Dialogue In Palestine

Since 1993, various international donors have poured money into a People-to-People (P2P) diplomacy programme in Palestine. This grassroots initiative – still funded by prominent external donors today - seeks to foster public engagement through contact and therefore remove deeply embedded barriers. This book examines the limited nature of this 'contact' and explains why the P2P framework, which was ostensibly concerned with the promotion of peace, ultimately served to reinforce conflict and power relations. The book is based on the author's own experience of the solidarity activities during the First Intifada and her first-hand involvement as a coordinator of the P2P projects implemented during the 1990s. It provides a much-needed critical account of the internationally-sponsored peace process and develops new theoretical analyses of settler colonialism.

In The Power of Dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, scholar and activist Nava Sonnenschein shares a collection of twenty-five powerful interviews she conducted with Palestinian and Jewish Israeli alumni of peacebuilding courses, showing the potential for a sustainable path to peace with equality in Israel and Palestine.

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

This book offers an analysis of the major sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and suggests principles and processes for building a peacemaking platform. The primary aim of this book is to analyze the crucial roles and capacities of mid-level, nongovernmental peacemakers as they provide unique approaches to transforming the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It also aims to analyze and experience dialogue as the primary mode of peacemaking communication. The two-part format of this book creates a structural dialogue. Part One provides an academic introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, why it matters, the role of identities, and strategies for transforming the conflict based on international law and human rights. Part Two is presented in a dialogue format, providing further conflict analysis through storytelling and dialogues with peacemakers. This book will be of great interest to anyone engaged with peace and conflict transformation, ethnography, social justice, communication studies, and Middle Eastern studies, human rights and international law.

Describes Dan Bar-On's method of using storytelling as both a qualitative biographical research method and as an intervention, to bring people from opposite sides of an abyss to a dialogue. Such work needs slow pace and long-term commitment, with a special combination of a scientific rigorous analysis with a sensitive approach toward the people one approaches.

The debate is intense, sometimes even biting, and goes deeper than Amos Elon and Sana Hassan's Between Enemies. Americans who read this crucial debate can make a start toward understanding the conflict as perceived by those in the Middle East