Beyond Hummus and Falafel: Social and Political Aspectsof Palestinian Food in Israel, by Liora Gvion. Translatedby David Wesley and Elana Wesley. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2012. xx + 197 pages. Index to p. 207.$26.95 paper. The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian CulinaryJourney, by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt.Charlottesville, Virginia: Just World Books, 2012. 137 pages.Index to p. 139. $29.00 paper.

REVIEWED BY SAMI ZUBAIDA

These two books are on socially and geographicallycontiguous areas, yet paint notably different pictures. Inboth, food is the focus of complex configurations ofidentity, sociality, culture, and conflict characteristic of thistroubled part of the world. But one is an ethnography of amarginalized population searching for a dignified identitybetween conflicting demands and models of living. Theother, being a cookbook, portrays exuberance, color, andpleasure alongside grievance and privation.

Beyond Hummus and Falafel is based on filed research oncommunities of Arab citizens of Israel by a sympatheticIsraeli sociologist. Liora Gvion relates how she had toovercome suspicion and distrust of her motives: why is anIsraeli woman writing on Arab food? Is her project yetanother folklorization of Palestinians? Is she “treating themlike Eskimos”(p. xvi)? Or is she pursuing the familiarstrategy of appropriating Palestinian food and publishingPalestinian recipes as your own? Only when respondentsrealized that Gvion was not writing a cookbook, but a bookon food as a cultural focus, did they relax. This theme offear and grievance at the appropriation of Palestinian

Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLIII, No. 2 (Winter 2014), p. 73, ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614. © 2014 by the Institute forPalestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University ofCalifornia Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jps.2014.43.2.73.

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culinary culture, in addition to hummus and falafel—the book’s namesake, is recurrent throughoutthese accounts.

Women are the custodians of the kitchen, and much of the ethnography is about ingredients,technique, division of labour, and authority in households and between the sexes and thegenerations. Culinary knowledge, transmitted through the generations, includes not only shoppingfor ingredients, but also foraging for wild plants and herbs, such as khubeyza, a mallow leaf muchused throughout the region. How to achieve variety with parsimony is a valued skill: a womanwho can produce twenty-four different aubergine dishes is much treasured. But technique istransformed with modern conditions and technologies, together with changes in lifestyles andwomen’s work outside the home. Fridges, freezers, domestic ovens, and food processors led tothese transformations. There are many interesting accounts of the ambivalences and compromisesbetween “authenticity”/tradition and convenience. These are complicated by anxieties aboutthreatened identity and marginalization, compounded by the association of modernity with theJewish/European models and lifestyles.

The last section is on “The Public Dimension: The Encounter with Jewish Society,” andincludes discussions on restaurants and cookbooks, or rather an absence of the latter. Arabrestaurants have a different function for Jewish diners than for Arab patrons. Jews, it wouldseem, don’t value the Arab restaurants or cuisine highly, and use them functionally for aquick lunch on working days. For Arab families, going out to a restaurant is recreational, anda rare occasion for relieving the woman from the chore of cooking. Consequently, Jews eatfrom a limited range of what is considered Arab food, and are not interested in theintricacies of the Arab kitchen, while Arabs choose something special which they don’t eatnormally at home, which seems to translate, according to Gvion, to a lot of meat. There isanother ambivalence: while Arabs resent Jewish low regard for and ignorance of their food,they also want to guard against Jewish appropriation (in the manner of hummus and falafel)by not exposing their culinary range, one of the rationales offered for the absence or rarity ofcookbooks of Arab cuisine in Israel.

Various other explanations are offered for the near absence of Arab-written cookbooks. Onereason is quoted in the title of the chapter: “When There is No Pride, Cookbooks Are NotWritten” (p. 129), a grievance at Arab devaluation of Palestinian culture and cuisine. Anotherexplanation that Gvion suggests for the absence of Arab cookbooks revolves around the questionof audience, given that Arabs in Israel know the foods and recipes from generational transmissionof mother to daughter, thereby rendering cookbooks unnecessary. This reality raises a moregeneral question about the function of cookbooks: are they just for foreigners or a supplement tofailed domestic education? The aforementioned rationale of guarding culinary knowledge fromappropriation also raises the question of the relationship between the different cuisines in theregion, and whether Palestinian food in Israel is so different from well-exposed cuisines of otherArabs and Jews from the region.

