Ben White

After decades of occupation and creeping annexation, Israel has created an apartheid system in historic Palestine. Peace efforts have failed because of one hard truth: the best Israeli offers do not meet the minimum that a truly free Palestine would require - nor that international law would recognize. There are, however, widening cracks in Israelis traditional pillars of support for this policy, and in this book Ben White lays them out. Opposition to Israeli policies, he shows, are growing within Jewish communities and among Western progressives, while the rise of populist movements around the world has confused traditional party lines on the question and the Palestinian-led boycott campaign continues to gain momentum. Now, White argues, is the time to plot a course to avoid the mistakes of the past - to create a real way forward, and beyond apartheid, in Palestine.

Penny Johnson
In August of 2016, Israeli police officers arrested a Palestinian donkey in the Jordan Valley. The charge? Not having the correct paperwork. It's an image as sad (and strangely common) as it is symbolic: No creature great or small is free from the absurdities of the Occupied Territories. 

Drawing on three decades of living in the region, Penny Johnson's insightful writing reveals what these and many other animals' fates tell us about the current state of Israel and Palestine. What's more, looking forward, she introduces a new generation of environmental activists to us, who represent the region's best hope for conservation, collaboration, and justice for all creatures.

Electricity is an integral part of everyday life—so integral that we rarely think of it as political. In Electrical Palestine, Fredrik Meiton illustrates how political power, just like electrical power, moves through physical materials whose properties govern its flow. At the dawn of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both kinds of power were circulated through the electric grid that was built by the Zionist engineer Pinhas Rutenberg in the period of British rule from 1917 to 1948. Drawing on new sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and several European languages, Electrical Palestine charts a story of rapid and uneven development that was greatly influenced by the electric grid and set the stage for the conflict between Arabs and Jews. Electrification, Meiton shows, was a critical element of Zionist state building. The outcome in 1948, therefore, of Jewish statehood and Palestinian statelessness was the result of a logic that was profoundly conditioned by the power system, a logic that has continued to shape the area until today.

Dr. Baconi discusses his new book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). The book offers the first thirty-year history of the group, drawing on interviews with organization leaders and publications from the group. It maps Hamas's transition from fringe military resistance towards governance and shows how, under Israel's approach of managing rather than resolving the conflict, Hamas's demand for Palestinian sovereignty has effectively been neutralized by its containment in Gaza.