Lecture: Haider, Israeli Imprisonment of Pakistani Fighters in the PLO, 1971-85

Posted on November 16, 2015 by Aryeh

Sabah Haider’s PhD research project investigates alternative histories of the Israeli-Arab conflict, during the 1970s and 80s. Specifically she will explore the use of Pakistani foreign fighters by the PLO to engage in armed conflict with Israel, and will seek to understand the ideological, political and cultural contexts of the participation of Pakistanis in this conflict. She will highlight and ask how and why complex and transnational histories are excluded from dominant Israeli and Palestinian narratives of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Dissertation: Bardi, Cleansing, Constructing, and Curating the State: India/Pakistan ’47 and Israel/Palestine ’48

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Aryeh

Bardi, Ariel Sophia. Cleansing, Constructing, and Curating the State: India/Pakistan ’47 and Israel/Palestine ’48 , PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 2015.

URL: http://gradworks.umi.com/36/63/3663495.html

Abstract

This dissertation looks at the ways in which the landscape and the built environment have been called upon and transformed into conduits of national belonging, focusing on the near-simultaneous emergences of Israel, India, and Pakistan. It considers the role of space in consolidating new national bodies, drawing on a variety of texts from both regions: memoirs, films, archival and field photos, housing plans, and the architectural landscape itself.

The first chapter explores the Jewish and Indian Muslim bids for sovereign lands along with the rise of Hindu nationalism. Looking at the founding of Pakistan and Israel, it considers the self-replicative logic of partition and the emergence of the homeland state. Arguing for the importance of image and space in conjuring new nationhoods, the second chapter compares systems of spatial control, visual regimes that mounted and imposed new national imaginaries. In India, Pakistan, and Israel/Palestine, selective acts of destruction transformed formerly shared spaces, inflecting the landscape with three distinct new states.

The third chapter looks at post-state refugee rehabilitation projects, focusing specifically on Mizrahi, or Arab Jewish, immigration to the Israeli hinterlands, and Mizrahi, or Indian refugee, resettlement within the Pakistani province of Sindh. In both regions, housing projects re-circumscribed place of origin, challenging the purported unity of each religiously pooled state and relegating refugees to the margins of each new nation. Tracing the relationship between architecture and partition, it considers the different modalities bound up in the process of national absorption. The fourth chapter compares historical preservation projects in India, Pakistan, Israel, and Palestine, and examines the role of heritage sites in visualizing statehood and homogenizing mixed spaces. Considering the furor over India’s Babri Masjid, it posits preservation as a corollary to demolition, and examines a selection of heritage locations in Israel and Pakistan while arguing for the uses of the past in upholding majority collectivities. Finally, the conclusion considers the afterlives of partition in places such as Kashmir, the West Bank, and India’s far northeast, in ongoing occupations that are as visual and spatial as they are material, economic, and political.

New Book: Rabinowitz, Bargaining on Nuclear Tests

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Aryeh

Rabinowitz, Or. Bargaining on Nuclear Tests. Washington and Its Cold War Deals. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Most observers who follow nuclear history agree on one major aspect regarding Israel’s famous policy of nuclear ambiguity; mainly that it is an exception. More specifically, it is largely accepted that the 1969 Nixon-Meir understanding, which formally established Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity and transformed it from an undeclared Israeli strategy into a long-lasting undisclosed bilateral agreement, was in fact a singularity, aimed at allowing Washington to turn a blind eye to the existence of an Israeli arsenal. According to conventional wisdom, this nuclear bargain was a foreign policy exception on behalf of Washington, an exception which reflected a relationship growing closer and warmer between the superpower leading the free world and its small Cold War associate. Contrary to the orthodox narrative, this research demonstrates that this was not the case. The 1969 bargain was not, in fact, an exception, but rather the first of three Cold War era deals on nuclear tests brokered by Washington with its Cold War associates, the other two being Pakistan and South Africa. These two deals are not well known and until now were discussed and explored in the literature in a very limited fashion. Bargaining on Nuclear Tests places the role of nuclear tests by American associates, as well as Washington’s attempts to prevent and delay them, at the heart of a new nuclear history narrative.

Table of Contents

1: Introduction
2: The Paradox of Hegemony
3: The NPT, Nuclear Tests and Their Changing Legal Status
4: The American Test Ban Debate
5: Israel
6: South Africa
7: Pakistan
8: India
9: Conclusions

Conference: Partitions. Towards Transnational History of 20th c. Territorial Separatism, Stanford, April 18-19, 2013

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ToC: Israel Affairs 18.1 (2012)

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Aryeh

The online platform for Taylor & Francis Group content

Israel Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 1, 01 Jan 2012 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online.
This new issue contains the following articles:

Online Israel Studies Bulletin Board

New Publications, Bibliography, Conferences, Jobs, Scholarships, etc.

Tag Archives: Pakistan