The perennial question of the West
The Israel-Palestine conflict is a subject that blurs moral categories and provokes fierce debate. How can one write about the subject, when every word is immediately politicised? Three new books by very different authors take on precisely this challenge.
German-Palestinian journalist Alena Jabarine describes her search for Palestine in "The Last Sky". Canadian-Egyptian journalist Omar El Akkad presents an essay on the moral corruption of the West. And French-Lebanese political scientist Gilbert Achcar places the destruction of Gaza in its historical context.
In "Der letzte Himmel: Meine Suche nach Palästina" ("The Last Sky: My Search for Palestine"), Jabarine offers an account of her time in the West Bank between 2020 and 2022. She describes a Palestine that was marked by expulsions, land expropriations and arbitrary arrests, even before 7 October 2023. The focus is on the voices of Palestinians, but also of Israelis she encountered.
Jabarine's own biography informs her reporting: her mother is German, her father belongs to the Palestinian minority in Israel. The author—unlike her Palestinian interviewees—also has an Israeli passport.
Jabarine tells the story of her friends Farah and Balqees from the West Bank, who are not allowed to travel to Tel Aviv, where Jabarine grew up, nor to Palestinian East Jerusalem. She reflects on her own privileges, making visible the structural inequality that exists not just between Israelis and Palestinians, but also among Palestinians with and without Israeli passports.
No shying away
The book is particularly strong when Jabarine turns to subjects rarely acknowledged or spoken of in Germany. Calls for the release of hostages kidnapped by Hamas rightly receive much attention, yet the systematic detention of Palestinians without charge—so-called administrative detention—is an issue largely ignored in Germany.
Jabarine tells the story of Zayn and the activist Issa Amro from Hebron, both of whom have been detained multiple times without trial, a routine practice in Israel.
Jabarine doesn't shy away from difficult topics, such as when she recounts her encounter with Randy, a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In the early 2000s, Randy was involved in planning suicide bombings and spent 20 years in Israeli prisons as a result. What drives people to such violence, Jabarine asks, initially without judgement. She listens and tries, above all, to understand.
When neutrality becomes complicity
German scholars of the Middle East often wear the mask of political neutrality. But both Western philosophy and the classical Islamic tradition insist that knowledge carries an ethical duty. A call for moral responsibility.
She also engages openly with an Israeli soldier, Guy, asking him directly why he participates in the policy of occupation. The answers offered by "The Last Sky" in response to questions such as these are mostly complex and not always clear-cut, but the book's greatest strength lies in the way it reveals contradictions and makes fractures visible.
It is clear that this is a very personal work, not only because the voices of Jabarine's friends and family appear in the text. In her foreword, Jabarine explains that she wanted to find her voice as a Palestinian living in Germany, a voice that is often dehumanised and delegitimised in public debate.
The West—a fiction?
Forms of dehumanisation are also at the heart of Omar El Akkad's essay "One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This", which originally appeared in English and has now been published in German. Unlike Jabarine, El Akkad would appear to have already found his voice.
He doesn't ask questions, but rather denounces the moral corruption of Western liberalism in the light of mass killings in Gaza. He describes Israel's actions as genocide.
For El Akkad, "the West" is a "fiction of moral convenience". It is not a system of universal values, but one in which belonging is allotted based on origin, religion and skin colour, something the war in Gaza has made abundantly clear.
As a reporter in Afghanistan, El Akkad had already witnessed early on how non-Western people are dehumanised in the media. It was only later that he realised his belief in having found an ideological home in Western liberalism was a delusion—as he admitted in an interview with Jacobin magazine.
The Christian case against the war on Gaza
Munther Isaac, a West Bank pastor, rejects Bible-based justifications for war and calls Gaza a "moral compass". In "Christ in the Rubble", he presents a view of the war that is polarising without being destructive.
El Akkad laments the high demands placed on people with a Muslim or Arab background. No matter how clearly he condemns authoritarian regimes and Hamas, he points out, it is never enough. Anyone who comes from the "wrong" region falls under general suspicion.
But El Akkad also takes aim at the Palestine rhetoric of Arab regimes: lip service instead of genuine solidarity is just as evident there. The difference, he writes, is that unlike in the West, he never had any illusions about it.
Gaza: a relapse into barbarism
Unlike Jabarine and El Akkad, Gilbert Achcar, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, takes a historical-analytical approach.
"The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective" brings together texts written between 1994 and 2024 (plus an afterword written in February 2025), reflecting Achcar's decades of expertise.
He provides a detailed analysis of the ideological foundations of Zionism and Hamas. Political Zionism, he argues, was a reaction to European antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries, but also took inspiration from Western colonialism.
The ideology of Hamas, he says, has its roots in Islamic fundamentalism and European antisemitism; here Achcar draws on certain passages in Islamic sources he characterises as "anti-Jewish". The particular synthesis of radical elements, however, he sees as a reaction to Zionist expansionism.
Pax Israelia or bellum aeternum?
With the support of the USA, Israel is reshaping the Middle East. Though framed as a path to stability, their strategy risks locking the region into a permanent conflict.
Achcar is very clear that a future of freedom for Palestinians is impossible without the involvement of Israelis. He considers the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 to be not only a war crime but also a serious strategic miscalculation. Given Israel's military superiority and extreme right-wing government, the brutal response was predictable.
For Achcar, Israel's involvement would require a transformation of Israeli society, which is itself currently right-wing. Just how this change might be achieved remains an open question.
Some warnings from the book's earlier texts have proven alarmingly prescient. Achcar considered a US attack on Iran far more likely under Trump than under a hypothetical Kamala Harris presidency.
The book is weaker, though, when Achcar describes members of the Israeli government as "neo-Nazis" without offering an analytical basis. It is also unfortunate that the role of the Palestinian Authority is only touched upon in passing. Unlike El Akkad, who would appear to have abandoned the West as a "fiction of moral convenience", Achcar reminds us of a very real moral commitment, reflected in international law. It is this order which is threatened by the genocide in Gaza.
"The Western promise of rule of law made in 1945 and renewed in 1990 is now dead. The law of the jungle reigns supreme. May this relapse of international relations into barbarism be reversed before it leads to a new global catastrophe."
Der letzte Himmel: Meine Suche nach Palästina
Alena Jabarine
384 pages (German)
Ullstein Buchverlage, 2025
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar El Akkad
206 pages
Penguin Random House, 2025
Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective
Gilbert Achcar
256 pages
University of California Press, 2025
This is an edited translation of the German original. Translation by Louise East.
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