After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan (Hill and Wang), by Ted Rall
Ted Rall is an author, graphic novelist and rarity among the recent generation of foreign correspondents—an unembedded reporter covering American mishaps without permission from the U.S. military. It’s dangerous work, he reports in this caustic account of his Afghan sojourn. In After We Kill You, Rall uses a graphic novel format to provide a controversial backstory to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, its main points contradicting everything we’ve heard from two administrations and every news channel. Like many observers, Rall declares the war in Afghanistan as inherently unwinnable, the regime we installed as hopelessly corrupt and unresponsive. The distinction between Taliban, criminals, warlords and pro-government forces can be hard to draw.
Gaza: A History (Oxford University Press), by Jean-Pierre Filiu
Gaza has a long history. French Middle East studies professor Jean-Pierre Filiu begins with ancient Egypt, with Gaza as the lynchpin between North Africa and West Asia, a key point in the trade routes. A century ago its population was diverse with Jewish and Eastern Orthodox minorities amidst the Sunni Muslims. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Egypt occupied Gaza and refugees fleeing Israel poured in. The flare up of recent months seems mild compared to the violence of the brief Israeli occupation in 1956. Israel retook Gaza in 1967 and comes off badly in Filiu’s account, as do Arab leaders whose machinations had little positive effect on the Palestinian people.
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Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion (University of Texas Press), by Israel Gershoni
The general line among historians is that Arab political leaders and the Arab public supported Nazi Germany during World War II. Tel Aviv University history professor Israel Gershoni takes a more nuanced view in Arab Responses. More painstaking in his research than his predecessors, Gershoni is also more familiar with Arabic language sources and less willing to make sweeping generalizations. He finds that while some Arab leaders supported the Nazis, whether from ideological affinity for the axiom that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, others supported the Allies, whether from a commitment to democracy or distrust of the Germans. Gershoni has written an important work, showing that history and human motivations are never simple, and that much of what we think we know about the past is probably wrong.
