she brings readers inside the permit regime, offering a first-hand account of how the Israeli secret service, government, and military civil administration control the Palestinian population. Through interviews with Palestinian laborers and their families, conversations with Israeli clerks and officials, and research into the archives and correspondence of governmental organizations, Berda reconstructs the institutional framework of the labyrinthine permit regime, illuminating both its overarching principles and its administrative practices. In an age where terrorism, crime, and immigration are perceived as intertwined security threats, she reveals how the Israeli example informs global homeland security and border control practices, creating a living emergency for targeted populations worldwide.
Reviews: Electronic Intifada
Max Blumenthal: The 51 day war: Ruin and resistance in Gaza (Nation Books, 2015, paperback, £14.99)
Publisher’s description: On July 8, 2014, Israel launched air strikes on Hamas-controlled Gaza, followed by a ground invasion. The ensuing fifty-one days of war left more than 2,200 people dead, the vast majority of whom were Palestinian civilians, including over 500 children. During the assault, at least 10,000 homes were destroyed and, according to the United Nations, nearly 300,000 Palestinians were displaced. Max Blumenthal was in Gaza and throughout Israel–Palestine during what he argues was an entirely avoidable catastrophe. In this explosive work of intimate reportage, Blumenthal reveals the harrowing conditions and cynical deceptions that led to the ruinous war—and tells the human stories.
Blumenthal brings the battles in Gaza to life, detailing the ferocious clashes that took place when Israel’s military invaded the besieged strip. He radically shifts the discussion around a number of highly contentious issues: the use of civilians as human shields by Israeli forces, the arbitrary targeting of Palestinian civilians, and the radicalization of Israeli public officials and top military personnel. Amid the rubble of Gaza’s border regions, Blumenthal recorded the testimonies from scores of residents, documenting potential war crimes committed by the Israeli armed forces while carefully examining the military doctrine that led to them.
Reviews: Electronic Intifada
Muftah
Bjorn Brenner: Gaza under Hamas: From Islamic democracy to Islamist governance (I.B.Taurus, 2016, £25)
Publisher’s description: Hamas is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the EU, the USA and the UN. It has made itself notorious for its violent radicalism and uncompromising rejection of the Jewish state. So after its victory in the 2006 elections the world was watching. How would Hamas govern? (…) Brenner investigates what happened after the elections and puts the spotlight on the people over whom Hamas rules, rather than on its ideas. Lodging with Palestinian families and experiencing their daily encounters with Hamas, he offers an intimate perspective of the group as seen through local eyes. The book is based on hard-to-secure interviews with a wide range of key political and security figures in the Hamas administration, as well as with military commanders and members of the feared Qassam Brigades. Brenner has also sought out those that Hamas identifies as local trouble makers: the extreme Salafi-Jihadis and members of the now more quiescent mainstream Fatah party led by Mahmoud Abbas. The book provides a new interpretation of one of the most powerful forces in the Israel-Palestine arena, arguing that the Gazan Islamists carry a potential to be much more flexible and pragmatic than anticipated – if they would think they stand to gain from it. Gaza under Hamas investigates the key challenges to Hamas’s authority and reveals why and in what ways ideology comes second to power consolidation.
Reviews: Middle East Monitor
Michael Buergermeister: Gaza: A philosophical dictionary (ePubli, 2015, paperback, £15.99)
Publisher’s description: This book is not about how evil either the Americans or Israelis are, which is how some might see it. This book is about both the causes and effects of Israeli and American policy. It is about the ideas, which underpin these policies and about the effects of these self-same policies on ordinary individuals. It is above all about how the narratives of Jews, Zionists and Palestinians are inextricably intertwined. It is a book about common humanity.
Reviews: William Hanna
Gregg Carlstrom: How long will Israel survive: The threat from within (Hurst, 2017, £20)
Publisher’s description: Israel is surrounded by an array of ever-changing threats. But what if its most serious challenge comes from within? There was once a national consensus in Israeli society: despite a left-right political split, its people were broadly secular and liberal. Over the past decade, the country has fractured into tribes with little shared understanding of what it means to be a Zionist—let alone an Israeli—and contesting the very notion of a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state. While this shift has profound implications for Israel’s relationship with the broadly liberal Jewish diaspora, the greatest consequences will be felt at home. Israel’s tribes increasingly lead separate lives; even the army, once a great melting-pot, is now a political and cultural battleground. Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad, has warned of the risk of civil war. Carlstrom maps this conflict, from cosmopolitan Tel Aviv to the hilltops of the West Bank, and asks a pressing question: will the Middle East’s strongest power survive its own internal contradictions?
Reviews: The Times
Kirkus Reviews
Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappé: On Palestine (Penguin, 2015, paperback, £6)
Publisher’s description: What is the future of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement directed at Israel? Which is more viable, the binational or one state solution? Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss these critical questions and more in this urgent and timely book, a sequel to their acclaimed Gaza in Crisis.
