The book that is providing a storm of controversy, from ‘Israel’s bravest historian’ (John Pilger) Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking work on the formation of the State of Israel. 'Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history.' NEW STATESMAN Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East. *** 'Ilan Pappe is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.' JOHN PILGER 'Pappe has opened up an important new line of inquiry into the vast and fateful subject of the Palestinian refugees. His book is rewarding in other ways. It has at times an elegiac, even sentimental, character, recalling the lost, obliterated life of the Palestinian Arabs and imagining or regretting what Pappe believes could have been a better land of Palestine.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'A major intervention in an argument that will, and must, continue. There's no hope of lasting Middle East peace while the ghosts of 1948 still walk.' INDEPENDENT

How do we contribute to the decolonisation of Palestine? In what ways can we divest from settler arrangements in the present-day? Exploring the Zionist takeover of Palestine as a settler colonial case, this book argues that in studying the elimination of native life in Palestine, the loss of Arab-Jewish shared life cannot be ignored. Muslims, Christians, and Jews, shared a life in Ottoman Palestine and in a different way during British rule. The attempt to eliminate native life involved the destruction of Arab society – its cultural hegemony and demographic superiority – but also the racial rejection of Arab-Jewish sociabilities, of shared life. Thus the settlerist process of dispossession of the Arabs was complemented with the destruction of the social and cultural infrastructure that made Arab-Jewish life a historical reality. Both operations formed Israeli polity. Can this understanding contribute to present-day Palestinian resistance and a politics of decolonisation? In this book, the authors address this question by exploring how the study of elimination of shared life can inform Arab-Jewish co-resistance as a way of defying Israel’s Zionist regime. Above and beyond opposing an unacceptable state of affairs, this book engages with past and present to discuss possible futures.

In Being Urban, Simon Goldhill and his team of outstanding urbanists explore the meaning of the urban condition, with particular reference to the Middle East. As Goldhill explains in his introduction, ‘What is a good city?’, five questions motivate the book: How can a city be systematically planned and yet maintain a possibility of flexibility, change, and the wellbeing of citizens? How does the city represent itself to itself, and image its past, its present and its future? What is it to dwell in, and experience, a city? How does violence erupt in and to a city, and what strategies of reconciliation and reconstruction can be employed? And finally, what is the relationship between the infrastructure of the city and the political process? Following the introduction, the twelve chapters are grouped into four sections: Engagement and Space; Infrastructure and Space; Conflict and Structures; and Curating the City. Through each chapter, the contributors reflect on aspects of urban infrastructure and culture, citizenship, belonging and exclusion, politics and conflict, with examples from across the Middle East, from Cairo to Tehran, Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Not only will Being Urban further understanding of the topography of citizenship in the Middle East and beyond, it will also contribute to answering one of today’s key questions: What Is A Good City?

Digital practices in social and political landscapes: Why two researchers can look at the same feature and see different things. Maps are widely believed to be objective, and data-rich computer-made maps are iconic examples of digital knowledge. It is often claimed that digital maps, and rational boundaries, can solve political conflict. But in Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine, Jess Bier challenges the view that digital maps are universal and value-free. She examines the ways that maps are made in Palestine and Israel to show how social and political landscapes shape the practice of science and technology. How can two scientific cartographers look at the same geographic feature and see fundamentally different things? In part, Bier argues, because knowledge about the Israeli military occupation is shaped by the occupation itself. Ongoing injustices—including checkpoints, roadblocks, and summary arrests—mean that Palestinian and Israeli cartographers have different experiences of the landscape. Palestinian forms of empirical knowledge, including maps, continue to be discounted. Bier examines three representative cases of population, governance, and urban maps. She analyzes Israeli population maps from 1967 to 1995, when Palestinian areas were left blank; Palestinian state maps of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which were influenced by Israeli raids on Palestinian offices and the legacy of British colonial maps; and urban maps after the Second Intifada, which show how segregated observers produce dramatically different maps of the same area. The geographic production of knowledge, including what and who are considered scientifically legitimate, can change across space and time. Bier argues that greater attention to these changes, and to related issues of power, will open up more heterogeneous ways of engaging with the world.

