A meticulously detailed examination of the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks that doesn’t fully live up to its potential.
An exhaustive account of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks from the 2000 Camp David Summit to the present.
In his latest book, Ben-Ami, an Israeli historian and former diplomat, provides a nearly minute-by-minute chronicle of the failed 2000 summit and the many halting attempts at peace that sprang up in its wake. “This book should be read as an obituary to the two-state solution,” he writes, arguing that “it is about time that all stakeholders shift their attention to other possible scenarios.” Oscillating between the broad sweep of history and the fine-grained details of international negotiation, the book assumes a great deal of historical and political knowledge as well as a keen interest in the particulars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The author digs deep into the varying definitions of sovereignty, territorial swaps in the West Bank, and the often conflicting interpretations of the Palestinian right of return. Aside from his depiction of Yasser Arafat—“an alley cat, proficient in the art of political survival, a man with a tactical cunning that frequently defeated his grand national vision”—Ben-Ami is almost always diplomatic in his assessment of his Palestinian counterparts, and he is often critical of right-wing Israeli politicians and policies. He calls Israeli discourse on Jerusalem “a pile of accepted lies” and argues that “the real existential threat facing Israel is not nuclear Iran; rather, it is to be found in the morally corrosive effects of the oppressive occupation of the Palestinian people.” Even so, the author is unable to escape the score-settling and mythologizing that doomed the Camp David Summit itself. In the final sections—which detail the two-state solution’s collapse as well as possible futures and corollaries—Ben-Ami arrives at the erudite and expansive synthesis readers are seeking. However, these pages feel rushed in comparison to the painstaking detail of the first half.
A meticulously detailed examination of the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks that doesn’t fully live up to its potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-006047-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
