Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege
by Amira Hass (Author), Maxine Nunn (Translator)
In 1993, Amira Hass, a young Israeli reporter, drove to Gaza to cover a story-and stayed, the first journalist to live in the grim Palestinian enclave so feared and despised by most Israelis that, in the local idiom, “Go to Gaza” is another way to say “Go to hell.
Now, in a work of calm power and painful clarity, Hass reflects on what she has seen in the Gaza Strips’s gutted streets and destitute refugee camps.
Yahweh Versus Yahweh: The Enigma of Jewish History
by Jay Gonen
Yahweh versus Yahweh is a vivid description of how the founding myths of Judaism have conditioned Jewish expectations from history. Jay L. Gonen unveils the collective psychology that underlies Jewish psychohistory. The enigmatic God of Gonen’s study brings to the Jewish people periods of construction and bounty but also periods of destruction and hopelessness. This duality, according to Gonen, runs throughout Jewish lore, literature, morality, the Kabbala, and Hassidism. It serves as the unifying factor in Jewish history – as it informed and influenced the establishment of the State of Israel, the history and future of Zionism, the debate over the Holocaust, the belief in the coming of the Messiah, and the current conflict in the Middle East.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
By Ilan Pappe
Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called ‘ethnic cleansing’. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East.
Proust among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East
By Jacqueline Rose
Known for her far-reaching examinations of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, Jacqueline Rose has in recent years turned her attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most enduring and apparently intractable conflicts of our time. In Proust among the Nations, she takes the development of her thought on this crisis a stage further, revealing it as a distinctly Western problem.
In a radical rereading of the Dreyfus affair through the lens of Marcel Proust in dialogue with Freud, Rose offers a fresh and nuanced account of the rise of Jewish nationalism and the subsequent creation of Israel. Following Proust’s heirs, Beckett and Genet, and a host of Middle Eastern writers, artists, and filmmakers, Rose traces the shifting dynamic of memory and identity across the crucial and ongoing cultural links between Europe and Palestine. A powerful and elegant analysis of the responsibility of writing, Proust among the Nations makes the case for literature as a unique resource for understanding political struggle and gives us new ways to think creatively about the violence in the Middle East.