On the 40th anniversary of the Camp David Accords, a groundbreaking new history shows how Egyptian-Israeli peace ensured lasting Palestinian statelessness.
For 70 years Israel has existed as a state, and for 40 years it has honored a peace treaty with Egypt. Yet the Palestinians — the would-be beneficiaries of a vision for a comprehensive regional settlement that led to the Camp David Accords in 1978 — remain stateless to this day. How and why Palestinian statelessness persists are the central questions of Seth Anziska’s groundbreaking book, which explores the complex legacy of the agreement brokered by President Jimmy Carter, says a review on the Princeton University Press website. Preventing Palestine charts the emergence of the Middle East peace process, including the establishment of a separate track to deal with the issue of Palestine. At the very start of this process, Anziska argues, Egyptian-Israeli peace came at the expense of the sovereignty of the Palestinians, whose aspirations for a homeland alongside Israel faced crippling challenges.
What We Are Reading Today: Preventing Palestine A political History from Camp David to Oslo
What We Are Reading Today: Preventing Palestine A political History from Camp David to Oslo
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Rituals of War’
- Bahrani brings together and analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural
Author: Zainab Bahrani
“Rituals of War” is an investigation into the earliest historical records of violence and biopolitics. In Mesopotamia, ancient Iraq (ca. 3000–500 BC) rituals of war and images of violence constituted part of the magical technologies of warfare that formed the underlying irrational processes of war. In the book, three lines of inquiry are converged into one historical domain of violence, namely, war, the body, and representation.
Building on Foucault’s argument in “Discipline and Punish” that the art of punishing must rest on a whole technology of representation, Zainab Bahrani investigates the ancient Mesopotamian record to reveal how that culture relied on the portrayal of violence and control as part of the mechanics of warfare. Moreover she takes up the more recent arguments of Giorgio Agamben on sovereign power and biopolitic to focus on the relationship of power, the body and violence in Assyro-Babylonian texts and monuments of war.
Bahrani brings together and analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural.
