Oral testimonies,archival sources,and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War: A close look at the occupation of a Galilean village

This article explores the (still) possible and significant contribution oral history can make to the study of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Its purpose is to create a constructive “dialogue” between archival sources and oral testimonies. By weaving the information contained in written documents together with that conveyed through spoken words – the two sources simultaneously support and cast doubt on each other – it bridges a gap between the path generally followed by Israeli historians and that taken by many Palestinian scholars. To illustrate the potential embodied in the proposed “dialogue” to improve our understanding of the war, the article presents a historical close-up of Fassuta, one of the Arab villages occupied by Jewish forces during the war. Cross-checking Israeli documents in Hebrew against Palestinian memories conveyed in Arabic, this article seeks to explain how and why that particular village remained intact while many of the neighboring villages were depopulated and destroyed.     

The Historiography of Deir Yassin

This article describes Israeli and Arab historiography concerning the events in the Arab village of Deir Yassin in April 1948, during the first Israeli–Arab war, of 1948. It begins with the internal, left–right Israeli controversy during 1969–71 about the alleged massacre and then describes and analyses what “really” happened at Deir Yassin on the basis of the Israeli (and, to a smaller extent, British) documentation from 1948 that has been declassified over the last few years. It then concludes by describing the evolution of the Israel and Palestinian histographical narratives on the event.     

Communists and the 1948 War: PCP,Maki, and the National Liberation League

This paper analyzes the way in which Palestine's Jewish and Arab communist parties, the PCP-Maki and the National Liberation League, acted during the 1948 war. Both groups made separate and different efforts to make the two-state solution a reality as originally conceived in the UN partition plan. Ironically, the decisive Jewish victory in the war resulted in an asymmetry between the Jewish Communists the Palestinian Communists when they were unified toward the end of the 1948 war. Despite Maki's labors for an Israeli victory, its standing in the nascent Israeli political system toward the end of the war remained marginal. The concept of Jewish–Arab cooperation under the aegis of the USSR was seen by the Zionist establishment as dangerous and subversive.     

Powerful State,Powerless Mediator: The United States and the Peace Efforts of the Palestine Conciliation Commission, 1949–51

The Arab–Israeli War of 1948 produced complex questions that needed to be solved to obtain peace. Whereas the Arab states suffered humiliating defeats, Israel was the undisputed winner, expanding and solidifying its power. For the Palestinians, the outcome was catastrophic. Between 600,000 and 760,000 Palestinians fled, becoming refugees on the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and in surrounding Arab states. Palestinian society collapsed and Palestine became divided between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, leaving the borders undecided. The Palestinians’ dreams of statehood were crushed. After the war, Israel used diplomacy to achieve its goals, defending the post-war status quo to preserve its expanded territory and resisting the return of Palestinian refugees. Through its membership in the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), established by the United Nations (UN) in 1948 to solve these problems, the United States was deeply involved in the negotiations. The United States became the informal, yet undisputed leader of the PCC, thus, it would seem, empowering it with the muscles of a superpower. After three years of struggling for peace the PCC had toadmit failure. Knowledge about these negotiations gives important insights into how mediators approached the conflict and shows that power asymmetry may explain why the belligerents could not obtain peace.     

“This is our land”: collective violence,property law,and imagining the geography of Palestine

This study seeks to explain the origins of two types of violence occurring on the Palestinian landscape, the erasure of Palestinian farms and the demolition of Palestinian homes. Such violence has two sources. One source derives from an enduring practice of meaning-making about geographical places that has inspired groups with territorial ambitions to seize control of the landscapes they covet and is referred to by Edward Said as the crafting of “imaginative geographies.” The second source focuses on changes in property rights that follow when groups with territorial ambitions succeed in seizing control of coveted land. It is the imagined geography of Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people, first framed by Zionists of the late 19^th century and absorbed into the practices of Israeli state-building, and the changes in property rights inscribed into the Palestinian landscape following Zionist and Israeli military conquests in 1948 and 1967, that lie at the core of violence directed against the Palestinian farm and home today. This process of imagination, legal transformation, and violence is part of a longstanding lineage of dispossession that includes the English enclosures and the taking of land from Amerindians on the Anglo-American colonial frontier.     

