Current Events: Israel-Gaza War

In The Accidental Empire, Gershom Gorenberg examines the strange birth of the settler movement in the ten years following the Six-Day War and finds that it was as much the child of Labor Party socialism as of religious extremism. Drawing on newly opened archives and extensive interviews, Gorenberg calls into question much of what we think we know about this issue that continues to haunt the Middle East.

Though it lasted for only six tense days in June, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war never really ended. Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting.

Killing a King relates parallel stories over the two years leading up to the assassination, as Rabin plotted political deals he hoped would lead to peace and Amir plotted murder. This deeply researched narrative is based on a trove of documents from the era and interviews with the key players, including members of Amir's family.

Benny Morris demolishes misconceptions and provides a comprehensive history of the Israeli-Arab war of 1948 This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military engagements, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. The book thoroughly investigates the role of the Great Powers--Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union--in shaping the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949.

This book explores the meaning of life for Israelis from communities bordering the Gaza Strip, whose lives are bound to the intractable conflict between Israel and the Hamas regime. Based on a psychosocial qualitative study of narrative interviews, photographs, YouTube videos, and Facebook posts created by residents, the book presents the life stories of ordinary people, their perspectives of patriotism and Zionism, and their perceptions of the Gazan Palestinians. Routine Emergency captures these perspectives through analyses of residents' interviews and photographs, the social media materials and poems fashioned from interviewees' words. The results challenge simplistic notions of what it means to live in this warzone, offering a multi-layered analysis of life in this region, which alternates between being Heaven and Hell. Written in a reader-friendly format, Routine Emergency, offers new theoretical insights into societal beliefs connected to living in an intractable warzone on the personal, family, community and national levels.

Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos--the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad's fate. It is every parent's worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian.

A critical examination of the history of US-Palestinian relations The United States has invested billions of dollars and countless diplomatic hours in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a two-state solution. Yet American attempts to broker an end to the conflict have repeatedly come up short. At the center of these failures lay two critical factors: Israeli power and Palestinian politics. While both Israelis and Palestinians undoubtedly share much of the blame, one also cannot escape the role of the United States, as the sole mediator in the process, in these repeated failures.

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members--mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists--The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides.

In January 2006 Hamas, an organisation classified by Western governments as terrorist, was democratically elected to govern the Palestinian territories. This book challenges the assumption that religion, violence and democracy are inherently incompatible.

In Stories from Palestine: Narratives of Resilience, Marda Dunsky presents a vivid overview of contemporary Palestinian society in the venues envisioned for a future Palestinian state. Dunsky has interviewed women and men from cities, towns, villages, and refugee camps who are farmers, scientists, writers, cultural innovators, educators, and entrepreneurs. Using their own words, she illuminates their resourcefulness in navigating agriculture, education, and cultural pursuits in the West Bank; persisting in Jerusalem as a sizable minority in the city; and confronting the challenges and uncertainties of life in the Gaza Strip. Based on her in-depth personal interviews, the narratives weave in quantitative data and historical background from a range of primary and secondary sources that contextualize Palestinian life under occupation.

The quest for an inclusive and independent state has been at the center of the Palestinian national struggle for a very long time. This book critically explores the meaning of Palestinian statehood and the challenges that face alternative models to it. Giving prominence to a young set of diverse Palestinian scholars, this groundbreaking book shows how notions of citizenship, sovereignty, and nationhood are being rethought within the broader context of decolonization. Bringing forth critical and multifaceted engagements with what modern Palestinian self-determination entails, Rethinking Statehood sets the terms of debate for the future of Palestine beyond partition.

Despite joint confrontation with the same opponent--Israel--Fatah leaders (the organization whose people are the foundation of the Palestinian Authority) and Hamas have failed to find a path to reconciliation. Examining the Palestinian internal question from an original angle, The Fatah-Hamas Rift analyzes the many rounds of negotiations and seeks to explain this failure, with a focus on the decade after 2007.

Sayliyeh analyzes in detail and with great personal knowledge the internal politics of the West Bank Palestinians and their international implications. Traditionally, West Bank politics had been the domain of elite, prominent families used by the Ottomans, the British, and the Jordanians to control local politics. Recent social changes, such as the growing trend toward higher education, exposure to the mass media, and labor mobility, have coincided with recent political changes--the consolidation of the communist movement, the radicalization of the student population, and the resurgence of Islam--to challenge the political order and give more power to the mass-supported local politicians.