A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Beyond Occupation looks at three contentious terms that regularly arise in contemporary arguments about Israel's practices towards Palestinians in the occupied territories – occupation, colonialism and apartheid – and considers whether their meanings in international law truly apply to Israel's policies. This analysis is timely and urgent – colonialism and apartheid are serious breaches of human rights law and apartheid is a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
The contributors present conclusive evidence that Israel’s administration of the Palestinian territories is consistent with colonialism and apartheid, as these regimes are defined in human rights law. Their analysis further shows that these practices are deliberate Israeli state policies, imposed on the Palestinian civilian population under military occupation.
These findings raise serious implications for the legality and legitimacy of Israel's continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories and the responsibility of the entire international community to challenge practices considered contrary to fundamental values of the international legal order.
"An original and powerful book." --Ilan Pappe, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Haifa University, and author of A Modern History of Palestine
"Very impressive. . . . Some of his findings will astound even the knowledgeable reader." --Salim Tamari, Director, Institute of Jerusalem Studies
What is Israel hoping to achieve with its recent withdrawal from Gaza and the buildiing of a 700 km wall? Journalist Jonathan Cook presents a lucid account of the motives. The heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. Israel fears the moment when the region's Palestinians--Israel's own Palestinian citizens and those in the Occupied Territories--become a majority. Inevitable omparisons with apartheid in South Africa will be drawn. The book charts Israel's increasingly desperate responses, including military repression of Palestinian dissent; a ban on marriages between Israel's Palestinian population and Palestinians living under occupation to prevent a right of return "through the back door;" and the redrawing of the Green Line to create an expanded state. Ultimately, the author concludes, these abuses will lead to a third, far deadlier intifada.
Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian newspaper, has written for the Times, Le Monde diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, al-Ahram Weekly, and Aljazeera.net. He is based in Nazareth.
In this volume, Quigley provides a thorough understanding of both sides of the conflict in the context of international law. He contends that the Palestinians have a stronger legal claim to Jerusalem than do the Israelis; that Palestinian refugees should be repatriated to areas including those within the borders of Israel; and that Israel should withdraw from the territory it occupied in 1967. As in his earlier volume, Quigley provides an extensively documented evaluation of the conflict over the last century, discussing the Zionist movement, the League of Nations’ decision to promote a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the 1948 war and creation of Israel, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights during the 1967 war.
Drawing on a newly developed theoretical definition of “missed opportunity,” Chances for Peace uses extensive sources in English, Hebrew, and Arabic to systematically measure the potentiality levels of opportunity across some ninety years of attempted negotiations in the Arab-Israeli conflict. With enlightening revelations that defy conventional wisdom, this study provides a balanced account of the most significant attempts to forge peace, initiated by the world’s superpowers, the Arabs (including the Palestinians), and Israel. From Arab-Zionist negotiations at the end of World War I to the subsequent partition, the aftermath of the 1967 War and the Sadat Initiative, and numerous agreements throughout the 1980s and 1990s, concluding with the Annapolis Conference in 2007 and the Abu Mazen-Olmert talks in 2008, pioneering scholar Elie Podeh uses empirical criteria and diverse secondary sources to assess the protagonists’ roles at more than two dozen key junctures.
A resource that brings together historiography, political science, and the practice of peace negotiation, Podeh’s insightful exploration also showcases opportunities that were not missed. Three agreements in particular (Israeli-Egyptian, 1979; Israeli-Lebanese, 1983; and Israeli-Jordanian, 1994) illuminate important variables for forging new paths to successful negotiation. By applying his framework to a broad range of power brokers and time periods, Podeh also sheds light on numerous incidents that contradict official narratives. This unique approach is poised to reshape the realm of conflict resolution.
Since 1967, more than 60,000 Jewish-Americans have settled in the territories captured by the State of Israel during the Six Day War. Comprising 15 percent of the settler population today, these immigrants have established major communities, transformed domestic politics and international relations, and committed shocking acts of terrorism. They demand attention in both Israel and the United States, but little is known about who they are and why they chose to leave America to live at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In this deeply researched, engaging work, Sara Yael Hirschhorn unsettles stereotypes, showing that the 1960s generation who moved to the occupied territories were not messianic zealots or right-wing extremists but idealists engaged in liberal causes. They did not abandon their progressive heritage when they crossed the Green Line. Rather, they saw a historic opportunity to create new communities to serve as a beacon—a “city on a hilltop”—to Jews across the globe. This pioneering vision was realized in their ventures at Yamit in the Sinai and Efrat and Tekoa in the West Bank. Later, the movement mobilized the rhetoric of civil rights to rebrand itself, especially in the wake of the 1994 Hebron massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein, one of their own.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war, Hirschhorn illuminates the changing face of the settlements and the clash between liberal values and political realities at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Thousands of ordinary people in Israel and Palestine have engaged in a dazzling array of daring and visionary joint nonviolent initiatives for more than a century. They have endured despite condemnation by their own societies, repetitive failures of diplomacy, harsh inequalities, and endemic cycles of violence.
Connecting with the Enemy presents the first comprehensive history of unprecedented grassroots efforts to forge nonviolent alternatives to the lethal collision of the two national movements. Bringing to light the work of over five hundred groups, Sheila H. Katz describes how Arabs and Jews, children and elders, artists and activists, educators and students, garage mechanics and physicists, and lawyers and prisoners have spoken truth to power, protected the environment, demonstrated peacefully, mourned together, stood in resistance and solidarity, and advocated for justice and security. She also critiques and assesses the significance of their work and explores why these good-will efforts have not yet managed to end the conflict or occupation. This previously untold story of Palestinian-Israeli joint nonviolence will challenge the mainstream narratives of terror and despair, monsters and heroes, that help to perpetuate the conflict. It will also inspire and encourage anyone grappling with social change, peace and war, oppression and inequality, and grassroots activism anywhere in the world.
The Russell Tribunal on Palestine is a people’s tribunal in the spirit of the Tribunal on Vietnam that was set up by Bertrand Russell in the 1960s. This book contains a selection of the most vital evidence and testimonies presented at the London session. It includes the papers submitted to the tribunal, written by expert witnesses, based on their detailed research into the companies that prop-up Israeli occupation.
Examining the involvement of corporations in the illegal occupation of Palestinian land by Israel, the tribunal of 2010 generated widespread media coverage. The book identifies companies and corporations participating in such illegality and possibilities for legal action against them are discussed.
