The Israel Palestine Question

An explicitly revisionist collection that takes the ground away from pro-Israeli historians and suggests a far more nuanced view of the issue,The Israel/Palestine Questionassimilates diverse interpretations of the origins of the Middle East conflict with emphasis on the fight for Palestine and its religious and political roots. Drawing largely on scholarly debates in Israel during the last two decades, which have become known as 'historical revisionism,' the collection presents the most recent developments in the historiography of the Arab-Israeli conflict and a critical reassessment of Israel's past. The volume commences with an overview of Palestinian history and the origins of modern Palestine, and includes essays on the early Zionist movement, the 1948 war, international influences on the conflict and the Intifada.

This study assimilates diverse interpretations of the origins of the Middle East conflict with emphasis on the fight for Palestine and its religious and political roots. It draws largely on the historical revisionism of the last two decades.

Public Opinion and the Palestine Question (1987) analyses public opinion on the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. It studies attitudes in various Western democratic countries and Israel, and examines whether the governments of those countries reflect the general positions on the issue of their people. It shows important changes taking place in the orientations of Western public opinion on the Palestinian question.

First published in 1988, The Palestine Question presents the highlights of the Palestine issue in a succinct, objective, and well-documented manner. The author reveals a fundamental fact which has apparently been overlooked, namely, that the conflict is not restricted to the territories seized by Israel in 1967, that is the West bank and the Gaza Strip which represent 20% of Palestine but concerns an area five times greater, that is the whole territory of Palestine as well as the fate of more than 5 million Palestinians. The author has done what has not been done before: he offers judicious peace plan based on right and justice for the intractable Arab Israeli conflict and its root cause, the Palestine problem. This book constitutes an indispensable reference work and essential reading for all who are concerned with Middle East and world peace.

After half a century of occupation and tremendous costs of the conflict, Israel is still struggling with the idea of a Palestinian state in what is often perceived as the Biblical Eretz Israel. Mapping Zionism, enemy images, peace and war policies, as well as democracy within the Jewish State, the present study offers original insights into Israel’s role in this conflict. By analyzing Israeli history, politics and security-oriented political culture as it has been evolving from 1948 on, this book reveals the ideological and political structures of a Zionist-oriented state and society. In doing so, it uncovers the abyss between the Zionist vision of Eretz Israel on the one hand and the aspiration to achieve normalization, peace and security on the other. In view of this conflict-laden bi-national reality, the Palestinian question is identified as the Achilles‘ heel of Jewish statehood in the Land of Israel. Thus, Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine provides a fresh, innovative, critical and yet accessible perspective on one of the most controversial issues in contemporary history.

“A brilliant and bracing analysis of the Palestine question and settler colonialism . . . a vital lens into movement lawyering on the international plane.” —Vasuki Nesiah, New York University, founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Justice in the Question of Palestine is often framed as a question of law. Yet none of the Israel-Palestinian conflict’s most vexing challenges have been resolved by judicial intervention. Occupation law has failed to stem Israel’s settlement enterprise. Laws of war have permitted killing and destruction during Israel’s military offensives in the Gaza Strip. The Oslo Accord’s two-state solution is now dead letter. Justice for Some offers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle for freedom, told through the power and control of international law. Focusing on key junctures—from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza—Noura Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. Over the past century, the law has done more to advance Israel’s interests than the Palestinians’. But, Erakat argues, this outcome was never inevitable. Law is politics, and its meaning and application depend on the political intervention of states and people alike. Within the law, change is possible. International law can serve the cause of freedom when it is mobilized in support of a political movement. Presenting the promise and risk of international law, Justice for Some calls for renewed action and attention to the Question of Palestine. “Careful and captivating . . . This book asks that the Palestinian liberation struggle and Jewish-Israeli society each reckon with the impossibility of a two-state future, reimagining what their interests are—and what they could become.” —Amanda McCaffrey, Jewish Currents

Considers the historical rationale for Zionism, including the centuries of virulent European anti-Semitism from which it grew, and asks how relevant and sustainable twentieth century Zionism is today.

Based primarily on Irish archival sources, parliamentary debates, EU, UN and Israeli documents as well as the Irish media, this work is the first attempt to examine Ireland's evolving policy towards the Palestine question since the birth of Israel in 1948. Beginning with an analysis of Ireland's approach to the issue both prior to and following its entry into the UN in the mid-1950s it then focuses on Ireland's increasing involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict since its accession to the EEC in the early 1970s. Specifically it deals with four distinct phases: 1973-1980 when the issue of Palestine and the role of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), came to the fore in UN and EU discussions on the Middle East; 1980-1988, when the EEC's support for Palestinian aspirations placed the Community increasingly at odds with Israel; 1988-1996, when the PLO's acceptance of a negotiated settlement to its conflict with Israel was followed by the Madrid and Oslo peace processes; and 1996-2004, a time during which the optimism of the early Oslo years has disappeared.