Literature

NOVANEWS   By Tarik Jan The United States, Israel relations has to be seen from the viewpoint of their respective interests. For example, the U.S. wants to have the relatively cheaper Middle Eastern oil free from encumbrance. Second, it needs to ensure that the Islamic aspirations of the Muslim masses are denied fruition. In the U.S. threat perception the two are interlinked. The United States sees Israel as a natural ally that can act with the U.S. national and military prodding to secure its interests. Also, the U.S. would not like to let Muslims have an entire Muslim Middle East to themselves with no geopolitical breach in its contiguous boundaries. Israeli presence in the Middle East map provides that breach serving as a watch dog in the region. Besides, in case of any untoward si...

NOVANEWS           Early on the morning of Monday 31 May, in international  waters  some  90  miles  from Gaza’s coastline, and in direct contravention  of international law and the Geneva conven- tions,  Israeli  commandos  forcibly  boarded                                    a  peaceful convoy of                                   aid ships that was                                    headed to Gaza city. Articles in this pamphlet tell the story of the attack, as well as setting out the consequences for  Israeli  zionism and for the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Following  the  attack  on the flotilla, Israel has never been more  isolated,  in  spite  of all her weaponry, while, despite the  Palestinians'  lack  of  arms, their ...

NOVANEWS   Pre-ordering's great for three reasons: You pay less and delivery is included in the price You receive your book from our advance print run, so you can read it weeks before anyone else Our inhouse post elves often get carried away when dispatching pre-orders and add bonus treats like badges, pencils and even free books to the packages Israeli Rejectionism A Hidden Agenda in the Middle East Peace ProcessZalman Amit and Daphna Levit Pre- order now for priority shipping in the first week of February 2011. The Palestine-Israel conflict is one of the longest running and seemingly intractable confrontations in the modern world. This book delves deep into the  ‘peace process’ to find out why so little progress has been made on the key issues. Zalman Amit and Daphna L...

NOVANEWS   David Shulman   Ehud Krinis   Hajja Sara Nawaja, whose tent in south Hebron was set on fire on December 28, 2010   The publication in Jerusalem of Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies 2000-2010—unprecedented first-hand accounts by over one hundred Israeli soldiers of their experiences while serving in the IDF—coincides with an appalling yet unsurprising incident I learned of only a few days ago. On Tuesday, December 28, 2010, at 3:00 AM, Hajja Sara Nawaja, a Palestinian grandmother living in a tent with her family in the arid hills of south Hebron, on the occupied West Bank, woke to the sound of dogs barking. She smelled smoke. She discovered that two adjacent tents, which the family used as kitchens, were on fire. She woke her son Ahmad, who manag...

NOVANEWS   Sami Al Jundi walks through the cobblestone streets of the Old City in Jerusalem, greeting passersby. “Sami! How are you?” an elderly man says in Arabic, shaking his hand vigorously. “Habibna! Salaam!” Sami calls out warmly to another man who is across the road buying falafel. “That one is in my book group. We are meeting tomorrow night at the Palestinian National Theatre.” Sami’s cell phone rings as we move inside the coffee shop to work on the chapter about his blind mother’s childhood, expelled from her village as a little girl after the war of 1948. “Yoel! Shalom!” Sami greets the caller in Hebrew and then covers the mouthpiece of the phone and whispers to me apologetically, “Sorry, Jen, this is my old friend Yoel who was in my Israeli-Palestinian dialogue group…he is inviti...

NOVANEWS   The Holocaust, Palestine and the Arab World: Gilbert Achcar interviewed  Arwa Aburawa,  The Electronic Intifada,  10 January 2011    Gilbert Achcar (Arwa Aburawa) In his latest book The Arabs and the Holocaust, Gilbert Achcar, a professor of Development Studies at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, explores the Arab world's complex and sometimes contradictory relationship with the Holocaust. Focusing on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Achcar tackles the Zionist caricature of all Arabs as anti-Semitic Holocaust-deniers complicit in Nazi crimes by meticulously deconstructing the evidence put forward. Achcar also doesn't shy away from condemning the persistence of unacceptable attitudes towards the Holocaust across the region. The E...

NOVANEWS Didi Remez  December 22, 2010 Breaking the Silence has just published a landmark collection of soldier testimonies from the Occupied Territories spanning the period 2000-2010. The 432 page book can now be browsed, downloaded and embedded here. If you read nothing else, take the time to look over the first to pages of the introduction for a simple and honest analysis of how the IDF degenerated into a tool of dispossession. Here's its core: From the descriptions given by the soldiers, one comes to grasp the logic of Israeli operations overall. The testimonies leave no room for doubt: while it is true that the Israeli security apparatus has had to deal with concrete threats in the past decade, including terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens, Israeli operations are n...

NOVANEWS November 4, 2010 by Johnny Punish Former President Says Torture Helped Thwart Attacks by Steve Holland, Reuters  WASHINGTON —  When then-President George W. Bush was asked to approve a tough interrogation technique known as waterboarding on September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he wasted little time in deciding.  “Damn right,” he said. Buy DECISION POINTS at Amazon.com Bush’s approval of waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning condemned by human rights activists as torture, to try to wrench information from captured al Qaeda operatives was among the most controversial decisions he made during eight years in the White House. Memoir: Bush Considered Replacing VP Cheney In his memoir, “Decision Points,” Bush strongly defends the use of waterboarding as critical to his...

NOVANEWS Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Purdue University Vol. 29, No. 1 ♦ 2010  (Fall)  Book Reviews ♦ 159 - 161 State Practices and Zionist Images: Shaping Economic Development in Arab Towns in Israel , by David A. Wesley. New York and Oxford : Berghahn Books, 2008. 256 pp. $34.95. This is a book of major importance by an Israeli anthropologist. It analyzes the relations between Jewish and Arab towns in the Galilee during the period 1992–1997 when an industrial area close to Nazareth called Zipporit was being developed. It also examines the role of central and local government bureaucracies in the planning process. Israeli bureaucracy is formidable in its ability to block development, but where the Arab minority is concerned there are additional factors at work. ...

NOVANEWS Parashat Maatot "And G-d spoke to Moses saying, 'Avenge the Israelite people on the Midianites'…'Let man be picked out from among you for a campaign and let them fall upon Midian to wreck the Lord's vengeance on Midian'" (Number 31:1-3). In the portion of Balak we wrote of the license to kill a Jew who has intercourse with a gentile woman in public, that one is permitted to kill him without a court of law and without witnesses and warning. We also wrote that one may not violate the Sabbath to save a non-Jew from death. In this portion we will deal with the laws of killing a gentile--not one who leaves a gentile to die on the Sabbath nor one who kills a gentile woman sleeping with a Jew, but the law of one who just out and out and kills a gentile. This is the revenge Moses took on ...