Helping the enemy? Why transnational Jewish philanthropic foundations donate to Palestinian NGOs in Israel

ABSTRACT. This article asks why transnational Jewish donor organisations have been increasingly providing financial support to Palestinian social movements and NGOs in Israel when many of the main recipients are strong critics of the Jewish character of the state and act to promote Palestinian national claims within Israel. The article evaluates a number of plausible explanations, some generated by interest‐centric theories while others are driven by ideational underpinnings. The study concludes that the donors do not view the interests of the Jewish state and the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel (PAI) in zero‐sum terms. Having internalised liberal values of minority rights and pluralism in their countries of residence (mainly the United States), donating foundations believe that the development of the PAI is both normatively desirable and strengthens Israel as a whole because it facilitates the minority's integration into Israel's society and bolsters its civic culture, and therefore, it also contributes to the country's security. These findings are theoretically significant because they demonstrate how the interpretation of communal interest is strongly related to the normative social environment in which transnational activists operate.     

History,memory and the meaning of place: the renovation of Sidnā ‘Alī mosque as a nexus of Palestinian,Arab and Islamic identity in Israel

This paper illustrates the possibility of gaining meaningful insights into a place by exploring its relationship with its surroundings. A model is suggested for examining the possible significances of this relationship and the actual meanings attributed to it by those who plan and use the place. The site analyzed here is Sidnā ‘Alī, an Islamic shrine on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. Sidnā ‘Alī, which has been a pilgrimage site for centuries, was abandoned during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War; it was renovated in the late 1980s by Muslim Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. The paper discusses the social mobilization for the renovation of the old mosque as a prelude to exploring the meanings of Sidnā ‘Alī’s relationships with the surrounding landscapes, places and buildings. The study of the social function of the renovation campaign focuses on its role in unifying the people involved and on forging a collective identity based on the shared struggle to return the site to Muslim hands. The spatial interpretation presented examines the renovation project as a form of Palestinian, Arab and Islamic resistance to the covert and overt Zionist hegemony in the public space.     

Towards a de-Occidentalist perspective on Israel: The case of the occupation

First fleshed out in German romanticism, Occidentalist discourse expresses a regressive, conspiratorial, and anti-cosmopolitan critique of “Western” modernity. In a process mirroring the Orientalization of the Jews in Europe, the Jewish State in the Middle East underwent a process of Occidentalization – a phenomenon most apparent in depictions of Jewish diaspora nationalism as a form of European settler-colonialism. In order to illustrate the research agenda of de-Occidentalizing Israel, two approaches are applied to the example of Israel's occupation: An analysis of preexisting theorizations of Israel's territorial expansion after 1967 points to Occidentalist motifs like the systematic dislocation of Israel from its particular era and region, the neglect of Palestinian resistance, and the failure to develop a regionally comparative perspective. In contrast, a de-Occidentalist recontextualization of Israel as a postcolonial state in the Middle East points to intriguing parallels with other cases of postcolonial state expansion like Syria's protectorate over Lebanon and Morocco's partial annexation of Western Sahara.     

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Is there a way out?

The blame for the inability to put an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians must be shared by all parties. In Israel, Ehud Barak's attempts were courageous but he never established trust with the Palestinians. The policy of the Sharon government, based only on response to violence by force, also failed. Although he did not mastermind the Second Intifada, Arafat's attitude towards the Palestinian militant armed groups was always ambiguous and he lost any credit even among the Israeli peace camp. The Arab countries never gave more than a formal support to the Palestinians and abstained from arguing in favour of coexistence with the Israelis. The Americans, with Clinton, seriously tried their best but lacked some long-term perspective and, with George W. Bush, aligned themselves with the most radical Israeli position. Europe did support the Palestinian economy but was too divided to influence dramatically the negotiations and did not invest enough into peace-building among the peoples of the region. The only way out of the quagmire is to follow the roadmap established by the international community, represented by the 'Quartet' (the UN, the USA, Russia and the European Union) for an end both to terrorism and occupation, and towards negotiations on the establishment of a democratic and viable Palestinian State.     