Gvion contends that despite expected cultural kinship between Arabs in Israel, their cousinsin the occupied territories, and those further afield in the Arab Levant, there are distinctivefeatures of their food. But it is difficult to determine what these are. Fattoush,maqluba and

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mulukhiya, mentioned as distinctive, are common features of the cuisine of the Arabs of theLevant and further afield, as the author realizes. So, is it the different ways they areprepared? The author acknowledges that within Israel, Arab recipes and procedures varyfrom house to house, as they do, indeed, all over the region. Middle Eastern food is largelyvariations on common themes. “Oriental” Jews share their culinary cultures with countries oforigin, and many features of Iraqi, Egyptian, Levantine, and Maghrebian cultures are presentin thier cuisine, and these are now celebrated in ethnic revivals and by celebrity chefs andwriters in Israel and internationally.

The Gaza Kitchen, written by an expatriate native of Gaza, Laila El-Haddad, and herEuropean collaborator, Maggie Schmitt, manifests precisely the pride, on behalf of the Gazans,that Gvion’s informants miss. The book combines accounts of the unique aspects of Gazancookery, profiles of cooks, producers and restaurants, and ethnographies of families andkitchens. It is richly illustrated with color photographs of people, places, and food. At times,these vibrant and joyful illustrations seem a little bizarre in the midst of great hardships andshortages occasioned by the siege and the wars. Paradoxically, however, it would seem that theshortages of fuel and electricity, by restricting use of refrigeration and electric gadgets, areleading to a rediscovery of traditional methods of preservation and preparations. Equally, theshortage of chemical fertilisers is encouraging the few farmers to emulate traditional organicpractices.

It seems that the cuisine that Gaza Kitchen highlights has many distinctive features: theliberal use of many spices, notably chilies, but also dill weed and seed, as well as the usualrepertoire of cumin, coriander, cardamom, and so on. The Strip has a distinctive red tahinimade from roasted sesame, now in short supply lacking the imported seeds, and swamped bythe cheaper Israeli import of the ordinary tahini. These recipes also go into original variantsof the Middle Eastern repertoire, such as stuffed vegetables, meat and vegetable stews, grills,and salads and dips. Fish and seafood dishes are rich and distinctive (a kufta of sardines anda whole range of squid recipes), but now limited by the drastic fishing restrictions imposedby Israel.

Concern about cultural appropriation of food items by Israelis with scant acknowledgement ofArab heritage also features here, with reference made to the “discovery” of frika (cracked smokygreen wheat berries, familiar throughout the region) by an Israeli chef. The anger over this andsimilar episodes of appropriation is understandable. But this issue is not restricted to Israel andPalestinians: the global explosion of food diffusions, writing, broadcasting, and restaurants featurecooks, writers and commerce vying for “discoveries,” innovations and fusions. Hummus is inevery supermarket in the Western world in unheard-of variety. But while most culinarypractitioners celebrate national and regional authenticity, the culinary heritage of the PalestinianArabs is devalued.

Sami Zubaida is emeritus professor of politics and sociology at Birkbeck, University of London. He is theauthor of Beyond Islam: A New Understanding of the Middle East and co-editor of A Taste of Thyme: CulinaryCultures of the Middle East.

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Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution, byMoshéMachover. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2012. xiv +302 pages. Endnotes to p. 316. Index to p. 327. $24.00paper.

REVIEWED BY MOSHE BEHAR

Born in 1936 in Mandatory Palestine, Moshé Machoveris an emeritus professor of mathematical logic, a lifelongmilitant socialist, and—along with such authors as JabraNicola, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Eqbal Ahmed, and NoamChomsky—one of the most analytically lucid interpretersof the origins and consolidation of the Arab-Zionistmatrix. With a small group of leftist dissidents expelledfrom the Israeli Communist Party in 1962, Machoverco-founded the Israeli Socialist Organization, better knownby its journal’s title Matzpen (Compass). With Akiva Orr,he published in 1961 the Hebrew book Peace, Peace, and

There Is No Peace. Based on publically available sources, this book explained why DavidBen-Gurion’s Israel opted to invade Egypt in 1956 and collaborate with British and Frenchcolonial powers rather than inch towards rapprochement with its most powerful Arab rival. Itwas this pioneering book, in conjunction with the explicitly regional, materialist, and inter-nationalist conceptualization of the conflict as fashioned by Nicola and Matzpen comrades, thatlaid the principal Marxist explanatory framework for the understanding of settler colonialism inthe context of Palestine/Israel. Subsequent texts that have deepened the settler colonialistframework departed from Matzpen’s foundational terms, yet did not introduce new ones toreplace them.

