Sorting by

×
ePALESTINE NOTES
ePalestine.ps - Sam Bahour

SUBSCRIBE | DONATE | CONTACT

News & opinions from a Palestinian-American
living & working in Ramallah/Al-Bireh, Palestine

Books

Overview | Recently Added | Full List


Man-made Israel [Book Review]

Man-made Israel [Book Review]

by | July 31, 2020 | Books, Sam's Writings

What do you get when you mix ten decades of biblical studies, an Old Testament, the ideology of Zionism, and a tablespoon of politically motivated archaeology, all mixed in a bowl of historical evidence? Author Keith W. Whitelam undertook this recipe and reports on the results in The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History”. The short answer to the question is that one is left with a toxic modern state, hell-bent on crafting an umbilical cord between itself and a mythical 2000-year old past. In other words, the State of Israel.


From Mormon Idaho, Through Youngstown, to Everyone in Palestine and Israel [Book Review]

From Mormon Idaho, Through Youngstown, to Everyone in Palestine and Israel [Book Review]

by | May 3, 2020 | Books, Sam's Writings

#1 NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, AND BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home. (Publisher’s Description)


Palestinian refugees are Israel’s Achilles heel [Book Review]

Palestinian refugees are Israel’s Achilles heel [Book Review]

by | May 1, 2020 | Books, Sam's Writings

The book is a long-winded frontal attack on Palestinian refugees and reads more as a commissioned assignment from the Hasbara-hub called the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs than a truly deep analysis of the issue of Palestinian refugees. What is missing from the book is as important as what is in it—all the other references that Palestinians’ Right of Return is based on, above and beyond the single one, UN General Assembly 194, that the authors pin their entire argument around.


Perpetual Turmoil: A man-made holy pandemic that never ends [Book Review]

Perpetual Turmoil: A man-made holy pandemic that never ends [Book Review]

by | April 17, 2020 | Books

Before Israel prohibited me from having free access to Jerusalem, I would meet up for lunch in East Jerusalem with Avner, a Jewish Israeli friend of mine, at the Ambassador Hotel, owned by a mutual friend of ours. Our political arguments always ended on the same note. I would claim that Israel has, and always had, a master plan and acts with full intention. Avner would counter that claim saying I’m giving the Israeli side too much credit and that much of what we are facing are a hodgepodge of haphazard missteps that have created an unfortunate reality on the ground. Enter Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron by Menachem Klein, another Jewish Israeli friend of mine. The book unintentionally offers Avner and myself an answer to our ongoing debate. It turns out we are both correct. How so? Read on.


“God does not exist, and he promised us this land” [Book Review]

“God does not exist, and he promised us this land” [Book Review]

by | April 8, 2020 | Books, Sam's Writings

Few countries provoke as much passion and controversy as Israel. What is Modern Israel? convincingly demonstrates that its founding ideology – Zionism – is anything but a simple reaction to antisemitism. Dispelling the notion that every Jew is a Zionist and therefore a natural advocate for the state of Israel, Yakov Rabkin points to the Protestant roots of Zionism, in order to explain the particular support Israel musters in the United States. (Publisher’s Review)


“The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017” [Recommended]

“The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017” [Recommended]

by | January 28, 2020 | Books

In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.


“Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians” by Atalia Omer [Recommended]

“Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians” by Atalia Omer [Recommended]

by | July 4, 2019 | Books

For many Jewish people in the mid-twentieth century, Zionism was an unquestionable tenet of what it meant to be Jewish. Seventy years later, a growing number of American Jews are instead expressing solidarity with Palestinians, questioning old allegiances to Israel. How did that transformation come about? What does it mean for the future of Judaism? In Days of Awe, Atalia Omer examines this shift through interviews with a new generation of Jewish activists, rigorous data analysis, and fieldwork within a progressive synagogue community.


“Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict” by Eve Spangler [Recommended]

“Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict” by Eve Spangler [Recommended]

by | May 29, 2019 | Books

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the longest on-going hot-and-cold war in the 20th and 21st century. In this book the author argues that human rights standards are the key to a just and sustainable solution and that, tragically, no one has ever made serious use of them in trying to end the conflict. The reader will have a comprehensive view of the conflict, its relationship to surrounding world events, and its similarities to and differences from other conflicts, especially those embedded in American race relations.


“Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance” [Recommended]

“Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance” [Recommended]

by | September 17, 2018 | Books

An essential account of America’s most controversial alliance that reveals how the United States came to see Israel as an extension of itself, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time. Our American Israel tells the story of how a Jewish state in the Middle East came to resonate profoundly with a broad range of Americans in the twentieth century. Beginning with debates about Zionism after World War II, Israel’s identity has been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Now, in the twenty-first century, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance.


“Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture” by Smadar Lavie [Recommended]

“Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture” by Smadar Lavie [Recommended]

by | July 1, 2018 | Books

In Wrapped in the Flag of Israel, Smadar Lavie analyzes the racial and gender justice protest movements in the State of Israel from the 2003 Single Mothers’ March to the 2014 New Black Panthers and explores the relationships between these movements, violence in Gaza, and the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran… Weaving together memoir, auto-ethnography, political analysis, and cultural critique, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that is both lyrical and provocative. Lavie’s focus on the often-minimized Mizraḥi population juxtaposed with the state’s monolithic culture suggests that Israeli bureaucracy is based on a theological notion that inserts the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship.