Raymond Deane

Steven Salaita is an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech who has written several books on the failure of liberal civil rights discourse to counter anti-Arab racism, particularly in the United States. In his new book, Israel’s Dead Soul, he evaluates the potential complicity between enlightened ideals and their opposite.

The Hour of Sunlight chronicles the life of Sami Al Jundi, former supervisor of the Seeds of Peace Center in Jerusalem. But the book doesn’t deliver on its promise to show readers “the path to a resolution” of the conflict.

Ronit Lentin is an Israeli-born academic and novelist now based in Ireland, where she teaches sociology at Trinity College, Dublin. She describes her latest book, Co-memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba, as “a reflection on the contested relations between commemoration and appropriation from the standpoint of a member of the perpetrators’ collectivity, whose politics align her with the colonized.”

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé’s new memoir Out of the Frame manages to link Pappé’s personal struggle against Israeli McCarthyism with a broader struggle for human and political rights of which academic freedom is merely one aspect. Raymond Deane reviews for The Electronic Intifada.

Eyes in Gaza is a detailed and harrowing account by the Norwegian doctors Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse of their experiences in al-Shifa Hospital during Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009.

London-based journalist and photographer William Parry’s Against the Wall serves as both a political and aesthetic document, perhaps exemplifying the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s famous thesis that “[t]here is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Objective information is urgently required in order to further a more nuanced awareness of what Hamas is all about. Raymond Deane determines whether two new books on the group that has caused an earthquake in Middle East politics stand up to the test.

Emma Williams is a doctor who worked in Britain, Pakistan, Afghanistan, New York and South Africa before accompanying her husband, a UN official, to Jerusalem in October 2000. This account of their three years in Palestine, It’s easier to reach heaven than the end of the street - a Jerusalem memoir, was originally published in the UK in 2006 and now appears in a revised and updated US edition. Raymond Deane reviews for The Electronic Intifada

Few recent books have aroused more interest and been more frequently reviewed in the US and Europe prior to the appearance of an English version as historian Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People. Raymond Deane reviews for The Electronic Intifada.