Middle East Politics

A gripping day-by-day account of the 1978 Camp David conference, when President Jimmy Carter persuaded Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to sign the first peace treaty in the modern Middle East, one which endures to this day.

The Wake Up Call examines the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack when Hamas and Gaza terrorists breached Israel's borders, brutally murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 others. This attack marked the worst security breach in Israel’s history. “10.7” ignited a global surge of antisemitism, spreading across university campuses and city streets worldwide.

In December 2003, after one of the largest, most aggressive manhunts in history, US military forces captured Iraqi president Saddam Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit. Beset by body-double rumors and false alarms during a nine-month search, the Bush administration needed positive identification of the prisoner before it could make the announcement that would rocket around the world. At the time John Nixon was a senior CIA leadership analyst who had spent years studying the Iraqi dictator.

As more and more people align themselves with the Palestinian people, Palestine in a World on Fire provides the global perspective and analysis needed to inform how we forge ahead on this path of newfound solidarity. Editors Ilan Pappé and Katherine Natanel have gathered a collection of interviews that are intimate, challenging, and rigorous—many of them conducted before October 7th but still startlingly prescient.

At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother's apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Its loss was central to her parents' decision to make their lives in America. In chronicling the people who lived in the Tahaan building, past and present, Alia portrays the Syrians—the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, and Kurds—who worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters, mirroring the political shifts in their country

Tens of thousands of men and women have left comfortable, privileged lives to join the Islamic State and kill for it. To them, its violence is beautiful and holy, and the caliphate a fulfillment of prophecy and the only place on earth where they can live and die as Muslims. The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State's true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London, Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathizers of the group.

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.

Iraq will continue to be a major issue and involvement for the United States into the foreseeable future says William R. Polk, former member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council and professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Chicago. Iraq sits on the world’s largest supply of oil, and with the world’s energy requirements continuously rising, Iraq will play an ongoing role in the global economy and the political environment throughout the Gulf region and the Middle East.

Based on firsthand reporting from Syria and throughout the Middle East, Inside Syria unravels the complex dynamics underlying the Syrian Civil War. Through vivid, on-the-ground accounts and interviews with rebel leaders, regime supporters, and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad himself, veteran journalist Reese Erlich gives the listener a better understanding of this momentous power struggle and why it matters.

David Rundell - one of America's foremost experts on Saudi Arabia - explains how the country has been stable for so long, why it is less so today, and what is most likely to happen in the future. The book is based on the author's close contacts and intimate knowledge of the country where he spent 15 years living and working as a diplomat. Vision or Mirage demystifies one of the most powerful, but least understood, states in the Middle East and is essential for anyone interested in the power dynamics and politics of the Arab world.

Michael Oren served as the Israeli ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013. An American by birth and a historian by training, Oren arrived at his diplomatic post just as Benjamin Netanyahu, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton assumed office. During Oren's tenure in office, Israel and America grappled with the Palestinian peace process, the Arab Spring, and existential threats to Israel posed by international terrorism and the Iranian nuclear program.

Bernard Lewis is recognized around the globe as one of the leading authorities on Islam. Hailed as "the world's foremost Islamic scholar" (Wall Street Journal), as "a towering figure among experts on the culture and religion of the Muslim world" (Baltimore Sun), and as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies" (New York Times), Lewis is nothing less than a national treasure, a trusted voice that politicians, journalists, historians, and the general public have all turned to for insight into the Middle East.

This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the modern era. The book includes a new foreword by Kecia Ali situating the text in its scholarly context and explaining its enduring influence.

When the U.S. began its withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Afghan Army instantly collapsed, Homeira Qaderi was marked for death at the hands of the Taliban. A celebrated author, academic, and champion for women's liberation, Homeira had achieved celebrity in her home country by winning custody of her son in a contentious divorce, a rarity in Afghanistan's patriarchal society.

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real, but it sits atop an older struggle between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan - a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam. Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out and to illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood.

The Iran hostage crisis was a watershed moment in American history. It was America's first showdown with Islamic fundamentalism, a confrontation at the forefront of American policy to this day. It was also a powerful dramatic story that captivated the American people, launched yellow-ribbon campaigns, made celebrities of the hostage's families, and crippled the reelection campaign of President Jimmy Carter.

This timely book focuses on President Obama's deeply considered strategy toward Iran's nuclear program and reveals how the historic agreement of 2015 broke the persistent stalemate in negotiations that had blocked earlier efforts. Drawing from more than 75 in-depth interviews with key decision-makers, including Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and US Secretary of State John Kerry, this is the first authoritative account of President Obama's signature foreign policy achievement.

Based on interviews with more than 40 survivors, knowledgeable political insiders, and Soviet archives of the period, investigative writer Joan Mellen presents evidence suggesting complicity between US and Israeli intelligence in the attack on Liberty and the more than 50-year long cover-up. What were the underlying motives? Was this a false flag operation conducted in the midst of the Six-Day War? Was it conceivable that Israel would have initiated such an operation without a green light from the United States?

"Küçük hanımlar, küçük beyler! Sizler hepiniz geleceğin bir gülü, yıldızı ve ikbal ışığısınız. Memleketi asıl ışığa boğacak olan sizsiniz. Kendinizin ne kadar önemli, değerli olduğunuzu düşünerek ona göre çalışınız. Sizlerden çok şey bekliyoruz."

Michael Korda's Hero is the story of an epic life on a grand scale: a revealing, in-depth, and gripping biography of the extraordinary, mysterious, and dynamic Englishman whose daring exploits and romantic profile, including his blond, sun-burnished good looks and flowing white robes, made him an object of intense fascination, still famous the world over as "Lawrence of Arabia".