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Reviews and reviewers
What people understand on what I write

Authors cannot know in advance if, and how, readers would understand their books. When one writes on disputed issues, as I, unfortunately, do, the danger of being read according to the readers' agenda, with relatively limited connection to the text and the subtext of the books themselves, is even higher. This reminds us of our limited ability to communicate... On the other hand, some times some people find in our writing more than we have expected. And this is also a lesson, probably more pleasant one.

Here are couple of links to reviews written on my work. It's needless to tell which is closer to my own understanding of my books, since most of them have at least one or two good, important points.

Here is what the Palestinian writer Adli Sadeq reads in my Army of Shadows (in Arabic): http://www.adlisadek.net/print.asp?field=the_news&id=415

And this is how Daniel Pipes (I guess 'a leading neo-con intelectual' would fairly describe him) read it:
http://www.danielpipes.org/6244/palestinians-who-helped-create-israel

Neve Gordon of Ben Gurion University has a different reading. He is a political scientist, after all:
http://www.thenation.com/article/shadowplays

Yet Benni Morris, the historian of 1948 of the same university, suggests another one: http://www.powells.com/review/2008_04_24.html

The last paragraph of Nimer Sultani's review of my Good Arabs in the Journal of Palestine Studies starts with the phrase "Despite these weaknesses". You better read it in his own words.
Though I'm not fully agree with him, it is an excellent example as to what can be learnt from a good review.
http://www.palestine-studies.org/journals.aspx?id=10929&jid=1&href=fulltext

For me it is interesting to read both scholars as the above-mentioned, and reviews in blogs and daily newspapers; a small sign that i succeed in writing to both the acadmeic enviroment and a wider public - and hopefully to learn from their reviews.