Edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner
OR Books, 2024
Why did Hamas attack? What is Israel trying to achieve? Did this catastrophe have to happen? And is there a way forward? The book’s expert contributors address these and other questions, which have never been more urgent.
In September 2023, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan boasted that the Middle East “is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” One week later, unprecedented violence in Gaza and Israel shattered the status quo and shocked the world.
Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Deluge punctured delusions of stability as hundreds of militants burst forth from the Gaza prison camp. In the ensuing carnage and firefights, 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more taken hostage.
Israel’s retaliation turned the besieged enclave into a howling wasteland. Nearly 30,000 people were killed in four months, including more than 12,000 children, and over 60 percent of homes were damaged or destroyed. Israel targeted the wounded and infirm, newborns and near-dead, as Gaza’s healthcare system—hospitals, clinics, ambulances, medical personnel—came under a systematic attack unprecedented in the annals of modern warfare.
The Hamas massacre and the genocidal Israeli campaign which followed together mark a historic turning point in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The reverberations have also shaken politics far beyond, not least in Europe and the United States, where gigantic, round-the-clock protests for Palestinian rights pitted politicians against the public and exposed a growing statist authoritarianism.
In this groundbreaking book—the first published about the 2023 Gaza war—leading Palestinian, Israeli, and international authorities put these momentous developments in context and provide an initial taking-stock.
Contributors: Musa Abuhashhash, Ahmed Alnaouq, Nathan J. Brown, Yaniv Cogan, Clare Daly MEP, Talal Hangari, Khaled Hroub, R. J., Colter Louwerse, Mitchell Plitnick, Mouin Rabbani, Sara Roy, and Avi Shlaim
[Publication date: April 16, 2024]
REVIEWS:
“Indispensable . . . a tour de force”
—Norman G. Finkelstein
"Eye-opening, compelling, required reading"
—Katie Halper
“First-rate analysis . . . a truly important antidote”
—John J. Mearsheimer
“Comprehensive and compassionate”
—Cornel West
"From the outset, in the introduction to this valuable collection of essays, editor Jamie Stern-Weiner declares its aim: “to place this war in its proper historical context and to provide a preliminary assessment of the many different aspects of the war”.
—Jewish Voice for Labor
"Deluge is a sharp and informative analysis of the Palestine issue, helpful to those new to the movement and energizing also for the more experienced."
—Counter Fire
"[A]n invaluable book, for experts and novices alike."
—The Middle East Eye
"The book’s contributors are brave to highlight what is known but less often said and to open the door to discussions and debates that need to take place for there to be any hope of understanding and stopping the violence in Gaza, Israel and the Occupied Territories."
—The Morning Star
"Considering that a book’s publication typically has at least a one-year journey, this book’s release in April 2024 is a testimony to the authors and editors recognizing the importance of the moment, especially as the Israeli response to the 7 October operation constitutes a genocide."
—The Electronic Intifada
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Jamie Stern-Weiner is an Associate Editor at OR Books and a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. Israeli-born and London-raised, he has written extensively about the history and politics of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as the contemporary politics of antisemitism. His publications include Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions (OR Books, 2018), Antisemitism and the Labour Party (Verso, 2019), and How the EHRC Got It So Wrong (Verso, 2021). His articles have been published in The Nation, Jacobin, Jadaliyya, Middle East Eye, and elsewhere. He co-founded the New Left Project.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Clare Daly MEP is an Irish politician, currently serving as a member of the European Parliament, representing the constituency of Dublin. Elected as an independent socialist, she is affiliated to the Left in the European Parliament, and works across a range of policy areas, including migration and human rights, data protection, home affairs, transport, and defense. She is a vocal advocate for peace and a critic of EU foreign policy.
Khaled Hroub is professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Northwestern University/Qatar and the author of two books on Hamas.
Mouin Rabbani is co-editor of Jadaliyya and host of its Connections podcast.
Sara Roy is an associate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance (Pluto Press, 2021).
Avi Shlaim is an emeritus professor of International Relations at Oxford University, a fellow of the British Academy, and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2014) and Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
After Hamas-led militants massacred Israeli civilians and soldiers on October 7th, prominent observers argued that the group’s ideological intransigence left Israel with no option but to eliminate it. US President Joe Biden rejected calls to “stop the war” because “[a]s long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace.” Senator Bernie Sanders dismissed the prospect of “a permanent ceasefire with an organization like Hamas which is dedicated to destroying the State of Israel.” “People who are calling for a ceasefire now,” former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted, “don’t understand Hamas.” The group “will sabotage any efforts to forge a lasting peace, and will never stop attacking Israel.”
