By Rod Such Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid, a collection of essays edited by historian Ilan Pappe, takes for granted the validity of the assertion that Israel is an apartheid state. Instead, what this book explores are the similarities and dissimilarities between Israel today and South Africa during its apartheid era. […]
By Or Amit Google works in mysterious ways. You search for something, you find something else instead, and that something leads to something else still, until you’ve forgotten what you were looking for in the first place. Recently I searched Google for something relating to Noam Chomsky and found a website that mentions Chomsky’s appearance […]
By Yousef M. Aljamal – Gaza The Centre for Political and Development Studies (CPDS), in Gaza, held a lecture on Monday October 10 titled ‘In Gaza I Dare to Dream‘, by Rana Shubair, a Palestinian writer and educator, who teaches English language and translation at various Gaza institutions, to discuss her recently-published book. Dozens of students […]
By Noor Abuisha “A detention room, a big stick, the beating and the kicking” The violence that Ahmed Khalaf, (13 years), used to avoid seeing while watching action movies, was experienced for real with every single horrible detail when the Israeli forces arrested him while he was celebrating the end of school exams with his […]
Reviewed by Jim Miles (Mission Failure – America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era. Michael Mandelbaum. Oxford University Press, New York, 2016.) If the reader is looking for the ‘indispensable’ nation and its ‘exceptionalism’, this is the book for you. Michael Mandelbaum, whose credentials include a PhD in Political Science from Harvard (which […]
Reviewed by Hatim Kanaaneh (I Remember My Name – Poetry by Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso. Vacy Vlazna, ed., 2016, Novum Publishing. Kindle Edition.) In penning this review, the primacy of Israel in North America’s hegemonic cultural circles limits my expectation of a sympathetic Western readership. The recent furor in Israeli government circles […]
Reviewed by Jim Miles (Inside the Middle East – Making Sense of the Most Dangerous and Complicated Region on Earth. Avi Melamed, Skyhorse Publishing, New York, 2016.) Reading Inside the Middle East is quite an adventure. I learned that I probably am a fairly quixotic fanatic tilting at windmills; that I need to learn how […]
Reviewed by Jim Miles (The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. Ben Ehrenreich. Granta Books, London, 2016.) A small town in Palestinian West Bank, north of Jerusalem, Nabi Saleh, essentially the home-town of the Tamimi clan, has like all other Palestinian towns suffered under the occupation of Israeli military forces and settler […]
Reviewed by Jim Miles (Obstacle to Peace – The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Jeremy R. Hammond. Worldview Publications, Cross Village, Michigan. 2016.) It is obvious to most in the world that the U.S. and Israel are symbiotically linked to each other – each using the other for their own purposes, some of which […]
By Gaither Stewart – Rome On this hot Italian late afternoon, after over a week inside the literary work entitled Gate of the Sun, I am still wandering in the gossamer framework of the novel constructed by a great writer and storyteller, Elias Khoury, a 531-page “story” consisting of the stories, incidents, histories, lives and […]
Reviewed by Jim Miles (Enzo Traverso. The End of Jewish Modernity. Pluto Press, London, 2016.) Works of political theory, written within the sphere of intellectual/philosophical history, are generally a difficult read. The End of Jewish Modernity would probably do well in an academic discussion within the pretensions of political science or general philosophy programs, but […]
Reviewed by Dr. Ludwig Watzal (Yakov M. Rabkin, What is Modern Israel, Pluto Press, London 2016, 228 pp. $ 27.) Zionism is primarily a Christian Protestant enterprise that has little to do with Judaism. This explains why US Christians are the most ardent Zionists and the most powerful supporters of Israel. The largest opposition to […]
By Haidar Eid – Gaza “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, […]
Reviewed by Jim Miles (America’s War for the Greater Middle East – A military history. Andrew J. Bacevich. Random House, New York, 2016.) Andrew Bacevich has written a series of books on the topic of U.S. imperialism and U.S. military power. His latest work, America’s War for the Greater Middle East [the GME War] is […]
(A Book Talk at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 12, 2016, Washington, D.C.) By Ambassador Chas W. Freeman Since the end of the Cold War, we’re had a lot of very instructive experience in the Middle East. Back in 2010, I compiled the real-time analyses I had made of our policies and their […]
By Jamil Khader In his blog, “Junction 48, Sexual is Political” (Huffington Post April 26, 2016), the eminent Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek roots, and rightly so, for Udi Aloni’s film, Junction 48, on “ideologico-political” grounds. Surprisingly, in his commentary on the merits of the film’s subject and form, Žižek is not Žižekian enough. He walks […]