Israelis and Palestinians gathers thirty-five texts that Machover wrote during the past fifty years,either alone or with comrades. It is mindboggling to realize how these crisp and non-pretentioustexts remain razor-sharp, relevant, and radical vis-à-vis contemporary Israel/Palestine and theMiddle East generally: for analysts of sociopolitical affairs, this lifelong achievement ofMachover’s is truly the stuff of dreams. The book’s essays are thematically grouped into sixuneven parts: “The Palestinian Struggle and the Arab East: Jabra Nicola and His Heritage,”“Israeli Society,” “Racism and the National Question,” “Polemics Against Zionism,” “Reviews,”and “Final Analysis.” The book engages with all major puzzles shaping the debate over Palestine/Israel during the past half-century, including the distinct Zionist political economy underlyingthe conflict (which differentiates Israel from neighboring cases such as colonial Algeria orapartheid South Africa); the parochialism of the post-1993 one-state/two-states debate; and thehegemonic analysis of Palestine as if it were, or remains, a sociopolitical island confined to itsfetishized Lilliputian territory in the caged borders drawn by Churchillian colonialists a merecentury ago.

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While Machover advances innumerable arguments, there is a pre-1967 one that remainsconsistent throughout his and Matzpen’s longue durée analysis, and that concurrently distinguishedtheir Marxist conceptualization from those of the PFLP around 1967 and certainly fromcontemporary religious and liberal anti-Zionist currents. Since its inception, Matzpen emphasizedthat “Zionist ideology denies the fact that a new Hebrew nation has come into existencebecause its self-legitimation depends on the fiction that all Jews around the world are onenation that has an eternal right over its God-given homeland” (p. xii). Since this Zionistdenial was dialectically shared by the Arab Left (and Right), in May 1967, Nicola andMachover argued:

As a result of Zionist colonization, a Hebrew nation with its own national characteristics(common language, separate economy, etc.) has been formed in Palestine. This nation hasa capitalist class structure—it is divided into exploiters and exploited, a bourgeoisie and aproletariat. That this nation has been formed artificially and at the expense of theindigenous Arab population does not change the fact that the Hebrew nation exists. Itwould be a disastrous error to ignore this fact. . . . Nationalist Arab leaders who call for theliberation of Palestine ignore the fact that even if Israel would be defeated militarily andcease to exist as a state, a Hebrew nation will still exist. If the problem of the existence ofthis nation is not solved correctly, a situation of dangerous and prolonged national conflictwill be re-created which will cause endless bloodshed and suffering. . . . It is no coincidencethat the leaders who advocate such a “solution” are also incapable of solving the Kurdishproblem. (p. 13)

In May 1973, Nicola and Machover reemphasized against the dominant left (and right) anti-Zionistcurrent, arguing that “the idea that Israeli Jews do not constitute a nation is a myth, a piece of wishfulthinking based on lack of familiarity with the actual facts” (p. 23). They maintained that theresolution of the conflict necessitated the overthrowing of both Zionism and reactionary Arabregimes and the formation of a socialist Arab federation that—if needed—must be socio-politically capable of granting equal national autonomy (rather than individual rights alone) tonon-Arab collectivities within it.

For Machover’s publisher, it would have been more powerful to adopt the poetic dictum “lessis more” and resist the temptation to lump together too many different texts. Instead, it wouldhave been preferable to only include Machover’s shiniest and historically most momentouswritings. Thus the entire fifth part, “Reviews,” could have been omitted and the reader’sattention left to focus on Machover’s foundational formulations. His following eighteen essaysshould now become compulsory reading for all contemporary students: essays 3–6, 8, 13–19,22–24 and 33–35.

Moshe Behar is a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchesterand co-editor of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics and Culture, 1893-1958(Brandeis, 2013).

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The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land toHomeland, by Shlomo Sand. London and New York:Verso, 2012. viii + 281 pages. Acknowledgments to p. 283.Index to p. 295. $26.95 cloth.

REVIEWED BY KEITH WHITELAM

In this follow-up to his well-known The Invention ofthe Jewish People, Sand sets out to show that although“the promised land” was an object of longing in Jewishmemory, the idea of the ownership of a national homelandtook shape among Evangelical Protestants and JewishZionists from the nineteenth century onwards.