Threat,Victimhood, and Peace: Debating the 2011 Palestinian UN State Membership Bid

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been described as one of the most intractable in the world. This article first provides an overview of the sociopolitical events that led up to the Palestinian UN state membership bid in September 2011, and second, as a case study, it examines how the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was constructed in speeches delivered by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding the state membership bid to the UN General Assembly in September 2011. Despite their opposing agendas, there are some significant discursive similarities in the two speeches. The most salient shared discourses concern that of in‐group victimhood on the one hand, and that of out‐group threat on the other. It is argued that the speeches dispel support for intergroup reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians by aggravating grievances on both sides and accentuating intergroup suspicion. This article highlights the importance of examining political speeches in order to better understand the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.     

The 1948 war veterans and postwar reconstruction in Israel

This article deals with the characteristics of postwar reconstruction in the State of Israel at the end of the 1948 war and during the early 1950s, focusing on the patterns and priorities of reconstruction of society as a whole and the rehabilitation of veteran soldiers in particular. The article addresses the social impact of the rehabilitation of the 1948 war veterans on the emerging Israeli society, including the creation of a social distinction between different sectors undergoing rehabilitation in terms of employment and housing. The article also discusses the social and political protests that accompanied the rehabilitation of the demobilized soldiers who campaigned for recognition and commemoration.     

‘White as Cheese’: A Discussion of ‘Jbene’, the Palestinian Oicotype of ATU 403

This article examines the oral versions of the Palestinian tale ‘Jbene’, an oicotype of ATU 403, focusing on the relationships between two plot details that neutralize each other: whitening the heroine, as an act of creation/blessing; and blackening her in an attempt to ruin/destroy her. Socio-cultural aspects are examined, taking into consideration the status of female sexuality in Palestinian society, as well as the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. The oicotype is viewed as both strengthening Palestinian collective identity and at the same time conveying messages to young women on how to handle their sexuality within a patriarchal society.     

National narratives and the Oslo peace process: How peacebuilding paradigms address conflicts over history

National narratives are an essential part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Little is said, however, on how the Oslo Peace Process sought to address these narratives. Conventional wisdom argues that the peace process initiated in the 1990s largely ignored the matter. This article challenges this view, arguing instead that the peace process was and continues to be actively engaged in solving the narrative wars that divide Israelis and Palestinians. To shed light on these solutions, this article looks beyond the agreements of the Oslo Peace Process and focuses on the peacebuilding paradigms that informed it, more specifically, the national partition and the liberal peace paradigms. These prescribe two solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict over history: narrative partition and evasion. In their implementation, the article concludes, these solutions imposed greater identity costs on the Palestinian narrative than on the Israeli one.     

The Bedouins in the Palestinian–Zionist struggle at the beginning of the British Mandate: 1920–1929

This article presents the causal factors behind the Arab riots of the 1920s and the reasons some of the Bedouin tribes joined that struggle. It provides an overview of the “Events,” as Zionist historiographers termed the riots—the developing conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews, the methods and resources used by both parties, as well as the responses of the British authorities—from the local, national, and regional perspectives, especially in the political arena. It investigates the political stances that emerged among the local Bedouin tribes regarding the Zionist–Palestinian struggle and the reasons for the diversity of stances: while some tribes took an active part in the events on the Palestinian side, others remained neutral and a few tribes even chose to ally with the Jews, or at least warn them of forthcoming attacks. These different stances consolidated during this period, affecting the events and outcomes of the Great Palestinian revolt that took place in 1936–1939, as well as the conduct of these groups during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.     

