University of California Press Blog

The Unmaking of the Middle East

Jeremy Salt teaches in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and is the author of Imperialism, Evangelism, and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878-1896. In his latest book, The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (UC Press, June 2008), Salt examines the history and human cost of Western intervention in Arab lands. In his blog below, Salt talks about Presidential Nominee, Barack Obama's recent remarks before the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.

By Jeremy Salt

Barack Obama’s speech to the annual conference of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, was predictable but still shocking, for a man who appeared on the political stage with a message of change.  Arab-Americans, Arabs, Muslims everywhere, and indeed anyone looking for signs of fresh thinking, will be dismayed and disillusioned.  Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Nancy Pelosi all engaged in the bidding war for the Jewish vote at the annual AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference in Washington but because Obama has raised expectations so high it was his speech that was the most dispiriting and disturbing.  Scant regard was shown for international law by this former president of the Harvard Law Review.  Not even the US government regards Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  The western half of the city was seized in 1948.  In the eastern half of the city Israel has no rights but only the responsibilities of an occupying power, which it has serially violated through the permanent changes it has introduced over the past four decades.  For Israel’s erstwhile negotiating partners in Ramallah –  the ‘moderates’ –  East Jerusalem  as the  capital of a Palestinian state is a sine qua non of any peace agreement.  Yet the message for them from Barack Obama was that ‘Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided’. Hamas now has further reason to say ‘what did we tell you?’.   This was a speech that could have been written in the Israeli Foreign Ministry.  There were references to rockets‘ raining down on Sderot’ and ‘raining down on Israel’, but naturally none to the missiles and the artillery and tank shells that  have rained down on occupied Palestinian land  over the past four decades.  There was mention of   the ‘constant threats’ Israel has faced, but naturally not of the constant threat Israel has posed to Arab states in the past six decades.  The word extremism was used in the context of the Palestinians, but naturally not in the context of an Israeli state whose actions in the occupied territories, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights have been condemned time after time over the past six decades by the UN General Assembly and international human rights organizations – not that Obama even mentioned the word ‘occupation’. 

Up till now there is no proof that Syria or Iran are developing nuclear weapons but Obama spoke as if they were, naturally without mentioning the menacing shadow Israel’s actual possession of nuclear weapons has cast across the  Middle East  for nearly four decades.  On this issue Obama spoke as stridently as George W. Bush, Ehud Olmert and John McCain.   ‘I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon’.  He repeated the ‘everything’ so that no one missed the point that he is ready to go to war if necessary.  ‘I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel’.    Obama’s Faustian pact with expediency comes at a price he will be paying for years if he becomes president.   By locking themselves into position behind an Israel that is determined to maintain its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East whatever the cost  (within days of his speech Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz said an attack on Iran was ‘unavoidable’),  he and John McCain have made another war in the Middle East more rather than less likely. This is hardly the kind of change Obama seemed to promise at the beginning of his campaign.   

Audio Interview with Kasra Naji, author of Ahmadinejad

Kasra Naji, author of Ahmadinejad: The Secret History of Iran's Radical Leader (UC Press, February 2008), was recently interviewed by Fresh Air at WHYY/NPR. In the interview, Naji talks about the controversial leader and his rise to power. You can find his interview on the NPR website.

Israel's Occupation

As a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel, Neve Gordon, writes about the history of Israel's occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as the on-going rift between Israel and Palestine dating back to the 1967 war. You can read more about his book and Middle Eastern politics at his website, Israel's Occupation. The University of California Press will be publishing his forthcoming title, Israel's Occupation in Fall 2008.

Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society

Author and Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, Ben Orlove writes in his blog about glacier retreat and how it effects inhabitants in surrounding areas. For more information, check out his blog, Darkening Peaks. The University of California Press published the February 2008 edited collection, Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society, edited by Ben Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian H. Luckman.

Baseball's Color Line

In commemorating the 60th anniversary of baseball's Jackie Robinson Day on April 15th, 2008, author Adrian Burgos, Jr. blogs about how Latinos were subsequently effected by Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier. Baseball Musings posted the article on April 18th. The University of California Press published Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line in 2007.

Aime Cesaire, Martinique Poet and Politician, Dies at 94

The poet and politician, Aimé Césaire, died yesterday at the age of 94.  The New York Times published an obituary yesterday.  The University of California Press published the Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire in 1983. 

Global Pentecostalism: Documentary Video Excerpt

Donald Miller, executive director of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture and director of the USC School of Religion, co-wrote Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement with Tetsunao Yamamori.

This video highlights some of the documentary footage that Miller shot during research visits to more than 20 countries.

Additional clips and interviews are available on a DVD included with the book. Video edited by: Mira Zimet

The Next Generation of College Textbooks

Chuck Crumly, Science Publisher at the University of California Press, continues with the second in a short series of posts about the future of specialized textbooks in the college curriculum.

One of the great strengths of science, as a way of understanding the world, is the connection between past research and future university-level teaching.  Exciting scientific findings percolate into textbooks and, as a result, textbooks are constantly changing. Unfortunately, not all change is for the better.  Sometimes by including new and amazing discoveries important parts of the foundation of the field are omitted.  More often, however, everything is added and nothing is omitted yielding books that ruin the backpacks (not to mention backs) of the students using them.  These mega-textbooks are also difficult to teach from because they suffer from a certain "kitchen sink." quality.  It is not easy to avoid the peripheral and focus on the core of a textbook that seems to have grown as if on steroids.

