"Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders & Intellectuals Speak Out" aims to challenge several strata of the current Palestine discourse that have led to the present dead end: the American pro-Israel political discourse, the Israeli colonial discourse, the Arab discourse of purported normalization, and the defunct discourse of the Palestinian factions. None promote justice, none have brought resolution; none bode well for any of the parties involved. Here, an alternative Palestinian view of liberation and decolonization is provided by engaged Palestinian leaders and intellectuals, those who been actively involved in generating an ongoing Palestinian discourse on liberation, taking into account the parameters of their struggle as it now stands.

Review: Selma DABBAH, "A murder-mystery set in Gaza, with a bookish bent " (The Electronic Intifada, June 20, 2022): click here!

A leading Arab scholar considers settler colonialism, occupation and nationhood, powerfully arguing for a justice-based approach to the ongoing conflict. Book review (Juan Cole).

Review: David Shulman, "Lost Illusions. Sylvain Cypel's transformation from liberal Zionist to ferocious critic of Israel" (NYRB, Jan 12, 2022), click here!
Review: Robert Herbst, "The State of Israel vs the Jews." Important new book chronicles Israel's spiritual demise"" (Mondoweiss, January 10, 2022), click here!

This book examines processes of fragmentation that have altered the social dynamics of Palestinian society since the second intifada. With a specific focus on the city of Nablus and its outer laying areas, the book details the extraordinarily personal experience of isolation - namely the physical division of communities through long-term military siege, and the ways that communities have adapted to get by despite frequently changing restrictions. J.R. shows various forms of isolation and social fragmentation, combined with the uncertainty of everyday life, that have come to characterise the existential experience of being Palestinian. More relevant than how the conditions of fragmentation have occurred is what isolation and uncertainty mean to communities that are severed from those surrounding them.

In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe--from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan--the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.

To understand Israel, you must first understand its army. ─ The Israeli army, officially named the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), was established in 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, who believed that ‘the whole nation is the army’. In his mind, the IDF was to be an army like no other. It was the instrument that might transform a diverse population into a new people. Since the foundation of Israel, therefore, the IDF has been the largest, richest and most influential institution in Israel’s Jewish society and is the nursery of its social, economic and political ruling class.

This book offers a provocative retelling of Palestinian political history through an examination of the international commissions that have investigated political violence and human rights violations. More than twenty commissions have been convened over the last century, yet no significant change has resulted from these inquiries. Drawing on debates in the press, previously unexamined UN reports, historical archives, and ethnographic research, Lori Allen explores six key investigative commissions over the last century. She highlights how Palestinians' persistent demands for independence have been routinely translated into the numb language of reports and resolutions. These commissions, Allen argues, operating as technologies of liberal global governance, yield no justice - only the oppressive status quo. Excerpt (Mondoweiss): click here!

Shay Hazkani's "Dear Palestine" is an incredibly valuable contribution that uses meticulous archival research to upend our understanding of the 1948 war...  Among other things, the author Shay Hazkani exposes Ashkenazi racism towards Moroccan Jewish soldiers, as well as revealing the tensions between the Arab League Army (ALA) and those of the indigenous Palestinians. When all is said and done, this account reinforces the view that there never was any genocidal intent on the part of the ALA to "throw the Jews into the sea" nor any encouragement for Palestinians to leave their homes. Quite the contrary. It also reveals "disturbing, blood-curdling calls to genocide in the indoctrination materials produced by the Israeli military" (Jewish Voice for Labour).

This edited volume makes an impassioned and informed case for the central place of Palestine in socialist organizing and of socialism in the struggle to free Palestine. "Palestine: A Socialist Introduction" systematically tackles a number of important aspects of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, contextualizing it in an increasingly polarized world and offering a socialist perspective on how full liberation can be won.

Defying the binarist and Eurocentric Arab-versus-Jew rendering of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Shohat's work has dared to engage with the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism and nationalism. Shohat's paradigm-shifting work unpacks such fraught issues as the anomalies of the national/colonial in Zionist discourse; the narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; the links and distinctions between the dispossession of the Nakba and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; the traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; the echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of 'the Jew'; and the efforts to imagine a possible future inter-communal 'convivencia'.