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This book provides an analysis of the crucial but underexplored roles the United States and other nations have played in shaping Syria's ongoing civil war. Most accounts of Syria's brutal, long-lasting civil war focus on a domestic contest that began in 2011 and only later drew foreign nations into the escalating violence. The book argues instead that the international dimension was never secondary but that Syria's war was, from the very start, profoundly influenced by regional factors, particularly the vacuum created by a perceived decline of U.S. power in the Middle East. This precipitated a new regional order in which six external protagonists — the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar — have violently competed for influence, with Syria a key battleground. Drawing on a plethora of original interviews, the book constructs a new narrative of Syria's war. Without absolving the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime, the book untangles the key external factors which explain the acceleration and endurance of the conflict, including the West's strategy against ISIS. It concludes with some insights on Syria and the region's future.

This book presents the story of how Zionist colonizers planned and established nearly 700 agricultural settlements, towns, and cities from the 1880s to the present. This extraordinary activity of planners, architects, social scientists, military personnel, politicians, and settlers is inextricably linked to multiple contexts: Jewish and Zionist history, the Arab/Jewish conflict, and the diffusion of European ideas to non-European worlds. This book demonstrates how professionals and settlers continually innovated plans for both rural and urban frontiers in response to the competing demands of social and political ideologies and the need to achieve productivity, economic independence, and security in a hostile environment. In the 1930s, security became the primary challenge, shaping and even distorting patterns of growth. Not until the 1993 Oslo Accords, with prospects of compromise and accommodation, did planners again imagine Israel as a normal state, developing like other modern societies. The book concludes that if Palestinian Arabs become reconciled to a Jewish state, Israel will reassign priority to the social and economic development of the country and region.

This book introduces and critically examines the first in a series of four corrective manifestos issued by the Gamā‘ah Islāmīyah, who formed part of the coalition of radical Islamists groups that assassinated president Anwar Sadat in 1981. In 1997, the leaders of the Gamā‘ah announced from prison their renunciation of political violence as a means of pursuing their goal of Islamicizing the Egyptian state and society. This came of a reexamination of their erstwhile position in light of what they came to understand of sharī‘ah, which they assiduously studied while incarcerated. This new understanding of jihad and the place of violence in Islam was formalized and published in Arabic 2002. The present book includes a full translation of the Arabic original. In this work, the Gamā‘ah abandons the understanding of jihad as an end in itself and comes to see it as a means to a loftier goal, namely, facilitating and safeguarding the ability to call people to Islam. Any application of jihad that does not serve this purpose is deemed impermissible, as it undermines the aim for which jihad was instituted. The Gamā‘ah assesses the impact of its violent actions on the Egyptian state and society and concludes that they were wrong in pursuing this path. While not abandoning the value of jihad in itself, the Gamā‘ah casts a critical light on the approach of radical jihadist movements overall, including the position of Usāmah b. Lādin and al-Qā‘idah.

During the past sixty-eight years, Israel's population has increased from one to eight million people. Such exponential growth has produced acute environmental and social crises in this tiny country. This book, written by one of Israel's foremost environmentalists, considers the ramifications of the extraordinary demographic shift, from burgeoning pollution and dwindling natural resources to overburdened infrastructure and overcrowding. The book aims to answer the question: What should Israel's demographic objectives be, and what public policies are needed to attain them? It argues that while Israel has made remarkable efforts to accommodate its growing population, this extraordinary demographic expansion is ultimately unsustainable. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, the book examines the origins of Israel's population policies and how they must change to support a sustainable future.

In this analysis of the origins of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the text draws on documents only recently made available to show how the war resulted not only from tension and competing interest between Arabs and Israelis, but also from policies adopted in both Washington and Moscow. Between 1969 and 1973, the Middle East in general and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular emerged as a crucial Cold War battleground where the limits of detente appeared in sharp relief. By prioritizing Cold War detente rather than genuine stability in the Middle East, the book shows that the United States and the Soviet Union fueled regional instability that ultimately undermined the prospects of a lasting peace agreement. The book further argues that as detente increased tensions between Arabs and Israelis, these tensions in turn negatively affected U.S.-Soviet relations.

