A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict

The Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the world’s most polarizing confrontations. Its current phase, Israel’s “temporary” occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, turned a half century old in June 2017. In these timely and provocative essays, Gershon Shafir asks three questions—What is the occupation, why has it lasted so long, and how has it transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? His cogent answers illuminate how we got here, what here is, and where we are likely to go. Shafir expertly demonstrates that at its fiftieth year, the occupation is riven with paradoxes, legal inconsistencies, and conflicting interests that weaken the occupiers’ hold and leave the occupation itself vulnerable to challenge.

• Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo
• The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine
• Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures)
• Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor
• Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
• Living Emergency: Israel's Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank
• Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness
• The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years Of War
• Ten Myths About Israel
• My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel