Departments

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Middle East history

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    4/26/2023

    Israel's Founding Contradictions Haunt 75th Anniversary

    by Bernard Avishai

    A bargain of tolerance between secular bourgeois and religious supremacist wings of Israeli society is being renegotiated by the right wing. Are concessions to religious groups made by David Ben-Gurion at the founding the root of conflict?

  • SOURCE: Times of Israel
    6/3/2021

    Solomon's Peace Accord

    by David Marks

    Can Israelis and Palestinians imagine and implement a Solomonic peace? 

  • SOURCE: Eurozine
    6/3/2021

    The Unbearable Easiness of Killing

    by Arie M. Dubnov

    "As a colleague justly commented, it is only helpful to call a situation ‘complicated’ if one is committed to unfolding the package, willing to examine its contents and prepared to be surprised by what one finds hidden inside."

  • SOURCE: Contingent
    5/28/2021

    Because of Palestine

    by N.A. Mansour

    "It is because I am Palestinian that I can tell you that objectivity—in history-writing, in the archives, in museums—does not exist."

  • SOURCE: National Interest
    5/24/2021

    How Napoleon’s Legacy Explains the Middle East’s Conflicts

    by Yoav Tenembaum

    An international relations scholar argues that the Middle East can be explained through the division of "revolutionary" and "status quo" interests that dates to Napoleon's challenges to the European imperial order. How other nations respond to the conflict will follow whether they favor the status quo. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    5/24/2021

    Republicans are Far More Radical than Democrats on Israel

    by Max Boot

    Post columnist Max Boot surveys the bipartisan field of US policy toward Israel and concludes that the absolute support for the Israeli right from the Republicans, driven by the importance of evangelical voters, is wholly unprecedented. 

  • SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
    5/20/2021

    In Israel, the Violent Legacy of 1948

    by Benny Morris

    "The chaos in the towns of Lydda, Ramle, Haifa, Umm al-Fahm and Acre is a dim echo of the civil war between Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communities that engulfed the country during the first months of the 1948 war."

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    5/20/2021

    What Liberal Comparisons between Bush-Cheney and Trump Get Wrong

    by Joseph Stieb

    Liberal critics of Liz Cheney have suggested she's a hypocrite, blasting Trump's "Big Lie" while having championed the deceptions that led to the Iraq War. This is an imperfect comparison, which ignores the real lessons of Iraq – that fixing the fact-finding process to fit a policy is a common and continuing danger. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    5/18/2021

    This is a War Israel Can’t Win

    by Max Boot

    Post columnist Max Boot argues that the current cycle of attacks and reprisals are symbolic political gestures, and that Israel should declare that it's made its point and resume the work of political normalization with its Arab neighbors and political concessions with the Palestinian Authority that marginalize Hamas.

  • SOURCE: New York Times`
    5/14/2021

    In Israel’s Rising Violence, Ripples From 1948

    The eruption of communal violence between Jews and Arabs in Israeli towns with mixed populations is a legacy of the events of 1948, when, in the context of war, many towns' Arab populations were purged (historians debate the degree to which this was planned, or part of Israeli state policy).