Reviews: Electronic Intifada
Qantara
Marwan Darweish & Andrew Rigby: Popular protest in Palestine: The uncertain future of unarmed resistance (Pluto Press, 2015, paperback, £16.99)
Publisher’s description: Popular Protest in Palestine provides an overview and analysis of the role and significance of unarmed civil (popular) resistance in the Palestinian national movement. The main focus is on the contemporary popular resistance movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), but it is prefaced by a historical review of the thread of unarmed civil resistance that has run throughout the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle. It informs a contemporary readership about this under-emphasised dimension of the Palestinian struggle, arguing that at the present juncture the popular resistance movement, especially in the West Bank, is the most significant form of struggle against the ongoing occupation. Popular Protest in Palestine also addresses the international dimensions of the Palestinian struggle, focusing in particular on the BDS campaign, the role of international solidarity activists in the OPT and beyond, and the changing forms of engagement developed by international agencies seeking to work on the roots of the conflict whilst fulfilling their humanitarian aid mandates.
Reviews: Peace News
972 mag
Khaled Diab: Intimate enemies: Living with Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land (Guardian Books, 2014, paperback £1.99)
Publisher’s description: The Holy Land is often presented as a story of two sides locked in a cycle of recurrent conflict: Jew vs Arab; Israeli vs Palestinian. For the outsider looking in, it is a question of military might and nationhood. Any view of the peoples themselves, of the lives being lived in Jerusalem, Gaza, Tel Aviv or the West Bank, is clouded by the divisive politics of the region. In ‘Intimate Enemies’, Khaled Diab explores the human lives at stake in the conflict. From Palestinians evading checkpoints to attend parties, to the different approaches Israelis take in defining personal Jewish identities, to the experiences of women from across the region, ‘Intimate Enemies’ looks at what makes people tick. It also becomes clear in this closer understanding of the people how misleading a simple notion of two opposing sides really is. Amongst both Israelis and Palestinians, Diab finds internal cultural, ideological and historical fractures, as well as unlikely patches of common ground between the political enemies.
Reviews: Qantara
Kareem Estefan (Ed.): Assuming boycott: Resistance, agency and cultural production (OR Books, 2017, paperback, £14)
Publisher’s description: Boycott and divestment are essential tools for activists around the globe. Today’s organizers target museums, universities, corporations, and governments to curtail unethical sources of profit, discriminatory practices, or human rights violations. They leverage cultural production – and challenge its institutional supports – helping transform situations in the name of social justice. The refusal to participate in an oppressive system has long been one of the most powerful weapons in the organizer’s arsenal. (…) Assuming Boycott is the essential reader for today’s creative leaders and cultural practitioners, including original contributions by artists, scholars, activists, critics, curators and writers who examine the historical precedent of South Africa; the current cultural boycott of Israel; freedom of speech and self-censorship; and long-distance activism. Far from withdrawal or cynicism, boycott emerges as a productive tool of creative and productive engagement.
Reviews: Electronic Intifada
Mondoweiss
Haidar Eid (Ed.): Countering the Palestinian Nakba: One state for all (Noor Publishing, 2017, paperback, € 36.90)
Publisher’s description: What do Palestinian, American and anti-Zionist Israeli intellectuals, artists and academicians think of the various “peace processes” and failed solutions to 69 years of dispossession and Diaspora? Are there alternative solutions and is there an effective and legitimate resistance? This collection of analytical writing on the conflict is composed almost entirely of essays by intellectuals and activists critical of the dominant US/Israeli political ideology in the Middle East. By featuring voices of American, Israeli, and Palestinian intellectuals and activists from a broad cross-section of academic institutions and civil society organizations, this collection aims to provide an in-depth look at how alternative political programs and struggles can offer prospects for a just peace in Palestine. The argument made is that the only just solution to the conflict is the establishment of a unitary state in which all inhabitants are treated equally regardless of their religion and ethnicity. What is envisioned is a solution based on resolutions of international legitimacy which accord the Palestinian people their basic rights — i.e., return of dispossessed refugees, and equality.
Reviews: Palestine Chronicle
Middle East Monitor
Richard Falk: Palestine’s Horizon: Toward a just peace (Pluto Press, 2107, paperback, £14.99)
Publisher’s description: Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine (2008-2014), has dedicated much of his life to the study of the Israel/Palestine conflict. In Palestine’s Horizon, he brings his experiences to bear on one of the most controversial issues of our times. This book explores the intricacies and interconnections of the history and politics of Israel/Palestine, in light of the global community’s troubled morality. After enduring years of violent occupation, the Palestinian movement is exploring different avenues for peace. These include the pursuit of rights under international law in venues such as the UN and International Criminal Court, and the new emphasis on global solidarity and non-violent militancy embodied by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign, among others. Falk refutes the notion that the Palestinian struggle is a ‘lost cause’ by focusing on new tactics of resistance.
Reviews: none yet available
Ru Freeman (Ed.): Extraordinary rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine (OR Books, 2015, paperback, £16)
Publisher’s description: Extraordinary Rendition brings together the work of sixty-five prominent writers to examine America’s culpability in the denial of human rights and dignity to Palestinians in Israel/Palestine and beyond. The anthology includes pieces by writers such as Chana Bloch, Jane Hirshfield, Colum McCann, Roger Reeves, George Saunders and Alice Walker. In writing that is always clear, and often startlingly beautiful, they cover a range of issues including the erasure and reconstruction of histories, the examination of identity, the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of speaking out as artists, the conditions of occupation, and the potential for activism. They also explore the way U.S. foreign policy towards Palestine regularly mirrors the harsh realities faced by many of America’s own minorities.