David Oppenheim (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders, and the contacts between Christians and Jews that books facilitated. From contact with the great courts of European nobility to the poor of Jerusalem, Oppenheim's family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended across Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Containing works of law and literature alongside prayer and poetry, his library served rabbinic scholars and communal leaders, introduced old books to new readers, and functioned as a unique source of personal authority that gained him fame throughout Jewish society and beyond. Based on the careful reconstruction of an archive that is still visited by scholars today, the book offers a window into the social life of Jewish books in early modern Europe.

For millennia, Jews and non-Jews alike have viewed forced population movement as a core aspect of the Jewish experience. This involuntary Jewish wandering has been explained by pre-modern Jews and Christians as divine punishment, by some modern non-Jews as the result of Jewish harmfulness, by some modern Jews as fostered by Christian anti-Jewish imagery, and by other modern Jews as caused by misguided Jewish acceptance of minority status. This book explores these various perspectives and argues that pre-modern Jewish population movement was in most cases voluntary, the result of a sense among Jews that there were alternatives available for making a better life elsewhere.

This book is an illuminating study tracing the evolution of drone technology and counterterrorism policy from the Reagan to the Obama administrations. The book uncovers the history of the most important instrument of U.S. counterterrorism today: the armed drone. It reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the CIA's covert drone program is not a product of 9/11. Rather, it is the result of U.S. counterterrorism practices extending back to an influential group of policy makers in the Reagan administration. Tracing the evolution of counterterrorism policy and drone technology from the fallout of Iran-Contra and the CIA's “Eagle Program” prototype in the mid-1980s to the emergence of al-Qaeda, the book shows how George W. Bush and Barack Obama built upon or discarded strategies from the Reagan and Clinton eras as they responded to changes in the partisan environment, the perceived level of threat, and technological advances. Examining a range of counterterrorism strategies, the book reveals why the CIA's drones became the United States' preferred tool for pursuing the decades-old goal of preemptively targeting anti-American terrorists around the world.

This history of the African diaspora and slavery in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries examines the interconnected themes of enslavement, globalization, and empire and challenges previously held conventions regarding Middle Eastern slavery and British imperialism. Whereas conventional historiography regards the Indian Ocean slave trade as fundamentally different from its Atlantic counterpart, this study argues that both systems were influenced by global economic forces. The book disputes the triumphalist antislavery narrative that attributes the end of the slave trade between East Africa and the Persian Gulf to the efforts of the British Royal Navy, arguing instead that Great Britain allowed the inhuman practice to continue because it was vital to the Gulf economy and therefore vital to British interests in the region. Slaves of One Master links the personal stories of enslaved Africans to the impersonal global commodity chains their labor enabled, demonstrating how the growing demand for workers created by a global demand for Persian Gulf products compelled the enslavement of these people and their transportation to eastern Arabia.

While toppling decades-old authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen took only months, rebuilding these states will likely take years. This book argues that to transition to sustainable peace and stability, these societies must engage in an inclusive national reconciliation process. Based on over 200 interviews with key figures in Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen, this book identifies the greatest drivers of the polarization afflicting each country and the specific national reconciliation processes that can best address them. Dr. Sharqieh finds that an effective national reconciliation process must include a national dialogue, a truth seeking effort, the reparation of victims’ past injuries, dealing with the former regime, and institutional reform. Each subject country has taken different approaches thus far. Tunisia held a homegrown national dialogue driven mainly by civil society organizations and Yemen completed a ten-month, UN-assisted conference, but Libya has been unable to begin a national dialogue thus far. Party politics and limited resources have influenced the other reconciliation processes. While Libya opted to purge all those who served in Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, Yemen chose to grant President Saleh immunity from prosecution in return for his abdication. Tunisia, meanwhile, has adopted a transitional justice law that mandates the investigation and prosecution of the state’s past crimes. These processes, especially if supported by key agents of reconciliation including women, civil society, and tribes, can combine to create the momentum needed to bridge divides and help Arab Spring societies move toward peace, stability, and development.