Released to coincide with the South Africa session at the end of 2011, Corporate Complicity in Israel's Occupation is a vital resource to lawyers, journalists and activists hoping to take informed action against Israeli war crimes and occupation.
Set in a Tel Aviv café in the moments before a suicide bomber enters, Iris Bahr’s 2008 Lucille Lortel Award–winning DAI (enough) courageously speaks to tragic current events. Bahr plays eleven different characters who span the ideological and class spectrum of Israeli society, including a Zionist kibbutznik, an evangelical from America funding an Armageddon fantasy, a West Bank settler, a snooty expat living in Long Island, and a Palestinian professor trying to keep her son from taking the path of extremism. Thanks to the emotional depth and honesty with which Bahr endows these characters and their individual stories, a complex portrait of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict emerges. Alternately very funny and tragic, DAI (enough) is a brave attempt to humanize the headlines.
For decades, we’ve been shocked by images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But for all their power, those images leave us at a loss: from our vantage at home, it’s hard for us to imagine the struggles of those living in the midst of the fighting. Now, American-born Israeli David Shulman takes us right into the heart of the conflict with Dark Hope, an eye-opening chronicle of his work as a member of the peace group Ta‘ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for “living together.”
Though Shulman never denies the complexity of the issues fueling the conflict—nor the culpability of people on both sides—he forcefully clarifies the injustices perpetrated by Israel by showing us the human dimension of the occupation. Here we meet Palestinians whose houses have been blown up by the Israeli army, shepherds whose sheep have been poisoned by settlers, farmers stripped of their land by Israel’s dividing wall. We watch as whip-swinging police on horseback attack crowds of nonviolent demonstrators, as Israeli settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, and as families and communities become utterly destroyed by the unrelenting violence of the occupation.
Opposing such injustices, Shulman and his companions—Israeli and Palestinian both—doggedly work through checkpoints to bring aid, rebuild houses, and physically block the progress of the dividing wall. As they face off against police, soldiers, and hostile Israeli settlers, anger mixes with compassion, moments of kinship alternate with confrontation, and, throughout, Shulman wrestles with his duty to fight the cruelty enabled by “that dependable and devastating human failure to feel.”
With Dark Hope, Shulman has written a book of deep moral searching, an attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong—and how, through acts of compassionate disobedience, it might still be brought back.
In Days of Awe, Atalia Omer examines this shift through interviews with a new generation of Jewish activists, rigorous data analysis, and fieldwork within a progressive synagogue community. She highlights people politically inspired by social justice campaigns including the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against anti-immigration policies. These activists, she shows, discover that their ethical outrage at US policies extends to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. For these American Jews, the Jewish history of dispossession and diaspora compels a search for solidarity with liberation movements. This shift produces innovations within Jewish tradition, including multi-racial and intersectional conceptions of Jewishness and movements to reclaim prophetic Judaism. Charting the rise of such religious innovation, Omer points toward the possible futures of post-Zionist Judaism.
For decades we have spoken of the 'Israel-Palestine conflict', but what if our understanding of the issue has been wrong all along? This book explores how the concept of settler colonialism provides a clearer understanding of the Zionist movement's project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, displacing the Palestinian Arab population and marginalizing its cultural presence.
Jeff Halper argues that the only way out of a colonial situation is decolonization: the dismantling of Zionist structures of domination and control and their replacement by a single democratic state, in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews forge a new civil society and a shared political community.
To show how this can be done, Halper uses the 10-point program of the One Democratic State Campaign as a guide for thinking through the process of decolonization to its post-colonial conclusion. Halper's unflinching reframing will empower activists fighting for the rights of the Palestinians and democracy for all.
Most of the wars in which Israel was involved, Maoz shows, were entirely avoidable, the result of deliberate Israeli aggression, flawed decision-making, and misguided conflict management strategies. None, with the possible exception of the 1948 War of Independence, were what Israelis call "wars of necessity." They were all wars of choice-or, worse, folly.
Demonstrating that Israel's national security policy rested on the shaky pairing of a trigger-happy approach to the use of force with a hesitant and reactive peace diplomacy, Defending the Holy Land recounts in minute-by-minute detail how the ascendancy of Israel's security establishment over its foreign policy apparatus led to unnecessary wars and missed opportunites for peace.
A scathing and brilliant revisionist history, Defending the Holy Land calls for sweeping reform of Israel's foreign policy and national security establishments. This book will fundamentally transform the way readers think about Israel's troubled history.
‘Usher ... does the best foreign on-the-spot reporting from Palestine.’ Edward Said, London Review of Books
‘The reader vicariously experiences what will become great moments of popular oral history that official historians will forget in the great scheme of things.’ Middle East International
In carefully crafted official statements, the European Union presents itself as an honest broker in the Middle East. In reality, however, the EU’s 27 governments have been engaged in a long process of accommodating Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.
Journalist David Cronin interrogates the relationship and its outcomes. A recent agreement for 'more intense, more fruitful, more influential co-operation' between the EU and Israel has meant that Israel has become a member state of the Union in all but name. Cronin shows that rather than using this relationship to encourage Israeli restraint, the EU has legitimised actions such as the ill-treatment of prisoners and the Gaza invasion.
Concluding his revealing and shocking account, Cronin calls for a continuation and deepening of international activism and protest to halt the EU's slide into complicity.
Falk suggests that a way to understand and explain such irrational matters is to examine the unconscious aspects of the conflict. He examines large-group psychology, nationalism, group narcissism, psychogeography, the Arab and Israeli minds, and suicidal terrorism, and he offers psychobiographical studies of Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat, two key players in this tragic conflict today.
David Shulman knows intimately what it takes to live your beliefs, to return, day after day, to the struggle, despite knowing you are often more likely to lose than win. Interweaving powerful stories and deep meditations, Freedom and Despair offers vivid firsthand reports from the occupied West Bank in Palestine as seen through the eyes of an experienced Israeli peace activist who has seen the Israeli occupation close up as it impacts on the lives of all Palestinian civilians.
