Balder Ex-Libris - Cook JonathanReview of books rare and missing2024-03-16T01:56:42+00:00urn:md5:aa728a70505b2fae05796923271581c2DotclearCook Jonathan - Disappearing Palestineurn:md5:b8567771feaabe88ed8087cca669a2362017-12-17T01:48:00+00:002018-04-14T19:50:53+01:00balderCook JonathanCatholiqueEuropeFranceIsraëlPalestine <p><img src="https://balderexlibris.com/public/img4/Cook_Jonathan_-_Disappearing_Palestine.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author : <strong>Cook Jonathan</strong><br />
Title : <strong>Disappearing Palestine Israel’s experiments in human despair</strong><br />
Year : 2008<br />
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Link download : <a href="https://balderexlibris.com/public/ebook3/Cook_Jonathan_-_Disappearing_Palestine.zip">Cook_Jonathan_-_Disappearing_Palestine.zip</a><br />
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Introduction. In spring 2003 I published a commentary in the International Herald Tribune about Israel’s steel and concrete ‘security barrier’ that was beginning to wind its way through the West Bank. The path to publication had been arduous. The Tribune, published from Paris, is little more than a syndicated version of the New York Times, but it does buy in a small number of opinion pieces to broaden its appeal to a non-American audience. I had placed several commentaries in these slots before, but my article about the wall faced stiff resistance from the editorial staff for several months. Then suddenly in May 2003 the Tribune put aside its fears and agreed to publish my commentary, possibly because President Bush had just delivered a speech in which he criticized the barrier.1 In my article I argued, at a time when it did not seem quite the truism it does today, that Israel was using the wall effectively to annex large swathes of Palestinian land in the West Bank, particularly farmland and territory over its aquifers, to destroy any chance of a viable Palestinian state emerging. <strong>...</strong></p>Cook Jonathan - Blood and religionurn:md5:4db7e3fea6882030a8f2b066f0611b9b2017-12-17T01:24:00+00:002018-04-14T19:51:42+01:00balderCook JonathanEuropeFranceIsraëlJewPalestine <p><img src="https://balderexlibris.com/public/img4/Cook_Jonathan_-_Blood_and_religion.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author : <strong>Cook Jonathan</strong><br />
Title : <strong>Blood and religion The unmasking of the jewish and democratic state</strong><br />
Year : 2006<br />
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Preface. Few tasks are more challenging than writing about Israel. For those trying to report or comment intelligently on events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the effort can sometimes seem futile. Israel’s apologists have succeeded in excising from the debate about the Jewish state the language of universal human rights and justice, values by which we judge other problematic conflicts. In the case of Israel, the culture of apology is now deeply rooted in the West, particularly among European and American Jewry. The apologist has a well-tested strategy. Whenever a critic of Israel makes his case by citing an incident or example, the apologist will provide a counter-example or counter-incident, however irrelevant, to suggest either his “opponent” is unfamiliar with the material or that his motives are suspect, the anti-Semitism canard. Challenges of this kind may do nothing to blunt the thrust of the original argument but they are a very successful ploy. The critic’s credibility can be dented with readers and, more damagingly, with commissioning editors, the media’s gatekeepers, who decide whether a news report or comment article will be published. Critical writers who wish to contribute to the mainstream media must either accept a bland, diluted terminology acceptable to the apologists or devote endless amounts of time, energy and valuable space trying to second-guess how the information they include will be distorted. As a consequence, much of the debate about Israel is weighed down with trivia, pedantry and obscurantism. I have tried to avoid these pitfalls. In doing so, I am sure to antagonise some readers. Doubtless I also risk accusations of anti-Semitism. Wherever possible, therefore, I have cited senior Israeli politicians and offi cials to support my arguments and quoted from Israeli publications, even if they are simply confirming my own observations and experiences as a reporter. A majority of my endnotes refer to articles and interviews in the Ha’aretz and Jerusalem Post newspapers. I have largely neglected non-Israeli and Arab sources not because I doubt their credibility but because they will be less convincing to those who seek to reject my argument. <strong>...</strong></p>Cook Jonathan - Israel and the clash of civilisationsurn:md5:da656e790de876ec1750cdbc059f80ad2014-01-29T23:05:00+00:002014-01-29T23:13:54+00:00balderCook JonathanIsraëlVenus <p><img src="https://balderexlibris.com/public/img2/.Cook_Jonathan_-_Israel_and_the_clash_of_civilisations_s.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author : <strong>Cook Jonathan</strong><br />