The opening personal account illustrates the brutaleffects of the notion of “historic right” that underpinsIsrael’s colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.Having been part of the Israeli forces that capturedJerusalem, Sand expresses surprise that his then colleagues

saw the invasion of Jerusalem as the natural fulfillment of an ancient historical right. The tortureand murder of an elderly Palestinian in Jericho, which Sand witnessed but confesses was toofrightened to intervene, demonstrates how absolute power corrupts. The book closes with hisreflections on the fact that the University of Tel Aviv, where he works, is built on the site ofal-Shaykh Muwannis, one of the four hundred Palestinian villages wiped from the map after1948. Despite the university having at least sixty faculty members in the History department,not one book has been written about the history of the land on which their institution is builtor its previous Palestinian inhabitants.

In the main body of the book, the layers that underpin the Zionist notions of “homeland” and“the land of Israel” are stripped away. Sand traces the idea of homeland through the Bible andother Jewish texts, concluding that Judaism’s strongest attachment has historically been to theBible and associated commentaries, not the land. Most Jews—including Philo, Josephus, SaadiaGaon, or Maimonides—preferred to live where they grew up.

Zionist attachment to the land has its roots in the Protestant reading of the Bible, the riseof English nationalism, and early Christian Zionism. The idea that Jews have to be returned toZion and converted to Christianity prior to the return of Christ can be traced from theseventeenth century to contemporary U.S. Christian Zionism. Despite its avowedly anti-Jewish nature, it is a stance that early Zionist leaders and successive Israeli governmentshave been willing to exploit in order to guarantee Western support for the colonization ofPalestine.

Prior to the twentieth century, most Jews did not regard Palestine as their land or want to move.In the late eighteenth century, there were fewer than five thousand Jews in Palestine compared withroughly 2.5 million Jews elsewhere. The idea of a longing to return, later enshrined in Israel’sDeclaration of Independence, was not prevalent. It was the persecution of European Jews thatdrove immigration and led to the establishment of the State of Israel.

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Sand paints a picture of a struggle between Judaism and Zionism: the Union of German Rabbisrefused to join the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and many Reform and Orthodox rabbis fearedthat nationalism would replace the Torah and adherence to God. “Traditional Judaism’s fear ofthe power of nationalism ultimately proved justified. With the terrifying assistance of history,Zionism defeated Judaism, and after the Second World War, large segments of world Jewry thathas survived extermination accepted the decisive verdict: the principle of a state designated asJewish and located in the Holy Land, which would be a Jewish national homeland” (p. 195).It was in the twentieth century, he argues, that the Holy Land really became the “Land of Israel.”

After 1948, “Judaization of the country” became the new slogan, gradually replacing “redemptionof the land.” Since then, the Bible has been used as a history book in schools to claim an ancientJewish presence in the land, with historians and archaeologists reinforcing the notion of historicalright. This has been accompanied by the struggle to expand the boundaries of the “Land ofIsrael.” “Creating facts on the ground,” Sand states, “has been a guiding principle of Zionist policyfrom the outset, and it remains so today” (p. 222).

This is a brave book, full of detail, but one that finishes with a tension: while he hopes for changeand calls for a commemoration of Palestinian loss and tragedy, Sand does not support their right toreturn. And so, the invention of the land of Israel becomes a reality that cannot be reversed and Israelcontinues its colonization of Palestine under the justification of historic right. Just as the religiousconvictions and strategic interests of earlier British politicians enabled the Holy Land to becomethe “Land of Israel,” so the same deadly combination underpins U.S. support for the continuingcolonization of Palestine.

Keith W. Whitelam is emeritus professor at the University of Sheffield.

Radical Christianity in Palestine and Israel: LiberationTheology in the Middle East, by Samuel J. Kuruvilla.London, United Kingdom: I. B. Tauris, 2013. xxi + 244pages. Appendices to p. 255. Index to p. 320. $95.00hardcover.

REVIEWED BY MARC ELLIS

Samuel Kuruvilla’s study is a welcome addition to thestudy of Christianity in Palestine/Israel with a specialemphasis on various forms of liberation and contextualtheologies that seek to address the plight of PalestinianChristians, who have been displaced and occupied bothwithin the State of Israel and in the Palestinian territories.He begins with a historical background of Christianity inthe Holy Land and quickly moves to the present era,during which the Christian population of the area is

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stressed, disoriented, and declining. Kuruvilla explores the initial responses of the Christian churchesand theologians to the creation of the State of Israel, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and finally the latestphase, beginning with the first intifada and beyond.

