by Ilan Pappe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2017
A grim, hard-hitting look at the nuts and bolts of Israeli occupation.
A diagnostic survey of Israel’s long-planned occupation of the Palestinians’ land.
In the political and legal realms, an “occupation” denotes “a temporary means of securing a territory following armed conflict or a war,” writes historian Pappe (History and International Studies/Univ. of Exeter; Ten Myths About Israel, 2017) in this follow-up to The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006). Yet, 50 years later, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip shows no end in sight. The occupation was conceived as early as 1963 by the Israeli military—the Israeli elite was looking for “the right historical moment to occupy the West Bank” even at the time of independence in 1948—but was hindered by certain strategic decisions. The so-called Shacham Plan eerily copied Britain’s occupation of Mandatory Palestine (which the early Zionists had condemned as “Nazi legislation”), entailing such dreaded regulations as permitting the governor to expel the population, summon any citizen to a police station, sanction administrative arrest, and resort to “preemptive measures.” The Six Day War of June 1967 brought this design into being, thanks to the solid military alliance sealed by then with the United States. Pappe underscores the “myth of the preemptive strike” against Egypt and Syria as actually long-plotted ventures to “Judaize Palestine and de-Arabize it.” Subsequently, such chief policymakers as Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon decided to exclude the West Bank and Gaza Strip from future peace negotiations. Annexation entailed dividing the territories into “Palestinian” and “Jewish” and expelling the Palestinians—or making life too harsh for them to stay—while encouraging Jewish settlement. The author focuses on many of the players in these early machinations and how in fact the Labour Party legacy of the first decade of occupation, 1968-1977, helped consolidate “a unilateral rule that incarcerated the people of the Occupied Territories as inmates for life”—despite its reputation as enlightened and peace-making.
A grim, hard-hitting look at the nuts and bolts of Israeli occupation.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-85168-587-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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