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David Shulman

David Shulman is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016. His books include Śrīnātha: The Poet Who Made Gods and Kings and, most recently, Tamil: A Biography.
 (April 2018)

IN THE REVIEW

Off With Their Heads

‘Kusa and Lava defeating Bharata, Lakshmana, and the monkey army’; from the Razmnamah, a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, 1598

Political Violence in Ancient India

by Upinder Singh
In September 1673, Vijaya Raghava, the last king of the Nayaka dynasty of Tanjavur, in the far south of India, sauntered forth from his palace in a final, suicidal confrontation with enemies from the city-state of Madurai who had broken through the ramparts and entered the royal fort. Vijaya Raghava …

A Hero in His Own Words

Shimon Peres

No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination, and the Making of Modern Israel

by Shimon Peres
The theme is an ancient one, fondly nurtured by the Jews for the last two millennia. The Passover Haggadah says it explicitly: “In every generation they come at us to exterminate us, and the Holy One, Blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” Needless to say, the Jews have good reason to recite these sentences once a year. The problem lies not in the historical record that gives them credibility but in the emotional and cultural investment in the idea, or perhaps the romance, of life on the edge of extinction, and in the political consequences of that idea in a generation for which the threat has vastly diminished, perhaps even disappeared.

Israel’s Irrational Rationality

Israeli policemen removing a protester during the eviction of Jewish settlers from the illegal settlement of Amona in the occupied West Bank, February 2017

The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East

by Guy Laron

The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine

by Nathan Thrall
This June, Israel is marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War. Some Israelis, including most members of the present government, are celebrating the country’s swift victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria as the beginning of the permanent annexation of the entire Palestinian West Bank; others, like me, mourn it as the start of a seemingly inexorable process of moral corruption and decline, the result of the continuing occupation of the West Bank, along with Israel’s now indirect but still-crippling control of Gaza. As it happens, my own life in Israel coincides exactly with the occupation.

Israel: The Broken Silence

Popular Protest in Palestine: The Uncertain Future of Unarmed Resistance

by Marwan Darweish and Andrew Rigby

Return: A Palestinian Memoir

by Ghada Karmi
Israeli human rights activists and what is left of the Israeli peace groups, including joint Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations, are under attack. In a sense, this is nothing very new. But open attacks on the Israeli left have now assumed a far more sinister and ruthless character; some of them are being played out in the interrogation rooms of Israeli prisons. Clearly, there is an ongoing coordinated campaign involving the government, members of the Knesset, the police, various semiautonomous right-wing groups, and the public media. Politically driven harassment, including violent and illegal arrest, interrogation, denial of legal support, virulent incitement, smear campaigns, even death threats issued by proxy—all this has become part of the repertoire of the far right, which dominates the present government and sets the tone for its policies.

NYR DAILY

Bulldozing the Peace Process in Israel

A Palestinian woman looking at the remains of her home after it was demolished by Israeli bulldozers, near Hebron, the West Bank, March 6, 2017

When Netanyahu claims, as he did recently, that Israel’s situation has never been better, he means, in part, that in his own mind he has smashed the Palestinian national movement once and for all. I have no doubt that this has been his goal all along. Indeed, Palestinians in the occupied territories are worn out, demoralized, fenced into small discontinuous enclaves where they lack basic human rights, where their land and other property may be appropriated at any moment, and where they may be arrested and incarcerated at the army’s whim. They are, by now, largely paralyzed by despair. Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem may galvanize them back into action; we shall see.

Submerged in the Cosmic Kingdom

Guge was once home to a major inner-Asian dynasty whose artists and craftsmen produced a plethora of masterpieces over some five centuries—including some large-scale murals and exquisitely carved and painted sculptures depicting Buddhist visions of the cosmos and its deities. Little known in the West largely because of Guge’s inaccessible location, the works have now been richly and systematically documented in the photographer and art historian Peter van Ham’s astonishing new book, Guge: Ages of Gold.

Palestine: The End of the Bedouins?

Abu Rasmi Ayyub amidst the ruins of al-Hammeh, 2016

Today, most of the Jordan Valley, undoubtedly one of the most ravishing landscapes on the planet, is situated in what is known as Area C of occupied Palestinian territory. This means that, with the exception of the ancient city of Jericho and its surroundings (which are in Area A, under Palestinian rule), the valley is under direct and exclusive Israeli military, legal, and political control, and also that large parts of it are taken up by Israeli settlements or by lands that have been reserved for future Israeli settlement. It also means that a Palestinian population of some 15,000 Bedouins who are settled in the valley is tacitly targeted for expulsion.