The thought-provoking roundtable on “theorizing violence” in the November 2013 issue of IJMES paid much attention to different manifestations of physical violence. This is the type of violence that as early as 1969 Johan Galtung, one of the founders of the field of peace studies, termed direct violence, distinguishing it from other forms of violence, to which I will refer below. Direct violence, Galtung noted, is related to “somatic incapacitation, or deprivation of health, alone (with killing as the extreme form), at the hands of an actor who intends this to be the consequence.” According to Galtung, direct violence is physically manifested, it is related to a discernible event, and it has to involve a perpetrator and a purpose.

In his review of my book, The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War, Moriel Ram offers praise and criticism. At the risk of sounding ungrateful for the praise, I find his review to be based on careless reading and thus unfounded, thereby doing disservice to readers of IJMES.

I would like to briefly address the contentions that Avi Raz raises in his retort to my review of his book. First, the term “negotiations” that I use refers to Raz's detailed depiction of the elaborate and almost endless stream of contacts between Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians that took place through various venues. Ironically, Raz continues to describe such negotiations in the second paragraph of his reply, while claiming that “there were no negotiations during the period covered by my book.” Perhaps if I had used a more general phrasing such as “talks” or “exchanges,” Raz would not have found this issue so problematic, but since these talks and exchanges were a form of negotiation I think the term is pertinent.