The fact that, after fifty years of Palestinian support efforts, the Israeli occupation is more entrenched than ever should inspire some intellectual humility among those hawking solutions to the conflict, notes Jamie Stern-Weiner in the introduction to his edited collection Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions. It is humbling as well to read through the volume, with more than seventy essays and rejoinders by more than fifty different authors, from almost every one of which something new can be learned.

The book is organized into fifteen chapters, most of them containing contending views on crucial questions regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. Stern-Weiner acknowledges up front that his own political views influenced his choice of questions to explore. He believes that “an end to the occupation would represent an important milestone” in the Palestinian quest for freedom, that “the occupation’s demise is a prerequisite for more far-reaching, if still always and only partial, advances toward justice,” and that the occupation “is at present the most ambitious objective around which Palestinians and their supporters might effectively organize.” But he has not insisted on ideological uniformity: many of his contributors disagree with his assessment of the occupation.

Obviously, one cannot include coverage of every controversy in a single volume. Regarding one omitted topic, the Palestinian right of return, Stern-Weiner writes: “of all the issues at the core of the dispute, the refugee question is the one on which least concrete debate has unfolded, and there does not at this point appear to be much new to say about it.”