You can now go to the ‘Buy’ button on the web-page for Rami Zurayk’s ‘War Diary: Lebanon 2006’ and place your advance order for this unique, 60-page work. The ebook will cost you $4.00 (in many different formats), and the paperback will cost you $7.00, plus shipping.
Here is the back-cover text:
- In the summer of 2006, the Israeli military undertook a mega-lethal 33-day attack against Lebanon in pursuit of what came to be known as the ‘Dahieh Doctrine’: an attempt to inflict such dire punishment on the country’s civilian population that they would—Israel’s leaders hoped—turn against the Hizbullah resistance movement once and for all. The attempt failed. Hizbullah emerged from the assault intact and with its political standing, in Lebanon and most of the Arab world, much stronger than before.
Rami Zurayk, a veteran activist from the Lebanese left and the author of Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring, stayed in Lebanon throughout the war. He was in Beirut and in his family’s home village in South Lebanon, working with other activists to relieve the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of civilians pushed out of their homes by Israel’s assault.
War Diary: Lebanon 2006 is the journal Zurayk kept of those 33 days. It is intimate, brutally honest, angry, impassioned, tender—and often bitingly funny. In his wry, diarists’s voice he explains why so many Arab leftists are ready today to make common cause with their more Islamist compatriots as they jointly defend their societies against the attacks not just of Israel but of Western governments and publics that sometimes seem deeply hostile to Arab and Muslim aspirations.
An engaging, must-read document, War Diary: Lebanon 2006 provides much-needed context for understanding the passions and politics of the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011.
I am so happy to make copies of this great work available to the public.
If you want to see the analysis I published of the 33-day war in Boston Review at the end of 2006, you can find it here. Rami’s view of the whole tragic affair, as he recorded it each day during the war, was much more intimate.
If you like what you see on War Diary‘s web-page, please circulate it widely to your friends and urge them to place advance orders, too. We should be able to get the ebook to you within the next week– and the paperback, just a few days after that.
This Saturday, by the way, is the anniversary of the Qana Massacre, one of the most grisly single episodes of the whole war.
p.s. If you go to the sales page(s) for the book, they’ll look as if they are run completely by our partners from OR Books. Well, they are. But we’ll be getting some mention of JWB onto those pages very son– along with a button that can send you back to browse more titles from our list, not just theirs. For now, you’ll have to use the back button– or go “back” to JWB in another tab.