Alongside a handful of beautifully written and often shocking tales from the field, Shulman meditates deeply on how to understand the evils around him, what it means to persevere as an activist decade after decade, and what it truly means to be free. The violent realities of the occupation are on full display. We get to know and understand the Palestinian shepherds and farmers and Israeli volunteers who face this situation head-on with nonviolent resistance. Shulman does not hold back on acknowledging the daily struggles that often leave him and his fellow activists full of despair. Inspired by these committed individuals who are not prepared to be silent or passive, Shulman suggests a model for ordinary people everywhere. Anyone prepared to take a risk and fight their oppressive political systems, he argues, can make a difference—if they strive to act with compassion and to keep hope alive.
This is the moving story of a man who continues to fight for good in the midst of despair. An indispensable book in our era of reactionary politics and refugee crises, political violence and ecological devastation, Freedom and Despair is a gripping memoir of struggle, activism, and hope for peace.
From Coexistence to Conquest seeks to explain how the Arab-Israeli conflict developed by looking beyond strict legalism to the men behind the policies adopted by the Great Powers at the dawn of the twentieth century. It controversially argues that Zionism was adopted by the British Government in its 1917 Balfour Declaration primarily as an immigration device and that it can be traced back to the 1903 Royal Commission on Alien Immigration and the Alien’s Act 1905.
The book places the violent reaction of the Palestine Arabs to mass Jewish immigration in the context of Zionism, highlighting the findings of several British commissions of inquiry which recommended that Britain abandon its policy. The book also revisits the controversies over the question of self-determination, and the partition of Palestine.
The Chapter on the 1948 conflict seeks to update international lawyers on the scholarship of Israel’s ‘new’ historians and reproduces some of the horrific accounts of the atrocities that took place. The penultimate chapter argues that Israel was created through an act of conquest or subjugation. The book concludes with a sobering analysis of the conflict arguing that neither Jews nor Arabs were to blame for starting it.
Contributors. Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, Shahd Abusalama, Samirah Alkassim, Basma Alsharif, Hadeel Assali, Azza El-Hassan, Hatim El-Hibri, Mohamed Jabaly, Ahmed Mansour, Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser, Kamran Rastegar, Viviane Saglier, Abdelsalam Shehada, Yaron Shemer, Rebecca L. Stein, Helga Tawil-Souri, Shaira Vadasaria, Nadia Yaqub
The unique model of apartheid, colonisation and military occupation that Israel imposes on the Palestinians, along with myriad violations of international law, have made Palestine the moral cause of a generation. Yet many people continue to ask, ‘what can we do?’
Generation Palestine helps to answer this question by bringing together Palestinian and international activists in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The movement aims to pressure Israel until it complies with International Law, mirroring the model that was successfully utilised against South African apartheid.
With essays written by a wide selection of contributors, Generation Palestine follows the BDS movement’s model of inclusivity and collaboration. Contributors include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ken Loach, Iain Banks, Ronnie Kasrils, Professor Richard Falk, Ilan Pappe, Omar Barghouti, Ramzy Baroud and Archbishop Attallah Hannah, alongside other internationally acclaimed artists, writers, academics and grassroots activists.
This beginner's guide to Hamas has been fully revised and updated. It now covers all the major events since the January 2006 elections, including the conflict with Fatah and Israel's brutal offensive in Gaza at the end of 2008.
Explaining the reasons for Hamas's popularity, leading Al-Jazeera journalist and Cambridge academic Khaled Hroub provides the key facts that are so often missing from conventional news reports. It's a one-stop guide that gives a clear overview of Hamas's history, key beliefs, and its political agenda.
This unique book provides a refreshing perspective that gets to the heart of Hamas.
This alternate history—where, among many scenarios, Hitler is assassinated, Japan does not bomb Pearl Harbor, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is succeeded after two terms by Robert A. Taft—does cause us to review and better appreciate history. As Gurock tells his tale, he concludes every chapter with a short section that describes what actually happened and, thus, further educates the reader.
Masalha argues that the heart of the conflict between Zionist immigrants/settlers and the native Palestinians has always been about land, territory, demography and water. He documents how Israeli policy has made it a priority to expel the Palestinians, either by war or peaceful measures. But these imperialist tendencies are not restricted to extremist zealots. The author uncovers the expansionist policies found in Labour Zionism and Kookist ideology.
Chapters cover the Whole Land of Israel Movement, Zionist Revisionism and the Likud Party, Gush Emunim and the religious fundamentalists, parties and movements of the far right and the evolution of Israeli Jewish public attitudes since 1967.
In the fall of 2001 Charles Salmon had a Fulbright fellowship in Israel. He was due to depart on September 12. Arriving in Israel a few weeks later, speaking no Hebrew and largely unfamiliar with Judaism and Israeli customs, he immersed himself in Israeli culture.
This collection of correspondence began as a weekly report to friends and was designed to offer an alternative to mainstream media. With the excitement of a tourist and the eagerness of an anthropologist, Salmon emerges as a modern Candide. He describes historical sites and a supermarket in Tel Aviv, discusses the differences between university students in Israel and America, and negotiates the purchase of food and the vagaries of the weather with humor and passion. The letters also discuss Israeli–Palestinian relations, and details terrorist events and responses to them.
This unique book focuses on how everyday hopes and fears transcend geopolitical boundaries and provides valuable lessons on how to thrive in these new and uncertain times.
Following on from their acclaimed book Bad News from Israel, Greg Philo and Mike Berry present a concise guide to the Israel-Palestine conflict. This uniquely accessible book will appeal to anyone looking for an approachable introduction. Uniquely, the authors show how there are many different, competing histories. They offer an overview of the wide range of contending viewpoints, and indicate those which are based on the most considered historical research.
The book covers key events in chronological order, in each case examining the varied historical accounts and presenting the beliefs of key thinkers across the ideological spectrum, from Edward Said to Binyamin Netanyahu. Starting the with emergence of the Zionist movement in the nineteenth century, and the figures who shaped it, the authors go on to cover the founding of Israel and its subsequent history, up to and including the 'roadmap for peace', the construction of the wall, the death of Arafat and the withdrawal from Gaza.
Veracini challenges two important myths: firstly, that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is unique and defies comparative approaches; and secondly that the struggle is mainly based in nationality and religion and therefore different to typical colonial conflicts. On the contrary, Veracini shows how Israeli society is organised along apartheid lines -- and that apartheid was not unique to South Africa, but a common feature of colonisation. He examines wars of decolonization, and conflicts where whole native populations were all but eradicated -- as in Australia. Comparing and contrasting these with the more recent history of Israel and Palestine, he offers a critical perspective on colonialism as well as important new insights into patterns of imperialism today.
