front cover of The Case for Palestine
The Case for Palestine
An International Law Perspective
John Quigley
Duke University Press, 2005
John Quigley brings a necessary international law perspective to bear on the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this updated edition of his important book. Since 2000, the cycle of bloodshed and retribution has spiraled increasingly out of control. Quigley attributes the breakdown of negotiations in 2000 to Israel’s unwillingness to negotiate on the basis of principles of justice and law. He argues that throughout the last century, established tenets of international law—and particularly the right of self-determination—have been overlooked or ignored in favor of the Zionists and then the Israelis, to the detriment of the Palestinians.

In this volume, Quigley provides a thorough understanding of both sides of the conflict in the context of international law. He contends that the Palestinians have a stronger legal claim to Jerusalem than do the Israelis; that Palestinian refugees should be repatriated to areas including those within the borders of Israel; and that Israel should withdraw from the territory it occupied in 1967. As in his earlier volume, Quigley provides an extensively documented evaluation of the conflict over the last century, discussing the Zionist movement, the League of Nations’ decision to promote a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the 1948 war and creation of Israel, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights during the 1967 war.

[more]

front cover of Eyes Without Country
Eyes Without Country
Searching for a Palestinian Strategy of Liberation
Souad R. Dajani
Temple University Press, 1994

Since Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the quest for just and lasting peace has been a fountainhead of debate, negotiation, and violent friction. Souad Dajani traces the Palestinians' struggle and argues for a strategy of nonviolent civilian resistance based on deterrence and defense. This strategy would defeat Israel's political will to maintain their occupation and prepare Palestinians for a time beyond the interim period of self-rule agreed upon by Israel and the PLO in September 19932.

Dajani's formulation of nonviolent civilian resistance is examined against a backdrop of early developments in Mandate Palestine, the impact of Zionist ideology, and the realities of life for Palestinians under occupation. Her assessment of the role of the PLO, objectives of the Palestinian National Movement, developments since the Gulf War, and other factors crucial to an effective strategy raises critical questions surrounding the operation of nonviolent techniques for the Palestinian community, Israeli politics, and international actors, most prominently the United States.

[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Failing Peace
Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
Sara Roy
Pluto Press, 2006
This book represents twenty years of research on the impact of Israeli occupation. Discussion of Israeli policy is often regarded as a taboo subject, with the result that few people—especially in the United States—understand the origins and consequences of the conflict. Sara Roy's book provides an indispensable context for understanding why the situation remains so intractable. The focus of Roy's work is the Gaza Strip, an area that remains consistently neglected and misunderstood. Drawing on more than two thousand interviews and extensive first-hand experience, Roy chronicles the impact of Israeli occupation over nearly a generation. Exploring the devastating consequences of socioeconomic and political decline, this is a unique and powerful account of the reality of life in the West Bank and Gaza. Written by one of the world's foremost scholars of the region, it offers an unrivalled breadth of scholarship and insight.
[more]

front cover of Gaza on Screen
Gaza on Screen
Nadia Yaqub, editor
Duke University Press, 2023
Gaza’s long association with resistance and humanitarian need has generated a complex and ever shifting range of visual material, comprising not just news reports and documentaries, but also essay, experimental, and fiction films, militant videos, and solidarity images. Contributors to Gaza on Screen, who include scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip. Conceptualizing screens—both large and small—as tools for mediation that are laden with power, the volume explores Gazan film and video in relation to humanitarianism and human rights, care, community, environment, mobility and confinement, and decolonization. The volume includes visual material ranging from solidarity broadcasts on Lebanese television, mid-twentieth-century British Pathé newsreels, and fiction films to breaking news, visuals of contemporary militant resistance, documentaries, and found footage films, arguing for a visual ecosystem in which differing types of film and video affect and inform each other. Throughout, Gaza on Screen demonstrates that screens shape and sustain relationships between Gaza and the world, and help to sustain the possibility of a different future.