Reviews: Electronic Intifada
Caroline Glick: The Israeli solution: A One-State plan for peace in the Middle East (Crown Forum, 2014, £15.10)
Publisher’s description: A manifesto that exposes the flaws in the two-state policy of the United States toward Israel and the Palestinians and offers a direct and powerful call for Israeli sovereignty in the region. The reigning consensus in elite and academic circles is that the United States must seek to resolve the Palestinians’ conflict with Israel by implementing the so-called two-state solution. Establishing a Palestinian state, so the thinking goes, would be a panacea for all the region’s ills. (…) In a time when American politics are marked by partisan gridlock, the two-state solution stands out for its ability to attract supporters from both sides of the ideological divide. But the great irony is that it is one of the most irrational and failed policies the United States has ever adopted. Between 1970 and 2013, the United States presented nine different peace plans for Israel and the Palestinians, and for the past twenty years, the two state solution has been the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy. But despite this laser focus, American efforts to implement a two-state peace deal have failed—and with each new attempt, the Middle East has become less stable, more violent, more radicalized, and more inimical to democratic values and interests. In The Israeli Solution, Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor to the Jerusalem Post, examines the history and misconceptions behind the two-state policy (…).
Reviews: Kirkus Reviews
The National
Alon Gratch: The Israeli mind: How the Israeli character shapes our world (St. Martin’s Press, 2015, £17.99)
Publisher’s description: Israelis are bold and visionary, passionate and generous. But they can also be grandiose and self-absorbed. Emerging from the depths of Jewish history and the drama of the Zionist rebellion against it, they have a deeply conflicted identity. They are willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective, but also to sacrifice that very collective for a higher, and likely unattainable, ideal. Resolving these internal conflicts and coming to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust are imperative to Israel’s survival as a nation and to the stability of the world. Alon Gratch, a clinical psychologist whose family has lived in Israel for generations, is uniquely positioned to confront these issues. (…) Drawing on a broad cultural and historical canvas, and weaving in the author’s personal and professional experience, The Israeli Mind presents a provocative, first-hand portrait of the Israeli national character.
Reviews: Kirkus Reviews
Jewish Book Council
Aeyal Gross: The writing on the Wall: Rethinking the international law of Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2017, paperback, £29.99)
Publisher’s description: As Israel’s control of the Occupied Palestinian Territory nears its fiftieth anniversary, The Writing on the Wall offers a critical perspective on the international law of occupation. Advocating a normative and functional approach to occupation and to the question of when it exists, it analyzes the application of humanitarian and human rights law, pointing to the risk of using the law of occupation in its current version to legitimize new variations of conquest and colonialism. The book points to the need for reconsidering the law of occupation in light of changing forms of control, such as those evident in Gaza. Although the Israeli occupation is a main focal point, the book broadens its compass to look at other cases, such as Iraq, Northern Cyprus, and Western Sahara, highlighting the role that international law plays in all of these cases.
Reviews: none yet available
Yifat Gutman: Memory activism: Reimagining the past for the future in Israel/Palestine (Vanderbilt UP, 2016, paperback, £26.95)
Publisher’s description: Set in Israel in the first decade of the twenty-first century and based on long-term fieldwork, this rich ethnographic study offers an innovative analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It explores practices of “memory activism” by three groups of Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens–Zochrot, Autobiography of a City, and Baladna–showing how they appropriated the global model of truth and reconciliation while utilizing local cultural practices such as tours and testimonies. These activist efforts gave visibility to a silenced Palestinian history in order to come to terms with the conflict’s origins and envision a new resolution for the future. This unique focus on memory as a weapon of the weak reveals a surprising shift in awareness of Palestinian suffering among the Jewish majority of Israeli society in a decade of escalating violence and polarization–albeit not without a backlash. (…) The walking tour and survivor testimonies originally deployed by the state for national Zionist education that marginalized Palestinian citizens are now being appropriated by activists for tours of pre-state Palestinian villages and testimonies by refugees
Reviews: none yet available
Jeff Halper: War against the people: Israel, the Palestinians and global pacification (Pluto Press, 2015, paperback, £14.99)
Publisher’s description: War Against the People is a disturbing insight into the new ways world powers such as the US, Israel, Britain and China forge war today. It is a subliminal war of surveillance and whitewashed terror, conducted through new, high-tech military apparatuses, designed and first used in Israel against the Palestinian population. Including hidden camera systems, sophisticated sensors, information databases on civilian activity, automated targeting systems and, in some cases, unmanned drones, it is used to control the very people the nation’s leaders profess to serve. Drawing from years of research, as well as investigations and interviews conducted at international arms fairs, Jeff Halper reveals that this practice is much more insidious than was previously thought.
Reviews: Electronic Intifada
Weekly Worker
Ibrahim Hewitt (Ed.): Israel and Gaza: Behind the media veil (MEMO publishers, 2014, paperback, £7.50)
Publisher’s description: The essays in this book examine media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014. Looking through a wide lens, they cover mainstream and social media, and draw attention not only to the lack of objectivity in coverage of the war but also the way that traditional media sources are being overtaken by new media as audiences search for the truth behind the headlines.
