In this book, first published in Hebrew in 1975 and now available in English for the first time with an introduction by Noam Chomsky, Amnon Kapeliouk traces the policies and attitudes that led to the 1973 Arab-Israel war. He describes the multiple diplomatic overtures from Egyptian presidents Nasser and Sadat after 1967 that Israel ignored or contemptuously rejected, as well as the complacent attitude that had become fully entrenched in the Israeli military establishment. On the political level, the triumvirate of Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and Israel Galili feature prominently as a study in arrogance and incompetence. Kapeliouk also notes the protest movement that arose among active-duty soldiers as well as veterans in the wake of the war demanding political accountability for the failures of the war. Finally, the book examines Israel's policy of colonizing the territories occupied in 1967, starting with the Golan Heights and later spreading to the West Bank ("Judaea and Samaria") and the Sinai - a policy that did much to convince the leaders of Arab states that war was their only option. Introduced by Noam Chomsky and Irene Gendzier.

Irene Gendzier's critically acclaimed, wide-reaching analysis of post-World War II U.S. policy in Lebanon posits that the politics of oil and pipelines figured far more significantly in U.S. relations with Lebanon than previously believed. In 1958 the United States sent thousands of troops to shore up the Lebanese regime in the face of domestic opposition and civil war. The justification was preventing a coup in Iraq, but recently declassified documents show that the true objective was to protect America's commercial, political, and strategic interests in Beirut and the Middle East. By reevaluating U.S.-Lebanese relations within the context of America's collaborative intervention with the Lebanese ruling elite, Gendzier aptly demonstrates how oil, power, and politics drove U.S. policy and influenced the development of the state and the region. In her new preface, Gendzier discusses the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the remarkable continuity of U.S. foreign policy from 1945 to the present.

Global society has been analyzed in any number of ways: books dealing with its economic and cultural implications flood the market. But Planetary Politics highlights something unique. It explores globalization with an eye on the transformation of politics into a planetary enterprise. Unifying this collection is a political purpose: the attempt to engage in progressive fashion the dominant trends, the terrible excesses, and the positive prospects in a decidedly new era marked by the transition from a corrosive interplay between nation-states to a burgeoning planetary politics. Bringing together the work of major scholars with national and international reputations, this exciting new work offers perspectives for dealing with the complexity of power in the planetary life of the new millennium.