The practical corollary of this reasoning was set out with disarming frankness by the Economist. In an editorial published November 2nd, that august journal acknowledged that “Israel is inflicting terrible civilian casualties” in Gaza, accepted that Israel “has unleashed a ferocious bombardment against the people of Gaza,” recognized that a prolongation of Israel’s offensive would cause “the deaths of thousands of innocent people” in Gaza—and concluded that “Israel must fight on,” because “while Hamas runs Gaza, peace is impossible.” Given its lethal-cum-genocidal implications, the claim that no lasting truce or peace agreement with Hamas is possible merits careful scrutiny.
Attempts to blame Palestinian recalcitrance for the intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict are not new. On the contrary, Israeli spokespeople long ago elevated into a public relations mantra the aphorism of Abba Eban, Israel’s one-time foreign minister: “The Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity” for peace. The main problem with this claim is that it is flatly contradicted by the historical record. Palestinian leaders have sought for decades to resolve the conflict on terms approved by the international community. By contrast, Israel and the United States have consistently rejected those terms in favor of Israel’s territorial expansion. Furthermore, Israeli military offensives have often been directed not at combatting Palestinian terrorism but, on the contrary, at dispelling the “threat” of a peace agreement. Whenever Palestinian leaders moved toward accepting the international consensus framework for resolving the conflict, Israel responded with violence calibrated to force them back into militant rejectionism.
To neutralize these Palestinian “peace offensives,” Israel sought first to bypass Palestinian leaders as interlocutors, then to violently provoke them, and finally to coopt and contain them. Israel followed this playbook with both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hamas, in roughly the same sequence. In each case, Israel initially refused even to engage with Palestinian overtures. When moderate PLO and Hamas pronouncements threatened to win them international legitimacy, and thereby to undermine the tenability of Israel’s non-engagement policy, Israel in both cases conducted brutal military attacks aimed at derailing Palestinian diplomacy. Finally, Israel maneuvered both the PLO and Hamas into positions of subordinacy. Each organization found itself responsible for administering occupied territory and dependent on Israel for the resources and stability needed to do so. Israel thereby sought to reconcile the PLO and Hamas to its regime of domination over the Palestinian people without having to make any political or territorial concessions.
In the West Bank, Israel’s policy proved remarkably successful. By subcontracting the task of repression to the PA, Israel eroded the Palestinian leadership’s legitimacy and thus its desire and capacity to mobilize popular resistance to Israel’s occupation. By 2023, Israel believed that it had engineered a similar equilibrium in Gaza, with Hamas administering a besieged prison camp on Israel’s behalf. At first glance, Hamas appeared to be “pacified”: insofar as the Islamist movement prioritized its rule in Gaza, its resistance could be “contained.” It is now evident that the Israeli assessment was complacent. Fenced off from any diplomatic horizon and trapped within an unbearable and interminable siege, Hamas resolved to disrupt Israel’s equilibrium and violently refocus international attention on Palestine.
The bottom line is this. If, over the past half-century, Israel and its allies had desisted for but a moment in not merely missing, but actively spurning and sabotaging prospects for a just resolution to the Palestine Question, the 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians and incipient genocide in Gaza need never have happened. Indeed, the Israel-Palestine conflict would almost certainly have been resolved decades ago.
The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealthby George Lipsitz
University of California Press, 2024
[Publication date: August 27, 2024]
The Danger Zone Is Everywhere shows that housing insecurity and the poor health associated with it are central components of an unjust, destructive, and deadly racial order. Housing discrimination is a civil and economic injustice, but it is also a menace to public health.
With this book, George Lipsitz reveals how the injuries of housing discrimination are augmented by racial bias in home appraisals and tax assessments, by the disparate racialized effects of policing, sentencing, and parole, and by the ways in which algorithms in insurance and other spheres associate race with risk. But The Danger Zone Is Everywhere also highlights new practices emerging in health care and the law, emphasizing how grassroots community mobilizations are creating an active and engaged public sphere constituency promoting new forms of legislation, litigation, and organization for social justice.
