From the former editor in chief of Haaretz, the first in-depth, comprehensive biography of Ariel Sharon, the most dramatic and imposing Israeli political and military leader of the last forty years.
The life of Ariel Sharon spans much of modern Israel's history. A commander in the Israeli Army from its inception in 1948, Sharon participated in the 1948 War of Independence, played decisive roles in the 1956 Suez War and the Six-Day War of 1967, and is credited here with the shift in the outcome of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
After leaving the professional army, Sharon became a political leader and served in numerous governments, most prominently as the defense minister during the 1982 Lebanon War in which he bore "personal responsibility," according to the state's commission of inquiry, for massacres of Palestinian civilians by Lebanese militia. As a general and as a politician, he championed the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. But as prime minister, he performed a dramatic reversal: orchestrating Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
Landau brilliantly chronicles Sharon's surprising about-face, combining the immediacy of firsthand reportage with the analysis and independent insight of a historian's perspective. Sharon suffered a stroke in January 2006 and remains in a persistent vegetative state. This biography recounts the life of the man who is considered by many to be Israel's greatest military leader and political statesman, illustrating how Sharon's leadership transformed Israel, and how his views were shaped by the changing nature of Israeli society.
Half a century ago, the United States overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, whose "crime" was nationalizing the country's oil industry.
In a cloak-and-dagger story of spies, saboteurs, and secret agents, Kinzer reveals the involvement of Eisenhower, Churchill, Kermit Roosevelt, and the CIA in Operation Ajax, which restored Mohammad Reza Shah to power. Reza imposed a tyranny that ultimately sparked the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which, in turn, inspired fundamentalists throughout the Muslim world, including the Taliban and terrorists who thrived under its protection.
"It is not far-fetched," Kinzer asserts, "to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."
The bestselling author of Gates of Fire and Killing Rommel delivers his first work of military nonfiction—an epic narrative of the Six Day War. June 5, 1967. The fearsome, Soviet-equipped Egyptian Army and its 1000 tanks are massed on Israel’s southern border. Meanwhile, the Syrian Army is shelling the much smaller nation from the north. And to the east, Jordan and Iraq are moving brigades and fighter squadrons into position to attack. Egypt’s President Nasser has declared that the Arab world’s goal is no less than “the destruction of Israel.”June 10, 1967. The combined Arab armies are in ruins, their air forces totally destroyed. Israel’s citizen-soldiers have seized the Gaza Strip and the entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. The land under Israeli control has tripled. The charismatic, eye-patch wearing Defense Minister Moshe Dayan has barreled through the Lion’s Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem, meeting up with a gang of paratroopers who have already raised the blue and white flag that frames the Star of David.How on earth did this happen?Only Steven Pressfield could get the real story from the fighter jocks in the air, the tank commanders through the sand, and the infantrymen on the ground. Through more than 300 hours of interviews conducted in Israel, he has written a gripping chronicle of the six days that changed the Middle East forever. He also captures the universal experience of individual soldiers compelled to stare down mortal fear and move headlong into a firestorm. The Lion’s Gate blends the immediacy of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, the esprit de corps of Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers, and the soul of James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers. It will join the indispensable canon of military nonfiction.
Widely respected as a civil libertarian, legal educator, and defense attorney extraordinaire, Alan M. Dershowitz has also been a passionate though not uncritical supporter of Israel. In this book, he presents an ardent defense of Israel's rights, supported by indisputable evidence. Dershowitz takes a close look at what Israel's accusers and detractors are saying about this war-torn country. He accuses those who attack Israel of international bigotry and backs up his argument with hard facts.
Across the Western alliance, liberal politicians and pundits are calling for renewed diplomatic engagement with Iran, convinced that Tehran will respond to reason and halt its nuclear weapons program. Yet, according to bestselling author and former U.N. ambassador Dore Gold, countries have repeatedly tried diplomatic talks and utterly failed. In The Rise of Nuclear Iran, Gold traces these past failures and explains why diplomacy will continue to backfire, no matter who is president or which party is in power.
Hezbollah is the most powerful Islamist group operating in the Middle East today, and no other Western journalist has penetrated as deeply inside this secretive organization as Nicholas Blanford. Now Blanford has written the first comprehensive inside account of Hezbollah and its enduring struggle against Israel. Based on more than a decade and a half of reporting in Lebanon and conversations with Hezbollah's determined fighters, Blanford reveals their ideology, motivations, and training, as well as new information on military tactics, weapons, and sophisticated electronic warfare and communications systems.
Using exclusive sources and his own dogged investigative skills, Blanford traces Hezbollah's extraordinary evolution-from a zealous group of raw fighters motivated by Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution into the most formidable non-state military organization in the world, whose charismatic leader vows to hasten Israel's destruction. With dramatic eyewitness accounts, including Blanford's own experiences of the battles, massacres, triumphs, and tragedies that have marked the conflict, the story follows the increasingly successful campaign of resistance that led to Israel's historic withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.