Dynamics and patterns of the shrinking of Arab lands in Palestine

This paper seeks to sketch a number of geographical patterns pertaining to the ongoing process of confiscation of Palestinian-Arab land in Israel and the 1967 occupied territories. It points out a geographical pattern and process of “enclaving” and “exclaving”, a form of spatial apartheid and exclusionary zoning which was adopted during the pre-state period of Jewish settlement and has continued down to the present day. The centrality of land possession and its transfer to Jewish national and state ownership is shared by almost all political classes in Israel. Even during key points in peace negotiations over the past several years, land confiscation never ceased nor was interrupted. The present paper employs the term “shrinking” to underscore that land confiscation is a continuous process in Palestine/Israel. This of course has both political and social ramifications for the type of state Israel seeks to be, declaring its desire to live in peace and harmony with its own Palestinian citizens and Palestinians elsewhere once a peace deal has been reached. Seen from the perspective of land, its control and use, this paper argues that there is no other alternative in achieving peaceful resolution between Jews in Israel and Palestinians except a return to square one: redefining a new geography for Palestinian villages and towns in Israel and for those many hundreds of villages which were demolished and have since been obliterated.     

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.     

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.     

Walking the Middle of the Peace Road? The Emergence of JCall in France

On 3 May 2010, a ‘Call to reason’ (Appel à la raison) was presented to the European Parliament in Brussels by a number of prominent figures from European Jewish political and intellectual classes, launching JCall, which is supposedly the European version of the US J Street. JCall explicitly positions itself as pro-Israel on one hand but against the Israeli state's occupation and increased settlement of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, on the other hand. The ‘reason’ it calls for is thus a negotiated two-state settlement to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the organisation urges EU governments to apply pressure on both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to this end. This article looks at JCall within the French context, first in distinction to J Street in the USA, with which JCall shares a political position but not organisational links, and second in relation to the broader French political debate about Jewishness, Muslimness and the Middle East. Criticised by the right for its supposed disloyalty to Israel and even ‘anti-Semitism’, and by the left for its non-support of boycott, divestment and sanctions and its ongoing support of the Israeli state, JCall at first appears as somewhat middle-of-the-road in the French context. It also, from this writer's point of view, regrettably lacks a strong female presence or gendered perspective. It has, however, emerged as a serious political voice in the debate over the Middle East and could be less of a lightweight in the French political battles over Israel and Palestine than it may have first appeared.     

An Independent Palestine: The Security Dimension

If negotiations produce an end to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict then a sovereign, independent Palestine may emerge. But what is required for it to succeed? Nothing is more important than the security of a Palestinian state–for itself, for Israel, and for the region: security trumps all else. In addition to the problem of dealing effectively with opposition to a peace agreement within Palestine or directed against it from outside, the nature and magnitude of the security challenge will depend in large part on three issues: the drawing of borders between Israel and Palestine–and whether they are porous or marked by a rigid line of barriers; whether Israeli settlements are withdrawn, or in part incorporated into Israel, perhaps through land swaps with Palestine; and what arrangements are made for Jerusalem. One answer is the creation of effective Palestinian military forces (in addition to police), but this course could be divisive; a second is the development of a series of Israeli–Palestinian confidence‐building and share–security measures, including intelligence cooperation; a third is progress towards reducing external threats to Israel–Palestine, including success in Iraq and in defusing other Middle East problems. Most useful, however, would be the creation of an American‐led peace enabling force, ideally modelled on NATO. This force would need to be agreed by both Israel and Palestine; it must be adequately staffed, trained and equipped; its duties and rules of engagement must make sense to all parties; and it must be part of a network of dispute‐resolution and confidence‐building measures in full partnership with Israeli and Palestinian authorities.     

