Current Analysis The Question of Palestine in Miniature The countdown to September 23 has begun. On that day, if he does not renege on his September 16 speech, Mahmoud ‘Abbas will present a formal request for full UN membership for a state of Palestine. The UN Security Council, which must approve such requests, will not do so, because the United States w The Editors • 10 min read
Current Analysis The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Arab Awakening The March 15 Youth Movement, whose name comes from demonstrations held in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that day to demand unity between Fatah and Hamas, is the most direct Palestinian expression of the “Arab awakening” of 2010-2011. The next day, March 16, Fatah’s leader, Palestinian Authority (PA) Joel Beinin • 13 min read
MER Article Evolutionary Constant Nadav Shelef, Evolving Nationalism: Homeland, Identity and Religion in Israel, 1925–2005 (Cornell, 2010). Zachary Lockman • 5 min read
MER Article Why India and Israel Were Not Friends, 1948-1991 P. R. Kumaraswamy, India’s Israel Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Vijay Prashad • 4 min read
MER Article Blueprint Negev Picking up a passenger by the hot, treeless roadside, Bedouin advocate ‘Ali Abu Subayh wheels his Fiat around onto a path, spitting rocks and coating the windows with dust, headed toward an “unrecognized village” in southern Israel. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the Israeli government displaced the B Rebecca Manski • 15 min read
Current Analysis Israel's Palestinian Minority Thrown Into a Maelstrom The first reports of Israel’s May 31 commando raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla surfaced among the country’s 1.4 million Palestinian citizens alongside rumors that Sheikh Ra’id Salah, head of the radical northern wing of the Islamic Movement of Israel, had been shot dead on the lead ship, the Mavi M Jonathan Cook • 19 min read
MER Article Drawing the Wrong Lessons from Israel's 2006 War For many military critics of COIN, the future of war is not to be found in the steamy jungles of Vietnam but rather on the rocky hillsides of southern Lebanon, where Israel was fought to a standstill by the guerrilla army of Hizballah in the summer of 2006. Israel possesses one of the world’s most p Steve Niva • 11 min read
MER Article Peleg, Israeli Culture Between the Two Intifadas Yaron Peleg, Israeli Culture Between the Two Intifadas: A Brief Romance (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008). Rebecca L. Stein • 4 min read
MER Article Waking the Red-Dead “Look at that!” said Muhammad ‘Asfour, an environmentalist and avid nature photographer, pointing to a picture of a boat and wooden staircase perched well above the Jordanian shore of the Dead Sea. “Do you see how far they are from the waterline?” Lizabeth Zack • 6 min read
MER Article Stein, Itineraries of Conflict Rebecca L. Stein, Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians and the Political Lives of Tourism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). “To read Israel as itinerant is to imagine its alternative future.” With these optimistic words, Rebecca L. Stein closes the introduction to her beautifull Gil Hochberg • 4 min read
MER Article Planning Apartheid in the Naqab The authority to plan and order physical space is among the most significant powers a government possesses. Spatial planning can be a force for reform and emancipation or a mechanism of control and subordination. In Israel, national planning goals are rooted in Zionism’s agenda of nation building an Monica Tarazi • 15 min read
MER Article Beyond Compare “Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming,” writes the novelist Alice Walker. “There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the bantustan. To the ‘rez.’ To the ‘colored section.’” In a poetic vein, Walker captures the confinement and marginality one senses in the Gaza Strip, and its familiarity to tho Julie Peteet • 22 min read
