Few international issues have aroused as much passionate interest and political activity among Canadians. The contest on "the domestic battleground" has been decisive in determining Canada's policies in the Middle East. The Domestic Battleground provides the history and background needed to understand Canadian attitudes toward both the explosive unrest occurring in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the participants in the conflict - Israel, the Palestinians, and the rest of the Arab world. Taras and Goldberg analyse the struggles over the levers of decision making in Ottawa and the battle between moral stances and convictions that has taken place among concerned Canadians. The Domestic Battleground is the first book devoted to analysing the study of Canada's Middle Eastern policy. David Taras and David H. Goldberg take readers inside the Canadian decision-making process on key issues regarding the Middle East over the last forty years. Bringing together articles by scholars with differing perspectives, this volume brings to light the positions and actions of Canadian political leaders - Mackenzie King, Lester B. Pearson, Joe Clark, Pierre Trudeau, and Brian Mulroney - and assess the impact of media coverage, corporate and governmental interests, and Arab and Jewish lobby groups. The Domestic Battleground addresses the narrowing of the emotional distance separating Canada from the conflicts and disputes indigenous to the Middle East and responds to the presence of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the mainstream of daily life and politics in Canada.

David Taras holds the Ralph Klein Chair in Media Studies at Mount Royal University. He is the author of several books, including The Newsmakers: The Media's Influence on Canadian Politics (1990) and Power and Betrayal in the Canadian Media (2001), and co-author of Last Word: Media Coverage of the Supreme Court of Canada (2005).

David Taras' profile page

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"The Taras and Goldberg volume adds considerably to our understanding of how the Canadian government has reacted to events in that area, both in an historical and also in a contemporary setting, and what kind of domestic factors have acted on, and continue to act on, decision-makers in Ottawa." Kim Richard Nossal, Department of Political Science, McMaster University.