Contributors. Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, Shahd Abusalama, Samirah Alkassim, Basma Alsharif, Hadeel Assali, Azza El-Hassan, Hatim El-Hibri, Mohamed Jabaly, Ahmed Mansour, Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser, Kamran Rastegar, Viviane Saglier, Abdelsalam Shehada, Yaron Shemer, Rebecca L. Stein, Helga Tawil-Souri, Shaira Vadasaria, Nadia Yaqub
[more]

front cover of Governing Gaza
Governing Gaza
Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967
Ilana Feldman
Duke University Press, 2008
Marred by political tumult and violent conflict since the early twentieth century, Gaza has been subject to a multiplicity of rulers. Still not part of a sovereign state, it would seem too exceptional to be a revealing site for a study of government. Ilana Feldman proves otherwise. She demonstrates that a focus on the Gaza Strip uncovers a great deal about how government actually works, not only in that small geographical space but more generally. Gaza’s experience shows how important bureaucracy is for the survival of government. Feldman analyzes civil service in Gaza under the British Mandate (1917–48) and the Egyptian Administration (1948–67). In the process, she sheds light on how governing authority is produced and reproduced; how government persists, even under conditions that seem untenable; and how government affects and is affected by the people and places it governs.

Drawing on archival research in Gaza, Cairo, Jerusalem, and London, as well as two years of ethnographic research with retired civil servants in Gaza, Feldman identifies two distinct, and in some ways contradictory, governing practices. She illuminates mechanisms of “reiterative authority” derived from the minutiae of daily bureaucratic practice, such as the repetitions of filing procedures, the accumulation of documents, and the habits of civil servants. Looking at the provision of services, she highlights the practice of “tactical government,” a deliberately restricted mode of rule that makes limited claims about governmental capacity, shifting in response to crisis and operating without long-term planning. This practice made it possible for government to proceed without claiming legitimacy: by holding the question of legitimacy in abeyance. Feldman shows that Gaza’s governments were able to manage under, though not to control, the difficult conditions in Gaza by deploying both the regularity of everyday bureaucracy and the exceptionality of tactical practice.

[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Hamas
A Beginner's Guide
Khaled Hroub
Pluto Press, 2010

This beginner's guide to Hamas has been fully revised and updated. It now covers all the major events since the January 2006 elections, including the conflict with Fatah and Israel's brutal offensive in Gaza at the end of 2008.

Explaining the reasons for Hamas's popularity, leading Al-Jazeera journalist and Cambridge academic Khaled Hroub provides the key facts that are so often missing from conventional news reports. It's a one-stop guide that gives a clear overview of Hamas's history, key beliefs, and its political agenda.

This unique book provides a refreshing perspective that gets to the heart of Hamas.

[more]

front cover of My Voice Is My Weapon
My Voice Is My Weapon
Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance
David A. McDonald
Duke University Press, 2013
In My Voice Is My Weapon, David A. McDonald rethinks the conventional history of the Palestinian crisis through an ethnographic analysis of music and musicians, protest songs, and popular culture. Charting a historical narrative that stretches from the late-Ottoman period through the end of the second Palestinian intifada, McDonald examines the shifting politics of music in its capacity to both reflect and shape fundamental aspects of national identity. Drawing case studies from Palestinian communities in Israel, in exile, and under occupation, McDonald grapples with the theoretical and methodological challenges of tracing "resistance" in the popular imagination, attempting to reveal the nuanced ways in which Palestinians have confronted and opposed the traumas of foreign occupation. The first of its kind, this book offers an in-depth ethnomusicological analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, contributing a performative perspective to the larger scholarly conversation about one of the world's most contested humanitarian issues.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Overcoming Zionism
Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine
Joel Kovel
Pluto Press, 2007

Joel Kovel argues that the inner contradictions of Zionism have led Israel to a ‘state-sponsored racism’ fully as incorrigible as that of apartheid South Africa and deserving of the same resolution. Only a path toward a single-state secular democracy can provide the justice essential to healing the wounds of the Middle East.

Kovel is well-known writer on the Middle East conflict. This book draws on his detailed knowledge to show that Zionism and democracy are essentially incompatible. He offers a thoughtful account of the emergence and disintegration of Zionism that integrates psychological, political, cultural, economic, and ideological levels.

