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Like electricity, political power travels through physical materials whose properties govern its flow. Electrical Palestine charts the construction of Palestine’s electric grid in the interwar period and its implication in the area’s rapid and uneven development. It does so in an effort to rethink both the origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the interplay of politics, capital, and technology more broadly. The study follows the coevolution of the power system and Zionist state building efforts in Palestine on the conceptual and material level. Conceptually, the design and construction of the system shaped Palestine as a precisely bounded entity with a distinct political, social, and economic character. Materially, the borders of the mandate were mapped onto the power system and structured an ethno-national division of capital, land, and labor. In 1948, these coevolving forces ultimately carried over into Jewish statehood and Palestinian statelessness.

The objective of Destroying Yemen is to put South Arabia within a framework of analysis that permits new ways to explore the global transformations driven by “liberalism and market economics” during the 1900-2017 period. Of concern are the kinds of interactions between external parties, primarily driven by globalist doctrines seeking to extract the considerable surplus wealth produced in South Arabia. Crucially, the response from Yemen’s indigenous peoples appears to have global significance. Long self-sufficient and often themselves actively engaged in dynamic trans-regional relations that pre-date the ascendency of global capitalism, looking closely at how Yemenis confront and until now, resist globalist encroachments presents us an opportunity to reinterpret recent events in Yemen and the larger world since the Cold War. In particular, this book analyzes post-war Yemen through its close association with, among other things, a neo-liberal model of economic “development” that ultimately arrives in Yemen via various channels—Egypt’s invasion in 1962, Takfiri violence with Saudi support, and neoliberal “reforms” introduced by stealth over a period of 30 years. The fact that Yemen played an important role in shaping the trajectory of what were global visions for imposing Euro-American power throughout the Middle East, may prove invaluable to a broad range of scholars interested in studying the modern world from the perspective of indigenous agents.

This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and initiatives. Employing nuanced ethnography, rare autobiographies, and unpublished maps and photos, this book discerns a self-consciously modern and secular Palestinian public sphere. New urban sensibilities, schools, monuments, public parks, railways, and roads catalyzed by the Great War and described in detail by the author show a world that challenges the politically driven denial of the existence of Palestine as a geographic, cultural, political, and economic space.

In the interwar Eastern Mediterranean, European colonial modes of establishing land claims and controlling populations converged with a recent Ottoman past featuring desperate and violent efforts at nationalization and an increasingly empowered Zionist settler colonialism. States of Separation explores how this confluence produced a series of internationally supported plans to move “minority” communities in, around, and out of the newly constituted states of Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Under the aegis of the new League of Nations and the British and French mandate governments, and often over the protests of those on the ground slated for displacement, these three states saw multiple efforts to remove entire communities, resettle populations, and redraw maps along ethnic lines. These efforts to create ethnically and religiously homogenous national enclaves out of a highly pluralistic political and cultural landscape constituted a massive demographic experiment that carried lasting political and social consequences for the twentieth-century Middle East and for the international order.

Born in 1945, the United Nations (UN) came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book's claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume includes chapters on the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states.

In the wake of continuing violence in Israel-Palestine, Sustaining Conflict examines how occupation, colonization, and domination are maintained not only through social sanction and popular support but also through the production of political apathy. Exploring the attitudes and experiences of self-defined leftist Jewish Israelis living in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, Katherine Natanel reveals how political depression, disengagement, and inaction serve to normalize the reality of violence and control. However, rather than signaling a state of passivity or an absence of care, here apathy takes shape as a form of active disengagement—a kind of hoping, trying, building, believing, knowing, relating, engaging, and acting oriented toward self-preservation. By shifting focus from violence to normalcy, Sustaining Conflict highlights how micro-political logics and social mechanisms maintain macro-political power in Israel-Palestine. Importantly, Natanel’s account argues that gender uniquely structures the expression and practice of apathy among leftist Jewish Israelis, sewing conflict deep into everyday life and shaping political action. Through a combination of ethnographic material, narrative, and political, cultural, and feminist theory, Natanel develops a groundbreaking theory that opens a new conversation about Israel-Palestine, one in which political apathy is taken seriously and regarded as significant to the future of the region.