Reviews: none yet available
Mya Guarnieri Jaradat: The Unchosen: The lives of Israel’s new others (Pluto Press, 2017, paperback, £14.99)
Publisher’s description: Drawing on a decade of courageous and pioneering reporting, Mya Guarnieri Jaradat brings us an unprecedented and compelling look at the lives of asylum seekers and migrant workers in Israel, who hail mainly from Africa and Asia. From illegal kindergartens to anti-immigrant rallies, from detention centres to workers’ living quarters, from family homes to the high court, The Unchosen sheds light on one of the most little-known but increasingly significant aspects of Israeli society. In highlighting Israel’s harsh and worsening treatment of these newcomers, The Unchosen presents a fresh angle on the Israel-Palestine conflict, calling into question the state’s perennial justification for mistreatment of Palestinians: ‘national security’. More fundamentally, this beautifully written book captures the voices and the struggles of some of the most marginalised and silenced people in Israel today.
Reviews: Electronic Intifada
Jewish Voice for Peace: On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the struggle for justice (Haymarket, 2017, paperback, £17.99)
Publisher’s description: When the State of Israel claims to represent all Jewish people, defenders of Israeli policy redefine antisemitism to include criticism of Israel. Antisemitism is harmful and real in our society. What must also be addressed is how the deployment of false charges of antisemitism or redefining antisemitism can suppress the global progressive fight for justice. There is no one definitive voice on antisemitism and its impact. Jewish Voice for Peace has curated a collection of essays that provides a diversity of perspectives and standpoints. Each contribution explores critical questions concerning uses and abuses of antisemitism in the twenty-first-century, focusing on the intersection between anti-Semitism, accusations of anti-Semitism, and Palestinian human rights activism. (…) Featuring contributions from Omar Barghouti, Judith Butler, and Rebecca Vilkomerson, as well as activists, academics, students, and cultural workers, On Antisemitism includes the voices of Palestinian students and activists, and Jews that are often marginalized in mainstream discussions of anti-Semitism, including Jews of Color and Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews.
Reviews: none yet available
Keith Kahn-Harris: Uncivil wars: The Israel conflict in the Jewish community (David Paul, 2014, Paperback, £10)
Publisher’s description: The author explores the causes of the conflicts and describes his own innovative efforts at conflict resolution. Analysing the various groupings – left, right, secular and religious, pro and anti-Zionist – in Britain and the USA, Keith Kahn-Harris looks at the history of civility in society and examines the different methods used by international organisations and groups involved in developing dialogue within Jewish communities. He describes, how using these techniques and with expert help, he brought together more than seventy prominent diverse British Jews for a series of encounters. He concludes that dialogue and civility is possible. But with no change in behaviour there will be serious consequences for the Jewish communities of the world.
Reviews: Times of Israel
JfJfP
Adi Kuntsman & Rebecca Stein: Digital militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the social media age (Stanford University Press, 2015, paperback, £14.99)
Publisher’s description: Israel’s occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world’s most active social media users. In Israel today, violent politics are interwoven with global networking practices, protocols, and aesthetics. Israeli soldiers carry smartphones into the field of military operations, sharing mobile uploads in real-time. Official Israeli military spokesmen announce wars on Twitter. And civilians encounter state violence first on their newsfeeds and mobile screens. Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation’s impact on everyday Israeli social media culture.
Reviews: New Inquiry
Electronic Intifada
Philip Leech: The state of Palestine: A critical analysis (Routledge, 2016, £90)
Publisher’s description: The Palestinian national movement reached a dead end and came close to disintegration at the beginning of the present century. This critical analysis of internal Palestinian politics in the West Bank traces the re-emergence of the Palestinian Authority’s established elite in the aftermath of the failed unity government and examines the main security and economic agendas pursued by them during that period. Based on extensive field research interviews and participant observation undertaken across several sites in Nablus and the surrounding area, it provides a bottom-up interpretation of the Palestinian Authority’s agenda and challenges the popular interpretation that its governance represents the only realistic path to Palestinian independence. As the first major account of the Palestinian Authority’s political agenda since the collapse of the unity government this book offers a unique explanation for the failure to bring a Palestinian state into being and challenges assumptions within the existing literature by addressing the apparent incoherence between mainstream debates on Palestine and the reality of conditions there.
Reviews: none yet available
Mark LeVine & Mathias Mossberg: One land: Israel and Palestine as two parallel states (University of California Press,2014, paperback, £19.95)
Publisher’s description: One Land, Two States imagines a new vision for Israel and Palestine in a situation where the peace process has failed to deliver an end of conflict. “If the land cannot be shared by geographical division, and if a one-state solution remains unacceptable,” the book asks, “can the land be shared in some other way?” Leading Palestinian and Israeli experts along with international diplomats and scholars answer this timely question by examining a scenario with two parallel state structures, both covering the whole territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, allowing for shared rather than competing claims of sovereignty. Such a political architecture would radically transform the nature and stakes of the Israel-Palestine conflict, open up for Israelis to remain in the West Bank and maintain their security position, enable Palestinians to settle in all of historic Palestine, and transform Jerusalem into a capital for both of full equality and independence—all without disturbing the demographic balance of each state. Exploring themes of security, resistance, diaspora, globalism, and religion, as well as forms of political and economic power that are not dependent on claims of exclusive territorial sovereignty, this pioneering book offers new ideas for the resolution of conflicts worldwide.
