Eastern Cauldron

Gilbert Achcar gathers years of his writing in this collection, which takes up three questions he treats as central to grasping the present: what political Islam means, how the West relates to the Muslim world, and what kind of imperial power the Soviet and American interventions in Afghanistan revealed. Together these questions bear on how global power is being reorganized and what it will be used for.

The essays trace the rise of Islamist fundamentalism and the outcome of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and what followed it. The longest focus is the Palestinian conflict, where the wider regional rivalries are most sharply visible. Achcar examines the social foundations, strategies and tactics of the PLO, Hezbollah, Israel and the United States, from the founding of Israel through the second Intifada. He also explores a tension at the heart of the Israeli state, which aims to be both Jewish and democratic, and shows how that tension shapes the conduct of every party involved.

The book is meant above all to deepen understanding of the region's conflicts rather than to argue a case. Achcar writes from firm moral and political convictions, yet his pieces go beyond polemic. He applies Marxist method to economic, political and ideological change while keeping each situation's specific character and its links to others in view. His arguments engage with competing schools of political thought and rest on close knowledge of the Middle East.