As Schulman learns more, she questions the contradiction between Israel's investment in presenting itself as gay friendly—financially sponsoring gay film festivals and parades—and its denial of the rights of Palestinians. At the same time, she talks with straight Palestinian activists about their position in relation to homosexuality and gay rights in Palestine and internationally. Back in the United States, Schulman draws on her extensive activist experience to organize a speaking tour for some of the Palestinian queer leaders whom she had met and trusted. Dubbed "Al-Tour," it takes the activists to LGBT community centers, conferences, and universities throughout the United States. Its success solidifies her commitment to working to end Israel's occupation of Palestine, and it kindles her larger hope that a new "queer international" will emerge and join other movements demanding human rights across the globe.
Combining vivid ethnographic detail, postcolonial theory, and readings of Israeli and Palestinian popular texts, Stein considers a broad range of Israeli leisure cultures of the Oslo period with a focus on the Jewish desires for Arab things, landscapes, and people that regional diplomacy catalyzed. Moving beyond conventional accounts, she situates tourism within a broader field of “discrepant mobility,” foregrounding the relationship between histories of mobility and immobility, leisure and exile, consumption and militarism. She contends that the study of Israeli tourism must open into broader interrogations of the Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian dispossession, and Israel’s future in the Arab Middle East. Itineraries in Conflict is both a cultural history of the Oslo process and a call to fellow scholars to rethink the contours of the Arab-Israeli conflict by considering the politics of popular culture in everyday Israeli and Palestinian lives.
Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism also engages a Humanist Zionist vision to confront the Zionist movement’s foundational sins and demands a full reckoning with the Palestinians. Graubart focuses on two of Humanist Zionism’s most insightful thinkers, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, putting them “in conversation” with each other, and synthesizing their collective insights and critical Jewish perspectives alongside the ideas of Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Ella Shohat, Edward Said, and other philosophers and academics. Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism concludes that an updated, binational program is the best path forward.
The theologian and philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965) was committed to radical socioeconomic reconstruction in pursuit of international peace. His voluminous writings on Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine interweave his religious and philosophical teachings with his politics, each essential to Buber’s vision of democratic and religious life.
A Land of Two Peoples collects the letters, talks, and essays in which Buber advocated for a binationalism that reconciled Arabs and Jews as a solution to the conflict in the Middle East. As relevant today as when it was first published nearly fifty years ago, this edition of A Land of Two Peoples includes two forewords from the preeminent Jewish and Palestinian scholars Paul Mendes-Flohr and Raef Zreik.
Collected in ALand of Two Peoples are the private and open letters, addresses, and essays in which Buber advocated binationalism as a solution to the conflict in the Middle East. A committed Zionist, Buber steadfastly articulated the moral necessity for reconciliation and accommodation between the Arabs and Jews. From the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 to his death in 1965, he campaigned passionately for a "one state solution.
With the Middle East embroiled in religious and ethnic chaos, A Land of Two Peoples remains as relevant today as it was when it was first published more than twenty years ago. This timely reprint, which includes a new preface by Paul Mendes-Flohr, offers context and depth to current affairs and will be welcomed by those interested in Middle Eastern studies and political theory.
Dubbed 'the poster girl of Palestinian militancy', Leila Khaled's image flashed across the world after she hijacked a passenger jet in 1969. The picture of a young, determined looking woman with a checkered scarf, clutching an AK-47, was as era-defining as that of Che Guevara.
In this intimate profile, based on interviews with Khaled and those who know her, Sarah Irving gives us the life-story behind the image. Key moments of Khaled's turbulent life are explored, including the dramatic events of the hijackings, her involvement in the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a radical element within the PLO), her opposition to the Oslo peace process and her activism today.
Leila Khaled's example gives unique insights into the Palestinian struggle through one remarkable life – from the tension between armed and political struggle, to the decline of the secular left and the rise of Hamas, and the role of women in a largely male movement.
The first comprehensive comparison of two of the century’s most important liberation movements.
Arising in the 1910s and emerging as legitimate governing bodies in the 1990s, the South African and the Palestinian national liberation movements have exhibited remarkable parallels over the course of their development. The fortunes of the African National Congress and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, however, have proven strikingly different. How the movements, despite similar circumstances and experiences, have arrived at such dissimilar outcomes is described in Liberation and Democratization.
Younis traces the evolution of the movements, from early domination by elites to the ascendancy of mass-based forces in their last phases of expansion. She shows how this latest shift, accompanied by a democratization of the process of liberation, made the movements more effective in the 1980s. Liberation and Democratization also identifies dissimilarities—the balance of class forces and resources—that led to the A.N.C.’s greater success relative to the P.L.O.’s achievements. The first comprehensive comparison of two of the most significant liberation movements of this century, Younis’s work brings to light problems and dynamics that will remain at work well into the future.
Making Endless War is built on the premise that any attempt to understand how the content and function of the laws of war changed in the second half of the twentieth century should consider two major armed conflicts, fought on opposite edges of Asia, and the legal pathways that link them together across time and space. The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli conflicts have been particularly significant in the shaping and attempted remaking of international law from 1945 right through to the present day. This carefully curated collection of essays by lawyers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and political geographers of war explores the significance of these two conflicts, including their impact on the politics and culture of the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America. The volume foregrounds attempts to develop legal rationales for the continued waging of war after 1945 by moving beyond explaining the end of war as a legal institution, and toward understanding the attempted institutionalization of endless war.
Abufarha draws on the life histories of martyrs, interviews he conducted with their families and members of the groups that sponsored their operations, and examinations of Palestinian literature, art, performance, news stories, and political commentaries. He also assesses data—about the bombers, targets, and fatalities caused—from more than two hundred martyrdom operations carried out by Palestinian groups between 2001 and 2004. Some involved the use of explosive belts or the detonation of cars; others entailed armed attacks against Israeli targets (military and civilian) undertaken with the intent of fighting until death. In addition, he scrutinized suicide attacks executed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad between 1994 and 2000. In his analysis of Palestinian political violence, Abufarha takes into account Palestinians’ understanding of the history of the conflict with Israel, the effects of containment on Palestinians’ everyday lives, the disillusionment created by the Oslo peace process, and reactions to specific forms of Israeli state violence. The Making of a Human Bomb illuminates the Palestinians’ perspective on the conflict with Israel and provides a model for ethnographers seeking to make sense of political violence.