Reviews: Kirkus Reviews
Middle East Forum
Emily McKee: Dwelling in conflict: Negev landscapes and the boundaries of belonging (Stanford University Press, 2016, paperback, £18.99)
Publisher’s description: Land disputes in Israel are most commonly described as stand-offs between distinct groups of Arabs and Jews. In Israel’s southern region, the Negev, Jewish and Bedouin Arab citizens and governmental bodies contest access to land for farming, homes, and industry and struggle over the status of unrecognized Bedouin villages. “Natural,” immutable divisions, both in space and between people, are too frequently assumed within these struggles. Dwelling in Conflict offers the first study of land conflict and environment based on extensive fieldwork within both Arab and Jewish settings. It explores planned towns for Jews and for Bedouin Arabs, unrecognized villages, and single-family farmsteads, as well as Knesset hearings, media coverage, and activist projects. Emily McKee sensitively portrays the impact that dividing lines—both physical and social—have on residents. She investigates the political charge of people’s everyday interactions with their environments and the ways in which basic understandings of people and “their” landscapes drive political developments. While recognizing deep divisions, McKee also takes seriously the social projects that residents engage in to soften and challenge socio-environmental boundaries.
Reviews: Institute for Palestine Studies
Yonatan Mendel: From the Arab Other to the Israeli Self: Palestinian culture in the making of Israeli national identity (Routledge, 2016, £95)
Publisher’s description: This book examines the role played by Arab-Palestinian culture and people in the construction and reproduction of Israeli national identity and culture, showing that it is impossible to understand modern Israeli national identity and culture without taking into account its crucial encounter and dialectical relationship with the Arab-Palestinian indigenous ‘Other’.
Based on extensive and original primary sources, including archival research, memoirs, advertisements, cookbooks and a variety of cultural products – from songs to dance steps – From the Arab Other to the Israeli Self sheds light on an important cultural and ideational diffusion that has occurred between the Zionist settlers – and later the Jewish-Israeli population – and the indigenous Arab-Palestinian people in Historical Palestine. By examining Israeli food culture, national symbols, the Modern Hebrew language spoken in Israel, and culture, the authors trace the journey of Israeli national identity and culture, in which Arab-Palestinian culture has been imitated, adapted and celebrated, but strikingly also rejected, forgotten and denied.
Reviews: none yet available
Shourideh Molavi: Stateless citizenship: The Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel (Haymarket Books, 2014, paperback, £16.15)
Publisher’s description: In this provocative and compelling work Shourideh Molavi documents the legal plight of Palestinians living inside of Israel.
Palestinians living inside of Israel are placed in a paradoxical situation where, as Arab citizens of a Jewish state, they are both inside and outside, host and guest, citizen and stateless. Through the paradigm of stateless citizenship Molavi centers our analytical gaze on the paradox that it is through their status as Israeli citizens that Palestinians are deemed stateless.
Reviews: none yet available
Cary Nelson & Gabriel Noah Brahm (Eds.); The case against academic boycotts of Israel (Wayne State University Press, 2014, paperback, £22.32)
Publisher’s description: How should we understand the international debate about the future of Israel and the Palestinians? Can justice be achieved in the Middle East? Until now, there was no single place for people to go to find detailed scholarly essays analyzing proposals to boycott Israel and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement of which they are a part. This book for the first time provides the historical background necessary for informed evaluation of one of the most controversial issues of our day— the struggle between two peoples living side-by-side but with conflicting views of history and conflicting national ambitions. This book encourages empathy for all parties, but it also takes a cold look at what solutions are realistic and possible. In doing so, it tackles issues, like the role of anti-Semitism in calls for the abolition of the Jewish state, that many have found impossible to confront until now.
Reviews: Jewish Pluralist
Tablet
Padraig O’Malley: The Two-State delusion (Viking Press, 2015, £21.99)
Publisher’s description: Disputes over settlements, the right of return, the rise of Hamas, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and other intractable issues have repeatedly derailed peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine. Now, in a book that is sure to spark controversy, renowned peacemaker Padraig O’Malley argues that the moment for a two-state solution has passed. After examining each issue and speaking with Palestinians and Israelis as well as negotiators directly involved in past summits, O’Malley concludes that even if such an agreement could be reached, it would be nearly impossible to implement given the staggering costs, Palestine’s political disunity and the viability of its economy, rapidly changing demographics, Israel’s continuing political shift to the right, global warming’s effect on the water supply, and more. In this revelatory, hard-hitting book, O’Malley approaches the key issues pragmatically, without ideological bias, to show that we must find new frameworks for reconciliation if there is to be lasting peace between Palestine and Israel.