It is this latest phase that takes up the bulk of the book and where Kuruvilla is most insightful.Most specifically, this book traces the contributions of two of the most significant Christiantheologians of these latter years, Rev. Na‘im ‘Ateek, based in Jerusalem with the Sabeel Center forEcumenical Liberation, and Rev. Mitri Raheb, based in Bethlehem with the International Centerof Bethlehem. While both have contributed to Christian theology and life in Israel/Palestine, theirmain influence has been outside the Middle East. Both have served as a bridge to the Christiancommunity in Europe and the United States, especially by encouraging and providing aframework for fellow Christians to become active on behalf of the Palestinian people.

Along with Jews of Conscience, ‘Ateek and Raheb have helped Christians and theirdenominations cross geographic and cultural divisions, laying the groundwork for the recent andcontroversial Christian denominational movement of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)against the Israeli occupation. Kuruvilla also mentions ‘Ateek and Raheb’s colleague in this effort,Rev. Elias Chacour, though he provides less analysis than should be accorded him.

Nonetheless, Kuruvilla’s take on ‘Ateek and Raheb is informative and articulate. ‘Ateek’s liberationtheology is analyzed in depth, as is Raheb’s contextual theology. Both are Protestant theologianseducated in the United States and Europe and both of their centers have primarily been fundedfrom sources outside Palestine as well. Thus their relevancy to the Christian community in Israel/Palestine has sometimes been questioned. Kuruvilla notes this criticism but mainly focuses on howboth theologians and the centers they founded and direct speak to the Christian tradition and thevolatile political situation that the Palestinians find themselves in. For example, being a liberationtheologian, ‘Ateek wrestles with the Hebrew Bible and how the promises of God to ancient Israelcan be interpreted for Palestinian Christians who are living within modern-day Israel, which claimsthe Bible as the state’s birthright. As Kuruvilla correctly points out, ‘Ateek breaks with liberationtheology’s embrace of the Exodus paradigm, as it places Palestinians in the position of the modern-day Canaanites. Instead, ‘Ateek adopts a more traditional Christian understanding that the HebrewBible can only be interpreted through the life and witness of Jesus, thereby universalizing salvationand abrogating any special promises to the Jewish people. Raheb utilizes a somewhat different tactby affirming and contextualizing the Exodus as the promise of God to always be with the poor andthe oppressed and against the institutional purveyors of injustice, in this case with Palestinians andagainst the abusive policies of the State of Israel. Another major difference between the tworeverends’ approaches is ‘Ateek’s emphasis on politics in relation to theology and Raheb’s emphasison culture as a political tool of resistance to injustice. In the end, though, their theologicaldifferences might be more consequential within Christian theological circles than they are in Raheband ‘Ateek’s vision(s) of a just future for Palestinians in their own homeland.

While Kuruvilla’s study is useful, informative and enlightening, the future for PalestinianChristians and Palestine itself is dark. If you look at ‘Ateek and Raheb as Palestinian emissaries toEurope and America who narrate the Palestinian story, they take their place alongside the lateEdward Said who performed the same function, albeit without religious language. In his earlyfifties, Raheb is relatively young; ‘Ateek is in his late seventies. The post-Said question is thus one

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for the next generation of those interested in the Palestinian question to pursue:Who will narrate theChristian and larger Palestinian narrative when ‘Ateek and Raheb pass from the scene?

Marc H. Ellis is a retired professor of Jewish Studies at Baylor University and associate fellow of the Department ofPeace and Conflict Studies at the University for Peace in San Jose, Costa Rica. He is the author of Future of theProphetic: Israel’s Ancient Wisdom Re-presented.

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel. Edited by AndreaLim. London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012. 244 pages.$14.95 paper.

REVIEWED BY MICHAEL NEUMANN

This anthology is a work of advocacy, a collection oftwenty-six essays by supporters of the Boycott, Divestment,and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The title’s reference tosanctions is slightly misleading since this international ornation-state undertaking represents more of a hope than acurrent reality for the BDS movement. The focus, in fact, ison boycotts and divestment.

The book has four parts: “Israel/Palestine,” whichprovides general perspectives on the occupation; “TheBoycott Movement,” which tracks the activities of variousBDS initiatives; “Intersections,” which focuses on the

relationship of BDS to feminist and other broader movements; and finally, “Case for Sanctionsagainst Israel.” These sections are followed by a helpful chronology and list of resources.

The collection is valuable for insights into the BDS movement itself. Dalit Baum and MeravAmir describe a complex Israel-based research project on the settlement economy broadlyconceived—“the entire economic sustenance of the settlements.” (p. 43) Joel Beinin traces thefortunes of BDS within North American universities. Noura Erakat offers a reflective summing upof BDS’s progress from 2001 to 2010 in the United States, and Haneen Maikey highlights thechallenges posed to and by BDS to gays and lesbians in Palestine. These and other essays portraya movement confident in the righteousness of its cause and sophisticated in the development ofits strategies.