Two rabbis, visiting Palestine in 1897, observed that the land was like a bride, 'beautiful, but married to another man'. By which they meant that, if a place was to be found for Israel in Palestine, where would the people of Palestine go? This is a dilemma that Israel has never been able to resolve.
No conflict today is more dangerous than that between Israel and the Palestinians. The implications it has for regional and global security cannot be overstated. The peace process as we know it is dead and no solution is in sight. Nor, as this book argues, will that change until everyone involved in finding a solution accepts the real causes of conflict, and its consequences on the ground.
Leading writer Ghada Karmi explains in fascinating detail the difficulties Israel's existence created for the Arab world and why the search for a solution has been so elusive. Ultimately, she argues that the conflict will end only once the needs of both Arabs and Israelis are accommodated equally. Her startling conclusions overturn conventional thinking -- but they are hard to refute.
Building on rigorous research by the world-renowned Glasgow University Media Group, More Bad News From Israel examines media coverage of the current conflict in the Middle East and the impact it has on public opinion.
The book brings together senior journalists and ordinary viewers to examine how audiences understand the news and how their views are shaped by media reporting. In the largest study ever undertaken in this area, the authors focus on television news. They illustrate major differences in the way Israelis and Palestinians are represented, including how casualties are shown and the presentation of the motives and rationales of both sides. They combine this with extensive audience research involving hundreds of participants from the USA, Britain and Germany. It shows extraordinary differences in levels of knowledge and understanding, especially amongst young people from these countries.
Covering recent developments, including the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza, this authoritative and up-to-date study will be an invaluable tool for journalists, activists and students and researchers of media studies.
This is the inside story of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), from its beginnings in 1964 to the signing of the Oslo agreement in 1993.
For over three decades, the main goal of the PLO was to achieve a just peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and to build a democratic state in Palestine for all its citizens. Shafiq Al-Hout, a high ranking PLO official until his resignation in 1993, provides previously unavailable details on the key events in its history such as its recognition by the UN and the Oslo peace negotiations. Taking us right to the heart of the decision making processes, this book explains the personalities and internal politics that shaped the PLO's actions and the Palestinian experience of the twentieth century.
Although he was an insider, Al-Hout's book does not shy from analysing and criticising decisions and individuals, including Yasser Arafat. This book is an essential piece of history that sheds new light on the significance of the PLO in the Palestinian struggle for justice.
Nahum Goldmann (1895-1982) was a major Zionist figure for the last half-century and the chief architect of the pact pledging West Germany to pay reparations to Israel and to individual Jews for acts committed during the Nazi regime. He was co-founder of the Eschkol Publishing House in Berlin and was co-publisher of the Encyclopedia Judaica, the only major Jewish encyclopedia published in Germany.
Patai’s study is the first to explore this brilliant, often irritating, and enormously successful Jewish politician and diplomat. Goldmann represented no government, yet he effected important international change. The book discusses Goldmann’s involvement with the partition controversy which led to the establishment of Israel, West German reparation payments amounting to over $36 billion, and a series of attempts to meet with Egyptian President Nasser in hopes of bringing peace to the Middle East.
After a decade of research in the Johannesburg and Jerusalem regions, Andy Clarno presents here a detailed ethnographic study of the precariousness of the poor in Alexandra township, the dynamics of colonization and enclosure in Bethlehem, the growth of fortress suburbs and private security in Johannesburg, and the regime of security coordination between the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The first comparative study of the changes in these two areas since the early 1990s, the book addresses the limitations of liberation in South Africa, highlights the impact of neoliberal restructuring in Palestine, and argues that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both contexts.
The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises evokes and investigates—from a Jewish American perspective and in the forms of poetry, essays, and interviews—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, America’s involvement as both perpetrator and victim of events in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the multiple ways that poetics can respond to political imperatives.
The poems range from the immediately lyrical to the experimental forms of the “Apple Anyone Sonnets” series, which relies heavily on the Arabic but has Shakespeare as its scaffolding.
In the essays, Schwartz calls on the power of poetry—and of some of the great poets in the Arabic, Jewish, and American traditions—to help rethink the battle lines of the contemporary Mid-East, with the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber looming large.
The interviews provide Schwartz’s discussions with Israeli poet and activist Aharon Shabtai, political philosopher Michael Hardt, and the late, great American poet Amiri Baraka.
In these creative, analytical, and conversational moments, Leonard Schwartz rethinks the battle lines of the contemporary Middle East and calls on the power of language as the essence of our humanity, endlessly fluid, but also the source of an intentional confusion there is a necessity to counter.
As a renowned academic, orator, and activist, Shohat’s work unpacks complexly fraught issues: anomalies of the national and colonial in Zionist discourse; narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; links and distinctions between the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew; and efforts to imagine a possible united and peaceful future. Shohat’s trans-disciplinary perspective illuminates the contemporary cultural politics in and around the Middle East. A transdisciplinary work engaging history, literature, sociology, film, media, and cultural studies, Selected Writings offers a vivid sense of Shohat’s unique intellectual journey and field-defining career.
into boiling waters. If it helps propel forward a debate that has hardly begun in this country it will
have performed a signal scholarly and political function.”
—Tony Judt, New York University
“. . . a pioneering text. . . . [A]s such it will take pride of place in a brewing debate.”
—Gary Sussman, Tel Aviv University
The One-State Solution demonstrates that Israeli settlements have already encroached on the occupied territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the extent that any Palestinian state in those areas is unviable. It reveals the irreversible impact of Israel’s settlement grid by summarizing its physical, demographic, financial, and political dimensions. Virginia Tilley explains why we should assume that this grid will not be withdrawn—or its expansion reversed—by reviewing the
role of the key political actors: the Israeli government, the United States, the Arab states, and the European Union. Finally, the book addresses the daunting obstacles to a one-state solution—including major revision of the Zionist dream but also Palestinian and other regional resistance—and offers some ideas about how those obstacles might be addressed.
Michael Riordon takes us to thousand year-old olive groves, besieged villages, refugee camps, checkpoints and barracks. In the face of deepening conflict, Our Way to Fight offers courageous grassroots action on both sides of the wall, and points the way to a liveable future.
