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Category Archives: Books of Interest

Posts I’ve received with information about books on related topics.

Contested Land, Contested Memory: New book by Jo Roberts

16 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta in Books of Interest

≈ Leave a comment

Hi all,
The below info comes from Toronto author Jo Roberts, whose impressive bio on her publisher’s site reads: “Trained in her native England as a lawyer and anthropologist, Jo Roberts is now a freelance writer. For five years she was managing editor of the New York Catholic Worker newspaper, to which she frequently contributed. Her reportage from Israel and from the West Bank has appeared in Embassy, Canada’s foreign policy weekly. She lives in Toronto, Canada.”

Jo Roberts wrote:

Dear friends,

I’m so happy to tell you that my book is now available! You can order it from your local independent bookseller, or get it from Amazon.

In these days of turmoil in the publishing industry, authors have to do the lion’s share of getting word out about their books; so please forward the info below to anyone you think might be interested!

With many thanks,

Jo

(Should you feel inspired to write (even a brief) review on Amazon.com and .ca, or on Goodreads, that would be wonderful!)

Now available from your local independent bookseller
or from Amazon.com or Amazon.ca
CONTESTED LAND, CONTESTED MEMORY:
Israel’s Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe
by Jo Roberts
“In this moving, lyrical, and very important book, with some of the bravest and most honest of Israelis and Palestinians as guides, Roberts offers readers an intimate, often searing tour of the country’s psychological landscape.”
— Professor Ian Lustick,
Bess W. Heyman chair of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania“This compelling and compassionate book offers fresh insight into how these divergent histories reverberate in Israel today, examining how selective memories of suffering that exclude the “other” impede reconciliation and a just peace.”
— Mubarak Awad, founder, Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence

“[T]his nuanced, empathic, and knowledgeable book is an important read for supporters of [both Israelis and Palestinians], and for people seeking a book through which to enter the charged field of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
— Hillel Cohen, Israeli historian and journalist

“[This] beautifully written book provides an essential perspective on a topic that could not be more urgent. . . [and] captures the voices of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in all their diversity, pain, and eloquence.”
— Professor Michael Rothberg, Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, & Memory Studies Initiative at the University of Illinois

1948: As Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust, struggle towards the new State of Israel, Arab refugees are fleeing, many under duress. Sixty years later, the memory of trauma has shaped both peoples’ collective understanding of who they are.After a war, the victors write history. How was the story of the exiled Palestinians erased — from textbooks, maps, even the land? How do Jewish and Palestinian Israelis now engage with the histories of the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”) and the Holocaust, and how do these echo through the political and physical landscapes of their country?

Vividly narrated, with extensive original interview material, Contested Land, Contested Memory examines how these tangled histories of suffering inform Jewish- and Palestinian-Israeli lives today, and frame Israel’s possibilities for peace.

More information at www.joroberts.org
PUBLISHED BY DUNDURN PRESS

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Exclusive Excerpt: Miko Peled’s ‘The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine’

25 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta in Books of Interest

≈ 1 Comment

from Mondoweiss

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/03/exclusive-excerpt-miko-peleds-the-generals-son-journey-of-an-israeli-in-palestine.html

March 9, 2012

Exclusive Excerpt: Miko Peled’s ‘The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine’

by Helena Cobban

Miko Peled is a Jewish Israeli, born in 1961 into the heart of the Zionist establishment in Jerusalem… who has traveled a long, long way since then. Three years ago, Miko started work on a memoir of the transformative journey he has taken in the course of his life; and this week, we received the first advance copies of his amazing, intimate, and thought-provoking memoir The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine. My company, Just World Books, has been proud to work with Miko to bring his important memoir-writing project to completion.

To me, Miko’s book has many of the same qualities as My Traitor’s Heart

– for full review, please click on Mondoweiss link above –

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Tom Hurndall: a remarkable man’s photographs of the Middle East

01 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta in Books of Interest

≈ Leave a comment

Sean OHagan, The Guardian, 1 March 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/mar/01/tom-hurndall-middle-east-photographs (via Occupation Magazine www.kibush.co.il )

Peace activist Tom Hurndall died at 22 after being shot by an Israeli sniper. His images and articles, that grew in intensity as his journey became more difficult, are published in a new book.

Human shield activist and photojournalist Tom Hurndall died while trying to help a young girl under fire. Photograph: Kay Fernandes/Reuters

Tom Hurndall was a peace activist and an aspiring photojournalist. His photographs, alongside his journals, bear witness to the often terrible, sometimes uplifting, events he saw and experienced while living among families in Iraq, in a refugee camp in Jordan, and in the Gaza Strip. It was there on 11 April 2003 that he was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier while attempting to rescue a child who had been pinned down by gunfire. He died nine months later in hospital in London. He was 22.

