Sure to be controversial, as books about Middle Eastern policy tend to be, but a welcome, well-informed contribution.
A focused look at the obdurate problem of Palestinian-Israeli relations and the Americans on both sides of the issue.
Media studies scholar Hill and Middle East foreign policy specialist Plitnick open with an example of what might appear to be contradictory stances among American progressives: outrage at the Trump administration’s immigration policy yet apparent silence when, soon after Trump deployed soldiers to the southern border, that administration cut off funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which “provides emergency food, shelter, medication, supplies, and medication to millions of Palestinian refugees living in the West Bank, Gaza, and camps in neighboring countries.” There was hardly any policy discussion on the matter, and those few progressives who did raise objections went unheeded. The Obama administration, note the authors, was little more concerned with Palestinian human rights issues, and, they add, things are likely to get worse. Gaza in particular is projected to be uninhabitable soon, and those who live there do so under the baleful eye of the Israeli military and a government that, in 2018, declared that “only Jews can exercise national self-determination in Israel.” The authors argue that human rights should become the “primary predicate for U.S. policy in the region.” They also examine the efficacy of various means of Palestinian resistance, winning no diplomatic points for nonviolence, even as Israel continues to view the situation as a zero-sum game: “Peaceful coexistence, while not entirely ruled out, is seen as too risky a gamble.” In their clear and evenhanded analysis, the authors conclude that progressives must work to dismantle injustices, many of which are perpetuated by the U.S. government, and in turn, to hold the Israeli government “accountable for its actions in the region, and especially for its denial of basic rights to Palestinians.”
Sure to be controversial, as books about Middle Eastern policy tend to be, but a welcome, well-informed contribution.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62097-592-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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