Beginning with the early Zionist settlement in Palestine that rose from the effort by Jews to escape long-standing discrimination in Europe, Qigley investigates the origins of the dispute, including the British occupation of Palestine, the British Mandate, and the involvement of the United Nations. He examines the 1948 War, the establishment of Israel, and explores the legal and political status of Jews there. After a detailed analysis of the 1967 War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he concludes with recommendations for resolving the conflict, including discussions of the responsibility of other states for the persisting injustice, the role of other states in settling the dispute, and steps to a possible solution.
The volume is interdisciplinary, including the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, ethnomusicologists, and Americanist and literary studies scholars. Contributors examine popular music of the Palestinian resistance, ethno-racial “passing” in Israeli cinema, Arab-Jewish rock, Euro-Israeli tourism to the Arab Middle East, Internet communities in the Palestinian diaspora, café culture in early-twentieth-century Jerusalem, and more. Together, they suggest new ways of conceptualizing Palestinian and Israeli political culture.
Contributors. Livia Alexander, Carol Bardenstein, Elliott Colla, Amy Horowitz, Laleh Khalili, Mary Layoun, Mark LeVine, Joseph Massad, Melani McAlister, Ilan Pappé, Rebecca L. Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Salim Tamari
Perfect for both general readers and students, it offers a comprehensive yet lucid rendering of the conflict, setting it in historical context. This fourth edition brings us up to date with a new introduction, conclusion, and material covering recent events: Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, the Palestinian unity deal between Fatah and Hamas, and ongoing Palestinian resistance, America’s Middle East policy, and the election of Trump.
Cutting through layers of confused and inconsistent information, this new edition of The Palestine-Israel Conflict will clarify the ongoing struggle for all readers.
Falk explores the intricacies and interconnections within the history and politics of Israel and Palestine, while delving into the complicated relationships the conflict has created within the global community. He refutes the notion that the Palestinian struggle is a lost cause and offers new tactics and possibilities for change. He also puts the ongoing conflict in context, reflecting on the legacy of Edward Said and drawing on the importance of his ideas as a humanist model for peace that is mindful of the formidable difficulties that come with achieving a solution to the long struggle. One of the most established and authoritative voices on the conflict, Falk now presents his most sustained and focused historical overview to date.
In a timely reminder of how the past informs the present, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal offer an authoritative account of the history of the Palestinian people from their modern origins to the Oslo peace process and beyond.
Palestinians struggled to create themselves as a people from the first revolt of the Arabs in Palestine in 1834 through the British Mandate to the impact of Zionism and the founding of Israel. Their relationship with the Jewish people and the State of Israel has been fundamental in shaping that identity, and today Palestinians find themselves again at a critical juncture. In the 1990s cornerstones for peace were laid for eventual Palestinian-Israeli coexistence, including mutual acceptance, the renunciation of violence as a permanent strategy, and the establishment for the first time of Palestinian self-government. But the dawn of the twenty-first century saw a reversion to unmitigated hatred and mutual demonization. By mid-2002 the brutal violence of the Intifada had crippled Palestine's fledgling political institutions and threatened the fragile social cohesion painstakingly constructed after 1967. Kimmerling and Migdal unravel what went right--and what went wrong--in the Oslo peace process, and what lessons we can draw about the forces that help to shape a people. The authors present a balanced, insightful, and sobering look at the realities of creating peace in the Middle East.
In this unique volume, leading analysts – many of whom have been actively involved in past negotiations on this issue – provide an overview of the key dimensions of the Palestinian refugee problem. Mindful of the sensitive and contested nature of the subject, none offers a single solution. Instead, each contribution summarises and synthesises the existing scholarly and governmental work on the topic.
Each paper develops an array of policy options for resolving various aspects of the refugee issue, written in such a way as to provide a broad menu of choices rather than a single narrow set of recommendations.
No other work on the Palestinian refugee issue has undertaken such a task. The Palestinian Refugee Problem: The Search for a Resolution is likely to be a pre-eminent reference and analytical work on the topic for many years to come.
The future of the West Bank and Gaza remains the single most crucial issue in the search for peace in the Middle East. Examining the entire range of possible outcomes, Mark Heller argues that an independent Palestinian state in those territories, even one dominated by the PLO, could, under certain stringent conditions, be the preferred option for Israel.
In the first comprehensive treatment of the political, social, economic, and military factors bearing on the disposition of the West Bank and Gaza, Heller sets forth the possible alternatives—annexation by Israel, perpetuation of the status quo, federal or communal arrangements, and territorial compromise within the framework of the Jordanian option—and evaluates their implications for Israeli security.
Heller outlines the conditions under which he believes the establishment of a Palestinian state could be the optimal solution. He also discusses the economic prospects of a Palestinian state and the future of Jerusalem. His analysis is the boldest attempt yet to come to grips with the Palestinian question and the future of Israel. No one interested in the pursuit of a peaceful settlement of the Israeli–Arab conflict can afford to ignore this book.
Law lies at the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Jews sought a national home by “Public Law” while Palestinians reject the project as illegal. Britain, the League of Nations and the United Nations all mobilised international law to justify their interventions. After the 1967 war, Israel organised an occupation with excessive legalism that most of the world viewed, in fact, as illegal.
Partitioning Palestine focuses on three key moments in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: the League of Nations Mandate, the United Nations partition plan and the Oslo agreements. None of these documents are neutral but, rather, encode a variety of meanings. The book traces the way in which these legal narratives have both shaped national identity and sharpened the conflict.
In this pioneering text, John Strawson argues that a committed attachment to the belief in legal justice has hampered the search for a settlement. Law, far from offering conflict resolution, has reinforced the trenches from which Palestinians and Israelis confront one another.
This book contradicts the dominant myth that incompetent, corrupt, and uncompromising Palestinian decision-makers are responsible for the lasting stalemate in the Middle-East Peace Process. It highlights recent political developments in Palestine that fundamentally redefine important parameters of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Contrary to public perception, new political trends in the Palestinian Territories bolster prospects for the realisation of Palestinian national aspirations. Michael Bröning identifies key indicators which fundamentally question dominant Israeli narratives and pose an unprecedented strategic challenge to the Israeli leadership. These include the re-invention of Hamas, the reform of the Fatah movement, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s state-building efforts and the surge of non-violent resistance against Israel.
This persuasive book forces us to reconsider the perceived wisdom that the Palestinians are powerless to influence events as they struggle for peace.
The 1948 war ended in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their villages and homes. Israeli settlers moved in to occupy their land and the Palestinian refugees found themselves in refugee camps, or in neighbouring Arab countries. Today there are nearly four million Palestinian refugees -- and they want the right to go home. Their problem is the greatest and most enduring refugee problem in the world.
