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A memoir that combines political and economic commentary with personal and national history. Mohammad Tarbush was born in British Mandate Palestine. As an infant, he and his family were forced to evacuate their village together with its entire population, after the Zionist victory that led to the establishment of the State of Israel. Then as landless refugees in the West Bank, the family sank into poverty. When, as a teenager, Tarbush left home one day under the pretext of visiting relatives in Jordan, he in fact set off on a year-long hitchhiking journey to Europe, where he would eventually become a highly successful international banker and a key behind-the-scenes promoter of the Palestinian cause. In My Palestine, Mohammad Tarbush combines poignant personal memoir with incisive political and economic commentary on the tumultuous events that shaped the history of Israel, Palestine, and the modern Middle East.
The fourteen original essays in this volume explore the psychological, political, and cultural bases of Arab nationalism since World War I and are arranged around broad themes of study: academic constructions of nationalist history, nationalist presentations of Arab histories, conflict among competing nationalist visions, and more.
In the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s nineteenth-century reforms, as guilds waned and new professions emerged, the scholarly ‘estate’ underwent social differentiation. Some found employment in the state’s new institutions as translators, teachers and editors, whilst others resisted civil servant status. Gradually, the scholar morphed into the public writer. Despite his fledgling status, he catered for the public interest all the more so since new professionals such as doctors, engineers and lawyers endorsed this latest social role as an integral part of their own self-image. This dual preoccupation with self-definition and all things public is the central concern of this book. Focusing...
Published in 1982, Role Of The Military in Politics is a valuable contribution to the field of Middles East Studies.
Years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a loosely organized insurgency continues to target American and Coalition soldiers, as well as Iraqi security forces and civilians, with devastating results. In this sobering account of the ongoing violence, Ahmed Hashim, a specialist on Middle Eastern strategic issues and on irregular warfare, reveals the insurgents behind the widespread revolt, their motives, and their tactics. The insurgency, he shows, is not a united movement directed by a leadership with a single ideological vision. Instead, it involves former regime loyalists, Iraqis resentful of foreign occupation, foreign and domestic Islamist extremists, and elements of organized crime. These g...
The looting of the Iraqi National Museum in April of 2003 provoked a world outcry at the loss of artifacts regarded as part of humanity's shared cultural patrimony. But though the losses were unprecedented in scale, the museum looting was hardly the first time that Iraqi heirlooms had been plundered or put to political uses. From the beginning of archaeology as a modern science in the nineteenth century, Europeans excavated and appropriated Iraqi antiquities as relics of the birth of Western civilization. Since Iraq was created in 1921, the modern state has used archaeology to forge a connection to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and/or Islamic empires and so build a sense of nation...
This book explores the emergence of an anarchic states-system in the twentieth-century Arab world. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalist movements first considered establishing a unified regional arrangement to take the empire's place and present a common front to outside powers. But over time different Arab leaderships abandoned this project and instead adopted policies characteristic of self-interested, territorially limited states. In his explanation of this phenomenon, the author shifts attention away from older debates about the origins and development of Arab nationalism and analyzes instead how different nationalist leaderships changed the ways that they carried on diplomatic and strategic relations. He situates this shift in the context of influential sociological theories of state formation, while showing how labor movements and other forms of popular mobilization shaped the origins of the regional states-system.
This book, first published in 1982, attempts to explain how and why Iraqi military intervened in the affairs of state between 1936 and 1941. The intention is not to describe the various coups of this period, but to explain the gradual assumption of a political role by the Iraqi army and the contributing factors at play, for example the fragmented nature of Iraqi society and the presence of the British. In addition, an understanding of the political role of the Iraqi army requires a thorough investigation of the development of the Iraqi state itself.
A noted Middle East specialist looks at conspiracy theories and the way they control life and politics in the region.