REVIEWS:
"George Lipsitz shines a brilliant light on the powerful connections between discriminatory housing conditions and wealth extraction and reveals the devastating health outcomes they leave in their wake. Backed up by extensive and accessibly presented research, The Danger Zone Is Everywhere paves the way for an integrative understanding of how the creation and maintenance of toxic and dangerous spaces (often referred to as 'social determinants') do enormous harm to bodies, minds, and spirits."—Tricia Rose, author of Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives—And How We Break Free
"Housing, health, and the arts are fundamental to precious life—not as separate categories but rather in their dynamic interrelatedness. Lipsitz exquisitely analyzes the spatial politics of both vulnerability and remedy. This beautiful book models abolition."—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation
"With amazing clarity and precision, Lipsitz explains how race-based residential segregation and wealth differences account for existing racial disparities in health and other areas of life. His command of the data and terrific examples will make The Danger Zone Is Everywhere the 'go-to' book to understand current racial affairs in the United States. In my estimation, this is his best book to date."—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America
"In The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, Lipsitz boldly demonstrates that housing discrimination constitutes the backbone of America's devastating race and class inequalities. Through impeccable analyses and mounds of evidence, he documents convincingly how housing discrimination causes racialized residential segregation, which in turn causes disastrous health and wealth disparities for people of color. These avoidable disparities maim and kill millions of children and adults annually. Lipsitz, in chilling fashion, dissects how good people—bankers, university faculties and administrators, government leaders, insurance executives, physicians, lawyers, real estate tycoons, prison executives, public school leaders, corporate CEOs, and middle-class property holders—knowingly and unknowingly create and perpetuate housing discrimination that massively destroys the lives of marginalized populations. This book is a must-read because it shows how racialized residential segregation makes a mockery of the democratic values that America shouts from the rooftops. Lipsitz makes a bold, disciplined call for America to tear down and discontinue housing discrimination if it is to live up to its creed."—Aldon Morris, author of The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
George Lipsitz is Research Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the critically acclaimed author of ten books including The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. He is a leading scholar in social movements, urban culture, inequality, the politics of popular culture, and Whiteness studies. In addition to The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, he has written Midnight at the Barrelhouse, Footsteps in the Dark, A Life in the Struggle, Time Passages, Dangerous Crossroads, American Studies in a Moment of Danger, Rainbow at Midnight, Sidewalks of St. Louis, Class & Culture in Cold War America and How Racism Takes Place. Lipsitz serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the African American Policy Forum and is on the board of the National Fair Housing Alliance. He edits the Critical American Series for University of Minnesota Press, and co-edits the American Crossroads series for University of California Press.
Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide
by Atef Abu Saif
Beacon Press, 2024
[Publication date: March 19, 2024]
A harrowing and indispensable first-hand account of the experience of the first 85 days of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, from a prominent Palestinian writer
In the morning I read the news. The news is about us. But it's designed for people reading it far, far away, who couldn't possibly imagine they could ever know anyone involved. It's for people who read the news to comfort themselves, to tell themselves: it's still far, far away. I read the news for different reasons: I read it to know I"m not dead.
Early in the morning of Oct 7, 2023, Atef Abu Saif went swimming. It was a beautiful morning: sunny with a cool breeze. The Palestinian Authority's Minister for Culture, he was on a combined work and pleasure trip to Gaza, visiting his extended family with his 15 year old son, Yasser, and participating in National Heritage Day.
Then the bombing started.
Don't Look Left takes us into the day to day experiences of Gazan civilians trying to survive Israel's war against Hamas, its detail and extended narrative showing us what brief reports and video clips cannot. In a war that has taken an extraordinarily high toll on civilians, it is a crucial document--a day-to-day testimony and a deeply moving depiction of a people's fight to survive and maintain their humanity amid the chaos and trauma of mass destruction. It is also, remarkably, a powerful literary experience. Atef Abu Saif was born in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza in 1973, and, as he writes, his first war broke out when he was two months old. He writes as only someone who knows Gaza deeply can, and only as someone who knows war can, picking out the details of ordinary life and survival amidst the possibility of death coming at any moment: washing the only shirt he has and waiting naked for three hours for it dry; noticing a cat, as terrified as the people on the street around it, hiding under a bistro table; visiting his sister-in-law's daughter in the hospital, who tells him in her dream she has no legs, and asks him if it is true. It is: she has lost her legs and a hand when her home was hit by a bomb. Trying to figure out the best place to sleep each night, and when and where to flee as the destruction intensifies.
This is not like past wars with Israel, Abu Saif soon realizes--thinking of the Nakba, and of images of bombed cities from World War II.
Profits from the sale of this book will go to two Palestinian charities: Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Middle East Children’s Alliance.
REVIEWS:
“A chilling day-by-day account of living in and fleeing from Gaza in the last three months of 2023 . . . Desperate, devastating, and difficult to read, making it all the more necessary.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Reading Abu Seif’s diary entries poses several reflections, not least the importance of Palestinians themselves sharing their own narratives...Abu Seif’s narrative offers an insightful perspective on the first 60 days, and there is no end in sight to Israel’s genocidal actions, having created the conditions for famine and starvation, and bombing people waiting for meagre humanitarian aid.”—Ramona Wadi, Middle East Monitor
“Trapped inside Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza, Atef Abu Saif has chronicled the destruction of his city and the heroism of his people with a clarity and eloquence profound enough to silence bombs.”—Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Atef Abu Saif is a Palestinian novelist and diarist of the Palestinian experience of war and occupation. Born in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza 1973, he relocated to the West Bank in 2019 and is currently the Minister for Culture in the Palestinian Authority. Excerpts from his diaries of the 2023-24 Israel-Hamas war have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, The Guardian, and elsewhere. In 2015 Atef was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arab Fiction, also known as the "Arabic Man Booker". In 2018 he also won the Katari Prize for Best Arabic Novel (young writers category). In 2015 he published his diaries of the 2014 war on Gaza: The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary (Comma Press), which was described by Molly Crabapple as "a modern classic of war literature."