Ultimately, Kovel argues, a two-state solution is essentially hopeless as it concedes too much to the regressive forces of nationalism, wherein lie the roots of continued conflict.

[more]

front cover of Palestine and Israel
Palestine and Israel
A Challenge to Justice
John Quigley
Duke University Press, 1990
The dispute over Palestine between the Palestinian Arabs and the Israelis is one of the most volatile and intractable conflicts in the world today. Palestine and Israel examines the history of this battle from the perspective of international law, and it argues that a long-term solution to the conflict must protect legitimate interests to remain viable—an element the author believes has so far been seriously neglected. This extensively documented work details the complex politics and agonizing struggles that have characterized the clash between Jews and Arabs, examining in depth the competing claims to Palestine and the extent to which legitimate interests remain to be fulfilled.
Beginning with the early Zionist settlement in Palestine that rose from the effort by Jews to escape long-standing discrimination in Europe, Qigley investigates the origins of the dispute, including the British occupation of Palestine, the British Mandate, and the involvement of the United Nations. He examines the 1948 War, the establishment of Israel, and explores the legal and political status of Jews there. After a detailed analysis of the 1967 War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he concludes with recommendations for resolving the conflict, including discussions of the responsibility of other states for the persisting injustice, the role of other states in settling the dispute, and steps to a possible solution.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
The Political Economy of Israel's Occupation
Repression Beyond Exploitation
Shir Hever
Pluto Press, 2010

The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967 has many important economic aspects that are often overlooked. In this highly original book, Shir Hever shows that understanding the economic dimensions of the occupation is crucial to unravelling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Hever rejects the premise that Israel keeps control over Palestinian territories for material gain, and also the premise that Israel is merely defending itself from Palestinian aggression. Instead, he argues that the occupation has reached an impasse, with the Palestinian resistance making exploitation of the Palestinians by Israeli business interests difficult, but the Israeli authorities reluctant to give up control.

With traditional economic analysis failing to explain this turn of events, this book will be invaluable for students, activists and journalists struggling to make sense of the complex issues surrounding Israel's occupation.

[more]

front cover of Unsilencing Gaza
Unsilencing Gaza
Reflections on Resistance
Sara Roy
Pluto Press, 2021
'Roy is humanely and professionally committed in ways that are unmatched by any other non-Palestinian scholar' - Edward W. Said

Gaza, the centre of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to the occupation, is the linchpin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the key to its resolution. Since 2005, Israel has deepened the isolation of the territory, severing it almost completely from its most vital connections to the West Bank, Israel and beyond, and has deliberately shattered its economy, transforming Palestinians from a people with political rights into a humanitarian problem.

Sara Roy unpacks this process, looking at US foreign policy towards the Palestinians, as well as analysing the trajectory of Israeli policy toward Gaza, which became a series of punitive approaches meant not only to contain the Hamas regime but weaken Gazan society.

Roy also reflects on Gaza's ruination from a Jewish perspective and discusses the connections between Gaza's history and her own as a child of Holocaust survivors. This book, a follow up from the renowned Failing Peace, comes from one of the world's most acclaimed writers on the region.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Unsilencing Gaza
Reflections on Resistance
Sara Roy
Pluto Press, 2021
'Roy is humanely and professionally committed in ways that are unmatched by any other non-Palestinian scholar' - Edward W. Said

Gaza, the centre of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to the occupation, is the linchpin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the key to its resolution. Since 2005, Israel has deepened the isolation of the territory, severing it almost completely from its most vital connections to the West Bank, Israel and beyond, and has deliberately shattered its economy, transforming Palestinians from a people with political rights into a humanitarian problem.

Sara Roy unpacks this process, looking at US foreign policy towards the Palestinians, as well as analysing the trajectory of Israeli policy toward Gaza, which became a series of punitive approaches meant not only to contain the Hamas regime but weaken Gazan society.

Roy also reflects on Gaza's ruination from a Jewish perspective and discusses the connections between Gaza's history and her own as a child of Holocaust survivors. This book, a follow up from the renowned Failing Peace, comes from one of the world's most acclaimed writers on the region.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter