An optimistic, evenhanded instruction manual, with upbeat illustrations, for anyone trying to understand the conflict.
A self-described liberal American Jew earnestly and humanely parses the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Acknowledging the passionate feelings surrounding the conflict on both sides, Sokatch, who runs the New Israel Fund, starts from the fair-minded position that Israelis and Palestinians are both right and both wrong, “two peoples, both with legitimate connections and claims to the land, who have been victimized by the outside world, each other, and themselves.” In a two-part narrative enhanced by Noxon’s illustrations, Sokatch first delves into the biblical history of the destruction of the Second Temple and dispersion of the Jews in 70 C.E. and the development of the two main Jewish cultures, Sephardic and Ashkenazi. The author moves on to Zionism and its various facets, with a sidebar exploring the question, “Is Zionism justifiable?” He then examines the existence of a people already on the ground when European Zionists arrived, raising the question of who has the more ancient legitimacy. (The likely truth, he writes, is that both peoples probably descend from the same stock.) With the rise of Jewish nationalism in the late 19th century, Palestinian Arab nationalists began to define themselves in direct opposition to the Zionists, and Jewish-Arab violence predictably increased. The author moves steadily from independence and the displacement of the Palestinians through the seemingly endless series of depressing, tumultuous conflicts that have plagued the region ever since. In the second part of the book, Sokatch addresses thorny issues that “make people crazy” about the conflict, including discrepancies between actual territory versus what the maps denote; the fraught history of U.S.–Israel relations; the effects of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; and the increase in power of Christian evangelicals. The author closes with a “Lexicon of the Conflict,” a highly useful tool offering further context to the narrative and the issues at hand.
An optimistic, evenhanded instruction manual, with upbeat illustrations, for anyone trying to understand the conflict.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-387-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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