Reviews: Kirkus Reviews
New York Times
Mohammed Omer: Shell-shocked: On the ground under Israel’s Gaza assault (OR Books, 2015, paperback, £12.99)
Publisher’s description: none available
Reviews: Palestine Chronicle
Independent
Ilan Pappe (Ed.): Israel and South Africa: The many faces of apartheid (Zed Books, 2015, paperback, £14.99)
Publisher’s description: In Israel and South Africa, Ilan Pappé, one of Israel’s preeminent academics and a noted critic of the current government, brings together lawyers, journalists, policy makers, and historians of both countries to assess the implications of the apartheid analogy for international law, activism and policy making.
Reviews: LSE Review of Books
Middle East Monitor
Julie Peteet: Space and mobility in Palestine (Indiana UP, 2017, paperback, £24)
Publisher’s description: Peteet believes that the concept of mobility is key to understanding how place and space act as forms of power, identity, and meaning among Palestinians in Israel today. In Space and Mobility in Palestine, she investigates how Israeli policies of closure and separation influence Palestinian concerns about constructing identity, the ability to give meaning to place, and how Palestinians comprehend, experience, narrate, and respond to Israeli settler-colonialism. Peteet’s work sheds new light on everyday life in the Occupied Territories and helps explain why regional peace may be difficult to achieve in the foreseeable future.
Reviews: none yet available
Dave Rich: The Left’s Jewish problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel & Anti-Semitism (Biteback Publishing, 2016, paperback, £12.99)
Publisher’s description: With three separate inquiries into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party in the first six months of 2016 alone, it seems hard to believe that, until the 1980s, the British left was broadly pro-Israel. And while the election of Jeremy Corbyn may have thrown a harsher spotlight on the crisis, it is by no means a recent phenomenon. The widening gulf between British Jews and the anti-Israel left – born out of antiapartheid campaigns and now allying itself with Islamist extremists who demand Israel’s destruction – did not happen overnight or by chance: political activists made it happen. This book reveals who they were, why they chose Palestine and how they sold their cause to the left.
Reviews: Labour Briefing (review by JfJfP signatory)
The Guardian
Mondoweiss
William Robinson & Maryam Griffin (Eds.): We will not be silenced: The academic repression of Israel’s critics (Pluto Press, 2017, paperback,£14,99)
Publisher’s description: This book is a collection of first-hand testimonials by scholars and students in the United States who have been targeted for persecution by the Israel lobby over the content of their teaching, scholarship and activism with regards to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Palestinian freedom struggle. As criticism continues to mount over Israel’s violation of Palestinian human rights and of international law, campaigns to silence and repress those who speak out against Israeli apartheid and US complicity have grown alarmingly. College and university campuses across the United States now find themselves at the centre stage of this conflict over free speech: scholars have been turned away from jobs, denied tenure and promotion, rejected for funding, and expelled from institutions, while student organisations have faced harassment and sanctions.
Reviews: none yet available
Nadim Rouhana: Israel and its Palestinian citizens: Ethnic privileges in the Jewish State (Cambridge University Press, 2017, paperback, £27.99)
Publisher’s description: This volume presents new perspectives on Israeli society, Palestinian society, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on historical foundations, it examines how Israel institutionalizes ethnic privileging among its nationally diverse citizens. Arab, Israeli, and American contributors discusses the paradoxes of democratic claims in ethnic states, as well as dynamics of social conflict in the absence of equality. This book advances a new understanding of Israel’s approach to the Palestinian citizens, covers the broadest range of areas in which Jews and Arabs are institutionally differentiated along ethnic basis, and explicates the psycho-political foundations of ethnic privileges.
Reviews: Project Muse
Michael Sandford (Ed.): The Bible, Zionism and Palestine: The Bible’s role in conflict and liberation in Israel-Palestine (Relegere Academic Press, 2016, free to download as PDF from here https://rap.relegere.org/rap/catalog/book/2)
Publisher’s description: Contributors evaluate the divisive and liberatory influences and effects of the Bible on Zionism and Palestine-Israel and, conversely, the practice of biblical interpretation in a Post-Nakba world.
Reviews: none yet available
Michael Sfard: The Wall and the Gate (Metropolitan Books, 2018, £22.99)
Publisher’s description: A farmer from a village in the occupied West Bank, cut off from his olive groves by the construction of Israel’s controversial separation wall, asked Israeli human rights lawyer Sfard to petition the courts to allow a gate to be built in the wall. While the gate would provide immediate relief for the farmer, would it not also confer legitimacy on the wall and on the court that deems it legal? The defense of human rights is often marked by such ethical dilemmas, which are especially acute in Israel, where lawyers have for decades sought redress for the abuse of Palestinian rights in the country’s High Court—that is, in the court of the abuser. In The Wall and the Gate, Sfard chronicles this struggle—a story that has never before been fully told— and in the process engages the core principles of human rights legal ethics. Sfard recounts the unfolding of key cases and issues, ranging from confiscation of land, deportations, the creation of settlements, punitive home demolitions, torture, and targeted killings—all actions considered violations of international law. In the process, he lays bare the reality of the occupation and the lives of the people who must contend with that reality. He also exposes the surreal legal structures that have been erected to put a stamp of lawfulness on an extensive program of dispossession. Finally, he weighs the success of the legal effort, reaching conclusions that are no less paradoxical than the fight itself.
