Where Now for Palestine? marks a turning point for the Middle East. Since 2000, the attacks of 9/11, the death of Arafat and the elections of Hamas and Kadima have meant that the Israel/Palestine 'two-state solution' now seems illusory. This collection critically revisits the concept of the 'two-state solution' and maps the effects of local and global political changes on both Palestinian people and politics. The authors discuss the changing face of Fateh, Israeli perceptions of Palestine, and the influence of the Palestinian diaspora. The book also analyzes the environmental destruction of Gaza and the West bank, the economic viability of a Palestinian state and the impact of US foreign policy in the region. This authoritative and up-to-date guide to the impasse facing the region is required reading for anyone wishing to understand a conflict entrenched at the heart of global politics.

“A rare historical insight into the tragic changes taking place in Palestine.” —Jimmy Carter From one of Palestine’s leading writers, a lyrical, elegiac account of one man’s wanderings through the landscape he loves—once pristine, now forever changed by settlements and walls—updated with a new afterword by the author. “I often come to walk in these hills,” I said to the man who was doing all the talking and seemed to be the commander. “In fact I was once here with my wife, it was 1999, and some of your soldiers shot at us.” “It was over on that side,” the soldier pointed out. “I was there,” he said, smiling. When Raja Shehadeh first started hill walking in Palestine, in the late 1970s, he was not aware that he was traveling through a vanishing landscape. In recent years, his hikes have become less than bucolic and sometimes downright dangerous. That is because his home is Ramallah, on the Palestinian West Bank, and the landscape he traverses is now the site of a tense standoff between his fellow Palestinians and settlers newly arrived from Israel. In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at length on the character of his native land, a terrain of olive trees on terraced hillsides, luxuriant valleys carved by sacred springs, carpets of wild iris and hyacinth and ancient monasteries built more than a thousand years ago. Shehadeh's love for this magical place saturates his renderings of its history and topography. But latterly, as seemingly endless concrete is poured to build settlements and their surrounding walls, he finds the old trails are now impassable and the countryside he once traversed freely has become contested ground. He is harassed by Israeli border patrols, watches in terror as a young hiking companion picks up an unexploded missile and even, on one occasion when accompanied by his wife, comes under prolonged gunfire. Amid the many and varied tragedies of the Middle East, the loss of a simple pleasure such as the ability to roam the countryside at will may seem a minor matter. But in Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh's elegy for his lost footpaths becomes a heartbreaking metaphor for the deprivations of an entire people estranged from their land.

Tourism in Palestine has been receiving an increasingly important profile given its economic and religious importance and the significant role it plays in Israeli-Palestinian relations, representation of Palestinian statehood and identity, and wider Middle Eastern politics. Nevertheless, Palestine, like much of the Middle East as a whole, remains extremely underrepresented in tourism literature. This title aims to fill this void by being the first book dedicated to exploring the significance of tourism in relationship to Palestine. The book examines the role of tourism in Palestine at three main levels. First, it provides an overview of destination management and marketing issues for the tourism industry in Palestine and addresses not only the visitor markets and the economic significance of tourism but also the realities of the difficulties of destination management, marketing and promotion of the Palestinian state. Second, it provides a series chapters and case studies that interrogate not only the various forms of tourism in Palestine but also its economic, social, environmental and spiritual importance. This section also conveys a dimension to tourism in Palestine that is not usually appreciated in the Western mainstream media. The third section indicates the way in which tourism in Palestine highlights broader questions and debates in tourism studies and the way in which travel in the region is framed in wider discourses. A significant dimension of the book is the attention it gives to the different voices of stakeholders in Palestinian tourism at varying levels of scale. This timely volume will offer the reader significant insight into the challenges and issues of tourism in this area now and in the future. It will benefit those interested in tourism, Middle East studies, politics, economics, development studies and geography.

In works such as "Culture and Imperialism," Said has compelled us to question our culture's most privileged myths. Now with this impassioned and incisive book, our foremost Palestinian-American intellectual challenges the official version of the Middle East "peace process." "He challenges and stimulates our thinking in every area."-- "Washington Post Book World"