Since 1948 Israeli refugee policy has become a classic case of denial: the denial that Zionist "transfer committees" had operated between 1937 and 1948; denial of any wrong-doing or any historical injustice; denial of the "right of return"; denial of restitution of property and compensation; and indeed denial of any moral responsibility or culpability for the creation of the refugee problem.
The aim of this book is to analyze Israeli policies towards the Palestinian refugees as they evolved from the 1948 catastrophe (or nakba) to the present. It is the first volume to look in detail at Israeli law and policy surrounding the refugee question. Drawing on extensive primary sources and previously classified archive material, Masalha discusses the 1948 exodus; Israeli resettlement schemes since 1948; Israeli approaches to compensation and restitution of property; Israeli refugee policies towards the internally displaced (‘present absentees’); and Israeli refugee policies during the Madrid and Oslo negotiations.
Masalha asks what rights Palestinians possess under international law? How can a refugee population be compensated, and will they ever be able to return to their homes? Masalha questions the official Israeli position that the only solution to the problem is resettlement of the refugees in Arab states or elsewhere. This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the subject that lies at the heart of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Shaul Ephraim Cohen has conducted an unprecedented study of planting in the region and the control of land it signifies. In The Politics of Planting, he provides historical background and examines both the politics behind Israel's afforestation policy its consequences. Focusing on the open land surrounding Jerusalem and four Palestinian villages outside the city, this study offers a new perspective on the conflict over land use in a region where planting has become a political tool.
For the valuable data it presents—collected from field work, previously unpublished documents, and interviews—and the insight it provides into this political struggle, this will be an important book for anyone studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In The Politics of the Trail, Löwenheim confronts this tension by focusing on his encounters with three places along the trail: the separation fence between Israel and the Palestinians; the ruins of the Palestinian village Qalunya, demolished in 1948; and the trail connecting the largest 9/11 memorial site outside of the U.S. with a top-secret nuclear-proof bunker for the Israeli cabinet. He shares the stories of the people he meets along the way and considers how his own subjectivity is shaped by the landscape and culture of conflict. Moreover, he deconstructs, challenges, and resists the concepts and institutions that constitute such a culture and invites conversation about the idea of conflict as a culture.
The book contains hundreds of stories of the heroic and highly innovative methods of resistance employed by the Palestinians over more than 100 years. The author also analyses the successes, failures, missed opportunities and challenges facing ordinary Palestinians as they struggle for freedom against incredible odds. This is the only book to critically and comparatively study the uprisings of 1920-21, 1929, 1936-9, 1970s, 1987-1991 and 2000-2006.
The compelling human stories told in this book will inspire people of all faiths and political backgrounds to chart a better and more informed direction for a future of peace with justice.
Known for her far-reaching examinations of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, Jacqueline Rose has in recent years turned her attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most enduring and apparently intractable conflicts of our time. In Proust among the Nations, she takes the development of her thought on this crisis a stage further, revealing it as a distinctly Western problem.
Shared Land/Conflicting Identity: Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Use argues that rhetoric, ideology, and myth have played key roles in influencing the development of the 100-year conflict between first the Zionist settlers and the current Israeli people and the Palestinian residents in what is now Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is usually treated as an issue of land and water. While these elements are the core of the conflict, they are heavily influenced by the symbols used by both peoples to describe, understand, and persuade each other. The authors argue that symbolic practices deeply influenced the Oslo Accords, and that the breakthrough in the peace process that led to Oslo could not have occurred without a breakthrough in communication styles.
Rowland and Frank develop four crucial ideas on social development: the roles of rhetoric, ideology, and myth; the influence of symbolic factors; specific symbolic factors that played a key role in peace negotiations; and the identification and value of criteria for evaluating symbolic practices in any society.
There is no more compelling and dramatic unfolding story, with more profound international ramifications, than the conflict in the Middle East.
Sharing the Land of Canaan is a critical examination of the core issues of the conflict that dares to put forward a radical but logical solution: that a shared state is the best way to achieve justice and peace for Israelis and Palestinians.
Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, a human rights activist based at Yale University, offers an overview of the issues at stake, and outlines his vision for a lasting peace based on upholding the principles of human rights for all. Tackling taboo subjects, myths and obstacles, he argues convincingly that apartheid in the form of a two-state solution is no longer a feasible way to achieve enduring peace.
At this critical time, when the 'road map' to peace looks more uncertain than ever, this book provides a refreshing counterpoint to the failed strategies of the past. It is a direct and accessible account of the history - and mythology - of the fabled 'Land of Canaan', which lays out hopeful ideas for the future of this truly multiethnic and multicultural region.
For years, renowned activist and scholar Ilana Hammerman has given the world remarkable translations of Kafka. With A Small Door Set in Concrete, she turns to the actual surreal existence that is life in the West Bank after decades of occupation.
After losing her husband and her sister, Hammerman set out to travel to the end of the world. She began her trip with the hope that it would reveal the right path to take in life. But she soon realized that finding answers was less important than experiencing the freedom to move from place to place without restriction. Hammerman returned to the West Bank with a renewed joie de vivre and a resolution: she would become a regular visitor to the men, women, and children who were on the other side of the wall, unable to move or act freely. She would listen to their dreams and fight to bring some justice into their lives.
A Small Door Set in Concrete is a moving picture of lives filled with destruction and frustration but also infusions of joy. Whether joining Palestinian laborers lining up behind checkpoints hours before the crack of dawn in the hope of crossing into Israel for a day’s work, accompanying a family to military court for their loved one’s hearing, or smuggling Palestinian children across borders for a day at the beach, Hammerman fearlessly ventures into territories where few Israelis dare set foot and challenges her readers not to avert their eyes in the face of injustice.
Hammerman neither preaches nor politicks. Instead, she engages in a much more personal, everyday kind of activism. Hammerman is adept at revealing the absurdities of a land where people are stripped of their humanity. And she is equally skilled at illuminating the humanity of those caught in this political web. To those who have become simply statistics or targets to those in Israel and around the world, she gives names, faces, dreams, desires.
This is not a book that allows us to sit passively. It is a slap in the face, a necessary splash of cold water that will reawaken the humanity inside all of us.
