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Gaza is among the most densely populated places in the world. Two-thirds of its inhabitants are refugees, and more than half the population is under eighteen years of age. Since Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, it has systematically de-developed the economy. After Hamas won democratic elections in 2006, Israel intensified its blockade of Gaza, and after Hamas consolidated its control of the territory in 2007, Israel tightened its illegal siege another notch. In the meantime, Israel has launched no less than eight military operations against Gaza--culminating in Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014--that left behind over three million tons of rubble. Recent UN reports predict that Gaza will be unlivable by 2020. Norman G. Finkelstein presents a meticulously researched and devastating inquest into Israel's actions of the last decade. He argues that although Israel justified its blockade and violent assaults in the name of self-defense, in fact these actions were cynical exercises of brutal power against an essentially defenseless civilian population. Based on hundreds of human rights reports, the book scrutinizes multifarious violations of international law Israel committed both during its operations and in the course of its decade-long siege of Gaza. It is a monument to Gaza's martyrs and a scorching accusation against their tormenters

In A Lost Peace, Galen Jackson rewrites an important chapter in the history of the middle period of the Cold War, changing how we think about the Arab-Israeli conflict. During the June 1967 Middle East war, Israeli forces seized the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. This conflict was followed, in October 1973, by a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel, which threatened to drag the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation even though the superpowers had seemingly embraced the idea of détente. This conflict contributed significantly to the ensuing deterioration of US-Soviet relations. The standard explanation for why détente failed is that the Soviet Union, driven mainly by its Communist ideology, pursued a highly aggressive foreign policy during the 1970s. In the Middle East specifically, the conventional wisdom is that the Soviets played a destabilizing role by encouraging the Arabs in their conflict with Israel in an effort to undermine the US position in the region for Cold War gain. Jackson challenges standard accounts of this period, demonstrating that the United States sought to exploit the Soviet Union in the Middle East, despite repeated entreaties from USSR leaders that the superpowers cooperate to reach a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement. By leveraging the remarkable evidence now available to scholars, Jackson reveals that the United States and the Soviet Union may have missed an opportunity for Middle East peace during the 1970s.

Histories of the Arab–Israeli War of 1967 have advanced a curious commonplace. As they have sought to account for the decisive factors in what they treat as a decisive war, soldiers and interpreters of their arguments have tacitly resorted to what Adolf Loos once referred to as a ‘principle of cladding’, or bekleidungsprinzip, in order to explain the successes of Israel’s armored corps. The bekleidungsprinzip is not a military principle but a dictum of fashion, according to which the renunciation of individual affect in dress is presumed to coincide with the emergence of the qualitative advantages of the modern. With little or no explanation to substantiate the relation between dress and success in armored warfare, histories of this war have instead explained that the causes of a decisive victory may have to be found in the relation between uniforms and technical uniformity. This presupposition possesses an intellectual history, in the course of which war intellectuals repeatedly sought to reconcile what they themselves posed as a contradiction between agency and structure by identifying a proper relation between habit and habitus. Elaborated in a series of doctrinal debates concerning the proper relation of the Jew to the tank in the Israel Defense Forces – and in subsequent interpretations of those disputes – the bekleidung argument is more than a mere curiosity of military history. It points, instead, to a theodicy of conflict according to which a reification of this history’s false premises presents itself to view in repeated images of their transcendence.

The war between Israel and Hamas that began in October 2023 deeply polarized public and political opinion worldwide. In contrast to many EU countries, the Czech Republic adopted a position of unwavering support for Israel, referencing their shared values and long-standing friendship grounded in the historical ties between the Czech and Jewish peoples. This article explores this narrative by examining the commonly cited example of Czechoslovakia's support for the establishment of Israel in the late 1940s, which included providing arms supplies, military training, and diplomatic backup. However, such reflections on history often overlook important international and domestic factors of the time, including the Eastern Bloc’s efforts to expand communism into the newly decolonized Third World countries and its pursuit of financial gain. As a result, Czechoslovakia’s pro-Israeli position during the Cold War was short-lived, and was quickly reversed when the political circumstances changed. Ignoring these facts leads to distorted historical interpretations and even the development of some historical myths.