Reviews: JJP
Keren Sharvit & Eran Halperin (Eds.): A Social Psychology perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Springer, 2016, £82)
Publisher’s description: This volume explores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a social psychology perspective. At the core of the book is a theory of intractable conflicts, as developed by Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University, applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Opening with an introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict situation and a few chapters on the theoretical backgrounds of the creation of a societal ethos of conflict, the volume then moves to an analysis of the psycho-social underpinnings of the conflict, while concluding with a discussion of the possibility of long-standing peace in the region. Among the topics included in the coverage are: Identity formation during conflict; The Israeli and Palestinian ethos of conflict; The important role of Palestinian and Israeli education; An analysis of the leadership in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process
Reviews: none yet available
Raja Shehadeh: Language of war, language of peace: Palestine, Israel & the search for justice (Profile Books, 2015, paperback, £8.99)
Publisher’s description: A passionate and elegant reflection on the language of the Middle East conflict expanded from Raja Shehadeh’s Edward Said memorial lectures. Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israeli Palestine conflict, reflecting on the walls that they create – legal and cultural – that confine today’s Palestinians just like the physical borders, checkpoints and the so called ‘Separation Barrier’. The peace process has been ground to a halt by twists of language and linguistic chicanery that has degraded the word ‘peace’ itself. No one even knows what the word might mean now for the Middle East. So to give one example of many, Israel argued that the omission of the word ‘the’ in one of the UN Security Council’s resolutions meant that it was not mandated to withdraw from all of the territories occupied in 1967.
Reviews: Independent
This Week in Palestine
Ella Shohat: On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and other displacements (Pluto Press, 2017, paperback, £20)
Publisher’s description: Spanning several decades, Shohat’s work has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East, focusing on the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew. This book gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material. Defying the binarist and Eurocentric Arab-versus-Jew rendering of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Shohat’s work has dared to engage with the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism and nationalism. Shohat’s paradigm-shifting work unpacks such fraught issues as the anomalies of the national/colonial in Zionist discourse; the narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; the links and distinctions between the dispossession of the Nakba and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; the traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; the echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of ‘the Jew’; and the efforts to imagine a possible future inter-communal ‘convivencia’. Shohat’s transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author’s intellectual journey
Reviews: none yet available
Jon Soske & Sean Jacobs (Eds.): Apartheid Israel: The politics of an analogy (Haymarket Press, 2015, paperback, £11.99)
Publisher’s description: In Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, twenty scholars of Africa and its diaspora reflect on the similarities and differences between apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary Israel, with an eye to strengthening and broadening today’s movement for justice in Palestine.
Reviews: SCTIW (link downloads a PDF)
Thomas Suarez: State of terror (Skyscraper Books, 2016, £20)
Publisher’s description: Why has the Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ endured for so long, with no resolution in sight? In this meticulously researched book, Thomas Suárez demonstrates that its cause is not the commonly depicted clash between two ethnic groups—Arabs and Jews—but the violent takeover of Palestine by Zionism, a European settler movement hailing from the era of ethnic nationalism. Tapping a trove of declassified British documents, much of which has never before been published, the book details a shocking campaign of Zionist terrorism in 1940s and 1950s Palestine that targeted anyone who challenged its messianic settler goals, whether the British government, the indigenous Palestinians, or Jews. Today’s seemingly intractable quagmire is that terror campaign’s unfinished business, an Israeli state driven by unrequited territorial designs and the dream of ethnic ‘purity’.
Reviews: Mondoweiss
Free Speech on Israel (review by JfJfP signatory)
Marcelo Svirsky: After Israel: Towards cultural transformation (Zed Books, 2014, Paperback, £19.99)
Publisher’s description: In this unique new contribution, Marcelo Svirsky asserts that no political solution currently on offer can provide the cultural marrow necessary to effect a transformation of modes of being and ways of life in the State of Israel. Controversially, Svirsky argues that the Zionist political project cannot be fixed – it is one that negatively affects the lives of its beneficiaries as well as of its victims. Instead, the book aims to generate a reflective attitude, allowing Jewish-Israelis to explore how they may divest themselves of Zionist identities by engaging with dissident rationalities, practices and institutions.
Reviews: SCTIW Review (link downloads a PDF)
Helga Tawil-Souri & Dina Matar (Eds.): Gaza as metaphor (C.Hurst, 2015, paperback, £16.99)
Publisher’s description: Open-air Prison, Terror, Resistance, Occupation, Siege, Trauma: irrespective of when, where, and to whom the word is uttered, ‘Gaza’ immediately evokes an abundance of metaphors. Similarly, a host of metaphors also recall Gaza: Crisis, Exception, Refugees, Destitution, Tunnels, Persistence. This book brings together journalists, writers, doctors, academics and others, who use metaphor to record and historicise Gaza, to contextualise its everyday realities, interrogate its representations and provide an understanding of its real and symbolic significance. (…) The contributors reveal the manner of Gaza’s historical and spatial creation, to show that Gaza is more than simply a metaphor for far-away humanitarian disaster, or a location of incomprehensible violence — it is above all an inseparable part of Palestine’s past, present, and future, and of the condition of dispossession.