The determination of ordinary people to end regional and global conflicts is powerful despite the forces opposing them. The Struggle for Peace explores how average citizens on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict worked for peace in the late twentieth century. Essays by noted scholars are juxtaposed with profiles of individual Israelis and Palestinians involved in peace activism. What emerges is a unique perspective on the prospects for peace in this troubled area.
Coordinated with a documentary film of the same name, the book is designed as a tool for the study of conflict resolution generally and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. The twelve original essays deal with the issues from different disciplinary perspectives: political science (Yehoshafat Harkabi, A. R. Norton, Muhammad Muslih, and Robert Vitalis); history (Avraham Zilkha and Joel Beinin); anthropology (Robert Rubinstein); sociology (Salim Tamari); film (Steven Talley); law (Edward Sherman); and international peacekeeping (Christian Harleman). The human side of the struggle is presented through brief biographies and portraits of twenty-five ordinary Israelis and Palestinians involved in peace activities in Israel and the West Bank.
Palestinian prisoners charged with security-related offences are immediately taken as a threat to Israel's security. They are seen as potential, if not actual, suicide bombers. This stereotype ignores the political nature of the Palestinian prisoners' actions and their desire for liberty.
By highlighting the various images of Palestinian prisoners in the Israel-Palestine conflict, Abeer Baker and Anat Matar chart their changing fortunes. Essays written by prisoners, ex-prisoners, Human rights defenders, lawyers and academic researchers analyse the political nature of imprisonment and Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian prisoners. These contributions deal with the prisoners' status within Palestinian society, the conditions of their imprisonment and various legal procedures used by the Israeli military courts in order to criminalise and de-politicise them. Also addressed are Israel's breaches of international treaties in its treatment of the Palestinian prisoners, practices of torture and solitary confinement, exchange deals and prospects for release.
This is a unique intervention within Middle East studies that will inspire those working in human rights, international law and the peace process.
This book is a comprehensive overview and analysis of the Palestinians’ travail as they move from revolutionary movement to state. Barry Rubin outlines the difficulties in the transition now underway arising from Palestinian history, society, and diplomatic agreements. He writes about the search for a national identity, the choice of an economic system, and the structure of government.
Rubin finds the political system interestingly distinctive—it appears to be a pluralist dictatorship. There are free elections, multiple parties, and some latitude in civil liberties. Yet there is a relatively unrestrained chief executive and arbitrariness in applying the law because of restraints on freedom. The new ruling elite is a complex mixture of veteran revolutionaries, heirs to large and wealthy families, professional soldiers, technocrats, and Islamic clerics. Beyond explaining how the executive and legislative branches work, Rubin factors in the role of public opinion in the peace process, the place of nongovernmental institutions, opposition movements, and the Palestinian Authority’s foreign relations—including Palestinian views and interactions with the Arab world, Israel, and the United States.
This book is drawn from documents in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, as well as interviews and direct observations. Rubin finds that, overall, the positive aspects of the Palestinian Authority outweigh the negative, and he foresees the establishment of a Palestinian state. His charting of the triumphs and difficulties of this state-in-the-making helps predict and explain future dramatic developments in the Middle East.
Halper goes on to show how this method of war is rapidly globalizing, as the major capitalist powers and corporations transform militaries, security agencies, and police forces into an effective instrument of global pacification. Simultaneously a deeply researched exposé and a clarion call, War Against the People is a bold attempt to shine the light on the daily injustices visited on a civilian population —and thus hasten their end.
What is the purpose of the West Bank Wall? Since Israel began its construction in 2002, it has sparked intense debate, being condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice. Israel claims it is a security measure to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks. Opponents point to the serious impact on the rights of Palestinians, depriving them of their land, mobility and access to health and educational services.
In The West Bank Wall, Dolphin explores the Palestinian experience of the Wall and places the debate in its international context. Dolphin's writing is informed by his work for the UN, where for three years he monitored and compiled reports on the Wall's impact on the humanitarian conditions in refugee camps, towns and villages. With an introduction by Graham Usher, who has worked as Palestine correspondent for major international publications including the Economist, Middle East International, al Ahram English Weekly, the Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique, this book puts the purpose of the Wall to the test.
What are the real intentions behind the Israeli security argument? Is it a means of securing territory permanently through an illegal annexation of East Jerusalem? Ray Dolphin provides some answers, offering a unique critical account of the impact of the wall and how it affects plans for a Palestinian state and for future peace in the Middle East.
“In a display of rationality uncommon to discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nusseibeh takes an impartial vantage point, trying to sort out a mess largely generated by overblown and hyperactive political identities.”—Boston Review
“[This] philosophical and balanced book is unfailingly sensitive and empathetic to both sides.”—Publishers Weekly
Can a devout Jew be a devout Jew and drop the belief in the rebuilding of the Temple? Can a devout Muslim be a devout Muslim and drop the belief in the sacredness of the Rock? Can one right (the right of return) be given up for another (the right to live in peace)? Can one claim Palestinian identity and still retain Israeli citizenship? What is a Palestinian state worth? For over sixty years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been subjected to many solutions and offered many answers by diverse parties. Yet, answers are only as good as the questions that beget them. It is with this simple, but powerful idea, the idea of asking the basic questions anew, that the renowned Palestinian philosopher and activist Sari Nusseibeh begins his book.
What Is a Palestinian State Worth? poses questions about the history, meaning, future, and resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Deeply informed by political philosophy and based on decades of personal involvement with politics and social activism, Nusseibeh’s moderate voice—global in its outlook, yet truly grounded in his native city of Jerusalem—points us toward a future which, as George Lamming once put it, is colonized by our acts in this moment, but which must always remain open.
Mainstream nationalist narratives and political movements have dominated the Israeli-Palestinian situation for too long. In this much-needed book, Ran Greenstein challenges this hegemony by focusing on four different, but at the same time connected, attempts which stood up to Zionist dominance and the settlement project before and after 1948.
Greenstein begins by addressing the role of the Palestinian Communist Party, and then the bi-nationalist movement, before moving on to the period after 1948 when Palestinian attempts to challenge their unjust conditions of marginalisation became more frequent. Finally, he confronts the radical anti-Zionist Matzpen group, which operated from the early 1960s–80s.
In addition to analyses of the shifting positions of these movements, Greenstein examines perspectives regarding a set of conceptual issues: colonialism and settlement, race/ethnicity and class, and questions of identity, rights and power, and how, such as in the case of South Africa, these relations should be seen as global.
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