A Half Century Of Occupation

What is the occupation? -- Why has the occupation lasted this long? -- How has the occupation transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

In Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, eighteen scholars of Africa and its diaspora reflect on the similarities and differences between apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary Israel, with an eye to strengthening and broadening today’s movement for justice in Palestine.

The contested politics of space and architecture in Mandate Palestine.

Janowitz examines the societal changes that have weakened the electoral system and contributed to the further decline of social control, and encourages the development of new forms of citizen participation.

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

“A compelling account . . . and a reminder that a true peace can be built only on justice.”—Desmond M. Tutu Tending one’s fields, visiting a relative, going to the hospital: for ordinary Palestinians, such activities require negotiating permits and passes, curfews and closures, “sterile roads” and “seam zones”—bureaucratic hurdles ultimately as deadly as outright military incursion. In Palestine Inside Out, Saree Makdisi draws on eye-opening statistics, academic histories, UN reports, and contemporary journalism to reveal how the “peace process” institutionalized Palestinians’ loss of control over their inner and outer lives—and argues powerfully and convincingly for a one-state solution.

Bringing together essays and photographs by leading Israeli practitioners, and complemented by maps, plans and statistical data, A Civilian Occupation explores the processes and repercussions of Israeli planning and its underlying ideology. It demonstrates how, over the last century, planning and architecture have been transformed from everyday professional practices into strategic weapons in the service of the state, which has sought to secure national and geopolitical objectives through the organization of space and in the redistribution of its population. In fact, as the book shows, Israeli architecture has consistently provided the concrete means for the pursuit of the Zionist project of building a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. As such, it is the first study to supplement the more familiar political, military and historical analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict with a detailed description of the physical environments in which it is played out. The banning of the first edition of this book by its original publisher was proof, if any were needed, that architecture in Israel, indeed architecture anywhere, can no longer be considered a politically naive activity: the politics of Israeli architecture is the politics of any architecture.

For five years during World War II, Denmark was occupied by Germany. While the Danish reaction to this period of its history has been extensively discussed in Danish-language publications, it has not until now received a thorough treatment in English. Set in the context of modern Danish foreign relations, and tracing the country’s responses to successive crises and wars in the region, Danish Reactions to German Occupation brings a full overview of the occupation to an English-speaking audience. Holbraad carefully dissects the motivations and ideologies driving conduct during the occupation, and his authoritative coverage of the preceding century provides a crucial link to understanding the forces behind Danish foreign policy divisions. Analysing the conduct of a traumatised and strategically exposed small state bordering on an aggressive great power, the book traces a development from reluctant cooperation to active resistance. In doing so, Holbraad surveys and examines the subsequent, and not yet quite finished, debate among Danish historians about this contested period, which takes place between those siding with the resistance and those more inclined to justify limited cooperation with the occupiers – and who sometimes even condone various acts of collaboration.