Palestine History

In the early 1980s on a remote part of the Sudanese coast, a new luxury holiday resort opened for business. Catering for divers, it attracted guests from around the world. Little did the holidaymakers know that the staff were undercover spies, working for the Mossad - the Israeli secret service. Providing a front for covert night-time activities, the holiday village allowed the agents to carry out an operation unlike any seen before. What began with one cryptic message pleading for help, turned into the secret evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jews....

Let There Be Water illustrates how Israel can serve as a model for the United States and countries everywhere by showing how to blunt the worst of the coming water calamities. Even with 60 percent of its country made of desert, Israel has not only solved its water problem; it also has an abundance of water. Israel even supplies water to its neighbors - the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan - every day.

From drones to satellites, missile defense systems to cyber warfare, Israel is leading the world when it comes to new technology being deployed on the modern battlefield. The Weapon Wizards shows how this tiny nation of 8,000,000 learned to adapt to the changes in warfare and in the defense industry and become the new prototype of a 21st century superpower, not in size, but rather in innovation and efficiency - and as a result of its long war experience.

Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University nine days before October 7th, 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history. Profound and moving, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

The politics and recent history of the Middle East can seem baffling to outsiders. Nowhere was that more evident than during the Lebanon War that raged in 1982. Even contemporary reporting often made fundamental mistakes, and there was little general understanding of what was happening and why. This conflict involved a bewildering number of groups and influences from different parts of the world. The precipitating event was the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London, carried out by members of a Palestinian terrorist group.

Zionism is the political and cultural movement to establish Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel. It is one of the most astonishingly successful national movements in history: not only did it establish a democratic state in a hostile region, but that state—Israel—became one of the most prosperous, innovative, and vibrant societies in the world.

A new history of the American Jewish relationship with Israel focused on its most urgent and sensitive issue: the question of Palestinian rights.

Although the area had fallen under the dominion of Rome in the first century BCE, it was still a Jewish Kingdom under the Herodian dynasty. The author draws on Christian, Greek, Jewish, and Roman sources to present life in Jerusalem, Judea, and the Galilee, including quotes from scripture, rabbinic sources, and the works of the Alexandrian philosopher Philo and the historian Josephus. Sketches of Jewish Social Life is highly regarded as an authoritative work of history.

Ami Ayalon seeks input and perspective from Palestinians and Israelis whose experiences differ from his own. As head of the Shin Bet security agency, he gained empathy for "the enemy" and learned that when Israel carries out anti-terrorist operations in a political context of hopelessness, the Palestinian public will support violence, because they have nothing to lose. Researching and writing Friendly Fire, he came to understand that his patriotic life had blinded him to the self-defeating nature of policies that have undermined Israel's civil society.

One fateful week in June 1967 redrew the map of the Middle East. Many scholars have documented how the Six-Day War unfolded, but little has been done to explain why the conflict happened at all. As we approach its 50th anniversary, Guy Laron refutes the widely accepted belief that the war was merely the result of regional friction, revealing the crucial roles played by American and Soviet policies in the face of an encroaching global economic crisis and restoring Syria's often overlooked centrality to events leading up to the hostilities.

The history of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah and their kings is a story of epic heroes and villains. David was the God-chosen savior who fought giants, and the remarkable individual who inspired the world’s greatest artists to create their immortal sculptures and paintings. Solomon is regarded as the author of many of the proverbs that we still use - and the ancient sources say he was married to 70 foreign princesses. The protagonists of this book also include famous rulers of the ancient world, such as Queen of Sheba and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.

Benjamin Netanyahu is embroiled in numerous scandals, all of his own making, and may soon be ousted from the office he has held longer than any prior Israeli prime minister outside of David Ben Gurion. But Bibi, as he is known by friend and foe alike, is no stranger to controversy. For many in Israel and elsewhere, he is an embarrassment, a threat to democracy, even a precursor to Donald Trump. He nevertheless continues to dominate Israeli public life - and he may yet survive his current crises, the most challenging of his career.

In 1973, Israel would face the greatest challenge to its very existence. Egypt and Syria launched massive simultaneous invasions intended to recapture territory occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War. Israel was taken completely by surprise by this attack, launched on the day of one of the most important Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur. Israeli intelligence, which had proved so effective in previous conflicts, failed to provide any warning, and the armed forces of Israel were completely unprepared to face this onslaught on two fronts. This is the story of the Yom Kippur War.

It is difficult to know the Sea People intimately because the records on them aren’t very comprehensive. But we set out to explore the many questions people have about this mysterious civilization. Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they do more than simply pillage, and what impact did they have on society and commerce? Would you be shocked to learn that these mysterious people were more than a band of pirates?

Welcome to the Middle East conflict, a conflict that is technically 63 years old and counting but has its roots in over 2,000 years of history. With so much time and history, the peace process has become laden with unique, politically sensitive concepts, like the right of return, contiguous borders, secure borders, demilitarized zones, and security requirements, with players like the Quartet, Palestinian Authority, Fatah, Hamas, the Arab League, and Israel. Over time, it has become exceedingly difficult for even sophisticated political pundits and followers to keep track of it all.

Shimon Peres was in his early 20s when he first met David Ben-Gurion. Although the state that Ben-Gurion would lead through war and peace had not yet declared its precarious independence, the "Old Man", as he was called even then, was already a mythic figure. Peres, who came of age in the cabinets of Ben-Gurion, is uniquely placed to evoke this figure of stirring contradictions - a prophetic visionary and a canny pragmatist who early grasped the necessity of compromise for national survival.

In this pause-resisting, eye-opening audiobook, journalist and military analyst Ronen Bergman - praised by David Remnick as 'arguably [Israel's] best investigative reporter' - offers a riveting inside account of the targeted killing programs: their successes, their failures, and the moral and political price exacted on the men and women who approved and carried out the missions.

At the heart of the Middle East, with its regional conflicts and proxy wars, is a 1400-year-old schism between Sunni and Shia. To understand this divide and its modern resonances, we need to revisit its origins—which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632; the accidental coup that set aside the claims of his son Ali; and the slaughter of Ali's own son Husayn at Karbala. These events, known to every Muslim, have created a slender faultline in the Middle East. The House Divided follows these narratives.

What are we talking about when we talk about antisemitism? For most of its history it was understood to be a menace from the political Right, the province of ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its tiny Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. When the twentieth century began, the vast majority of the world’s Jews lived in Europe. For them, there was no confusion about where the threat of antisemitic politics lay, a threat that culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

What is at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What does justice demand of us in this conflict? This audiobook clarifies an intimidatingly complex issue - and upends conventional views about America’s stake in it. In this audiobook, Elan Journo explains the essential nature of the conflict and what has fueled it for so long. What justice demands, he shows, is that we evaluate both adversaries - and America's approach to the conflict - according to a universal moral ideal: individual liberty.