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At a time when a lasting peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis seems virtually unattainable, understanding the roots of their conflict is an essential step in restoring hope to the region. In The Iron Cage, Rashid Khalidi, one of the most respected historians and political observers of the Middle East, homes in on Palestinian politics and history. By drawing on a wealth of experience and scholarship, Khalidi provides a lucid context for the realities on the ground today, a context that has been, until now, notably lacking in our discourse. The story of the Palestinian search to establish a state begins in the mandate period immediately following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, t...
The first systematic global study of how Christians respond to persecution, presenting new research by leading scholars of global Christianity.
After the 9/11 Commission concluded in 2004 that the U.S. was engaged in a war with terrorists and never realized it, they reasoned that “a failure of imagination” had prevented us from seeing terrorism coming. In effect, Americans were simply unable, or in fact disabled, to fathom that there were people who hated and opposed our democracy with such ferocity. But after billions of dollars and almost a decade fighting a war in the Middle East, will we miss the threat again? With penetrating insight and candor, Walid Phares, Fox News terrorism and Middle East expert and a specialist in global strategies, argues that a fierce race for control of the Middle East is on, and the world’s futu...
An investigation into how government persists under even the most untenable conditions, based on an analysis of government in Gaza between 1917 and 1967.
HOW GLOBAL HUMANITARIANISM TURNS REFUGEES INTO CHEAP LABOR Historian Laura Robson unveils the dark heart of our purportedly humanitarian international regime. Tracing the century-long history of attempts to remake refugees into disposable migrant labor, Robson elucidates global humanitarianism’s deep-seated commitment to refugee exploitation and containment. Surveying more than a hundred years of policy across the globe, Robson captures the travails of Balkan refugees in the late Ottoman Empire, Roosevelt’s secret plans to use German Jewish refugees as laborers in Latin America, and contemporary European efforts to deploy Syrians as low-wage workers in remote regions of Jordan. The advent of internationalist refugee aid has long been told as an inspirational story in which reformers fought tirelessly for a system that would recognize and guarantee the rights of displaced and dispossessed people. But as Robson demonstrates, the motives behind modern refugee policy can be mercenary. Refugees have become easy prey for global industrial capitalism.
Prologue : Shiʻism, sectarianism, modernity -- The incomplete nationalization of Jabal ʻAmil -- The modernity of Shiʻi tradition -- Institutionalizing personal status -- Practicing sectarianism -- Adjudicating society at the Jaʻfari court -- ʻAmili Shiʻis into Shiʻi Lebanese? -- Epilogue : Making Lebanon sectarian.
Practicing Sectarianism explores the imaginative and contradictory ways that people live sectarianism. The book's essays use the concept as an animating principle within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas and over a range of historical periods. With contributions from historians and anthropologists, this volume reveals the many ways sectarianism is used to exhibit, imagine, or contest power: What forms of affective pull does it have on people and communities? What epistemological work does it do as a concept? How does it function as a marker of social difference? Examining social interaction, each essay analyzes how people experience sectarianism, sometimes pushing back, som...
Introductory Matters -- The History of Scholarship on Ancient Israelite Religion : A Brief Sketch -- Methodology -- El Worship -- The Iconography of Divinity : El -- The Origin of Yahweh -- The Iconography of Divinity : Yahweh -- The Characterization of the Deity Yahweh : Yahweh as Warrior and Family God -- The Characterization of the Deity Yahweh : Yahweh as King and Yahweh as Judge -- Characterization of the Deity Yahweh : Yahweh as Holy.
A study of the period of armed conflict following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East.
Laura Robson examines the interactions between international and regional political economies of oil and water, and the increasingly explicit colonial and postcolonial politics of ethno-national identity centered around the question of Palestine, arguing that the Middle East's emergence as a 'zone of violence' only developed over the past century.