As for actually making the case for BDS, the results are underwhelming. There are twoquestions raised when it comes to justifying BDS: is the objective worthwhile? Will the tactic beeffective? The first, no longer as controversial as when some of these essays were written, getsmore careful attention than the second. Virtually every controversy concerning the effects ofBDS is evaded or poorly addressed.

There is some variety in the stated goals of BDS, but broadly speaking the idea is to pressureIsrael to change its policies towards the Palestinians, anything from ending the occupation to thecreation of a single state. The reason for setting this goal is, of course, that Israel treats

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Palestinians unjustly. The authors have no difficulty showing this—repeatedly, since the essays areindependent of one another and most were not written for the collection. Indeed, the discussion isalmost dated, because recognition of Israeli injustices is now quite normal even in the mainstreammedia, including such unexpected places as the hugely popular Jon Stewart show. On this topic,where the collection is effective, its purpose has at least partially been superseded by a change inthe climate of public opinion.

But will BDS succeed in rectifying Israeli injustice? Will it apply enough pressure, without toomany or too acute undesirable side effects? In answering these questions, the collection falters.

First, there is the question of whether a boycott of Israeli products—or, as some prefer, Israelisettlement products—will hurt individuals, especially “the wrong” individuals. The essayists’invariable response is that the boycott is aimed at institutions, not individuals. (See the essays byOmar Barghouti, p. 31, 36; Lisa Taraki and Mark Levine, p. 166; and John Berger, p. 188.) Butthis is sophistry—as if hurting institutions cannot hurt the individuals who depend on them! Thatmight certainly hold for members of universities, objects of the “cultural boycott.” One wonderswhether BDS advocates would also claim that Israel’s attacks on Palestinian institutions “aren’taimed at individuals.”

Second, there is the question of whether a boycott will hurt the Palestinians themselves—but unfortunately, this question is hardly ever asked. It is approached, twice, when ChiefAlbert Luthuli is cited as saying “It has been argued that Non-White people will be the firstto be hit by external boycotts. This may be so, but every organisation which commands anyimportant Non-White support in South Africa is in favour of them. The alternative to theuse of these weapons is the continuation of the status quo and a bleak prospect of unendingdiscrimination” (p. 101).

This itself is less than straightforward, since it’s not clear why organizations should makesuch a decision for individuals, but at least it squarely recognizes the existence of a problem.However, Ronnie Kasrils, who cites the passage, merely comments that it is “claimed” thatPalestinians may be harmed, and instantly changes the subject (p. 101). One longs forsomeone to say: yes, some will be harmed, but it’s worth it. Nowhere is the argumentattempted.

“Collateral damage” aside, will BDS work? Some make a convincing case for its psychologicaleffect. Others go further, citing the South African precedent as reason to expect a nonviolentoverthrow of Israeli apartheid. Yet the precedent is questionable. Some claim that out-of-controltownship violence was more important in dissuading potential South African investors, and thenonviolence account studiously ignores the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, which Dumisani ShadrackKumalo, South Africa’s UN ambassador, described in 2008 as “a decisive turning point in thestruggle against apartheid.”

Hind Awwad, in “Six Years of BDS: Success!,” asserts that “One of the most successful campaignsis against Veolia” (p.79). This claim derives in part from Veolia Environment’s abandonment of aNorth London (Hackney) waste management bid as a triumph for BDS. She doesn’t mention thatwhen BDS opponents of the bid wanted to appear before Hackney Council, they were barred byunanimous vote. The East London Times commented that “A motion to block a deputation from

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speaking at a council meeting is extremely rare and Hackney Council could not cite another instanceof this happening.” This, however, doesn’t prove anything. Veolia may indeed have abandoned itsbid because of pressure from the BDS movement. But it does illustrate how much work has beenleft undone in making the case for BDS.

Michael Neumann is professor emeritus of philosophy at Trent University. He is the author of The Case againstIsrael, as well as academic works in ethics and political philosophy.

Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace, by Josh Ruebner. New York: Verso, 2013.291 pages. Notes to p. 342. Index to p. 354. $26.95 cloth.

