Book picks similar to
The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation by Aeyal Gross
israel-palestine
law
palestine
In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story
Ghada Karmi - 2002
It speaks for the millions of people all over the world who have lived suspended between their old and new countries, fitting into neither. An account not of the physical hardship and abuse suffered by many refugees, but rather an exploration of the subtler privations of psychological displacement and loss of identity.
Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy
Shlomo Ben-Ami - 2005
Here he offers an unflinching account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, informed by his firsthand knowledge of the major characters and events.Clear-eyed and unsparing, Ben-Ami traces the twists and turns of the Middle East conflict and gives us behind-the-scenes accounts of the meetings in Oslo, Madrid, and Camp David. The author paints particularly trenchant portraits of key figures from Ben-Gurion to Bill Clinton. He is highly critical of both Ariel Sharon and the late Yasser Arafat, seeing Arafat's rejection of Clinton's peace plan as a crime against the Palestinian people. The author is also critical of President Bush's Middle East policy, which he calls a presumptuous grand strategy. Along the way, Ben-Ami highlights the many blunders on both sides, describing for instance how the great victory of the Six Day War launched many Israelis on a misbegotten messianic dream of controlling all the Biblical Jewish lands, which only served to make the Palestinian problem much worse. In contrast, it has only been when Israel has suffered setbacks that it has made moves towards peace. The best hope for the region, he concludes, is to create an international mandate in the Palestinian territories that would lead to the implementation of Clinton's two-state peace parameters.Scars of War, Wounds of Peace is a major work of history--with by far the most fair and balanced critique of Israel ever to come from one of its key officials. This paperback edition features a new Epilogue by the author featuring an analysis of the most recent events in the Israeli-Arab situation, from the disappearance of Ariel Sharon from public life to the emergence of Hamas and Israel's recent war against Hizballah. It is an absolute must-read for everyone who wants to understand the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Minor Detail
Adania Shibli - 2017
Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation
Saree Makdisi - 2008
Tending one's fields, visiting a relative, going to the hospital: for ordinary Palestinians, such everyday activities require negotiating permits and passes, curfews and closures, "sterile roads" and "seam zones"—bureaucratic hurdles ultimately as deadly as outright military incursion.Not since the late Edward Said has there been such an articulate Arab voice on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In devastating detail, Saree Makdisi reveals how the "peace process" institutionalized Palestinians' loss of control over their inner and outer lives. He shows how Israel's massive concrete walls going up around Gaza and the West Bank isolate communities from their lands, their livelihoods, and each other. Through eye-opening statistics and day-by-day reports, we learn how Palestinians have seen their hopes for freedom and statehood culminate in the creation of abject "territories" comparable to open-air prisons.Anyone surprised at Arab anger or the election of Hamas must read this book.
Failing Law Schools
Brian Z. Tamanaha - 2012
Enrollments are on the rise, and their resources are often the envy of every other university department. Law professors are among the highest paid and play key roles as public intellectuals, advisers, and government officials. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession.Addressing all these problems and more in a ringing critique is renowned legal scholar Brian Z. Tamanaha. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis and the likely consequences if the current trend continues. The out-of-pocket cost of obtaining a law degree at many schools now approaches $200,000. The average law school graduate’s debt is around $100,000—the highest it has ever been—while the legal job market is the worst in decades, with the scarce jobs offering starting salaries well below what is needed to handle such a debt load. At the heart of the problem, Tamanaha argues, are the economic demands and competitive pressures on law schools—driven by competition over U.S. News and World Report ranking. When paired with a lack of regulatory oversight, the work environment of professors, the limited information available to prospective students, and loan-based tuition financing, the result is a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.Growing concern with the crisis in legal education has led to high-profile coverage in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and many observers expect it soon will be the focus of congressional scrutiny. Bringing to the table his years of experience from within the legal academy, Tamanaha has provided the perfect resource for assessing what’s wrong with law schools and figuring out how to fix them.
One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Benny Morris - 2008
With the same commitment to objectivity that has consistently characterized his approach, Morris now turns his attention to the present-day legacy of the events of 1948 and the concrete options for the future of Palestine and Israel.The book scrutinizes the history of the goals of the Palestinian national movement and the Zionist movement, then considers the various one- and two-state proposals made by different streams within the two movements. It also looks at the willingness or unwillingness of each movement to find an accommodation based on compromise. Morris assesses the viability and practicality of proposed solutions in the light of complicated and acrimonious realities. Throughout his groundbreaking career, Morris has reshaped understanding of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Here, once again, he arrives at a new way of thinking about the discord, injecting a ray of hope in a region where it is most sorely needed.
