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Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents

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DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2014.898951

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 The European Legacy
Toward New Paradigms

ISSN: 1084-8770 (Print) 1470-1316 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cele20

Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History

with Documents

Markus Meckl

To cite this article: Markus Meckl (2014) Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with
Documents, The European Legacy, 19:3, 398-399, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2014.898951

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 398 BOOK REVIEWS
In this concise, intelligent and provocative
volume, an October imprint of MIT Press, Mal-
colm Turvey raises a bold challenge to com-
monly accepted wisdom about key European
avant-garde films and filmmakers dating from
the 1920s. A Sarah Lawrence film professor
and editor of the October academic journal,
Turvey sifts the various strands of Dadaism and
Surrealism, and examines silent film era con-
text and syntax, in order to locate nuance,
complexity and distinctions in the ways the
avant-garde—artists, musicians, photographers
Downloaded by [University Of Akureyri], [Markus Meckl] at 02:51 20 May 2016
and writers as well as nascent auteurs like René
Clair and Luis Buñuel—approached the young
visual medium. The pioneering avant-garde
filmmakers have been too simplistically under-
stood, the author argues.
Turvey meticulously dissects five major
works: the abstract Rhythmus or Rhythm 21
by the influential German Hans Richter
(1921); Ballet Mécanique by French painter
Fernand Léger (like Richter, a Cubist turned
Dadaist) and American in Paris Dudley Mur-
phy (1923–24); Entre’Acte (1924) and Paris
Qui Dort (1925) by René Clair; the eye-
slitting, ant-crawling, dream-seeded Un chien
Andalou (1929), the most widely-seen of the
films, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali; and
the experimental documentary Man with a
Movie Camera (1929) by the Russian Dziga
Vertov and wife-editor Elizaveta Svilova.
Although this is a slender book nicely
sized (7¼ x 9¼) to squeeze onto any shelf, to
summarize its dense deep-cogitating almost
seems unfair. Early avant-garde filmmakers
(here I go anyway) ranged in theory and
practice. While avant-gardists shared concerns
about modern life, they disagreed about what
aspects of modernity required aesthetic or
social transformation. The movement was not
merely destructive, and it was far from a
wholehearted celebration of the irrational.
Thus “To conflate the assault on society of
some of its members with a condemnation of
bourgeois modernity as a whole,” Turvey
writes, would be wrong. There were camps
and subtleties. Machinism, for example, can
be misconstrued as an attack on the machine
world of modern times; close study, however,
reveals many avant-gardists saw machines as
“useful” and as “beautiful objects in their
own right.”
While abstract and shock visuals were
part of the movement, the avant-gardists
were not “anti-film” per se; indeed many
avant-gardists borrowed shrewdly and heav-
ily from mainstream narrative techniques.
While tracing the antecedents of style and
imagery can be knotty (as when Turvey dis-
cusses the “anti-subjectivist subjectivism” of
Dada), the author’s always intelligent prose
is supported by lovely layouts of frame cap-
tures. Scholars drawn to the avant-garde will
find here an indispensable addition to the
niche.
PATRICK MCGILLIGAN
Marquette University, USA
Pat.McGilligan@gmail.com
© 2014, Patrick McGilligan
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2014.898950
Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A
History with Documents. By D. Charles
Smith (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s
Press, 2010), xxii + 583 pp. $50.95 paper.
In his introduction to “Perpetual Peace: A
Philosophical Sketch,” Kant mentions a
Dutch innkeeper who named his pub
“Perpetual Peace” with a drawing of a grave-
yard under the inscription on the signboard.
Faced with this troubling possibility Kant
suggests that reason might lead us to look for
an alternative and he offers in nine articles
a foundation for a lasting peace. The
recommendations he gives are quite simple;
they include, for example, the advice that no
state “shall come under the dominion of
another state” and that “No state shall, during
war, permit such acts of hostility which
would make mutual confidence in the
subsequent peace impossible.”
Charles D. Smith’s book on the Arab-
Israeli conflict leaves the reader with the
feeling that the two sides have little interest in
a liberal Kantian approach to international rela-
tions; both sides, as he demonstrates in his very
impressive study, just follow an approach
called Realism. According to this approach the
relation between states is based on power—
power as a necessary means to secure national
interests. Moral questions are secondary.
The two sides in this conflict act under
these premises and Smith attempts to explain
their motives for doing so. He sees himself as