The Only House Left Standing – The Middle East Journals of Tom Hurndall

by Tom Hurndall, Robert Fisk

Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

Search the Guardian bookshop

It is difficult, then, to look dispassionately at the photographs in The Only House Left Standing: The Middle East Journals of Tom Hurndall, which is published by Trolley Books this week. They are a mixture of reportage and citizen journalism of the most intense kind; a visual record of struggle and conflict left by someone who comes across as extraordinarily committed and fearless. As his writings show, though, Hurndall grappled with his fear every day. He travelled to Baghdad in 2003, one of a group of “human shields” who arrived just before the invasion by American and British troops, determined to protest the war in the most direct and dangerous way. In a series of articles emailed to ManchesterMetropolitanUniversity’s student magazine, Pulp, he wrote honestly and without self-pity about his constant doubts and creeping fears. One sentence stands out: “When a man must lie to himself to do what he knows he should, that is when you know he is terrified.”

It is hard to equate these words, this kind of self-knowledge, with the handsome, short-haired, unshaven young man who smiles out from the first photograph in the book, cigarette in hand. He looks like a student about to begin a gap year, having just landed in some faraway country where adventure awaits. Like the emails and articles that punctuate the book, the photographs grow in intensity as his journey becomes ever more difficult, ever more dangerous.

He took photographs inside a power station in Baghdad, on the streets of Amman, and in the Al-Rweished refugee camp just five kilometres from the Iraq border. He had an eye for light and shadow, for the snatched portrait, and for capturing a mood, whether joyful or sombre. By April 2003, he had arrived in Israel and, as the veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk writes in his foreword, was heading “inexorably towards Gaza where he was confronted by the massive tragedy of the Palestinians”.

In Jerusalem, on 3 April, he wrote of the death of Rachel Corrie, who had been crushed to death by an Israeli defence force bulldozer while acting as a human shield near the Rafah refugee camp. “I wonder how few or many people heard it on the news and just counted it as another death, just another number ”

In the final section of the book, Rafah, Gaza, 06-11 April 2003, there is a series of Hurndall’s photographs from the frontline of the protests against the Israeli tanks and D-9 bulldozers demolishing Palestinian houses. They are both dramatic and oddly intimate, a view from the ground of dirt and destruction, chaos and violence as well as the strange sense of calm determination that comes from the civilians in bright orange jackets who line up before these massive and intimidating machines.

In his journal, Hurndall describes that day’s events: “It was strange. As we approached, and the guns were firing, it sent shivers down my spine, but nothing more than that.” The entry ends: “Any one of us could be watched through a sniper’s sights at this moment. The certainty is that they are watching, and it is on the decision of any one Israeli soldier or settler that my life depends ”

The last picture that Hurndall took was a black-and-white shot of a street in Rafah at 1.30pm on 11 April 2003: a burnt-out car in the foreground, two children in the middle distance. The final picture in the book was taken by someone else. It shows him being carried unconscious by two local youths, both of whom are shouting for help. To the left, another youth is clutching his head in horror and despair. What looks like a camera bag is hanging from Hurndall’s waist. Beneath it, the dusty street is stained with blood.

In the frantic few minutes before this picture was taken, according to a first-hand account by the local co-ordinator of the International Solidarity Movement, Hurndall had rescued a young boy “trapped under fire behind a sand mound”. Having carried the boy to safety, he went back to the same spot to rescue a young girl and, “as he was attempting to carry her, he got hit in the forehead by an Israeli sniper bullet”.

Hurndall’s journals, as Fisk puts it, “show a remarkable man of remarkable principle”. His photographs, too, are testament to the strength of his commitment to the cause of non-violent protest, and to his courage. He caught the world around him in all its uncertainty and, as it grew more dangerous and threatening, his eye grew keener. The images he produced became, by turns, more unflinching and reflective. They tell their own story of a brief life lived to the full.

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Our Way to Fight – by Michael Riordon

13 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta in Books of Interest

≈ Leave a comment

I haven’t yet finished reading Michael Riordon’s new book, Our Way to Fight: Peace-Work Under Siege in Israel-Palestine, but even at less than half-way through, I think Prof. Victor Friedman’s review on the website of Challenge Magazine is right on. I highly recommend this book. 

Maxine

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Sharing the Land of Canaan – book info from Mazin Qumsiyeh’s Human Rights Web blog qumsiyeh.com

13 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta in Books of Interest

≈ Leave a comment

Sent by Elana Wesley

Sharing the Land of Canaan

Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle
By Mazin B. Qumsiyeh–Pluto Press (London & Sterling, Virginia)

There is no more compelling and dramatic unfolding story with more profound international ramifications than the conflict in the Middle East. Over five million Palestinian refugees were created and almost an equal number of new immigrants and settlers came under the banner of Zionism. The unrest and injustices created have ramifications for all humanity as seen in recent events. This book brings a critical documentation of these events and the core issues of the conflict with the view that human rights are key to any plans for a lasting peace. There is a growing interest in a vision and a roadmap for peace based on Human Rights among Israelis, Palestinians, and human rights activists around the world. A shared future is increasingly recognized as far more realistic than separation and continued injustice.

