Land Labor And The Origins Of The Israeli Palestinian Conflict 1882 1914

Gershon Shafir challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise. He argues that it was not the imported Zionist ideas that were responsible for the character of the Israeli state, but the particular conditions of the local conflict between the European "settlers" and the Palestinian Arab population.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the world’s most polarizing confrontations. Its current phase, Israel’s “temporary” occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, turned a half century old in June 2017. In these timely and provocative essays, Gershon Shafir asks three questions—What is the occupation, why has it lasted so long, and how has it transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? His cogent answers illuminate how we got here, what here is, and where we are likely to go. Shafir expertly demonstrates that at its fiftieth year, the occupation is riven with paradoxes, legal inconsistencies, and conflicting interests that weaken the occupiers’ hold and leave the occupation itself vulnerable to challenge.

"Zionism and Technocracy is important reading for anyone seriously interested in the development of the Yishuv during the last decades of Ottoman rule."--Choice "... stimulating and well written... " --Shofar "A pioneering work on the most important aspect of early Zionist history, well researched, well written, highly to be recommended." --Walter Laqueur "Taut and well-written with a fresh approach, Penslar's painstakingly researched study fills an important gap in the literature on the early Yishuv." --The Jerusalem Post Magazine "Penslar has written one of the first 'social histories' of an important aspect of Zionism." --David Sorkin "... Penslar presents an alternative perspective of those early days of Jewish settlement. Instead of a tale of individuals and their efforts, it is history of the organizational efforts to develop the institutions needed to reestablish the Jewish presence on the land." --Midstream The creation of a Jewish homeland in modern Palestine represented a monumental technical achievement. This achievement, and the story of the Jewish technocrats from Central Europe who engineered it, is documented here for the first time--bringing together social, intellectual, and institutional history in a pathbreaking study.

The main focus of The Palestinians in Israel (1979) is the position of the Arab minority in Israel, from being a majority to becoming a minority. By using the framework of internal colonialism, it provides evidence which highlights the social class transformations of the Palestinians in Israel from peasantry to proletariat, the patterns of land alienation, and the nature of inter-ethnic contacts which typify Israeli–Palestinian relations. It looks at Arab social structure in pre-1948 Palestine, discusses the Arabs as they appear in Israeli social science writings, describes the transformation of Arab class structure in Israel, and considers the politicization of Israeli Arabs.

When did the Arab-Israeli conflict begin? Some discussions focus on the 1967 war, some go back to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and others look to the beginning of the British Mandate in 1929. Alan Dowty, however, traces the earliest roots of the conflict to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, arguing that this historical approach highlights constant clashes between religious and ethnic groups in Palestine. He demonstrates that existing Arab residents viewed new Jewish settlers as European and shares evidence of overwhelming hostility to foreigners from European lands. He shows that Jewish settlers had tremendous incentive to minimize all obstacles to settlement, including the inconvenient hostility of the existing population. Dowty's thorough research reveals how events that occurred over 125 years ago shaped the implacable conflict that dominates the Middle East today.

"Illuminating. . . . The entire field of modern Middle Eastern Studies still has remarkably little closely researched social history of this sort. Beinin's study adds to the work recently published by revisionist Israeli historians, debunking the dominant view of the origin and early history of the Palestine conflict and extending the revision into the 1950s and early 1960s. His explanation of the different political paths that were taken, turned back from, and lost sight of is an important—indeed vital—contribution to contemporary scholarly and political understanding."—Timothy Mitchell, New York University

In Comrades and Enemies Zachary Lockman explores the mutually formative interactions between the Arab and Jewish working classes, labor movements, and worker-oriented political parties in Palestine just before and during the period of British colonial rule. Unlike most of the historical and sociological literature on Palestine in this period, Comrades and Enemies avoids treating the Arab and Jewish communities as if they developed independently of each other. Instead of focusing on politics, diplomacy, or military history, Lockman draws on detailed archival research in both Arabic and Hebrew, and on interviews with activists, to delve into the country's social, economic, and cultural history, showing how Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine helped to shape each other in significant ways. Comrades and Enemies presents a narrative of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine that extends and complicates the conventional story of primordial identities, total separation, and unremitting conflict while going beyond both Zionist and Palestinian nationalist mythologies and paradigms of interpretation.