Title : <strong>Israel and the clash of civilisations Iraq, Iran and the plan to remake the Middle East</strong><br />
Year : 2008<br />
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Link download : <a href="https://balderexlibris.com/public/ebook2/Cook_Jonathan_-_Israel_and_the_clash_of_civilisations.zip">Cook_Jonathan_-_Israel_and_the_clash_of_civilisations.zip</a><br />
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Preface. In summer 2007, Ghaith Abdul Ahad of the Guardian and Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post, two young journalists who had recently won awards for their coverage of the US occupation of Iraq, sat down to discuss the disaster unfolding there. In particular, Abdul Ahad, an Iraqi who had spent years on the run from Saddam Hussein’s army, could claim an intimate familiarity with Iraqi society not possible for his Western colleagues. Also unlike them, he did not live in the Green Zone, a sealed-off area of Baghdad from which Western journalists rarely ventured, and when on assignment he never ‘embedded’ with US soldiers. The two journalists agreed that Iraq, a country where more than 650,000 people had probably been killed since the US invasion, would continue to be ‘bloody and dark and chaotic’ for years to come. They also noted that before the US invasion, no one had been able to tell whether a neighbourhood was Sunni or Shia, two branches of Islam whose rivalry was at the root of a sectarian war engulfi ng the country. Under Saddam, Iraq had had the highest rate of Sunni and Shia intermarriage of any Arab or Muslim country, they pointed out. Abdul Ahad observed: Now we can draw a sectarian map of Baghdad right down to tiny alleyways and streets and houses. Everything has changed. As an Iraqi I go anywhere (not only in Iraq, but also in the Middle East), (and) the fi rst thing people ask me is: ‘Are you a Sunni or a Shia?’ … I think the problem we have now on the ground is a civil war. Call it whatever you want, it is a civil war. Four million of Iraq’s 27 million inhabitants had already fl ed the country or become internal refugees, exiled from their homes. Was partition of Iraq between the three main communities there – the Sunni, Shia and Kurds – inevitable? Chandrasekaran thought so: ‘People are already voting with their feet. They’re dividing themselves on their own, people are moving from one community to another, one neighbourhood to another in Baghdad. In some cases they’re leaving Iraq outright. This is the direction things are headed.’ Abdul Ahad, clearly upset by the thought of his country breaking apart, nevertheless had to agree that communal division was happening: I see a de facto split in the country, I see a de facto cantonisation between Sunnis and Shia. To enshrine this in some form of process will be messy, it’ll be bloody. The main issue is for the Americans to recognise they don’t have an Iraqi partner. So who was responsible for the civil war and the humanitarian catastrophe? Chandrasekaran answered: ‘I wouldn’t blame the US for the civil war in Iraq, but I certainly think an awful lot of decisions made by Ambassador (Paul) Bremer, the fi rst American viceroy to Iraq, have helped to fuel the instability we see today.’ In this book, I argue that this prevalent view of Iraq’s fate – that its civil war was a terrible unforeseen consequence of the US invasion and a series of bad decisions made by the occupation regime – is profoundly mistaken. Rather, civil war and partition were the intended outcomes of the invasion and seen as benefi cial to American interests, or at least they were by a small group of ultra-hawks known as the neoconservatives who came to dominate the White House under President George W. Bush. The neoconservatives’ understanding of American interests in the Middle East was little different from that of previous administrations: securing control of oil in the Persian Gulf. But what distinguished Bush’s invasion of Iraq from similar US attempts at regime change was the strategy used to achieve this goal. <strong>...</strong></p>