International Journal of Middle East Studies (2025),1–3 BOOK REVIEW Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of Palestine–Israel Liron Mor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024). Pp. 288. $110.00 cloth, $32.00 paper. ISBN: 9781531505431 Reviewed by Matan Kaminer , School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University, London, UK (m.kaminer@qmul.ac.uk) “The language of ‘conflict’ implies a symmetrical relationship between two opposed sides,” Liron Mor points out straightaway in the introduction to this book (p. 5). The descent of the US-bankrolled, Israeli-operated assault on Gaza into the wholesale slaughter of civilians makes it easier, cognitively speaking, to dismiss any notion of “symmetry,” but Mor shows that the conceptual frame of “two opposed sides” is much more difficult to slip out of. Indeed, the destruction of Gaza has polarized the entire world in this binary fashion: in the face of genocide, it seems, only two positions are possible. Mor’s book was written before October 7, 2023, and the freedom she takes to explore alternative ways of framing the Palestinian/Israeli scene retrospectively feels like a memento from a comparatively optimistic time. But her excavation of local literature offers a very relevant toolbox of interpretative strategies, building on the counterintuitive axioms that the conflict is “not between two” and also “not one.”“Conflicts” is plural because this sliver of land excites many struggles, some of which involve more (or less) than two parties. Refusing a dialectical approach, Mor is also anxious not to reduce conflict to “sheer chaos” (p. 3). She accomplishes this difficult task with tools forged from the antagonistic polyphony of the country’s literatures, aided by a sensitive if not fully acknowledged ear for the ancient music that underlies the “zones of indeterminacy” between Arabic and Hebrew, languages whose “near-cognate” names both derive from roots related to passage and travel (pp. 9–10). Mor offers readers five concepts with which to rethink this disastrous scene: ishtibāk or “clashing engagement”; leva _ tim, “disorienting dilemmas”; ikhtifāʾ, “anti/colonial disappearance”; _ hoḳḳ, the “mediating law”; and inqisām, “hostile severance.” The numerous English para- phrases she provides for these terms, of which those listed here are only a sample, indicate the irreducible richness of the terms. Ishtibāk—an Arabic word with cognates in both languages meaning “net,”“thicket,”“complication,”“struggle” and “intertwining”—is derived from the work of Ghassan Kanafani, the legendary Palestinian novelist, theorist, and militant with a penetrating interest in the Israeli psyche. Mor defines ishtibāk by contrast to the “either/or logic of judgment [that] has come to dominate contemporary conceptions of conflicts” and to undergird both warfare and negotiations (p. 31). The alternative, a consciousness of the impossibility of pulling such painful intercalations cleanly apart, is exemplified in the refusal of the heroes of Kanafani’s novella “Returning to Haifa,” Palestinian parents whose son has grown up Israeli, to negotiate with his abductors-adopters. Indeterminacy is processed in a very different way through leva _ tim, the equivocations and qualms that Mor locates at the heart of hegemonic Israeli subjectivity. Reading the prose of novelist Haim Hazaz, she shows how melancholic inwardness and farcical wavering serve to constitute an Ashkenazi (European Jewish) settler subject whose deep interiority distin- guishes him from both the Arab victim, whose unfortunate plight he may deeply regret, and © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743825100792 Published online by Cambridge University Press