REVIEWED BY JOHN V. WHITBECK

Josh Ruebner, National Advocacy Director of the U.S.Campaign to End the Occupation, has produced adevastating book. Mining deeply into the treasure trove ofclassified documents released by Wikileaks in 2010 and the“Palestine Papers,” official documents of the Palestiniannegotiating team released by Al-Jazeera in 2011, Ruebnerdemonstrates that the role of the Obama administrationregarding Israel-Palestine has been even worse than thosepaying close attention to public, non-leaked material couldhave imagined.

Conscious of the risks of writing “instant history,”Ruebner explains his motivation and the urgency for

writing this book as deriving “from the fact that US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians,especially during the Obama administration, is so morally wrong, so intrinsically opposed to USinterests and so inimical to the establishment of a just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace as tonecessitate an immediate reconsideration. Quite simply put: US policy toward Israel and thePalestinians, by underwriting and undergirding Israel’s oppressive policies, makes a just andlasting peace inconceivable” (p. 18).

Early on in Shattered Hopes, Ruebner implicitly addresses the question why anyone should havehad any hopes to shatter. Perhaps, he posits, it was Barack Obama’s skin tone and childhood years ina Muslim country that led many to assume that he would recognize that Palestinians are humanbeings and, as such, entitled to fundamental human rights. In any event, whatever may be inObama’s heart and mind, Ruebner demonstrates that there was a wealth of public statements andpublished positions suggesting that the future President Obama was firmly positioned in the“pro-Israel” mainstream and would never permit such a humane recognition to interfere with hispersonal advancement in a political system in which unconditional allegiance to a foreign countryis assumed to be an existential necessity.

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The picture which Ruebner paints of Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Mitchell is one ofindividuals who are not malign or consciously cynical, but rather naïve, clueless, cowardly, andincompetent (although he does not use these words), blinded by the delusion that the currentIsraeli government wishes to end the occupation and achieve “peace” when, in reality, like allprior Israeli governments, it wishes to end resistance to the occupation and maintain itseffective control of all of historical Palestine. Indeed, he writes: “There is no reason to doubtthe sincerity of Obama’s intentions” (p. 3). However, by the end of the book, readers maywell conclude from the weight of the evidence that Ruebner is being prudently generous andcharitable in his treatment of the president, the secretary of state, and the special envoy forMiddle East peace, and that it would not be unfair to apply the words “malign” and“consciously cynical.”

On the other hand, Ruebner shows no generosity or charity in his treatment of the membersof the U.S. Congress, unleashing a veritable tsunami of quotes and votes which paint them (asidefrom a handful of brave exceptions) as not simply breathtakingly ignorant, but vicious and rabidlyracist in their very public efforts to demonstrate their abject subservience to Israel and theirdenigration and detestation of the Palestinian people.

The book is divided equally into two parts—one on “US Policy, 2009–2011” and one on“Themes of US Policy.” Two sections in the second part stand out—(i) a section, benefiting fromleaked documents, on the extraordinary, frenzied American efforts to sabotage the GoldstoneReport on the Operation Cast Lead assault on Gaza and thereby preserve Israel’s impunityregarding its war crimes and crimes against humanity, and (ii) a section, requiring no non-publicdocuments, on the over-the-top “Who loves Israel more?” theme, which rose to the level ofridicule during the 2012 presidential and congressional elections. The only hints of optimism areto be found in the sections on the progress of the BDS campaign and the evolution of media andpopular culture.

It would be difficult for anyone reading this book to avoid concluding (if one had not alreadydone so) that the principal obstacle to ending the occupation and achieving peace with somemeasure of justice is, as it has been for decades, the U.S. government, and that not even a semi-decent “solution” is conceivable so long as the United States maintains its monopoly strangleholdon the so-called “peace process.”

Ruebner clearly hopes that his book will enlighten Americans and stimulate them to getinvolved, and accordingly, includes a “Get Involved” page featuring the website address ofthe U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (www.endtheoccupation.org). It would bemarvelous if hundreds of thousands of American “neutrals” were to read this book, be overcomeby patriotic humiliation, outrage, and disgust, and resolve to get involved. Unfortunately, itis more likely that the book will be read almost exclusively by people who are already involvedand that the evidence which Ruebner has skillfully assembled and recounted may cause them todespair and lose all hope.

John V. Whitbeck, a Paris-based international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team innegotiations with Israel, is the author of The World According to Whitbeck.

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The European Union and Occupied Palestinian Territories:State-Building without a State, by Dimitris Bouris. Oxonand New York: Routledge, 2014. xxvi + 175 pages.Bibliography to p. 205. Index to p. 214. £80.00 hardcover.

