The fortune of a salesman and the fate of the Palestinians In her magnificent book the 'Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through 20th-Century Europe', Victoria de Grazia charts the distinctive character of the United States' global hegemony as a market empire. De Grazia begins her book by citing the twenty-eighth American president, Woodrow Wilson, extolling the US virtues of trade and business acumen. In an address to the first World's Salesmanship Congress in 1916, Wilson called…
The legacy of Orientalism in the work of Bernard Lewis In a 'London Review of Books' article about Bernard Lewis' 1986 book 'Semites and Anti- Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice' Richard Wolheim makes the suggestive remark that the subtitle is 'not strictly accurate, for the book manifestly and by design gives prejudice priority over conflict'. Wolheim here touches on a principal feature of Bernard Lewis' work on Islam and Muslim societies: in Lewis'…
As you walk down the alleyways of the Palestinian refugee camps across the Levant you often hear a curious refrain that the refugees utter in their alltoo- common moments of indignation and desperation: Ma alna al Allah w krt al mou'n (We have no recourse except God and the ration card). The refrain refers to the card that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) issued to the vast majority of…