Warriors of God shows how Hezbollah won hearts and minds with exhaustive social welfare programs and sophisticated propaganda skills. Blanford traces the group's secret military build-up since 2000 and reveals the stunning scope of its underground network of tunnels and bunkers, becoming the only journalist to independently discover and explore them. With the Middle East fearful of another, even more destructive war between Lebanon and Israel, Blanford tenaciously pursues Hezbollah's post-2006 battle plans in the Lebanese mountains, earning him newspaper scoops as well as a terrifying interrogation and a night in jail.
Featuring sixteen years of probing interviews with Hezbollah's leaders and fighters, Warriors of God is essential to understanding a key player in a region rocked by change and uncertainty.
'In a Nutshell', the new 1-CD audiobook series from Naxos AudioBooks, continues with a fascinating history of Afghanistan. For centuries it has been the playground of big powers, from Alexander the Great to the British Empire and the Soviet Union. It has been torn by internal strife and ideological differences, yet Afghans, tribal though they may be, remain a proud nation. Here is a short history, setting the background to the current situation.
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. It is the story of a nation struggling to take form, a nation undermined by its own demons while every forty to sixty years a great power disrupts whatever progress has been made. Related in storytelling style, Games without Rules provides revelatory insight into a country at the center of political debate.
"A breezy, accessible overview of centuries of messy Afghan history, including the present military quagmire...Lively instruction on how Afghanistan has coped, and continues to cope, with being a strategic flash point."-Kirkus Reviews
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.
With his hallmark insight into the forces at play in the Middle East and his acclaimed journalistic skill, Lawrence Wright takes us through each of the thirteen days of the Camp David conference, illuminating the issues that have made the problems of the region so intractable, as well as exploring the scriptural narratives that continue to frame the conflict. In addition to his in-depth accounts of the lives of the three leaders, Wright draws vivid portraits of other fiery personalities who were present at Camp David––including Moshe Dayan, Osama el-Baz, and Zbigniew Brzezinski––as they work furiously behind the scenes. Wright also explores the significant role played by Rosalynn Carter.
What emerges is a riveting view of the making of this unexpected and so far unprecedented peace. Wright exhibits the full extent of Carter’s persistence in pushing an agreement forward, the extraordinary way in which the participants at the conference—many of them lifelong enemies—attained it, and the profound difficulties inherent in the process and its outcome, not the least of which has been the still unsettled struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
In Thirteen Days in September, Wright gives us a resonant work of history and reportage that provides both a timely revisiting of this important diplomatic triumph and an inside look at how peace is made.
Timmerman, an investigative reporter who has written extensively about the Middle East for more than two decades, goes deep inside the Arab world to reveal the depth and extent of anti-Semitic hatred there-and to expose how the "new" anti-Semitism means not just hatred of Jews but also hatred of America and the West.
From Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Lebanon, vicious anti-Semitic and antiAmerican propaganda is spewing forth from the preachers of hate: Muslim clerics, government newspapers, government television networks, and even government officials. Many Muslim leaders are not simply encouraging the hatred; they are actually spending vast sums of money to spread the lies that spawned the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks on America, the March 2004 Madrid bombing, and the May 2004 attack that killed six Westerners in Saudi Arabia.
Even more troubling, the hatred has spread throughout Europe and even to the United States. Timmerman has uncovered jaw-dropping examples of this anti-Semitic and anti-American hatred in this country, including at some of our most prestigious universities.
Preachers of Hate shows how the United States is suffering many defeats in the war on terror precisely because we continue to ignore this very real threat.
In Like Dreamers, acclaimed journalist Yossi Klein Halevi interweaves the stories of a group of 1967 paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem, tracing the history of Israel and the divergent ideologies shaping it from the Six-Day War to the present.
In Like Dreamers, acclaimed journalist Yossi Klein Halevi interweaves the stories of a group of 1967 paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem, tracing the history of Israel and the divergent ideologies shaping it from the Six-Day War to the present.
Following the lives of seven young members from the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade, the unit responsible for restoring Jewish sovereignty to Jerusalem, Halevi reveals how this band of brothers played pivotal roles in shaping Israel's destiny long after their historic victory. While they worked together to reunite their country in 1967, these men harbored drastically different visions for Israel's future.
One emerges at the forefront of the religious settlement movement, while another is instrumental in the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. One becomes a driving force in the growth of Israel's capitalist economy, while another ardently defends the socialist kibbutzim. One is a leading peace activist, while another helps create an anti-Zionist terror underground in Damascus.
Like Dreamers is a nuanced, in-depth look at these diverse men and the conflicting beliefs that have helped to define modern Israel and the Middle East.
