Showing titles in Israel & Palestine

Despite losing the 1948 War, Arab nations throughout the Middle East had still refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist. After the Suez Crisis, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser envisioned creating a unified Arab world, commonly referred to as pan-Arabism. Nasser was the consummate pan-Arab leader in the 1960s, positioning himself as the leader of the Arab world through increasing incitement against Israel with rhetoric. Israel found itself in possession of more land after 1948 than envisioned by the U.N. Partition Plan.

Individuals who decide to learn about the Old Testament of the Bible are immediately faced with the difficult proposition of identifying the various peoples that the Hebrews met and sometimes came into conflict with when they entered the territory that eventually became Israel. The Canaanites and Philistines: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Israelites' Enemies in the Land That Became Israel looks at the various groups and their impact on the region and subsequent cultures.

Nasser Abu Srour grew up in a refugee camp in the West Bank, on the outskirts of Bethlehem. As a child, he played in its shadow and explored the little world within the camp. As he grew older, he began questioning the boundaries that limited his existence. Later, sentenced to life in prison, with no hope of parole, he found himself surrounded by a physical wall. This is the story of how, over thirty years in captivity, he crafted a new definition of freedom. Turning to writings by philosophers as varied as Derrida, Kirkegaard and Freud, he begins to let go of freedom...

The product of painstaking research and countless interviews, A High Price offers a nuanced, definitive historical account of Israel's bold but often failed efforts to fight terrorist groups. Israel's debacles in Lebanon against groups like the Lebanese Hizballah are examined in-depth, as is the country's problematic response to Jewish terrorist groups that have struck at Arabs and Israelis seeking peace.

David Ben-Gurion cast a great shadow during his lifetime, and his legacy continues to be sharply debated to this day. There have been many books written about the life and accomplishments of the Zionist icon and founder of modern Israel, but this new biography by eminent Israeli historian Anita Shapira strives to get to the core of the complex man who would become the face of the new Jewish nation. Shapira tells the Ben-Gurion story anew, focusing especially on the period after 1948, during the first years of statehood.

More than a decade ago, the historian Tony Judt considered whether the behavior of Israel was becoming not only "bad for Israel itself" but also, on a wider scale, "bad for the Jews." Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, this issue has grown ever more urgent. In The State of Israel vs. the Jews, veteran journalist Sylvain Cypel addresses it in depth, exploring Israel's rightward shift on the international scene and with regard to the diaspora.

A celebrated Israeli author explores the roots of the divide between religion and secularism in Israel today and offers a path to bridging the divide.

In addition to Hamas, which provoked the recent war, and Gaza with its rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, Alan Dershowitz argues that Israel's most dangerous enemies include Jimmy Carter and other western leaders who would delegitimize Israel as an apartheid regime subject to the same fate as white South Africans; Israel's academic enemies, led by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who would accuse supporters of Israel of dual loyalty and indeed disloyalty to America.

One of the leading architects of the historic Abraham Accords, David Friedman explains why in these turbulent and dangerous times, the simple phrase of three words—ONE JEWISH STATE—must be the guideline for Israel and the world’s collective future.

Light in Gaza is a seminal, moving, and wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists. It constitutes a collective effort to organize and center Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle. As political discourse shifts toward futurism as a means of reimagining a better way of living, beyond the violence and limitations of colonialism, Light in Gaza is an urgent and powerful intervention into an important political moment.

Nephi puts us on notice in his very first sentence that The Book of Mormon was written by temple worshippers and for temple worshippers. He and the other prophets of The Book of Mormon, who called themselves the visionary men and the peaceable followers of Christ, knew and practiced a mystery, an ordinance by which they ascended through the temple and entered into the presence of God. This ordinance was embodied in a dramatic representation of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden and their return to it, in which initiates played the roles of Adam and Eve or their descendants.

A new history of the American Jewish relationship with Israel focused on its most urgent and sensitive issue: the question of Palestinian rights.

Who Will Tell My Story? presents an ordinary existence interrupted by unfathomably seismic and unjust events. On the ground during the first months of the assault on Gaza following the events of 7 October, the author of this diary - first published in The Guardian - maps out the physical and psychological terrain of a life under siege.

Diary of a Crisis explores the past tumultuous and traumatic year in Israel-Palestine. The eminent historian Saul Friedländer began a diary of Israeli politics in January 2023 as the country was convulsed by protests against Netanyahu's attempt to overhaul the judiciary. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demonstrate against this threat to democracy. But the protests said nothing about the Palestinian question—the "elephant in the room," according to Friedländer, who resumed his diary after Hamas's October 7 assault on southern Israel.

In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake's human stories—and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved.

Fights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. But despite these arguments' significance to American politics, American Jewish life, and to Israel itself, no one has ever systematically examined their history and explained why they matter. In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins.

The ancient Israelites emerged from Mount Sinai onto the hilly plains of Canaan and established a civilization that endured for hundreds of years. Even when the Israelites fell to incursions from foreign invaders and were subjected to torture and exile, they held fast to their belief system. They emerged from the Babylonian captivity as the people of Yehud. With the aid of Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenid Empire, they rebuilt their sacred temple and got back on their feet.

Über kaum ein anderes Land wird in Deutschland so viel geredet und gestritten: Zu Israel hat jeder eine Meinung. Warum ist das so? Wieso hat der Nahostkonflikt eine solche Bedeutung? Und warum ist die Debatte so emotional – und oft so vergiftet? Als Meron Mendel vor zwanzig Jahren nach Deutschland kam, stellte er überrascht fest, welche Bedeutung Israel im öffentlichen Diskurs hat. Nahezu alle, mit denen er sprach, konnten sehr klare Positionen zu Israel und seiner Politik formulieren.

Uri Bialer lays a foundation for understanding the principal aspects of Israeli foreign policy, from the early days of the state's existence to the Oslo Accords. In addition to identifying important state actors, Bialer highlights the many figures who had no defined, diplomatic roles, but were influential in establishing foreign policy goals. He shows how foreign policy was essential to the political, economic, and social well-being of the state, and how it helped to deal with Israel's most intractable problem - the resolution of the conflict with Arab states and the Palestinians.

In the eighth century BCE, one of the most important provinces within the Assyrian Empire was Samaria. Also known as Israel, Samaria repeatedly rebelled against their Assyrian overlords, but in 722, the Assyrians overran Samaria once and for all, killing countless numbers and sending most of the rest of its inhabitants into forced exile.