REVIEWED BY ALAA TARTIR

Historically, the Palestinian leadership debated twoparadigms: “liberation-before-state” or “state-before-liberation.” The Fatah leadership of the PalestineLiberation Organization (PLO) chose the latter andpursued the peace settlement route that led to thesignature of the Oslo peace accords. Two decades afterOslo, neither a sovereign Palestinian state nor a just peacehas been realized. Additionally, since the Oslo accords, theinternational community has invested more than $24billion in “peace or/and state-building” in the occupiedPalestinian territories (oPt). However, despite the glowing

state-building rhetoric, facts on the ground illustrate an entrenched Israeli military occupation, anddeteriorating socio-economic conditions of the Palestinians.

The European Union (EU) and European countries are the biggest donors for the Palestiniansand for the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s state-building project. They are well-known to be good“payers” but bad “players,” and their intervention is fraught with contradictions. The EU hasfailed to become a major peace broker, despite the leverage of its aid to the Palestinians and itspreferential trade relations with Israel. The sticks-and-carrots game played by the EU reinforcesthe conventional wisdom in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip that the “the U.S. decides,the World Bank leads, the EU pays, the UN feeds.”

On these grounds, Dimitris Bouris’ The European Union and Occupied Palestinian Territories:State-Building without a State aims to tackle one central question: How effective has the EU beenin its state-building policies towards the oPt? The effectiveness of the EU as a state-builder ismeasured through three major criteria/parameters: namely, generation of legitimacy, coherence,and regulation of violence/ability of enforcement. Drawing on over 140 interviews with European,Palestinian and Israeli interviewees to reflect the “voices from the field,” Dr. Bouris examines inparticular the EU role in the Security Sector Reform, Judiciary Sector Reform, and the rule of lawin the oPt.

Bouris, who received his PhD from the University of Warwick and is a research fellow at theEuropean Neighbourhood Policy Chair, College of Europe (Natolin), argues that the distinctiveEU role in the state-building project, in comparison with the models of the UN or theInternational Financial Institutions, means that the “EU is opting for state-building as a means toconflict resolution in its approach to the Palestinian question” (p. 2). Bouris highlights theincoherence and inconsistency in the EU policies and practices and problematizes the emerginggap between rhetoric and reality. The author argues powerfully that “in reality, the EU has

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supported a technical and training approach rather than a genuine Security Sector Reform (SSR)process promoting democratic civilian oversight and accountability” (p. 95). The author alsoargues that “the main obstacle to the EU’s efficiency in the domain of SSR is the EU itself and thishas significant reverberations not only for the security sector, but for the whole state-buildingproject carried out in the OPTs” (p. 95). This technically-oriented and politically-constrained EUapproach means that the “EU is trying to promote the rule of law dimension in the OPTs in anauthoritarian rather than democratic manner” (p. 162).

While some of the arguments in the book are not new, they are skilfully presented, theoreticallyembedded in the literature, and sharpened by the wealth of the “views from the field.” In particular,the three parameters (and their sub-criteria) used to measure the EU’s effectiveness as a state-builderare distinctive features of this book. The centrality of the three parameters in the analysis is helpful,but it made the text repetitive at times, and limiting and constraining at others. The book isinformative at both the theoretical and empirical levels. It introduces the reader to the literatureon state-building, liberal peace, and the EU’s approach and role as a state-builder. In addition,through the lenses of the above-mentioned parameters, the book assesses the role of the EU’ssecurity missions in the oPt (EU Co-ordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support and EUBorder Assistance Mission Rafah), and the EU’s initiatives in the domain of judiciary sectorreform and rule of law.

Though perhaps it is due to research design more than oversight, it is still quite puzzling why theissue of security collaboration between Israel and the PA is not discussed. It is a major source oftension between the Palestinian people and the resistance movement and the PA leadership, and amain source of the eroding legitimacy of the PA. The methodology of utilizing the “voices fromthe field” overlooks the potentially interesting gap between the EU officials in Brussels and thoseworking in the West Bank and Gaza. Finally, the understanding of the “legitimacy on the ground”and “local ownership” concepts, as well as the way the EU has operationalized them, is quiteproblematic on certain occasions, since it assumes linearity and dismisses multiple complex layers.But these concerns are relatively minor in contrast to the book’s larger contribution to thescholarly work on Palestine, the EU, and the state-building ventures in conflict-affected areas.Bouris has written an informative book that reflects the predictable outcome for attempting tolaunch a state-building project before liberation.

Alaa Tartir is a doctoral candidate and researcher in international development studies and political economy atthe Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

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