Israel and Palestine: alternative perspectives on statehood. Edited by John Ehrenberg and Yoav Peled

Extract

Israel and Palestine: alternative perspectives on statehood. Edited by John Ehrenberg and Yoav Peled. London: Rowman and Littlefield. 2016. 396pp. Index. £55.00. ISBN 978 1 44224 507 5. Available as e-book.

This work is a collection of papers, varying in quality and originality—as well as ‘alternativeness’—which discuss and debate future logistical and political permutations for the land mass(es) currently inhabited by Israelis and Palestinians, religious and secular, majority and minority. Therein lies what many readers may consider a problem: that in the desire to propose potential solutions to the Arab–Israeli conflict, some contributors may fall prey to utopian thinking, unrealistic assumptions and biased critique.

There is little doubt that all the contributions add something to current debates over Israeli and Palestinian statecraft, but those outside academia may be confused over the relevance and practicality of some of the ideas promoted in this anthology. Others may question how alternative many of the contributions are, given that a substantial part of this book is concerned with the continuing clash of histories within the traditional and revisionist narratives—arguably comprising the mainstream in academia, both in Israel and in the West in general.