Middle East Politics

Gershon Baskin's memoir of 38 years of intensive pursuit of peace begins with a childhood on Long Island and a bar mitzvah trip to Israel with his family. Baskin joined Young Judaea back in the States, then later lived on a kibbutz in Israel, where he announced to his parents that he had decided to make aliya, emigrate to Israel. They persuaded him to return to study at NYU, after which he finally emigrated under the auspices of Interns for Peace. In Israel he spent a pivotal two years living with Arabs in the village of Kufr Qara.

A ferociously intimate memoir by a devout woman from a modest family in Saudi Arabia who became the unexpected leader of a courageous movement to support women's right to drive.

Daniel Levin was at his office when he got a call from an acquaintance with an urgent, cryptic request to meet in Paris. A young man had gone missing in Syria. No government, embassy, or intelligence agency would help. Could he? Would he? So begins a suspenseful, shocking, and at times brutal true story of one man’s search to find a missing person in Syria over twenty tense days.

A war is being waged against us by radical Islamists, and, as current events demonstrate, they are only getting stronger. Al-Qaeda has morphed into a much more dangerous, menacing threat: ISIS. Lt. General Michael T. Flynn is blunt and urgent. This book aims to inform the American people of the grave danger we face in the war on terror—and will continue to face—until our government takes decisive action against the terrorists that want nothing more than to destroy us and our way of life.

Uri Bialer lays a foundation for understanding the principal aspects of Israeli foreign policy, from the early days of the state's existence to the Oslo Accords. In addition to identifying important state actors, Bialer highlights the many figures who had no defined, diplomatic roles, but were influential in establishing foreign policy goals. He shows how foreign policy was essential to the political, economic, and social well-being of the state, and how it helped to deal with Israel's most intractable problem - the resolution of the conflict with Arab states and the Palestinians.

Light in Gaza is a seminal, moving, and wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists. It constitutes a collective effort to organize and center Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle. As political discourse shifts toward futurism as a means of reimagining a better way of living, beyond the violence and limitations of colonialism, Light in Gaza is an urgent and powerful intervention into an important political moment.

As the son-in-law of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and a close advisor to his successor, Anwar Sadat, Ashraf Marwan had access to the deepest secrets of the country's government. But he himself had a secret: he was a spy for the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service. Under the codename "The Angel", Marwan turned Egypt into an open book for the Israeli intelligence services and, by alerting the Mossad in advance of the joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Yom Kippur, saved Israel from a devastating defeat.

In Doomed to Succeed, Ross takes us through every administration from Truman to Obama, throwing into dramatic relief each president's attitudes toward Israel and the region, the often tumultuous debates between key advisers, and the events that drove the policies and at times led to a shift in approach.

The companion to the Oscar-nominated documentary, an unparalleled look inside Israel's security establishment. Imagine the following situation: You have just received a tip that six suicide bombers are making their way into the heart of Israel's major cities, each one to a different city, to set off explosions in the most crowded centers of population. How far would you go to stop the attacks?

The Islamic State, known as ISIS, exploded into the public eye in 2014 with startling speed and shocking brutality. It has captured the imagination of the global jihadist movement, attracting recruits in unprecedented numbers and wreaking bloody destruction with a sadistic glee that has alienated even the hardcore terrorists of its parent organization, al Qaeda. Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, two of America’s leading experts on terrorism, dissect the new model for violent extremism that ISIS has leveraged into an empire of death in Iraq and Syria, and an international network that is rapidly expanding in the Middle East, North Africa and around the world.

In addition to Hamas, which provoked the recent war, and Gaza with its rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, Alan Dershowitz argues that Israel's most dangerous enemies include Jimmy Carter and other western leaders who would delegitimize Israel as an apartheid regime subject to the same fate as white South Africans; Israel's academic enemies, led by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who would accuse supporters of Israel of dual loyalty and indeed disloyalty to America.

What happens to the women who choose to work in a country struggling to reconcile a traditional culture with the demands of globalization? In this sharply drawn portrait of Egyptian society—deepened by two years of immersive reporting—Leslie T. Chang follows three women as they persevere in a country that throws up obstacles to their progress at every step, from dramatic swings in economic policy to conservative marriage expectations and a failing education system.

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops.

Far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and al-Qaeda are fighting a clandestine war of drones and suicide bombers in an unforgiving corner of Arabia. The Last Refuge charts the rise, fall, and resurrection of al-Qaeda in Yemen over the last 30 years, detailing how a group that the United States once defeated has now become one of the world’s most dangerous threats. An expert on Yemen who has spent years on the ground there, Gregory D. Johnsen uses al-Qaeda’s Arabic battle notes to reconstruct their world as they take aim at the United States and its allies.

Fleeing East from Nazi terror, over a million Polish Jews traversed the Soviet Union, many finding refuge in Muslim lands. Their story - the extraordinary saga of two thirds of Polish Jewish survivors - has never been fully told. Author Mikhal Dekel's father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of these refugees. After they fled the town in eastern Poland where their family had been successful brewers for centuries, they endured extreme suffering in the Soviet forced labor camps known as "special settlements".

The first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi has inspired millions around the globe through her work as a human rights lawyer defending women and children against a brutal regime in Iran. Now Ebadi tells her story of courage and defiance in the face of a government out to destroy her, her family, and her mission: to bring justice to the people and the country she loves.

The birth of South Sudan was celebrated the world round. But the celebration would not last: South Sudan's freedom-fighters soon plunged their new nation back into chaos, shattering the promise of liberation and exposing the hubris of their American backers. Drawing on extraordinary personal stories of identity, liberation, and survival, this narrative tells an epic story of paradise won and then lost. Zach Vertin's firsthand accounts, from deadly war zones to the halls of Washington power, bring listeners on an extraordinary journey into the rise and fall of the world's newest state.

World affairs expert and intrepid travel journalist Robert D. Kaplan braved the dangers of war-ravaged Afghanistan in the 1980s, living among the mujahidin-the "soldiers of god"-whose unwavering devotion to Islam fueled their mission to oust the formidable Soviet invaders. In Soldiers of God, we follow Kaplan's extraordinary journey and learn how the thwarted Soviet invasion gave rise to the ruthless Taliban and the defining international conflagration of the twenty-first century.

A timely primer on the conflict between the United States and Iran by scholars of Middle Eastern politics who advocate diplomacy and de-escalation.

In 1863, a French senator arrived in Jerusalem hoping to unearth relics dating to biblical times. Digging deep underground, he discovered an ancient grave that, he claimed, belonged to an Old Testament queen. News of his find ricocheted around the world, evoking awe and envy alike, and inspiring others to explore Jerusalem’s storied past.