Download or read book The Hundred Years War on Palestine written by Rashid Khalidi and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

Download or read book Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria written by Ann Jeffers and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-08-14 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with Deut. 18:9ff and its condemnation of magicians and diviners, this book explores the window that this text gives us into magic and divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria. Investigating the wealth of language combined with the archaeological and historical evidence, it seeks to place the influence of these factors in the emerging Israelite religion. An integral part of Ancient Near Eastern cosmology and culture, magic and divination are never completely eradicated despite the ideological warfare led by the Old Testament writers. The first part examines the function of various magicians and diviners. This is followed by a chapter on dreams and visions. The third chapter looks at the techniques and devices used by the oracular practitioners. Other subjects covered include magic in warfare, in the treatment of diseases, and blessing and cursing.

Download or read book Thinking Palestine written by Ronit Lentin and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together an inter-disciplinary group of Palestinian, Israeli, American, British and Irish scholars who theorise 'the question of Palestine'. Critically committed to supporting the Palestinian quest for self determination, they present new theoretical ways of thinking about Palestine. These include the 'Palestinization' of ethnic and racial conflicts, the theorization of Palestine as camp, ghetto and prison, the tourist/activist gaze, the role of gendered resistance, the centrality of the memory of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) to the contemporary understanding of the conflict, and the historic roots of the contemporary discourse on Palestine. The book offers a novel examination of how the Palestinian experience of being governed under what Giorgio Agamben names a 'state of exception' may be theorised as paradigmatic for new forms of global governance. An indispensable read for any serious scholar.

Download or read book Making Civilizations written by Hans-Joachim Gehrke and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020-05-09 with total page 1120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the History of the World series, Making Civilizations traces the origins of large-scale organized human societies. Led by archaeologist Hans-Joachim Gehrke, a distinguished group of scholars lays out latest findings about Neanderthals, the Agrarian Revolution, the founding of imperial China, the world of Western classical antiquity, and more.

Download or read book Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine written by Zeev Weiss and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-24 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wishing to ingratiate himself with Rome, Herod the Great built theaters, amphitheaters, and hippodromes to bring pagan entertainments of all sorts to Palestine. Zeev Weiss explores how the indigenous Jewish and Christian populations responded, as both spectators and performers, to these cultural imports, which left a lasting imprint on the region.

Download or read book Bible and Sword written by Barbara W. Tuchman and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Barbara W. Tuchman, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August, comes history through a wide-angle lens: a fascinating chronicle of Britain’s long relationship with Palestine and the Middle East, from the ancient world to the twentieth century. Historically, the British were drawn to the Holy Land for two major reasons: first, to translate the Bible into English and, later, to control the road to India and access to the oil of the Middle East. With the lucidity and vividness that characterize all her work, Barbara W. Tuchman follows these twin spiritual and imperial motives—the Bible and the sword—to their seemingly inevitable endpoint, when Britain conquered Palestine at the conclusion of World War I. At that moment, in a gesture of significance and solemnity, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 established a British-sponsored mandate for a national home for the Jewish people. Throughout this characteristically vivid account, Tuchman demonstrates that the seeds of conflict were planted in the Middle East long before the official founding of the modern state of Israel. Praise for Bible and Sword “Tuchman is a wise and witty writer, a shrewd observer with a lively command of high drama.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “In her métier as a narrative popular historical writer, Barbara Tuchman is supreme.”—Chicago Sun-Times

Download or read book Overthrowing Geography written by Mark LeVine and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-05-02 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark book offers a truly integrated perspective for understanding the formation of Jewish and Palestinian Arab identities and relations in Palestine before 1948. Beginning with the late Ottoman period Mark LeVine explores the evolving history and geography of two cities: Jaffa, one of the oldest ports in the world, and Tel Aviv, which was born alongside Jaffa and by 1948 had annexed it as well as its surrounding Arab villages. Drawing from a wealth of untapped primary sources, including Ottoman records, Jaffa Shari'a court documents, town planning records, oral histories, and numerous Zionist and European archival sources, LeVine challenges nationalist historiographies of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, revealing the manifold interactions of the Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities that lived there. At the center of the book is a discussion of how Tel Aviv's self-definition as the epitome of modernity affected its and Jaffa's development and Jaffa's own modern pretenses as well. As he unravels this dynamic, LeVine provides new insights into how popular cultures and public spheres evolved in this intersection of colonial, modern, and urban space. He concludes with a provocative discussion of how these discourses affected the development of today's unified city of Tel Aviv–Yafo and, through it, Israeli and Palestinian identities within in and outside historical Palestine.

