Palestine S Horizon

The former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine brings his life's work together to discuss how the region can find peace

What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel’s project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel’s search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. The Book of Disappearance grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Antoon’s translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.

Broadening Horizons is a series of international congresses dedicated to researchers, including postgraduate students, in the early-stages of their careers who are involved in a number of different disciplinary areas in the study of the Ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. The general aim of the conferences is to encourage discussion of new topics and to promote the exchange of ideas, data and scientific information among students and scholars of many different specialties – archaeology, prehistory, history, anthropology, archaeobiology and philology – throughout the geographical area known as the Ancient Near East. The 3rd of these congresses was held in Barcelona (Spain), from the 19th to the 21st of July 2010 in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, following previous congresses which had taken place at Ghent University (Belgium) in 2006 and at Université Lyon 2 (France) in 2007. This volume includes not only the very interesting and diverse set of papers presented in Barcelona but also the invited contributions of the key speakers. These two sections are followed by a final paper by the editors about the trajectory of the BH conferences and about the particularities and difficulties confronting young scholars who are doing research in the Near East.

Why does Hamas refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the state of Israel? What makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so intractable? Reflecting both Israeli and Palestinian points of view, this volume addresses the two powerful, bitterly contested, competing historical narratives that underpin the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Project on Arab-Israeli Futures is a research effort designed to anticipate and assess obstacles and opportunities facing the peace process over the next 5 to 10 years. Stepping back from the day-to-day ebb and flow of events in the Middle East, this project examines broader, ¿over-the-horizon¿ developments that could foreclose future options or offer new opportunities for peace. The effort brings together U.S., Israeli, and Arab researchers. This report identifies which local, regional, and international trends will have the greatest impact on Israel¿s relationships with Palestinians in the coming years. Author Yossi (Joseph) Alpher is a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

The Conflict over the Conflict offers a unique view of the threat to free speech, academic freedom, and the future of the academy posed by those on both sides of the Israel/Palestine campus debate.

What if our understanding of Israel/Palestine has been wrong all along?