Latest News
![From Mormon Idaho, Through Youngstown, to Everyone in Palestine and Israel [Book Review]](https://epalestine.ps/sambahour/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/educated-tara-westover.jpg)
by Sam Bahour | 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]](https://epalestine.ps/sambahour/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/the-war-of-return-adi-schwartz-einat-wilf.png)
by Sam Bahour | 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]](https://epalestine.ps/sambahour/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/BookCover252832529-768545-1.png)
by Sam Bahour | 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.
by Sam Bahour | April 12, 2020 | Latest News
![“God does not exist, and he promised us this land” [Book Review]](https://epalestine.ps/sambahour/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/9780745335810252822529-710357-1.jpg)
by Sam Bahour | 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)
by Sam Bahour | March 10, 2020 | Latest News
by Sam Bahour | January 30, 2020 | Latest News
by Sam Bahour | January 28, 2020 | Latest News
![“The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017” [Recommended]](https://epalestine.ps/sambahour/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/the-hundred-years-war-on-palestine-a-history-of-settler-colonialism-and-resistance-1917–2017-by-rashid-khalidi-1.jpg)
by Sam Bahour | 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.
by Sam Bahour | January 15, 2020 | Documentaries
Acclaimed Israeli writer-director Yaron Zilberman (“A Late Quartet”) chronicles the disturbing descent of a promising law student to an intransigent ultranationalist obsessed with murdering his country’s leader, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “Incitement” is a gripping and unnerving look through the eyes of a murderer who silenced a powerful voice for peace.