Download or read book The Phoenicians written by Vadim S. Jigoulov and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on an impressive range of archaeological and textual sources and a nuanced understanding of biases, this book offers a valuable reappraisal of the enigmatic Phoenicians. The Phoenicians is a fascinating exploration of this much-mythologized people: their history, artistic heritage, and the scope of their maritime and colonizing activities in the Mediterranean. Two aspects of the book stand out from other studies of Phoenician history: the source-focused approach and the attention paid to the various ways that biases—ancient and modern—have contributed to widespread misconceptions about who the Phoenicians really were. The book describes and analyzes various artifacts (epigraphic, numismatic, and material remains) and considers how historians have derived information about a people with little surviving literature. This analysis includes a critical look at the primary texts (classical, Near Eastern, and biblical), the relationship between the Phoenician and Punic worlds; Phoenician interaction with the Greeks and others; and the repurposing of Phoenician heritage in modernity. Detailed and engrossing, The Phoenicians casts new light on this most enigmatic of civilizations.

Download or read book From Mesopotamia to Iraq written by Hans J. Nissen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent reopening of Iraq’s National Museum attracted worldwide attention, underscoring the country’s dual image as both the cradle of civilization and a contemporary geopolitical battleground. A sweeping account of the rich history that has played out between these chronological poles, From Mesopotamia to Iraq looks back through 10,000 years of the region’s deeply significant yet increasingly overshadowed past. Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine begin by explaining how ancient Mesopotamian inventions—including urban society, a system of writing, and mathematical texts that anticipated Pythagoras—profoundly influenced the course of human history. These towering innovations, they go on to reveal, have sometimes obscured the major role Mesopotamia continued to play on the world stage. Alexander the Great, for example, was fascinated by Babylon and eventually died there. Seventh-century Muslim armies made the region one of their first conquests outside the Arabian peninsula. And the Arab caliphs who ruled for centuries after the invasion built the magnificent city of Baghdad, attracting legions of artists and scientists. Tracing the evolution of this vibrant country into a contested part of the Ottoman Empire, a twentieth-century British colony, a republic ruled by Saddam Hussein, and the democracy it has become, Nissen and Heine repair the fragmented image of Iraq that has come to dominate our collective imagination. In hardly any other continuously inhabited part of the globe can we chart such developments in politics, economy, and culture across so extended a period of time. By doing just that, the authors illuminate nothing less than the forces that have made the world what it is today.

Download or read book Jerusalem Besieged written by Eric H. Cline and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jerusalem Besieged is a fascinating account of how and why a baffling array of peoples, ideologies, and religions have fought for some four thousand years over a city without either great wealth, size, or strategic importance. Cline guides us through the baffling, but always bloody, array of Jewish, Roman, Moslem, Crusader, Ottoman, Western, Arab, and Israeli fights for possession of such a symbolic prize in a manner that is both scholarly and engaging." -Victor Davis Hanson, Stanford University; author of The Other Greeks and Carnage and Culture "A beautifully lucid presentation of four thousand years of history in a single volume. Cline writes primarily as an archaeologist-avoiding polemic and offering evidence for any religious claims-yet he has also incorporated much journalistic material into this study. Jerusalem Besieged will enlighten anyone interested in the history of military conflict in and around Jerusalem." -Col. Rose Mary Sheldon, Virginia Military Institute "This groundbreaking study offers a fascinating synthesis of Jerusalem's military history from its first occupation into the modern era. Cline amply deploys primary source material to investigate assaults on Jerusalem of every sort, starting at the dawn of recorded history. Jerusalem Besieged is invaluable for framing the contemporary situation in the Middle East in the context of a very long and pertinent history." -Baruch Halpern, Pennsylvania State University A sweeping history of four thousand years of struggle for control of one city "[An] absorbing account of archaeological history, from the ancient Israelites' first conquest to today's second intifada. Cline clearly lays out the fascinating history behind the conflicts." -USA Today "A pleasure to read, this work makes this important but complicated subject fascinating." -Jewish Book World "Jerusalem Besieged is a fascinating account of how and why a baffling array of peoples, ideologies, and religions have fought for some four thousand years over a city without either great wealth, size, or strategic importance. Cline guides us through the baffling, but always bloody, array of Jewish, Roman, Moslem, Crusader, Ottoman, Western, Arab, and Israeli fights for possession of such a symbolic prize in a manner that is both scholarly and engaging." -Victor Davis Hanson, Stanford University; author of The Other Greeks and Carnage and Culture

