Free audio book: Palestine, Israel, and the U.S. Empire

Oct 9, 2023

If you think the Israel-Palestine conflict is too complex to understand, think again. Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire, written without academic jargon by author and activist Richard Becker, provides a solid introduction to key events in the history underlying today’s current events. Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire is unabashedly partisan toward the Palestinian cause, but the author’s claims are well reasoned and documented.

There is, in fact, an irreconcilable conflict in the Middle East, but it is not one between different peoples or faiths. It is instead the struggle between imperialism, Israel and the dependent Arab regimes on the one hand and the oppressed peoples of this oil-rich and strategic region fighting for liberation and progress on the other.

At the very heart of this conflict is Palestine. The Palestinian struggle is a struggle against Western colonialism. It has been this way from the beginning, more than a century ago. As is the case with all conflicts and world events, what is going on today in Palestine and the Middle East can only be understood in its historical context.

Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire was published by Liberation Media in 2009. It’s available for purchase here. In light of the recent resurgence in the Palestinian solidarity movement, the PSL has made the book freely available, and Liberation Audio created the audio versions for each chapter found below.

Chapter 1: A struggle against Western colonialism

Chapter 2: Does the Israel lobby control U.S. policy?

Chapter 3: Dividing the Middle East

Chapter 4: Zionism: A colonial project

Chapter 5: Building a settler state American-style

Chapter 6: The Palestinian revolt of 1936-1939

Chapter 7: World War II: Anti-Semitism and genocide

Chapter 8: Illegal U.N. partition

Chapter 9: Born of massacres and ethnic cleansing

Chapter 10: Watchdog for the West

Chapter 11: Fortifying the US-Israeli alliance

Chapter 12: The Palestinian struggle takes center stage

Chapter 13: Lebanon: Civil war and occupation

Chapter 14: Intifada, ‘Peace Process,’ Intifada

Chapter 15: Imperialist failure: The ‘New Middle East’

Chapter 16: U.S.-Israeli relations after Bush

Chapter 17: Is Israel an apartheid state?

Chapter 18: The Palestinian right of return

Chapter 19: Subsidizing occupation: U.S. aid to Israel

Chapter 20: Palestine and the U.S. anti-war movement

Chapter 21: The ‘irreconcilable’ conflict and the future

Study, fast, train, fight: The roots of Black August

Study, fast, train, fight: The roots of Black August

  This article, first published in August 2022, includes some slight edits, updated information, and added citations. Introduction In August 1619, enslaved Africans touched foot in the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. The...