Arapsko proljeće jedan je od ključnih čimbenika postojeće krize na Bliskom istoku. Posredno, ono je ojačalo radikalno krilo islamističkog pokreta, dovelo do ratova u Siriji i Jemenu, intenziviralo regionalno natjecanje i destabiliziralo cijelu regiju. Nestabilnost bliskoistočne regije nije, međutim, recentni fenomen, nego ima korijene u razdoblju neposredno nakon Prvoga svjetskog rata, kad je kombinacija unutrašnjih i vanjskih čimbenika transformirala tu nekoć mirnu regiju u zonu visokog rizika. Iako arapski nacionalizam, koji se sredinom 20. stoljeća konstituirao kao vodeća ideološka sila na Bliskom istoku, već dulje vrijeme nije relevantan čimbenik međuarapskih odnosa, bilo bi pogrešno zaključiti da on ne snosi nikakvu odgovornost za aktualno stanje u regiji. Rad je posvećen analizi razvojne dinamike arapskog nacionalizma. To podrazumijeva analizu okolnosti pod kojima se njegov liberalni, eurofilni diskurs postupno transformirao u autoritarni diskurs panarabizma, analizu njegova utjecaja na politički ustroj i odnose u regiji, kao i analizu razloga zbog kojih je ideja arapskog ujedinjenja prestala funkcionirati kao iole značajniji orijentir individualnog i kolektivnog djelovanja. Na kraju se razmatra njegova politička ostavština. Arapski nacionalizam nestao je s bliskoistočne političke scene, ali je iza sebe ostavio autokratske režime odlučne da se po svaku cijenu održe na vlasti. Ti represivni režimi, u stalnom »ratu« sa svojim građanima i s hegemonijskim pretenzijama prema susjednim državama, politička su ostavština arapskog nacionalizma na kojoj počiva veliki dio odgovornosti za nasilje koje je pratilo slom Arapskog proljeća i posljedičnu moru bliskoistočne stvarnosti.

In the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt, and established a long-lasting military regime over their Palestinian population. In this article, recently declassified sources and published reports were used to demonstrate how the Israeli government initiated and funded academic research on Palestinian society to gain reliable, useful knowledge to inform its policies. The Israeli leadership was most specifically concerned with pacification of the occupied population, the Arab/Jewish demographic balance, and the status of the 1948 Palestinian refugees. By early 1968, the research team had produced a series of policy-oriented reports on Palestinian society, covering such subjects as employment, education, nationalism, migration, and general values. The team used surveys, questionnaires, and observations, with modernization theory providing the theoretical framework for analyzing their empirical findings and formulating policy recommendations. As the Israeli team had studied a population under military occupation, their recommendations differed from those reached by their US peers who studied traditional populations in the context of the Cold War. Israeli civil and military officials had great interest in this new knowledge, rendering social research an ongoing practice for the Israeli occupation regime in the years to come.

The \"Zionist-Crusader analogy\" is a recurring trope in Israeli politics and society. The present article focuses on an overlooked aspect of this analogy, the visual and artistic expression of supposed similarity and distinction between the medieval Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291) and the State of Israel. We examine the visual and literary output of renowned Israeli artist Igael Tumarkin (1933–2021) whose crusades-related art embodies the tensions between past and present, east and west, and personal and collective memory. An in-depth study of a few of Tumarkin's artworks and writings reveals the artist's unique viewpoint on the \"Zionist-Crusader\" historiographical framework. These works, it is argued, inhabit two main interpretive frames, which are intricately connected. The first reflects, though not always consistently, the extent to which contemporary Israel \"belongs\" within the greater Levantine context; the second is the artist's reflection on his own identity as a Jew born in Germany and an Israeli citizen, who often perceives himself as an outsider navigating between different cultural iconographies and identities.