This article aims to explore the development of what we define as “middle-ground” politics among the Palestinians in Israel. By middle ground, we mean the linkage between Palestine as an abstract notion and the concrete daily concerns of the Palestinians. The activities at demolished Palestinian villages and towns are one of the most salient manifestations of this middle ground. We argue that these activities create a new sense of group identity for many Palestinians and can be termed a re-Palestinization of places in Israel.

Despite the considerable expansion of research in Ottoman economic and social history in recent decades, our knowledge of the long-term trends in prices in the Ottoman Empire, and more generally in the Balkans and the Middle East, is very limited. Economic and social historians of these regions in the late medieval and early modern eras are still unable to make sense of the most basic of monetary magnitudes involving prices, wages, and wealth, even though inter-temporal comparisons of these magnitudes are the most basic prerequisites for studying the long durée.

The two main issues in Israel's foreign policy are relations with the Arab world and relations with the Great Powers, and there is extensive literature on both. But whereas the literature on relations with the Great Powers is marked by a broad consensus, the literature on relations with the Arab world is dominated by a deep and often acrimonious debate. A major landmark in the evolution of this debate was the emergence in the late 1980s of a school of “new,” or revisionist, Israeli historians. Among the members of this group were Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and the present author. We were called the “new historians” because we challenged the traditional Zionist narrative of the birth of Israel and of the first Arab–Israeli war. The momentous events that unfolded in 1948 were the main focus of the debate. Subsequent books by some of these authors extended the critique of Israel's policy in the conflict to the post-independence period. The debate between the “old” and the “new” historians has been going on for nearly two decades, and it is still going strong.

Dionisius Agius, a reader in Arabic and the Medieval Mediterranean at the University of Leeds, has directed his expertise in linguistics and the writings of medieval geographers writing in Arabic to a study of seafaring in the Arabian/Persian Gulf and Oman. Drawing on a wide range of literary sources and more than ten years of fieldwork in the region, Agius has sought in this book “to establish an historical and linguistic link between the present traditional seagoing vessels and coastal boats of the Gulf and Oman, and those of the medieval Islamic period” (p. xv).

This is a frustrating book. It is frustrating because the author, R. J. Barendse, has clearly undertaken an enormous amount of archival research, including extensive work in the Dutch archives, which, for linguistic reasons, have not been sufficiently exploited. His sources provide a wealth of colorful vignettes from the world of trade in the 17th century. The trip from Mosul to Basra, for example, “led through barren deserts, where the single sound was the distant wail of hyenas. No other human beings were seen for days; sometimes on the far horizon appeared campfires” (p. 44). Or the trials and tribulations of a Turkish merchant named Nasr Ali Cagasi who went to Samarkand to buy rhubarb for a Dutch merchant. When he went bankrupt, the Dutch East India Company threw him in jail to force him to pay his debts. Finally, they released him since no one came forward to provide bail; he had to labor as a domestic servant instead (p. 157). Yet the wealth of detail in the book is not presented within a coherent framework. Indeed, organization of the material is so lacking that it is exhausting to read.

In From the “Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe”: European Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Aslı Çırakman argues that European attitudes towards the Ottoman Empire were extremely variable in the 16th and 17th centuries, hardening into a simpler picture as Europeans became more self-confident and more self-critical: “one can observe that in the eighteenth-century images of Ottomans there is more agreement than controversy as to the nature of this peculiar form of government and people” (p. 108). The author seeks to challenge Edward Said's arguments in Orientalism, stating flatly that Said oversimplified early modern attitudes to smooth the way for a teleological argument that European attitudes started out reflexively hostile and only became more so with the rise of imperialist and colonialist agendas in the region. Specifically, she argues that earlier travelers and essayists displayed a more wide-ranging curiosity and therefore produced more diverse perspectives on the Ottoman Empire than did their counterparts in the 18th century.

In A. D. 945, eleven days after receiving his title from the ruling Abbasid Caliph al-Mustakfi, the Buwayhid amir Muizz al-Dawla deposed him. Like the green dome of the palace of Abu Jafar Mansur that had crumbled during the spring rains of 939, the Abbasid caliphate was collapsing inward. Not until the turn of the next century, with the loosening of the hold of the Buwayhid amirs on Baghdad, did a caliph make guarded efforts to assert his divinely sanctioned authority outside his sacred precinct. By that time, beyond the walls of the caliphal palace, monumental changes in the structure of power had long since occurred.