The governmentalities of infrastructure and services amid urban conflict: East Jerusalem in the post Oslo era

Urban conflict in Jerusalem has mainly been studied through the lens of spatial and functional segregation and discriminative fragmentation between Israeli and Palestinian localities. This article adopts a governmentality approach to the study of the politics of urban infrastructure and services in urban conflict, and argues that a governmentalization process of East Jerusalem by Israel has evolved in the last two decades that has been enacted mainly through the control and management of Palestinian urban infrastructure and services. Since, as manifestations of resistance to Israeli occupation, many of the Palestinian urban functionalities historically operated separately from Israeli state apparatuses, this new development and its consequences indicate an increasing dependency and forced adaptation of Palestinians in Jerusalem to Israeli rule. Based on analysis of Palestinian public transport and education systems, the article demonstrates how the “soft” power of governmentality – mediated through the control and management of urban infrastructure and services – diffuses among the Palestinian population and in space, restructuring them as objects and subjects of Israeli administration and governmental order. In this light, urban infrastructure and services appear in the course of urban conflict as an arena of governmentality and counter-governmentality. On the one hand they serve as a site where identities are practiced and defended; on the other, they may mediate and facilitate the restructuring of political subjectivities and normalization of political structures and hierarchies.     

Explaining the occupation: Israeli hasbara and the occupied territories in the aftermath of the June 1967 war

Israeli rule over the territories it occupied in the June 1967 war has been the subject of animated international debate in the past half century. This article explores the policy-making process behind Israel’s immediate postwar propaganda and public diplomacy, or “hasbara” in Hebrew, intended to put before foreign audiences the necessity and legitimacy of the occupation. Based on unpublished archival sources, this paper will delineate and analyze the Israeli government’s numerous difficulties in explaining the occupation, faced by media and other reports of Palestinian postwar hardship and resistance to Israeli rule, as well as the harsh measures enforcing Israeli military control and the beginning of Israeli settlement. It also demonstrates the problem of conflicting demands placed on the Israeli government by its domestic audience. It finally argues that the perceived dent to Israel’s image so often discussed by its government and public, has much to say generally about the limits of any propaganda and public diplomacy.     

Infinite conditions on the road to peace: the second New Labour government’s foreign policy approach to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict after 9/11

This article examines how a resurgent clash of Arab and Israeli nationalisms created tensions within New Labour as the leadership sought to reconcile claims of duplicity in its Middle East policy after 9/11 while retaining party unity and an international consensus for a war in Afghanistan. It argues that as European and international pressure to prioritise Middle East peace before pursuing a war with Iraq increased, Tony Blair’s emphasis on economic progress as a prerequisite to creating a state of Palestine was expanded to determine that Palestinian national rights also be considered on the evidence of fundamental reform and modernisation across the spectrum of political, civil and cultural life. These objectives, however, were not to be achieved following the deployment of a UN peace-keeping force, but the prevailing conditions of the Israeli occupation, provisos later inscribed in the US-led goal-driven, performance-based Road Map for Peace. This focus ran in parallel with his assumed role as a transatlantic ‘bridge’, and collectively helped to transform the multilateralist template of the Quartet into a classic trilateralist negotiating model—bilateral Arab-Israel talks, unilaterally overseen by the US—enacting the further exclusion of key European partners.     

The Guests' Guests: Palestinian Refugees,Lebanese Civilians,and the War of 2006

Abstract: In the war between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006, 10,000 displaced Lebanese citizens were granted shelter and hospitality by Palestinian refugees in the camps of southern Lebanon. For the duration of the war, the Palestinian guests became hosts to their own hosts, and this temporary reversal of the usual relations of refuge set the scene for the rebuilding and renegotiation of relations between Palestinian refugees and their host country and its citizens. This paper addresses these events through a focus on the nature, politics and ethics of Palestinian hospitality and argues that hospitality was not simply a selfless act of giving, but also an instrumental act that had the potential to transform Palestinian–Lebanese relations in lasting ways.     

The Political Economy of Israeli-Palestinian Interdependence

The Israeli and Palestinian economies are asymmetrically interdependent. Some scholars argue that the Palestinian economy cannot be viable alone. Others believe that economic links with Israel will promote peace. Supporters of separation argue that these links distort Palestinian development. I show that the current interdependence is associated with a cyclical Israeli-Palestinian violence and Palestinian economic decline. Assuming that an independent Palestinian state forms in most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, I argue that Israeli-Palestinian relations require economic separation to be stable. Economic separation will deteriorate Palestinian welfare in the short run. Policies to make it viable are considered.     