Download or read book The Palestinian People written by Baruch Kimmerling and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a timely reminder of how the past informs the present, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal offer an authoritative account of the history of the Palestinian people from their modern origins to the Oslo peace process and beyond. Palestinians struggled to create themselves as a people from the first revolt of the Arabs in Palestine in 1834 through the British Mandate to the impact of Zionism and the founding of Israel. Their relationship with the Jewish people and the State of Israel has been fundamental in shaping that identity, and today Palestinians find themselves again at a critical juncture. In the 1990s cornerstones for peace were laid for eventual Palestinian-Israeli coexistence, including mutual acceptance, the renunciation of violence as a permanent strategy, and the establishment for the first time of Palestinian self-government. But the dawn of the twenty-first century saw a reversion to unmitigated hatred and mutual demonization. By mid-2002 the brutal violence of the Intifada had crippled Palestine's fledgling political institutions and threatened the fragile social cohesion painstakingly constructed after 1967. Kimmerling and Migdal unravel what went right--and what went wrong--in the Oslo peace process, and what lessons we can draw about the forces that help to shape a people. The authors present a balanced, insightful, and sobering look at the realities of creating peace in the Middle East.

Download or read book Rome and Jerusalem written by Martin Goodman and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2007-01-25 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In AD 70, after a war that had flared sporadically for four years, three Roman legions under the future Emperors Vespasian and his son Titus surrounded, laid siege to, and eventually devastated the city of Jerusalem, destroying completely the magnificent Temple which had been built by Herod only eighty years earlier. What brought about this extraordinary conflict, with its extraordinary consequences? This superb book, by one of the world’s leading scholars of the ancient Roman and Jewish worlds, narrates and explains this titanic struggle, showing why Rome’s interests were served by this policy of brutal hostility, and how the first generation of Christians first distanced themselves from its Jewish origins and then became increasingly hostile to Jews as their influence spread within the empire. The book thus also provides an exceptional and original account of the origins of anti-Semitism, whose history has had often cataclysmic reverberations down to our own time.

Download or read book A History of the Arab Peoples written by Albert Habib Hourani and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the history of Arab civilization, looking at the beauty of the great mosques, the importance attached to education, the achievements of Arab science, the role of women, internal conflicts, and the Palestinian question.

Download or read book Ancient History written by John Morris Roberts and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 920 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fascinating and highly readable account of humankind's development over 10,000 years in a brilliantly illustrated volume by one of the world's most distinguished historians." -- Publisher's website.

Download or read book Mandate Days British Lives in Palestine 1918 1948 written by A. J. Sherman and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 1998-01-17 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An essential purchase for anyone interested in modern Middle East history.” —Jerusalem Post The strife-torn three decades of British rule over Palestine, known as the Mandate, is one of the great dramas in British imperial history, and remains passionately controversial now, some fifty years after the last British High Commissioner left Jerusalem. British policies, promises, the mere presence of Britain in the Holy Land, are all still argued, deplored, or--less frequently--admired. In all the polemic surrounding the Mandate, the thousands of British men and women who actually lived and worked in Palestine have been overlooked, as if their presence there had been irrelevant. Whether civil servants, teachers, soldiers, or missionaries, posted to Jerusalem or remote outposts in the hills, whatever their rank or tasks, the British of the Mandate lived through an extraordinary, transforming personal adventure. Here for the first time is their often poignant story, written largely in their own words, with honesty, humor, and occasional bitterness, against a background of tragic and violent events. Their letters home, diaries, and memoirs vividly describe British landscapes, cultural affinities and misunderstandings, feelings for Arabs or Jews, accomplishments and mishaps, and a strong sense of imperial mission coupled with an often sorrowful awareness of human limitations and the folly of unrealistic expectations. This powerful and authentic personal writing, enhanced by evocative illustrations, brings to life a notable chapter in imperial history and illuminates the experiences and motivations of the last, remarkably articulate generation of British proconsuls and their wives.