The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world's most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage, and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed by its successive protagonists. Intrigued by the absence of a holistic portrayal of this body of water and inspired by Fernand Braudel's famous work on the Mediterranean, this book brings alive a dynamic Red Sea world across time, revealing the particular features of a unique historical actor. In capturing this heretofore lost space, it also presents a critical, conceptual history of the sea, leading the reader into the heart of Eurocentrism. The Sea, it is shown, is a vital element of the modern philosophy of history. The author is not satisfied with this inclusion of the Red Sea into history and attendant critique of Eurocentrism. The book explores how the world and the sea were imagined differently before imperial European hegemony. Searching for the lost space of Ottoman visions of the sea, this book makes a deeper argument about the discipline of history and the historian's craft.

Bread from Stones explores how modern humanitarianism evolved in the face of the historical experience of mass violence, starvation, human trafficking, and the displacement of millions in the early twentieth-century eastern Mediterranean. Using a vast array of archival, literary, and visual sources, the book juxtaposes the inhumanity of war, civil conflict, and genocide with the creation of forms of aid for the victims of violence, the establishment of institutions to resettle displaced peoples, and the elaboration of novel, international legal regimes for refugees. It traces the origins of modern humanitarianism from the perspective of its implementation in the eastern Mediterranean as both practice and ideology, and it connects it to the other dominant ideologies of the interwar period—nationalism and colonialism; it defines humanitarianism’s role in the history of human rights and addresses how the concept of shared humanity informed bureaucratic, social, and legal humanitarian practices.

Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its national form of Islam, “Moroccan Islam.” This book argues that Moroccan Islam is far from timeless, that the discourse on Moroccan Islam was the collective product of a generation of French scholars, volunteer ethnologists, and colonial officers. The chapters in part 1 trace the history of the Moroccan colonial archive over the period 1900–1912. They argue that the Moroccan colonial archive was not just a product of its Algerian colonial roots and discursive destiny. Rather, it must be viewed against the background of the multiple historical conjunctures (diplomatic, political, and intellectual). The chapters in part 2 explore the transformation of Moroccan Islam following the 1912 establishment of the French protectorate. In this phase, French ethnographers were tasked with providing the basis for native policy planning. A series of publications were launched and new institutions were founded, among them, the Institut des hautes marocaines and the Ecole supérieure des lettres. Chapters in this section also detail the development of French policy toward Moroccan Berbers and cities. Part 3 traces how the discourse on Moroccan Islam provided the ideological template for the French protectorate over Morocco, a model of indirect rule that claimed to be deeply respectful of Moroccan traditions and culture and the preexisting Moroccan state structures. Ultimately, the French colonial project was deeply dependent upon the hegemony of the discourse on Moroccan Islam. It structured, organized, and institutionalized the perceptions of the protectorate for non-Moroccans and Moroccans alike, in the process, creating the modern Moroccan polity.

Westerners and non-Westerners alike tend to agree that the colonial and postcolonial worlds are characterized by “elastic” conceptions of time, whose origins are primordial. Such dispositions toward time, this book provocatively argues, were, in fact, a nineteenth-century creation, one that was every bit as technological and modern as their European and American temporal counterparts. Surprisingly, it was the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone into colonial Egypt between 1830 and 1940 that triggered the development of unique practices of timekeeping that deceptively evade the modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These newly introduced means of conveyance did not drive social synchronization and standardized timekeeping, as conventionally understood by social scientists. Rather, they often promoted “countertempos” predicated on unease with the time of the clock, and a vocal disdain with “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, linearity, and punctuality. In this pioneering history of transportation and communication technology in the modern Middle East, On Barak retraces to these countertempos the universal notion of an empty and homogeneous standard time of modernity. To these countertempos we also owe much of the current political language in the Arab world, a lexicon dominated by nonlinear, temporal terms.