Colonialism has three foundational concerns - violence, territory, and population control - all of which rest on racialist discourse and practice. Placing the Zionist project in Israel/Palestine within the context of settler colonialism reveals strategies and goals behind the region’s rules of governance that have included violence, repressive state laws and racialized forms of surveillance. In Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit, Elia Zureik revisits and reworks fundamental ideas that informed his first work on colonialism and Palestine three decades ago. Focusing on the means of control that are at the centre of Israel’s actions toward Palestine, this book applies Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to colonialism and to the situation in Israel/Palestine in particular. It reveals how racism plays a central role in colonialism and biopolitics, and how surveillance, in all its forms, becomes the indispensable tool of governance. It goes on to analyse territoriality in light of biopolitics, with the dispossession of indigenous people and population transfer advancing the state’s agenda and justified as in the interests of national security. The book incorporates sociological, historical and postcolonial studies into an informed and original examination of the Zionist project in Palestine, from the establishment of Israel through to the actions and decisions of the present-day Israeli government. Providing new perspectives on settler colonialism informed by Foucault’s theory, and with particular focus on the role played by state surveillance in controlling the Palestinian population, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in the Arab-Israeli Conflict and Colonialism.

The long cultural moment that arose in the wake of 9/11 and the conflict in the Middle East has fostered a global wave of surveillance and counterinsurgency. Performance in a Militarized Culture explores the ways in which we experience this new status quo. Addressing the most commonplace of everyday interactions, from mobile phone calls to traffic cameras, this edited collection considers: How militarization appropriates and deploys performance techniques How performing arts practices can confront militarization The long and complex history of militarization How the war on terror has transformed into a values system that prioritizes the military The ways in which performance can be used to secure and maintain power across social strata Performance in a Militarized Culture draws on performances from North, Central, and South America; Europe; the Middle East; and Asia to chronicle a range of experience: from those who live under a daily threat of terrorism, to others who live with a distant, imagined fear of such danger.

This book explores the multiple histories of critical geography as it developed in 14 different locations around the globe, whilst bringing together a range of approaches in critical geography. It is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive account of a wide variety of historical geographies of critical geography from around the world. Accordingly, the chapters provide accounts of the development of critical approaches in geography from beyond the hegemonic Anglo-American metropoles. Bringing together geographers from a wide range of regional and intellectual milieus, this volume provides a critical overview that is international and illustrates the interactions (or lack thereof) between different critical geographers, working across a range of spaces. The chapters provide a more nuanced history of critical geography, suggesting that while there were sometimes strong connections with Anglo-American critical geography, there were also deeply independent developments that were part of the construction of very different kinds of critical geography in different parts of the world. Placing Critical Geographies provides an excellent companion to existing histories of critical geography and will be important reading for researchers as well as undergraduate and graduate students of the history and philosophy of geography.

The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction presents a comprehensive view on the destruction of cultural heritage and offers insights into this multifaceted, interdisciplinary phenomenon; the methods scholars have used to study it; and the results these various methods have produced. By juxtaposing theoretical and legal frameworks and conceptual contexts alongside a wide distribution of geographical and temporal case studies, this book throws light upon the risks, and the realizations, of art and heritage destruction. Exploring the variety of forces that drive the destruction of heritage, the volume also contains contributions that consider what forms heritage destruction takes and in which contexts and circumstances it manifests. Contributors, including local scholars, also consider how these drivers and contexts change, and what effect this has on heritage destruction, and how we conceptualise it. Overall, the book establishes the importance of the need to study the destruction of art and cultural heritage within a wider framework that encompasses not only theory but also legal, military, social, and ontological issues. The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction will contribute to the development of a more complete understanding and analysis of heritage destruction. The Handbook will be useful to academics, students, and professionals with interest in heritage, conservation and preservation, history and art history, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, and law.

Defining the lives of a majority of the world's population, the question of 'the city' has risen to the fore as one the most urgent issues of our time "e; uniting concerns across the terrain of climate policies, global financing, localised struggles and multi-disciplinary research. Deleuze and the City rests on a conviction that philosophy is crucially important for advancing knowledge on cities, and for allowing us to envisage new forms of urban life toward a more sustainable future. It gathers some of the most original thinkers and accomplished scholars in contemporary urban studies, showing how Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical project is essential for our thinking through the multi-scalar, uneven and contested landscapes that constitute 'the city' today. Case studies range from the 'laboratory urbanism' of an Austrian ski resort and a 'sustainable' Swedish shopping mall to the 'urbicidal' refurbishments of Haifa.