Students for Justice in Palestine Book Resource

The Routledge Atlas of Arab-Israeli Conflict by Martin Gilbert The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflicttraces not only the tangled and bitter history of the Arab-Jewish struggle from the early twentieth century to the present, it also illustrates the move towards finding peace and the efforts to bring the horrors of the fighting to an end through negotiation and proposals for agreed boundaries. In 155 maps, the complete history of the conflict is revealed including: * the Prelude and Background to the Conflict * the Jewish National Home * the Intensification of the Conflict * the State of Israel * the Moves to find peace.

They Dare to Speak Out by Paul Findley Paul Findley served as an Illinois congressman for 22 years and was a senior member of the House Middle East Committee

The Right to Maim by Jasbir K. Puar In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of "debility"--bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors--to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.

Hamas: a Beginner's Guide by Khaled Hroub This beginner's guide to Hamas has been fully revised and updated. It now covers all the major events since the January 2006 elections, including the conflict with Fatah and Israel's brutal offensive in Gaza at the end of 2008. Explaining the reasons for Hamas's popularity, leading Al-Jazeera journalist and Cambridge academic Khaled Hroub provides the key facts that are so often missing from conventional news reports. It's a one-stop guide that gives a clear overview of Hamas's history, key beliefs, and its political agenda. This unique book provides a refreshing perspective that gets to the heart of Hamas.

The Palestinian Idea by Greg Burris Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid. Greg Burris employs the work of Edward W. Said, Jacques Rancière, and Cedric J. Robinson in order to locate Palestinian utopia in the heart of the Zionist present. He analyzes the films of prominent directors Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea, When I Saw You) and Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now) to investigate the emergence and formation of Palestinian identity. Looking at Mais Darwazah's documentary My Love Awaits Me By the Sea, Burris considers the counterhistories that make up the Palestinian experience--stories and memories that have otherwise been obscured or denied. He also examines Palestinian (in)visibility in the global media landscape, and how issues of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity are illustrated through social media, staged news spectacles, and hip hop music.

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness by Adina Hoffman Beautifully written, and composed with a novelist’s eye for detail, this book tells the story of an exceptional man and the culture from which he emerged. Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact, he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving into what National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Eliot Weinberger has dubbed “perhaps the most accessible and delightful poet alive today.” As it places Muhammad Ali’s life in the context of the lives of his predecessors and peers, My Happiness offers a sweeping depiction of a charged and fateful epoch. It is a work that Arabic scholar Michael Sells describes as “among the five ‘must read’ books on the Israel-Palestine tragedy.” In an era when talk of the “Clash of Civilizations” dominates, this biography offers something else entirely: a view of the people and culture of the Middle East that is rich, nuanced, and, above all else, deeply human.

In the Wake of the Poetic by Najat Rahman Heralding a new period of creativity, In the Wake of the Poetic explores the aesthetics and politics of Palestinian cultural expression in the last two decades. As it increasingly gains a significant presence on the international scene, much of Palestinian art owes a debt to Mahmoud Darwish, one of the finest contemporary poets, and to Palestinian writers of his generation. Rahman maps the immense influence of Darwish's poetry on a new generation of performance artists, visual artists, spoken-word poets, and musicians. Through an examination of selected works by key artists--such as Suheir Hammad, Ghassan Zaqtan, Elia Suleiman, Mona Hatoum, Sharif Waked, and others--Rahman articulates an aesthetic founded on loss, dispersion, dispossession, and transformation. It interrupts dominant regimes, constituting acts of dissension and intervention. It reinscribes belonging and is oriented toward solidarity and future. This innovative wave of experimentation transforms our understanding of the national through the diasporic and the transnational, and offers a profound meditation on identity.

Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective by Anna Ball Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective is the first sustained study of gender-consciousness in the Palestinian creative imagination. Drawing on concepts from postcolonial feminist theory, Ball analyses a range of literary and filmic works by major creative practitioners including Michel Khleifi , Liana Badr, Annemarie Jacir, Elia Suleiman, Mona Hatoum and Suheir Hammad, and reveals a hitherto unrecognized trajectory in gender-consciousness under development in the Palestinian imagination from the start of the twentieth century. The book explores how these works resonate with questions of power, identity, nation, resistance, and self-representation in the Palestinian imagination more broadly, and asks how these gender-conscious narratives transform our understanding of Palestine's struggle for postcoloniality. Working at the cusp of postcolonial, feminist and cultural enquiry, Ball seeks to open up vital new directions in the interdisciplinary study of Palestine.

Palestinian Cinema by Nurith Gertz; George Khleifi Although in recent years the entire world has been increasingly concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are few truly reliable sources of information about Palestinian society and culture. One of the best sources for understanding Palestinian culture is the cinema, which has strived to delineate Palestinian history and to portray the daily lives of Palestinian men, women, and children. Here, an Israeli and a Palestinian scholar, in a rare and welcome collaboration, follow the development of Palestinian cinema, commenting on its response to political and social transformations. They reveal that the more that social, political, and economic conditions have worsened and chaos and pain prevail, the more Palestinian cinema has engaged with the national struggle.