Israel,Nigeria and the Biafra civil war, 1967–70

The Biafran secession of 1967 and ensuing civil war presented Israel with an acute dilemma. Israel sought to maintain correct relations with the Federal Government of Nigeria, which viewed as a hostile act any support rendered to the Biafran separatists. At the same time, the plight of the Igbos reminded many Israelis of the Holocaust. This article makes use of Israeli archival material to shed new light on how Israel shaped its policy towards the conflict. The Israeli public, press and parliament called for assistance to Biafra, evoking their country's deep moral obligation to help a people in distress. Israel aided Biafra, including, in a clandestine manner, the supply of weapons for which the secessionists pressed, in addition to humanitarian assistance. At the same time, Israel also sold arms to Nigeria, seeking to prevent a diplomatic rupture with the Lagos government that would have affected Israel's position in all of black Africa.     

Australian Public Opinion on the Israel–Palestine Conflict: Implications in the Context of Arab Revolutions

This article examines the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy making in Australia by turning to the findings of a national survey of Australian public opinion on the Israel–Palestine conflict. The survey findings suggest that the Australian government's policy on the Israel–Palestine conflict is inconsistent with public opinion, and such disparity is explained here in terms of the lack of public attachment to the conflict, the limited media and the absence of any notable public advocacy for policy change. This explanation is informed by in-depth interviews conducted with current and former members of parliament and senior public servants. The article also explores the implications of the survey's findings in relation to the significant political changes taking place across the Middle East region. It suggests that these events may be creating an impetus for policy change that endorses Palestinian self-determination, for which there is significant support among the Australian public.     

A Historical Inevitability?: Kissinger and US Contacts with the Palestinians (1973–76)

This article examines Henry Kissinger's role in shaping US strategy towards the Palestinian issue between 1973 and 1976, focusing a series of direct and indirect covert contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its representatives during these years. Although scholars have correctly noted that Kissinger's Middle East policy concentrated on reconciling Israel with the Arab states, particularly Egypt, these contacts suggest an intent to keep open the possibility of bringing the PLO into negotiations with Israel.     

Righteous Realism Versus Postmodern Play: The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in Female-Authored French Fiction

This article analyses literary mediations of francophone Jewish attitudes towards Israel, and particularly towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Its primary corpus comprises two female-authored novels published during the Second Intifada: Olivia Rosenthal's Les Fantaisies spéculatives de J.H. le sémite (2005) and Chantal Osterreicher's L'Insouciance d'Adèle (2006). It demonstrates how these two texts represent antithetical stances towards Israel, the former intermittently critical and even censorious, the latter defensive and at least partly valorising. Given the status of both authors as French-born Jews (although Osterreicher now lives in Israel), both of these texts can be seen to mediate heterodox attitudes to the conflict. But the heterodoxy depends upon the context in which the reader places the two authors. In the context of the twenty-first-century France in which it was published, which, like most other countries in the global mediasphere, is heavily critical of Israel, Osterreicher's text is acidly contestatory of default-position anti-Zionism. On the other hand, in the context of the French Jewry to which Rosenthal belongs, which has traditionally evinced unflinching solidarity with Israel, her own critique of that country's dealings with Palestinians is equally contestatory, and, despite its ludicity, is no less impactful than Osterreicher's reverse discourse. A final axis of enquiry is the extent to which there may be some consensus as well as obvious dissensus between these two ostensibly antinomous texts.     

The Basis of China's Pro‐Palestine Stance and the Current Status of its Implementation

This article is built upon the author's previous attempt to review Sino–Israel relations from the Chinese perspective, where it is argued that the relationship is at a crossroads because China is increasingly more proactively involved in the international arena, which will inevitably lead to a more assertive role in trying to facilitate a solution to the Israel–Palestinian conflicts. The author also affirmed that China is more supportive of the Palestinians. In this article, the author will further analyze China's pro‐Palestine stance, give empirical evidence of this preference by Chinese intelligentsia, and provide insight into the decision‐making mechanisms of the Chinese government in terms of its diplomatic policies. The author also wants to demonstrate that, despite the evident pro‐Palestine tendency of Chinese scholars and consequently the government, little has been done to implement this preference. The Israelis still have a sizable time window to achieve a fair and just peace agreement with the Palestinians. In the long run, China's pro‐Palestine inclination will work more and more against Israel, in contrast to the strong pro‐Israel inclination of the United States.     

