Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations
With characteristic rigor and readability, Avi Shlaim reflects on a range of key issues, transformations and personalities in the Israel–Palestine conflict. From the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the 2008 invasion of Gaza, Israel and Palestine places current events in their proper historical perspective, and assesses the impact of key political and intellectual figures, including Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon, Edward Said and Benny Morris. It also re-examines the United States’ influential role in the conflict, and explores the many missed opportunities for peace and progress. Clear-eyed and meticulous, Israel and Palestine is an essential tool for understanding the fractured history and future prospects of the region.
Paperback, 416 pages
ISBN: 9781844676569
November 2010
$22.95 / £10.99 / $28.50CAN
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Reviews
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Highly recommended: Everyone interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—general readers and academics alike—will want to consult this book.
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A valuable collection.
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Shlaim … provides a realpolitik reading of the history, demolishing the heroic and innocent image of Israel in its relations with the Palestinians.
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Wonderful … Not often today do we find historians who are this honest and this bleak and this able to express truth so simply.
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Shlaim does not aim at a comprehensive overview of the conflict so much as a running rebuttal of Israel’s version of it; an insurgency in the public relations war.
Blog
Authors speak out to save owner of Jerusalem bookshop from deportation
The bookshop at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem is known worldwide for being the best place to buy English-language bookshops in Israel or Palestine. Its owner Munther Fahmi has run the bookshop for 13 years, but now faces deportation despite being born in Jerusalem. In addition to the injustice of this, the closure of the bookshop would impoverish the cultural life of Jerusalem, and to debate and dissent in Israel. Please sign the petition to stop Munther being deported.
Munther Fahmi is a well-known figure in Jerusalem's diplomatic community and among the city's foreign press corps. A visit to his small bookstore at the American Colony Hotel is a must for anyone seeking to immerse himself in the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Among his many and well-known patrons are ambassadors, authors and politicians, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
But it appears all the connections in the world are no match for Israel's Interior Ministry, which is now seeking to have Fahmi deported.
"After Tunisia: Don't forget Palestine"
Avi Shlaim responds to Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian perspective in the Guardian feature in which leading writers from across the Arab world reflect on the Tunisia protests. Shlaim, author of Israel and Palestine, urges us to remember Palestine:
Your 10 Arab writers gave voice to the wave of optimism that is sweeping through their countries in the wake of the peaceful revolution in Tunisia ("After Tunisia", 29 January). It was melancholy to note, however, that Raja Shehadeh, the Palestinian lawyer and writer, cannot share in this optimism. While the rest of the Arab world is at long last moving towards participatory democracy, a police state is emerging in Palestine with active western support.
The Palestine Papers—comment and historical context
Al Jazeera and the Guardian and Al Quds (Arabic) newspapers yesterday released over 1600 confidential documents laying open the last decade of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The papers go well beyond refuting the threadbare myth that the Israelis have had no 'partner for peace', and show rather how weak and incompetent officials betrayed Palestinians by offering to surrender "virtually everything except their salaries", as Tariq Ali puts it on the London Review of Books blog. As Ali notes, it is well worth revisiting Edward Said's prophetic 1994 article for the LRB in which he described the Oslo accords as a "Palestinian Versailles" in the light of these revelations.