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Selim Deringil's The Ottoman Twilight in the Arab Lands: Turkish Memoirs and Testimonies of the Great War is an account of five memoirs written after World War I by leading Ottoman military commanders and intellectuals who spent the war years in the Arab provinces. The memoirs include those of Falih Rifki Atay, Ahmad Cemal Pasha's deputy in the Fourth Army and head of intelligence in Damascus and Jerusalem; Hüseyin Kazım Kadri, a founder of the Young Turk movement and editor of Tanin; Naci Kaşif Kıcıman, the chief intelligence officer in Hijaz during the Great Revolt; Münevver Ayaşlı, the daughter of the Turkish head of the Ottoman tobacco monopoly who became an ardent Islamic feminist in the Republican period; and Ali Fuad Erden, the Fourth Army's chief of staff. Deringil's introduction, which references other works on the final days of Ottoman rule in Syria and Palestine, provides a critical framing of these narratives in the context of (some) Turkish claims that the Great Revolt constituted a "stab in the back" to the Ottoman war effort and a betrayal of the state. The memoirs contain vivid accounts of daily life in Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Medina during World War I.

This interview and remembrance marks the passing in 2016 of Ibrahim Dakkak, the last of the great socialist leaders of Palestine's post-Nakba generation. Dakkak helped lead three major movements inside the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt): al-Jabha al-wataniyya or Palestine National Front, a coalition launched in August 1973 that mobilized civil resistance to Israeli land confiscations and a whole host of other rights violations; Lajnat al-tawjih al-watani (the National Guidance Committee or NGC), established in 1978 to coordinate resistance efforts inside the oPt with the political leadership of the national movement based outside; and al-Mubadara al-wataniyya (the National Initiative Committee), which Dakkak cofounded with Mustafa Barghouti and Haidar Abdel-Shafi in the 1990s to counter the consequences of the Oslo Accords. In this interview, Dakkak also shares personal reminiscences of growing up in the Old City, as well as the 1967 arson attack on al-Aqsa Mosque, and his role in its restoration after the fire.

This essay explores the evolving usage and meanings of normalcy (the routinization of daily life)—as opposed to normalization—during various phases of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with particular emphasis on the post-1967 period. It does so by highlighting how Palestinians and Israelis have understood and continue to perceive normalization both at the high politics level, as well as in their daily lives. In particular, it focuses on how conditions of perceived normalcy for Israelis have created conditions of instability for Palestinians.