Middle East Politics

The Palestinian Delusion is unique in situating the Israeli/Palestinian conflict within the context of the global jihad that has found renewed impetus in the latter portion of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Briskly recounting the tumultuous history of the "peace process", Robert Spencer demonstrates that the determination of diplomats, policymakers, and negotiators to ignore this aspect of the conflict has led the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world down numerous blind alleys. This has often only exacerbated, rather than healed, this conflict.

Through a stellar cast of politicians, diplomats, spies and soldiers, including T. E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, A Line in the Sand vividly tells the story of the short but crucial era when Britain and France ruled the Middle East. It explains exactly how the old antagonism between these two powers inflamed the more familiar modern rivalry between the Arabs and the Jews and ultimately led to war between the British and the French in 1941 and between the Arabs and the Jews in 1948.

As one of al-Qaeda's most respected bomb-makers, Aimen Dean rubbed shoulders with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself. As a double agent at the heart of al-Qaeda's chemical weapons program, he foiled attacks on civilians and saved countless lives, brushing with death so often that his handlers began to call him their spy with nine lives. This is the story of how a young Muslim, determined to defend his faith, found himself fighting on the wrong side - and his fateful decision to work undercover for his sworn enemy.

In the past five years, Israel has mounted three major assaults on the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped behind its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Taken together, Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), and Operation Protective Edge (2014) have resulted in the deaths of some 3,700 Palestinians. Meanwhile a total of 90 Israelis were killed in the invasions. On the face of it, this succession of vastly disproportionate attacks has often seemed frenzied and pathological.

In Mossad, authors MichaelBar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal take us behind the closed curtain with riveting, eye-opening, boots-on-the-ground accounts of the most dangerous, most crucial missions in the agency's 60-year history.

A former member of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, Polk describes a country and a history misunderstood by many in the West. While Iranians chafe under the yolk of their current leaders, they also have bitter memories of generations of British, Russian, and American espionage, invasion, and dominance. There are important lessons to be learned from the past, and Polk teases them out of a long and rich history and shows that it is not just now, but for decades to come that an understanding of Iran will be essential to American safety and well-being.

Acclaimed Israeli intelligence analyst Avi Melamed has spent more than 30 years interpreting Middle East affairs. His long-awaited Inside the Middle East challenges widely accepted perceptions and provides a gripping and uniquely enlightening guide to make sense of the events unfolding in the region. Melamed considers all the major power players in the Middle East, explains the underlying issues, and creates a three-dimensional picture, an illustration that connects the dots and provides a fascinating road map.

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region.

Leading Australian journalist John Lyons takes readers on a fascinating personal journey through the wonders and dangers of the Middle East. In this updated edition, Lyons draws from his years living in Jerusalem to give context to the devastating war between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and gives listeners a behind-the-scenes look at the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Since the Six-Day War, Israelis have been entrenched in a national debate over whether to keep the land they conquered or to return some, if not all, of the territories to Palestinians. In a balanced and insightful analysis, Micah Goodman deftly sheds light on the ideas that have shaped Israelis' thinking on both sides of the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Contrary to opinions that dominate the discussion, he discovers that the paradox of Israeli political discourse is that both sides are right in what they affirm - and wrong in what they deny.

Working from both primary and secondary sources, Walter Reid explores Britain's role in the creation of the modern Middle East and the rise of Zionism from the early years of the twentieth century to 1948, when Britain handed over Palestine to United Nations' control. From the decisions that Britain made has flowed much of the instability of the region and of the worldwide tensions that threaten the twenty-first century; this thought-provoking book considers how much Britain was to blame.

The enormous sense of optimism unleashed by the Arab Spring in 2011 soon gave way to widespread suffering and despair. Of the many popular uprisings against autocratic regimes, Tunisia's now stands alone as a beacon of hope for sustainable human rights progress. Challenging the widely shared pessimism among regional experts, Micheline Ishay charts bold and realistic pathways for human rights in a region beset by political repression, economic distress, sectarian conflict, a refugee crisis, and violence against women.

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of Black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles - from the Black freedom movement to the South African antiapartheid movement.

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924 the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to two percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. This is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population.

Until his assassination by US drone strike in January 2020, commander Qassem Soleimani was one of the most powerful men in Iran and the military spearhead for Iranian foreign policy, enacting the wishes of the country's Supreme Leader in the region. A widely popular but also feared maverick operator, he helped to establish the Islamic Republic as a major force in the Middle East, with interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. This was a long way from where he began as a youth, living on the margins in a country ruled by a monarch supported by the United States.

Offering a new view of one of America's most important, infamously strained, and widely misunderstood relationships of the postwar era, this book tells the history of America and Iran from the time the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was placed on the throne in 1941 to the 1979 revolution that brought the present Islamist government to power.

You hear about Israel in the news regularly, but beyond the many opinions and preconceptions, do you really know what to make of the conflicts and controversies in the Middle East? What Should We Think About Israel? exposes the main current issues and provides well-researched objective facts to help you learn the truth about Israel's past, present, and future. This compilation from experts including Walter Kaiser, Jr., David Brickner, Mitch Glaser, Michael Brown, Arnold Fructenbaum, and Steven Ger will help you answer the tough questions.

David Rundell - one of America's foremost experts on Saudi Arabia - explains how the country has been stable for so long, why it is less so today, and what is most likely to happen in the future. The book is based on the author's close contacts and intimate knowledge of the country where he spent 15 years living and working as a diplomat. Vision or Mirage demystifies one of the most powerful, but least understood, states in the Middle East and is essential for anyone interested in the power dynamics and politics of the Arab world.

From the first cannonballs fired by American warships at North African pirates to the conquest of Falluja by the Marines, and from the early American explorers who probed the sources of the Nile to the diplomats who strove for Arab-Israeli peace, the United States has been dramatically involved in the Middle East. For well over two centuries, American statesmen, merchants, and missionaries, both men and women, have had a profound impact on the shaping of this crucial region.

Published on the 15th anniversary of the Six-Day War that culminated in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Pappe offers a comprehensive exploration of one of the world's most prolonged and tragic conflicts. Using recently declassified archival material, Pappe analyses the motivations and strategies of the generals and politicians-and the decision-making process itself - that laid the foundation of the occupation. Pappe paints a picture of what is to all intents and purposes the world's largest "open prison".