This Side of Peace: A Personal Account
Hanan Ashrawi - 1995
The world turns to her to make sense of the often conflicting attempts at peace in the Middle East as much for her clarity and vision as for her actions and experience. When the intifada began, Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi was at the front lines, trying to reason with the Israeli soldiers and to articulate the feelings of an occupied, and troubled, nation; when peace talks were initiated, she brought the human element into the increasingly complex diplomatic meetings; and when Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, she had worked out the last-minute details that finally made it possible.Now, in a revealing and important account, Ashrawi tells of her own struggles, as a Christian Arab woman in a Muslim, male-dominated world, torn between motherhood and the demands of her cause, and as a pivotal peacemaker in the most monumental negotiations of our lifetime. She offers an inside view of Mideast diplomacy, Arafat and the PLO hierarchy, and the thinking of the Palestinians, and she shares the emotional complexities of her everyday and extraordinary life. The daughter of a physician, a university professor herself -- and a wife and mother of two young daughters -- she could have found ways to avoid most of the hardship of the occupation, but instead she chose to be part of her people's struggle. In the midst of the heaviest fighting, when the two sides were locked in a fatal embrace, Ashrawi learned and drew great strength from her family and her intense friendships with both Palestinian and Israeli women, and quietly helped to lay the foundation for peace.In her tireless efforts, she understood, by instinct and trial and error, when to follow diplomatic channels and when to take the back door, when to behave and when to break the rules. At the negotiating table she has pierced the iciest veneers with her keen intellect and fiery concern for human rights, and at international conferences, from Madrid to Washington, she has taken the diplomatic community and the media by storm. Still, in her every word, it is clear that her commitment is to the human -- not the political -- elements of nation-building.Writing in the language of her heart, Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi voices the most reasoned understanding of the situation in the Middle East, of the difficult road traveled, and of the perhaps more difficult road ahead.
My Michael
Amos Oz - 1967
As the years pass and Hannah’s tempestuous fantasy life encroaches upon reality, she feels increasingly estranged from him and the marriage gradually disintegrates. Gorgeously written, profoundly moving, this extraordinary novel is at once a haunting love story, and a rich reflective portrait of a place.
The Discipline of Law
Alfred Thompson Denning - 1979
They should be moulded and shaped to meet the needs and opinions of today. The Discipline of Law is a fascinating account of Lord Denning's personal contribution to the changing face of the law in this century.
Why Israel is the Victim
David Horowitz - 2009
David Horowitz’s classic Why Israel is the Victim, updated by the author, sets the record straight about the basic truths of the Middle East conflict. In addition to restoring the authentic history of the region – a history of obsessive aggression first by Arab countries determined to physically annihilate the Jewish State and later by terror groups determined to destroy its will to survive and right to exist—this booklet brings the story up to date by showing the systematic way in which Hamas and Hezbollah, under Iran’s direction, have subverted peace in the Middle East. As Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield notes in his insightful introduction, this pamphlet “tells us why we should reject the “Blame Israel First” narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media… It confronts the myth of Palestinian victimhood… and it delivers a rousing restatement of the true history of the hate that led us to all this.” America should be Israel’s protector. Instead, as David Horowitz notes, under the leadership of Barack Obama, it has become its prosecutor.
How Israel Lost: The Four Questions
Richard Ben Cramer - 2004
Why do we care about Israel? II. Why don¹t the Palestinians have a state? III. What is a Jewish state? IV. Why is there no peace? Cramer illustrates how Israel is losing her soul by maintaining her occupation of the lands conquered in the Six Day War. Israel has become a victim of that occupation no less than the Palestinians, who must have a nation of their own. Both his observations and argument are drawn with startling clarity, informed by the fierce and fearless reporting that won him the Pulitzer Prize for Middle East coverage.
The Almond Tree
Michelle Cohen Corasanti - 2012
Living under occupation, the inhabitants of the village harbour a constant fear of losing their homes, jobs, belongings – and each other. On Ahmed’s twelfth birthday, that fear becomes a reality. With his father now imprisoned, his family’s home and possessions confiscated and his siblings quickly succumbing to hatred in the face of conflict, Ahmed embarks on a journey to liberate his loved ones from their hardship, using his prodigious intellect. In so doing, he begins to reclaim a love for others that had been lost over the course of a childhood rife with violence, and discovers new hope for the future.
War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History, Revised and Updated
Avi Shlaim - 1994
"Remarkable...breathtaking in its scope and historical precision, this is highly recommended volume for both publivc and academic libraries.—Library Journal.
Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life
Sari Nusseibeh - 2007
From his time teaching side by side with Israelis at the Hebrew University through his appointment by Yasir Arafat to administer the Arab Jerusalem, he has held fast to the principles of freedom and equality for all, and his story dramatizes the consequences of war, partition, and terrorism as few other books have done. Once Upon a Country brings rare depth and compassion to the story of his country.