The starting point for explaining modern Palestinian political history is the assumption that Palestinians failed to organize adequately during the British Mandate (1918–1948), were defeated by the Zionist movement, and consequently dispersed from their homeland. That Palestinians did not unite politically during this crucial period in their history, nor cooperate economically, nor even band together militarily is considered corollaries of this organizational incapacity and reasons enough for their failure to achieve a national sovereignty of their own. Thus Porath notes that ultimately no Palestinian political organization could bridge the divisions of region, family, and narrow economic or political interest which encouraged the proliferation of parties and weakened the drive against Zionism. Ann Mosely Lesch calls her book on Arab politics in Palestine, “the frustration of a nationalist movement.”

Scholars often acknowledge reproductive behavior as a core issue in Israeli politics but theyseldom examine how public policies affect family size. Israel has designed no official governmentfertility program, but the country's leaders are nevertheless obsessed with Jewish natality.Israeli women are bombarded with regulations affecting access to contraceptives and abortionprocedures and with all sorts of unsubtle massages about the importance of mothering as a factorin the state's continuing vitality and fulfilling its national purpose. Jacqueline Portugeseexplains Israel's ongoing efforts to encourage a high Jewish birthrate by focusing a feministlens on public discourse, popular culture, and particular policies, all of which, she argues, have ahighly pernicious impact on women. Despite the differences in feminist perspectives on the issueof fertility, they share a critical stance toward state regulation of the family, and all aidPortugese's narrative in uncovering and explaining the large repertoire of relativelyintrusive regulatory mechanisms at the disposal of the government. The special insight of Fertility in Israel lies in its clarifications of the connections between seemingly benignwelfare benefits and tax incentives and denying women autonomy with regard to the decision tobear children.

An argument that the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians can be resolved no longer seems utopian, and some might even assert that it no longer needs to be made. It is in this sense that this book of essays by the Israeli journalist and essayist Amos Elon is important, for it describes how deeply the conflict has structured regional political developments and how much is involved in breaking the cycles of violence and hostility. Elon's perspective on the prolonged confrontation between Israel and the Arab world conveys a strong sense of contingency: the confrontation that is taken for granted as a fixture of Middle Eastern politics is interpreted by Elon as the result of bad choices made by politicians whose attachment to the past turned into an unbearable burden for the future. With his powerful prose, Elon raises fundamental questions about the authoritarian polities characteristic of the Arab states, as well as about the nature of Israeli democracy and its concentration of political power. These essays, mostly drawn from previously published articles in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books from 1967 through 1995, provoke a serious critique of Israel's dominant culture even as they are very much a product of it.