Between ideology and practice,national conflict and anti‐imperialist struggle: the National Liberation League in Palestine

This paper focuses on the National Liberation League (NLL), a Palestinian Arab communist movement which operated in Palestine between the years 1943–1948. The paper examines its short‐lived history in light of the relevant three contexts in which it operated: the local Palestinian national context; the regional context of communist activity in the Middle East and the external‐internationalist context of the Soviet Union. The paper further discusses the activities of the NLL during the period of the 1948 War in Palestine, as well as in the first period of military rule, imposed on the Palestinian citizens of Israel. An analysis of the NLL during the late Mandatory period and the early years of the State of Israel allows a close examination of the ways by which concepts of identity, nationalism, class and ethnicity were conceptualised, debated and contested during times of a national conflict and anti‐imperial struggle and brings to the fore tensions between ideology and practice, nationalism and internationalism. The NLL offers an important opportunity to look into the complex matrix of communist movements that combine anti‐imperial struggles with struggles for national liberation in the context of a national conflict and to examine their dilemmas and what may seem as internal contradictions.     

Jihad,competing norms and the Israel–Palestine impasse

A central factor in the failure to resolve the Israel–Palestine conflict is the direct competition that exists between its two most central international norms: ‘self-determination’, the fundamental claim of the Palestinians, and ‘self-defence’, the overriding concern of Israelis. Particularly since 9/11, Palestinian violence has been a liability for their cause and has served to validate Israel's self-defence arguments. Increasingly, Palestinian violence has been perpetrated by the Islamically oriented under the banner of jihad, which is understood almost exclusively in terms of armed struggle. Non-violence — which has the potential to undermine Israel's self-defence arguments and generate external pressure on Israel to adhere to the terms of a just peace — has been under-appreciated by such Palestinians. Non-violence is far from having a normative status in the Muslim world as an Islamically legitimate response to occupation and it is yet to be conceptualised as an effective form of resistance. The concept needs to be reformulated in accordance with the realities and opportunities confronting the Palestinians. Contextualisation combined with a maqasid or objective-oriented approach establishes non-violence as a preferable option to violence both in terms of the higher objectives of jihad, enshrined in the Quran, as well as of the attainment of Palestinian self-determination.     

“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.     

Turkey and the Palestinian Question: The Shift of Roles in Foreign Policy

For Turkey, which was seeking a leading role in the Middle East, the Palestinian Question became a priority in its foreign policy during the late 1990s. In this article, it is argued that the role Turkey primarily espoused in the resolution of the Palestinian Question in the period 2000–2009 has mainly been that of a communicator. Nonetheless, in times of crises between Palestine and Israel, Ankara lost its neutrality and credibility to some extent, as it shifted to the role of guardian of Palestinians and proponent of Palestine, thereby undermining its communicator role. Finally, this dilemma in Turkish foreign policy in the Palestinian Question was the fundamental impediment to Turkey's sustainable and constructive contribution to the settlement of the problem in the examined period.     

从阿拉伯民族主义到巴勒斯坦民族主义——巴勒斯坦民族的成长历程

巴勒斯坦民族经历了从“潜在民族”→“自在民族”→“自觉民族”的过程。在思想领域,巴勒斯坦人经历了从阿拉伯民族主义到巴勒斯坦民族主义的转变。在完成了这一转变后,美国、以色列和国际社会才把解决巴勒斯坦问题的重心从阿拉伯国家转移到巴勒斯坦人身上,才使中东和平进程步入了正确轨道。     

Reframing Bi‐nationalism in Palestine‐Israel as a Process of Settler Decolonisation

This paper examines some of the emerging critical civil society debates in relation to the one‐state solution being the most appropriate geo‐political arrangement for the articulation of freedom, justice and equality in Palestine‐Israel. This is done with reference to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions’ 2012 statement in support of a bi‐national state and the ensuing critiques it attracted from Palestinian supporters of the one‐state position. Drawing on these debates which have largely revolved around Jewish Israeli rights to political self‐determination in Palestine‐Israel, this paper proposes that alternative versions of self‐determination as cultural rights for the established Hebrew‐speaking national community represent a more inclusive form of self‐determination in the eventuality of decolonisation.