The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

What explains the peculiar intensity and evident intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Of all the "hot spots" in the world today, the apparently endless clash between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East seems unique in its longevity and resistance to resolution. Is this conflict really different from other ethnic and nationalist confrontations, and if so, in what way? In this fully revised and expanded fifth edition of his highly respected introductory text, Alan Dowty demystifies the conflict by putting it in broad historical perspective, identifying its roots, and tracing its evolution up to the current impasse. His account offers a clear analytic framework for understanding transformations over time, and in doing so, punctures the myths of an "age-old" conflict with an unbridgeable gap between the two sides. Rather than simply reciting historical detail, this book presents a clear overview that serves as a road map through the thicket of conflicting claims. Updated to include recent developments, such as the recent Israeli elections and the debate over the two-state solution, the new edition presents in full the opposed perspectives of the two sides, leaving readers to make their own evaluations of the issues. The book thus expresses fairly and objectively the concerns, hopes, fears, and passions of both sides, making it clear why this conflict is waged with such vehemence - and how, for all that, the gap between the two sides has narrowed over time.

This meticulously curated edited volume presents an assemblage of insightful, critical, and contemporary perspectives on how Israeli domination has been sustained and reproduced in new forms and means using various mechanisms and techniques of control, coloniality, and settler colonialism. Based on original empirical fieldwork, the contributors to this book adopt interdisciplinary and decolonial approaches in their examination of the intricate functions and structures of domination that permeate Palestinian life by illuminating the power dynamics at play and revealing the mechanisms that sustain the settler-colonial regime. This book identifies sites of colonial control and domination exerted on Palestine by Israel, and demonstrates how these sites of control are also sites of Palestinian resistance. The first section explores the political sites of control by focusing on governmentality, institutions, and technologies and mechanisms of control including how Israel manages access to health, life and death. The second section examines the economic mechanisms of exploitation, dispossession, and de-development including banking, taxation and the relationships between finance capital, aid and military occupation. The third section turns attention to environmental sites of control, focusing on land, indigeneity, space and racial capitalism. Finally, section four scrutinizes the intellectual sites of control, highlighting how norms, narratives, and knowledge production perpetuate domination.

In late 1991 and early 1992, Joe Sacco spent two months with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, traveling and taking notes. Upon returning to the U.S., he started writing and drawing Palestine, which combined the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comic-book storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighty situation.

The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Isabel Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities. In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe--from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan--the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.

Confronting Apartheid examines the regimes of these three societies from the perspective of the author's experiences as a human rights lawyer in South Africa and Namibia and as a UN human rights envoy in occupied Palestine. John Dugard describes the work he undertook in defense of human rights in South West Africa/Namibia, South Africa, and more recently in occupied Palestine.

This book provides a comparative historical study of the rise and evolution of anti-colonial movements in South Africa and Israel/Palestine. It focuses on the ways in which major political movements and activists conceptualised their positions vis-a-vis historical processes of colonial settlement and indigenous resistance over the last century. Drawing on a range of primary sources, the author engages with theoretical debates involving key actors operating in their own time and space. Using a comparative framework, the book illustrates common and divergent patterns of political and ideological contestations and focuses on the relevance of debates about race and class, state and power, ethnicity and nationalism. Particular attention is given to South Africa and Israel/Palestine's links to global campaigns to undermine foreign domination and internal oppression, tensions between the quests for national liberation and equality of rights, the role of dissidents from within the ranks of settler communities, and the various attempts to consolidate indigenous resistance internally while forging alliances with other social and political forces on the outside. This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of African History, Middle East History, and African Studies, and to social justice and solidarity activists globally.