Reviewed by Vacy Vlazna (Salman Abu Sitta, Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir. Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press; 2016) “I spent the rest of my life on a long, winding journey of return, a journey that has taken me to dozens of counties over decades of travel, and turned my black hair to […]
Reviewed by Jim Miles (Age of Fools. William A. Cook. Dandelion Books, LLC. Mesa, Arizona. 2015. ) In a world of fools, Age of Fools by William Cook is passionate and accusatory book that reviews the Bush/Sharon era of Israeli/Palestinian affairs. Cook’s style is different than the usual prosaic works of history, and while the ‘facts’ […]
Reviewed by Stuart Rees (Vacy Vlazna, ed., I remember my name – Poetry by Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud, Jehan Bseiso. Novum Publishing, 2016) Poetry’s Panacea Conditions on the West Bank, in Gaza, in East Jerusalem and in myriad Palestinian refugee camps are monstrous. What non-violent response can there be to the violence and hatred, the killings […]
Reviewed by Jim Miles (Ally – My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide. Michael B. Oren. Random House, New York, 2015.) Reading a work that would obviously be very pro-Israel sets up an anticipatory set of expectations and Michael Oren’s account of his term as Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Ally – My Journey Across the […]
Reviewed by Richard Falk (Jeff Halper, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, Pluto Press, 2015, 296 pp., ISBN 9780745334301.) Jeff Halper is an unusual hybrid presence on both the scholarly and political scene. He describes himself as an “activist-scholar” (6), which adopts a controversial self-identification. The conventional stance erects a high […]
Reviewed Jim Miles (Roadmap to Apartheid. Ind. documentary, Ana Noguiera and Eron Davidson. 2012.) It is curious that the more Israel denies apartheid, and the more other states, such as Canada, “condemn” the BDS movement, the more awareness of the true situation of the Palestinians increases in the general population. Fear of BDS The Israelis […]
By Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH. Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky and Water (Bloomsbury, 2015) is her second published novel. It is a tribute to the author and to all the other Palestinian raconteurs and activists that not only is this book issued by a major American mainstream publisher but also that rights have been […]
Reviewed by Jim Miles (Israeli Society in the 21st Century – Immigration, Inequality, and Religious Conflict. Calvin Goldscheider. Brandeis University Press, Waltham , Massachusetts. 2015.) This work intrigued me as it is obviously supportive of the Israeli position in the Middle East and at a quick glance would illuminate something new about the state of […]
By Jamal Kanj How can a two-year-old novel become a best seller? Censorship is the short answer. The most important question is, however, why would the “Jewish democracy” censor a love fiction between a Jew and non-Jew? The banned book Borderlife was based on a love story between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man. According […]
By Jim Miles (Genesis – Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict. John B. Judis. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York. 2014.) Every once in awhile a history book arrives that is remarkable in its presentation. Genesis is one of those remarkable works, presenting a narrative that goes well beyond dates, times, […]
Reviewed by Ludwig Watzal (Ghada Ageel, ed., Apartheid in Palestine. Hard Laws and Harder Experiences, University of Alberta Press, Edmonton 2016.) Apartheid in Palestine” is a valuable guidance in the struggle for justice in Palestine. Ghada Ageel gathered activists, indigenous Palestinians and scholars, which do not represent the worn-out media views that the public is tired of […]
By Dr. Saleh Al-Naami Israeli documents have revealed that the Israeli army deliberately adopted a policy based on the destruction, vandalism and harm of the sanctity of churches in Palestine, during and after the 1948 war. An Israeli book, which will be published next month, explains how the Israeli army carried out seizure and destruction […]
Reviewed by Rod Such (Irene Gendzier – Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East. Columbia University Press – November 2015) During the mass demonstrations that took place across the United States to protest the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, one protestor held up […]
By Lillian Rosengarten (Lillian Rosengarten is the author of Survival and Conscience: From the Shadows of Nazi Germany to the Jewish Boat to Gaza, which Just World Books will be launching at this event— also featuring Philip Weiss– to be held in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, on October 5th. What follows is the Prologue of […]