a chronicler of the events, not their judge: “I
consider Zionist and Palestinian attitudes to
be equally comprehensible in the context of
their respective histories and cultures” (vi).
Since no other conflict in the second half of
the twentieth century has drawn so much
attention and emotion as the Arab-Israeli
conflict, an approach which does not judge
but tries to understand it is already an
achievement.
In order to understand the conflict Smith
takes the reader on a tour de force through
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the history of Palestine in the last 3,000 years,
starting from ancient Israel and ending with
Benjamin Netanyahu forming a coalition in
2009. Nearly two-thirds of the book is dedi-
cated to the post-1948 period, following the
creation of the State of Israel.
The weak point of the book, conceived
as a textbook for university students, with a
selective choice of historical documents on
the topic treated in each of its eleven chap-
ters, are its sources. For example, while one
would expect an author of the history of
French-German relations to know both
French and German, for a history of the
Israeli-Arab conflict this does not seem neces-
sary. Smith does not use any literature from
these languages, he relies almost entirely, with
a few French exceptions, on English sources.
MARKUS MECKL
University of Akureyri, Iceland
markus@unak.is
© 2014, Markus Meckl
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2014.898951
Nietzsche’s Gay Science: Dancing Coher-
ence. By Monika M. Langer (Hampshire,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), xviii + 275
pp. £18.99 paper.
As Walter Kaufmann self-consciously
observed regarding Nietzsche’s writing style,
“As soon as one attempts to penetrate beyond
the clever epigrams and well turned insults to
grasp their consequences and to coordinate
them, one is troubled” (Nietzsche: Philosopher,
Psychologist, Antichrist, 3d ed. [Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1968], 72). The
Gay Science has always proved in this regard
to be the most troubling of all of his works
View publication stats
BOOK REVIEWS 399
that Nietzsche saw published, and this fact is
reflected in the secondary literature. As Mon-
ika Langer explains in her Introduction, pre-
vious commentators have almost unanimously
maintained that The Gay Science lacks any
kind of sequential coherence or systematic
unity. The most common view is that the
entire book consists of a collection of apho-
risms that have little sequential logic and that
evidence no thematic cohesiveness whatso-
ever. As Langer notes, the most sympathetic
recent interpretations are those of Kathleen
Higgins and David Allison: Higgins suggests
that Nietzsche, with his fragmentary style,
“directs our thinking into specific sequences,
manipulating our experience of reflecting to
provoke certain associations” (xii), and Alli-
son “contends Nietzsche intentionally made
the work nondirective, to achieve ‘the exis-
tential effect’ of having to ponder and
respond to a world with no ultimate purpose
or moral absolutes” (xiii).
Langer takes a courageous step in placing
herself in direct opposition to the entire
tradition of interpretation. She argues that the
aphorisms, sections, and parts of The Gay
Science are interconnected, and that
Nietzsche’s text in fact embodies a coherent
whole the integral unity of which can be
revealed through “a detailed, sequential read-
ing of the entire work as it appeared in its
second edition” (xiv). Langer maintains,
moreover, that “The Gay Science arguably
has three main, interconnected themes: the
de-deification of nature, the world, morality,
and knowledge; the naturalization of our-
selves; and the beautification of our lives”
(xv).
Regrettably, Langer’s “sequential read-
ing” fails to reveal any unity in Nietzsche’s
text, and even the thematic unity we might
expect from her mention of the “main, inter-
connected themes” never appears. The struc-
ture of The Gay Science poses insuperable
difficulties for such a “detailed, sequential
reading” as that followed by Langer: Nietz-
sche’s text contains a Preface, a Prelude con-
sisting of 63 poems, a First Book of 56
aphorisms, a Second Book of 51 aphorisms, a
Third Book of 168 aphorisms, a Fourth Book
of 67 aphorisms, a Fifth Book of 41 apho-
risms, and an Appendix of 14 “songs.” In her
attempt to proceed “sequentially” through this
text, from beginning to end, she obviously