Preserving ‘the Enemy’s’ architecture: preservation and gentrification in a formerly Palestinian Jerusalem neighbourhood

This article relates to the preservation of Palestinian buildings in Jerusalem and raises the question why state-sanctioned institutions act to preserve Palestinian architecture built pre-1948, bearing in mind the context of a difficult past and an on-going conflict? The article addresses the manner in which Jerusalem’s authorised heritage discourse focuses only on preserving Palestinian buildings’ tangible aspects (architectural styles), and not on intangible aspects such as the narrative of their builders. The main argument is that while preservation is presented as a civilised practice, it is driven by the commodification of the buildings and sites and their valued ‘authenticity’. The common practice is to ‘preserve’ these buildings by developing them to create more housing units. This practice inevitably leads to gentrification. Moreover, even when intangible aspects of heritage are pushed aside, preserving these buildings comes with the ‘risk’ of them being used as memory sites for subaltern groups. The article focuses on one formerly Palestinian West Jerusalem neighbourhood, Baka, where gentrification was triggered by historic Palestinian homes and where the neighbourhood’s development continues to be linked with historic preservation.     

Inside Checkpoint 300: Checkpoint Regimes as Spatial Political Technologies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

As a part of the architecture of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories, the Israeli government introduced in 2005 a series of so‐called terminal checkpoints as “neutral border crossings”, to minimise the impact of these barriers on Palestinian lives through a different design and the use of several machines, such as turnstiles and metal detectors. In this article, we analyse terminal Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem, framing it as a spatial political technology aimed at controlling the movement of Palestinians. More specifically, we investigate the interactions between Palestinian commuters, Israeli soldiers/security guards and the machines operating inside Checkpoint 300. We conclude by suggesting that Checkpoint 300 is a porous barrier whose regime is produced, reproduced but also challenged by such interactions, and that, despite the new “neutral design”, Checkpoint 300 is a place still filled with tension and violence, often exercised by the machines and their “decisions”.     

Heritage Interpretation and Politics in Kfar Etzion,Israel

Kfar Etzion is a Kibbutz first established in Palestine in the 1930s. At the end of the British Mandate, in 1948, it became a de facto Israeli military outpost that controlled access to Jerusalem from the south. Kfar Etzion fell to Arab forces in 1948 and the area became Jordanian territory until 1967 when Israeli forces occupied the West Bank. Kfar Etzion was re-established in the same year. Kfar Etzion now interprets its history through a sophisticated multilingual audio-visual presentation offered in a museum built over a former bunker where Jewish defenders were killed. This presentation is analysed to illustrate the ways in which an historical narrative is constructed for interpretive purposes and to show that Bloc and Israeli perspectives are conflated for political purposes. The battle for the Bloc continues through the interpretation of heritage.     

A Chronicle of Failure Foretold: The UK,Israel and Arms Sales to Argentina in the Era of the Falklands War

In spite of fierce British protests, Israel supplied Argentina with arms both during the Falklands war and with greater intensity after the fighting. While the weapons sales were vital for Israel's economy and its arms industry, recently declassified papers suggest that the Begin government viewed the arms supplies to Argentina as a bargaining chip to exert pressure on Britain to halt its own sale of weapons to Israel's Arab adversaries and to end London's arms embargo against the Jewish State. Britain's restrictions on arms sales had long cast a shadow over Anglo-Israeli ties, and Israeli resentment towards Britain was exacerbated by anger over London's strong condemnation of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and its leading involvement in the EEC Venice Declaration of June 1980 which recognized Palestinian self-determination and a role for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The Israelis also perceived the arms supplies as a means to influence the junta in its treatment of Argentina's Jews. Yet, there was actually a rise in the level of anti-Semitism in Argentina during the period in question. At the same time, Britain's approach in attempting to dissuade its allies from selling arms to Argentina was riddled with inconsistencies and ultimately misconceived.