Since the 1930s, government claims and popular thought within El Salvador have held that the country no longer holds any Indian population. This book explores why this claim has endured despite the existence of substantial indigenous communities within the country's territory. Drawing on history, anthropology, and archaeology, Virginia Tilley delves into the history of Salvadoran racial thought and nation-building to illuminate the political motives for eradicating Indians from the country's national consciousness. Part I draws from the author's own ethnographic research in El Salvador and Guatemala to show how 'Indian-ness' has persisted, in contested forms, within El Salvador. Part II traces how the Salvadoran definition of being Indian has been altered to fit within the country's desired image as a racially unified society -- and to erase Indians from public records after 1932. The author explains in Part III the motives driving the myth of Indian disappearance and ends with a look at the debate that raged in the 1990s regarding El Salvador's indigenous peoples' attempts to express themselves politically. As Tilley notes, the transnational indigenous rights movement, translated into potent funding leverage by non-indigenous donor agencies, has ""actually generated new difficulties for the Salvador indigenous communities and their movements for national recognition by erecting new standards for 'being Indian' that clash with older ideas and local experience.

Within the already heavily polarised debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa remain highly contentious. A number of prominent academic and political commentators, including former US president Jimmy Carter and UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, have argued that Israel's treatment of its Arab-Israeli citizens and the people of the occupied territories amounts to a system of oppression no less brutal or inhumane than that of South Africa's white supremacists. Similarly, boycott and disinvestment campaigns comparable to those employed by anti-apartheid activists have attracted growing support. Yet while the 'apartheid question' has become increasingly visible in this debate, there has been little in the way of genuine scholarly analysis of the similarities (or otherwise) between the Zionist and apartheid regimes. In Israel and South Africa, Ilan Pappe, one of Israel's preeminent academics and a noted critic of the current government, brings together lawyers, journalists, policy makers and historians of both countries to assess the implications of the apartheid analogy for international law, activism and policy making. With contributors including the distinguished anti-apartheid activist Ronnie Kasrils, Israel and South Africa offers a bold and incisive perspective on one of the defining moral questions of our age.