Download or read book Classic Essays in Early Rabbinic Culture and History written by Christine Hayes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a set of classic essays on early rabbinic history and culture, seven of which have been translated into English especially for this publication. The studies are presented in three sections according to theme: (1) sources, methods and meaning; (2) tradition and self-invention; and (3) rabbinic contexts. The first section contains essays that made a pioneering contribution to the identification of sources for the historical and cultural study of the rabbinic period, articulated methodologies for the study of rabbinic history and culture, or addressed historical topics that continue to engage scholars to the present day. The second section contains pioneering contributions to our understanding of the culture of the sages whose sources we deploy for the purposes of historical reconstruction, contributions which grappled with the riddle and rhythm of the rabbis’ emergence to authority, or pierced the veil of their self-presentation. The essays in the third section made contributions of fundamental importance to our understanding of the broader cultural contexts of rabbinic sources, identified patterns of rabbinic participation in prevailing cultural systems, or sought to define with greater precision the social location of the rabbinic class within Jewish society of late antiquity. The volume is introduced by a new essay from the editor, summarizing the field and contextualizing the reprinted papers. About the series Classic Essays in Jewish History (Series Editor: Kenneth Stow) The 6000 year history of the Jewish peoples, their faith and their culture is a subject of enormous importance, not only to the rapidly growing body of students of Jewish studies itself, but also to those working in the fields of Byzantine, eastern Christian, Islamic, Mediterranean and European history. Classic Essays in Jewish History is a library reference collection that makes available the most important articles and research papers on the development of Jewish communities across Europe and the Middle East. By reprinting together in chronologically-themed volumes material from a widespread range of sources, many difficult to access, especially those drawn from sources that may never be digitized, this series constitutes a major new resource for libraries and scholars. The articles are selected not only for their current role in breaking new ground, but also for their place as seminal contributions to the formation of the field, and their utility in providing access to the subject for students and specialists in other fields. A number of articles not previously published in English will be specially translated for this series. Classic Essays in Jewish History provides comprehensive coverage of its subject. Each volume in the series focuses on a particular time-period and is edited by an authority on that field. The collection is planned to consist of 10 thematically ordered volumes, each containing a specially-written introduction to the subject, a bibliographical guide, and an index. All volumes are hardcover and printed on acid-free paper, to suit library needs. Subjects covered include: The Biblical Period The Second Temple Period The Development of Jewish Culture in Spain Jewish Communities in Medieval Central Europe Jews in Medieval England and France Jews in Renaissance Europe Jews in Early Modern Europe Jews under Medieval Islam Jews in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa

Download or read book Cultural Genocide written by Lawrence Davidson and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-08 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most scholars of genocide focus on mass murder. Lawrence Davidson, by contrast, explores the murder of culture. He suggests that when people have limited knowledge of the culture outside of their own group, they are unable to accurately assess the alleged threat of others around them. Throughout history, dominant populations have often dealt with these fears through mass murder. However, the shock of the Holocaust now deters today’s great powers from the practice of physical genocide. Majority populations, cognizant of outside pressure and knowing that they should not resort to mass murder, have turned instead to cultural genocide as a “second best” politically determined substitute for physical genocide. In Cultural Genocide, this theory is applied to events in four settings, two events that preceded the Holocaust and two events that followed it: the destruction of American Indians by uninformed settlers who viewed these natives as inferior and were more intent on removing them from the frontier than annihilating them; the attack on the culture of Eastern European Jews living within Russian-controlled areas before the Holocaust; the Israeli attack on Palestinian culture; and the absorption of Tibet by the People’s Republic of China. In conclusion, Davidson examines the mechanisms that may be used to combat today’s cultural genocide as well as the contemporary social and political forces at work that must be overcome in the process.