As mentioned in my previous blog posting, this trend leaves the specialized courses behind because the growth in the number of pages in a text cannot be sustained by a smaller market.  Thus, textbooks for traditionally small classes are disappearing from the marketplace. The solution to both of these phenomena involves establishing a better partnership between the author and the publisher.  The underlying elements of this partnership need to be service to the student, some sacrifice, and sustainable financial plans for each textbook.

Let us imagine a publisher working with an author to create a specialized science textbook.  These days the goal would have to include content that is in print and also in digital form.  Students would be granted the option of obtaining content in either medium. Flexible downloading options would need to be available - from chapter by chapter pay per view to full-text downloads.  Authors would need to agree to changes in the way that royalties are assessed and paid so that this flexibility could be implemented by the publisher.  And, at least in the short term, authors might be asked to do more work with respect to manuscript preparation (e.g. obtaining digital permissions for all content) and accept less money because the publisher is spending more on digital experiments in content development.  This would be the price authors pay to provide service to a smaller student audience.

The author-publisher partnership will not be one-sided.  The publisher will need to experiment with fiscally unproven content delivery systems.  And some will fail.  Individual textbooks will become test subjects or guinea pigs.  Because of this testing phase, individual textbooks are likely to cost more to produce and yield less in a return on the investment.  And this would be the price that the publisher would have to pay.

Assuming that both author and publisher are willing to join in these sacrifices, what would the world of the textbook look like in ten, twenty or thirty years?

Stay tuned - next time is reserved for the crystal ball

John DiIulio, Jr., author of Godly Republic, on Fresh Air

John DiIulio, Jr., the author of Godly Republic, was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air yesterday. They discussed DiIulio's experience as the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and the future of faith in American policy.

Listen to the interview here.

Amazon Kindling New Interest in eBooks?

Amazon's unveiling of their new ebook reader, the Kindle, has generated much attention in both publishing circles and in the general media.  Everybody seems to have an opinion about the Kindle.  The most recent high-profile discussion of the merits of the Amazon Kindle was a piece by Randall Stross in the January 27th edition of the New York Times.

From the beginning, Amazon has been betting that the Kindle will be to book lovers what the iPod has been to music lovers.  Whether the Kindle really catches fire (no pun intended) or lands on the ash heap of failed attempts to digitize the general book business, I do think the conversations about books that the unveiling of the Kindle have started have been profitable for both consumers, publishers, and other people involved in the book trade. 

UC Press has agreed to participate in the Kindle program, and Amazon is in the process of preparing a few dozen files for inclusion as downloadable ebooks for the Kindle reader, so we don't currently have a big stake in this.  But from the media attention that's been lavished on this homely little ebook reading device, one would think that the future of the book business hinged upon its success.  Is it all hyperbole?

From the time I first saw a prototype of the device, I had my doubts that people would want yet another gadget, let alone an expensive gadget, in order to read digital books.  This is, unfortunately, a limitation of today's digital book reading technology.  The very technology that currently makes digital books more readable on screen, E-ink technology, requires a different display than your computer monitor, cell phone, or PDA use.  Indeed, Joe Wikert of John Wiley and Sons recently blogged about this on the Teleread ebook blog, positing that the ideal gadget for reading digital books would be a laptop that is somehow e-ink enabled.

Ultimately, though, Randall Stross's piece in the New York Times, spends less time discussing the technology behind the Kindle and more time discussing how the fate of reading book length treatments of anything in this country might be joined at the hip with wider adoption of electronic reading devices.  The book industry (it has been pointed out many times before) is one of the few entertainment industries that has stubbornly resisted digitization.  This is partly attributable to intellectual property issues with digital books and with borrowed material contained within books themselves, which isn't so much an issue for, say, musical compositions, unless they contain tons of samples.  It's also partially attributable to a sense that a book is in and of itself an aesthetic object, and avid readers from the time they start reading beautifully illustrated, four-color children's books are brought up with this mentality.  And, well, frankly, things just don't move along very quickly in the book business.  But, mostly, readers just haven't take to reading books online, although they're increasingly reading tons of other stuff online.

While none of these things is likely to change overnight, I think that the heat is being turned up by a younger generation that is accustomed to reading on screen and wants instant gratification.  But whether ebooks are ultimately widely adopted turns on not the technology itself but whether or not avid readers (those 20% of the population who buy the overwhelming number of the books sold in this country) begin to turn to ebooks.  Gadget collectors and technophiles won't make or break the ebook business–avid readers will. It also hinges upon whether this country will continue to produce avid readers of books, and some anecdotal evidence from a recent Frontline piece on social networking suggested we might be having some difficulty in this area.

Nonetheless, Amazon is in an excellent position to deliver the goods to these avid readers.  People may argue about Amazon's use of a proprietary format and digital rights management to lock down Kindle ebooks, but for users who just want to get on with the business of reading and who don't care much about managing their ebook collections, these features make this system easy to work with.  This could be the real upside to what Amazon has done.

If the Kindle itself hasn't delivered the future of the ebook, the conversations generated by its introduction have at least given us a glimpse.