History

Method and Madness
The hidden story of Israel's assaults on Gaza

In the past five years Israel has mounted three major assaults on the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped behind its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Taken together, Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), and Operation Protective Edge (2014), have resulted in the deaths of some 3,700 Palestinians. Meanwhile, a total of 90 Israelis were killed in the invasions.

On the face of it, this succession of vastly disproportionate attacks has often seemed frenzied and pathological. Senior Israeli politicians have not discouraged such perceptions, indeed they have actively encouraged them. After the 2008-9 assault Israel’s then-foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, boasted, “Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded.”

However, as Norman G. Finkelstein sets out in this concise, paradigm-shifting new book, a closer examination of Israel’s motives reveals a state whose repeated recourse to savage war is far from irrational. Rather, Israel’s attacks have been designed to sabotage the possibility of a compromise peace with the Palestinians, even on terms that are favorable to it.

Looking also at machinations around the 2009 UN sponsored Goldstone report and Turkey’s forlorn attempt to seek redress in the UN for the killing of its citizens in the 2010 attack on the Gaza freedom flotilla, Finkelstein documents how Israel has repeatedly eluded accountability for what are now widely recognized as war crimes.

Further, he shows that, though neither side can claim clear victory in these conflicts, the ensuing stalemate remains much more tolerable for Israelis than for the beleaguered citizens of Gaza. A strategy of mass non-violent protest might, he contends, hold more promise for a Palestinian victory than military resistance, however brave.


Notes of a Native Son

James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom.

'A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew' Washington Post

'Edgy and provocative, entertainingly satirical' Robert McCrum, Guardian

'Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest' Time


Our Sister's Land
The changing identities of Women in Wales

Women's lives in Wales are changing dramatically. They are becoming increasingly important to the world of paid work, while retaining their roles and responsibilities in the home. The pattern of family life has shifted, to the much vaunted growth of single parents, and the increase of elderly women living alone. Many women are increasingly active in public life, but meet barriers to their success, whether the arena be returning to study as mature students, the church, business, the arts or literature: they are expected to fit into a male world. Women's lives are very diverse, and their changing identity as they manage the balance between private and public lives has been as yet realtively uncharted. This text brings together a collection of interdisciplinary research papers on the changing identity of women in Wales. Research findings are complemented by cameo "voices" - personal accounts by a variety of individual women living and working in Wales. The volume is illustrated with photographs especially commissioned from the photographer Mary Giles.


Pure Running
A Life Story

Reminiscences of a Jamaican woman, born in the 1930's, who emigrated to London in th 1960's.


Remembering Srebrenica : Acts of Courage
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This publication has voices of support from leading international figures; short histories of the conflict (survivors share the road to genocide); the stories behind the statistics.



The New Warlords
From the Gulf war to the recolonisation of the Middle East

The New Warlords is a collection of articles from the newspaper Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! and brings together a concise and complete history of the conflicts in Iraq, Kurdistan and Palestine. The book follows not only the involvment of the apparently warring states i.e. Palestine and Iraq, but also charts the interference from the British Labour governemts of particular years.

 


The Question of Palestine

This original and deeply provocative book was the first to make Palestine the subject of a serious debate—one that remains as critical as ever. With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and an exile's passion (he is Palestinian by birth and has been a member of the Palestine National Council), Edward W. Said traces the fatal collision between two peoples in the Middle East and its repercussions in the lives of both the occupier and the occupied—as well as in the conscience of the West. He has now updated this landmark work to portray the changed status of Palestine and its people in light of such developments as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the intifada, the Gulf War, and the ongoing Middle East peace initiative.

For anyone interested in this region and its future, The Question of Palestine remains the most useful and authoritative account available.


The Trinity of Fundamentals
Translated by Palestine Youth Movement

On the occasion of Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, the Palestinian Youth Movement’s (PYM) Popular University Committee is thrilled to announce the English translation and publication of Wisam Rafeedie’s The Trinity of Fundamentals. Written in 1993 during Rafeedie’s time in Zionist prison and confiscated by prison guards, the novel was smuggled out by Wisam’s comrades, and soon after became a significant text for the Palestinian prisoner’s movement.
The Trinity of Fundamentals follows the story of 22-year-old Kan’an during his nine years of hiding from the occupation between 1982 and 1991. Driven by an unshakable commitment to the Palestinian cause, Kan’an takes the reader through his compelling journey filled with sacrifice and struggle, love and pain, isolation and liberation. All the while, major political and historical transformations unfold across international, regional and local contexts, including the First Intifada. Throughout all this, Kan’an maintains a spirit of revolutionary optimism so strong that the reader is bound to be transformed. It is all the more moving to know that Kan’an’s story is inspired by the real life experience of Rafeedie as he organized and struggled against the Zionist oppression of his people.


Love, revolution, and life—these are the “Trinity of Fundamentals'' that pave Kan’an’s path of struggle. Although the novel is set in the past, it holds many lessons that resonate with our current political moment, mobilizing us into collective action.


These Bodies of Water
Notes on the British Empire, the Middle East and Where We Meet

'Sabrina Mahfouz is a tidal wave of truth swallowing the banks of empire with a torrent of information which will not be damned' Lemn Sissay

'A bold, brave look at the ways imperialism affects us all, from the universally political to the insightfully intimate' Riz Ahmed

'Impossible to put down while you're reading, and impossible to forget about when you've finished' Glamour

Are you not made of Suez silt?
How do we know you won't
shore our boats
by making yourself bigger
than we made you?

Sabrina Mahfouz once sat in a Whitehall interview room and was interrogated about everything from her political leanings to her private life. It was ostensibly a job interview, but implicit in their demands was the unspoken question: as a woman of Middle Eastern heritage, could she really be trusted?

Years later, Sabrina found herself confronting the meaning behind this interrogation, and how it was specifically informed by the British Empire's historical dominance in the Middle East. THESE BODIES OF WATER investigates this history through the Middle Eastern coastlines and waterways that were so vital to the Empire's hold. Interwoven with her own personal experiences, Sabrina combines history, politics, myth and poetry in a devastating examination of this unacknowledged part of Britain's colonial past.

Part history, part polemic and part intimate memoir, THESE BODIES OF WATER is a tapestry of writing that tells the story of Britain's relationship with the Middle East in the most revealing terms.