This book examines evolution of the conflict in Israel/Palestine and articulates future directions based on the logic of equality and human rights rather than apartheid. The advocated moral, ethical, and humane solutions can achieve a lasting and just peace. People who now live in this land of Canaan and those dispossessed from it will find the text compelling. Another issue addressed in the book is such things as sustainable development and impossibility of separating resources for two countries in the same area. Recent plans confirm this as shown in this report on Water in Palestine.

“An erudite work of extensive scholarship, enormous scope, searing honesty, and intellectual audacity. Mazin Qumsiyeh, once again, is challenging the prevailing misconceptions, facile generalizations, and downright ignorance that have long served to obscure Palestinian realities, and, consequently, to prevent the articulation of a just solution. Breathtaking!” Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, previous Palestinian Minister of Higher Education, Bir Zeit University and http://miftah.org

“Mazin Qumsiyeh brings to light many forgotten and willfully buried facts about the origins of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.” Dr. Norman Finkelstein

“A tour de force by a brilliant scientist who debunks entrenched myths standing in the way of the only logical and compassionate peace based on sharing,integration, co-existence,and equality rather than separation and ghettoization. It is a welcome addition to the growing literature on one of the most complex issues of our times.” Dr. Naseer Aruri, Professor Emeritus and author of “Dishonest Broker”

onetoone.jpg

Errata on first edition
pg. 28 First full sentence: change “are not challenged” to “are now challenged”
pg. 53 Line 9, change “greater” to “less”
pg. 59, m “A challenge to Roman rule did come about in 70 CE in the form of a rebellion led by the Maccabees…” should read “by the Hasmoneans”
pg.69 second paragraph, 4th line should read “and after whome a town in Australia is named).
pg. 212 4th line change “Romanian Christians” to “Armenian Christians”

Introducci�n a la edici�n en castellano 2007
Introduction to the Spanish Translation 2007

Table of Contents
Sample Chapters
Chapter 2 People and the Land
Chapter 3 Biology and ideology
Chapter 4 On Refugees
Chapter 6 On Zionism
Chapter 7 Is Israel a Democracy?
Chapter 11 Political Context

About Qumsiyeh
BOOK REVIEWS:
The Ambassadors July 2004
Professor Elaine Hagopian November 2004
Sara Powell in the Washington Report March 2005
Ghada Talhami Review MEPC, Summer ’05
Anis Hamadeh review, English & German
Michael R. Fischbach in JPS
Peter Harley, Middle East Window
other book comments
Brief Review Excerpts
“Here comes this book, as a breath of fresh air. The author, a well-known human rights activist, defies all odds and proposes a scheme of coexistence. He envisages a pluralistic society in which human dignity and rights are respected. He eloquently and gently guides you through the maze of obstacles towards the natural and sensible solution of coexistence.” From the Forward by Dr. Salman Abu Sitta

“Free, fair and democratic elections in the occupied territories might make many misguided Israelis and Americans feel good, but the fact remains that Oslo ushered in an era of aggressive Israeli land grabs. Is a separate, viable and fully sovereign Palestinian state still possible? Many moderate and wise scholars who have devoted a great deal of research and honest thought to examining the situation think otherwise. For instance, “Sharing the Land of Canaan,” by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, carefully studies human rights and the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. His conclusion is that a shared state is the best way to achieve justice and peace for Israelis and Palestinians. As his book is not a mystery novel, I feel that it is fair to give away the ending: “We can either remain locked in our old mythological and tribal ways, or we can envision a better future and work for it. The choice is obvious.” Anne Selden Annab, Mechanicsburg, Pa., Jan. 12, 2005, Published Letter in NY Times

“Professor Qumsiyeh, a distinguished Yale University geneticist and highly respected Palestinian activist, contributes in this study some scholarly and thought-provoking new insights into the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. This book is “must-reading” for those who are interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Norton Mezvinsky, CSU University Professor, Central Connecticut State University, co-author of “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel”
Other comments may be found in Reports and Testimonials

We can arrange book signing and lectures about this issue. Author recent appearances are listed under Invited Talks Given. To arrange such events or inquire about closest future appearances, contact qumsi001@gawab.com. In Europe, copies are available through Pluto Press or in the US through The University of Michigan Press, Amazon, Walmart ,Borders or Barnes and Noble.
sharingcover.jpg

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Pelham Meeting (Quakers in Niagara)

Information from Quakers in Niagara

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Outposted blog, memoir, creative non-fiction

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Coordinating Quaker Efforts to Bring Peace and Justice to Palestinians and Israelis

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We Are Palestine: The Faces, People and Dreams!

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Let's raise the issue, but lower the temperature.

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this blog will describe my journey as an Ecumenical Accompanier with the World Council of Church's Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel from September to December 2011, from February to April 2013, and my volunteer work with the Hebron International Resources Network in 2014 and 2015

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Author, tutor and campaigner

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Accompaniment in Palestine and Israel

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A Blog by Rabbi Brant Rosen

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The struggle for justice in Palestine-Israel

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