Reviews: none yet available
M.Turner & O.Shweiki (eds.): Decolonising Palestinian political economy: De-development and beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, £65)
Publisher’s description: This volume provides cutting-edge political economy analyses of the Palestinian people as a whole – those living in the occupied territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (including annexed East Jerusalem), those living within Israel and refugees in neighbouring Arab states. It rejects the dominant, conventional approach that has fragmented the Palestinians into separate and distinct groups (some thereafter named as ‘Arab-Israeli’, ‘Bedouin’, etc.), and which has reduced those regarded as ‘the Palestinian people’ to only those who reside within the occupied territory. The book challenges this intellectual fragmentation by reuniting Palestinians in one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common process of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation.
Reviews: Electronic Intifada
SCITW
Matthew Vickery: Employing the enemy: The Story of Palestinian labourers on Israeli Settlements (Zed Books, 2017, paperback, £14.99)
Publisher’s description: How would it feel to build homes on land stolen from you? This bitter toil is the daily reality for many Palestinians. Currently, thousands of Palestinians are working in, and building, illegal Israeli settlements. This work entails a rejection of their legal rights, little to no job security, low wages and dangerous working conditions. Through a vivid and moving narrative, based on many conversations with these workers and their families, Vickery explores the rationale, emotions, thoughts and consequences of such employment. In doing so, he draws attention to a previously neglected aspect of the Palestinian experience and Israeli subjugation. This, coupled with an innovative and ground-breaking analysis of the Israeli government’s role in the settlement employment sector, exposes the true nature of these practices as a new, insidious form of state-sponsored forced labour.
Reviews: Palestine Square
JJP
Dov Waxman: Trouble in the tribe: The American Jewish conflict over Israel (Princeton University Press, 2016, £22.95)
Publisher’s description: Trouble in the Tribe explores the increasingly contentious place of Israel in the American Jewish community. In a fundamental shift, growing numbers of American Jews have become less willing to unquestioningly support Israel and more willing to publicly criticize its government. More than ever before, American Jews are arguing about Israeli policies, and many, especially younger ones, are becoming uncomfortable with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Dov Waxman argues that Israel is fast becoming a source of disunity for American Jewry, and that a new era of American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of solidarity. Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with American Jewish leaders and activists, Waxman shows why Israel has become such a divisive issue among American Jews. (…) Waxman sets this conflict in the context of broader cultural, political, institutional, and demographic changes happening in the American Jewish community.
Reviews: Kirkus Reviews
History News Network
Eyal Weizmann & Fazal Sheikh: The conflict shoreline: Colonization as climate change in the Negev desert (Steidl, 2015, £25)
Publisher’s description: The village of al-‘Araqib has been destroyed and rebuilt more than seventy times in the ongoing “battle over the Negev,” an Israeli state campaign to uproot the Palestinian Bedouins from the northern threshold of the desert. Unlike other frontiers fought over during the Israel-Palestine conflict, this one is not demarcated by fences and walls but by shifting climatic conditions. The threshold of the desert advances and recedes in response to colonization, cultivation, displacement, urbanization, and, most recently, climate change. In his response to Sheikh’s “Desert Bloom” series (part of Sheikh’s The Erasure Trilogy, published by Steidl), Eyal Weizman’s essay incorporates historical aerial photographs, contemporary remote sensing data, state plans, court testimonies, and nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts, exploring the Negev’s threshold as a “shoreline” along which climate change and political conflict are deeply and dangerously entangled.
Reviews: Uncube
Public Seminar
Bill Williamson: Place is the passion: Reframing the Israel/Palestine conflict (Comerford & Miller, 2016, paperback, £9.95)
Publisher’s description: Israel relies for its survival on its lucrative arms trade and American military support. Meanwhile, the Palestinians suffer poverty and destitution as an occupied nation. Indeed, were it not for vast international financial support, the Palestinians would face starvation. Any solution is impossible while Israel pursues an aggressive programme of settlement, expansion and ethnic cleansing. The author rejects the two state solution, which he likens to Apartheid. In a convincing fact-based analysis, he shows that a better future is achievable for both peoples: one that is secular, democratic, bi-national, culturally vibrant and economically successful.
Reviews: Red Pepper
Yeshua-Lyth, Ofra: Politically incorrect: Why a Jewish state is a bad idea (Skyscraper Books, 2016, paperback, £11.99)
Publisher’s description: Israel claims to be a modern democratic state, but Israeli writer Ofra Yeshua-Lyth reveals some startling truths about modern day Israel: how although 70% of Israelis do not follow the Jewish religion, all citizens are all subject to laws designed to favour religious Israelis over all others. In matters of birth and death; marriage and divorce; finance and the military, Israel’s rabbis exercise iron control over governments, however secular they claim to be. Yeshua-Lyth sees the seeds of Israel’s demise in the growing tension between Israelis who want to lead modern secular lives, and those who wish Israel to continue in the iron grip of the rabbis. The arguments are woven through the story of the author’s childhood and later life in Israel, and illustrated with personal experiences.
Reviews: Tribune Magazine
Socialist Review