New Book: Waldman, Anglo-American Diplomacy and the Palestinian Refugee Problem

Waldman, Simon A. Anglo-American Diplomacy and the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1948-51. Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

This volume examines British and US attitudes towards the means and mechanisms for the facilitation of an Arab-Israeli reconciliation, focusing specifically on the refugee factor in diplomatic initiatives. It explains why Britain and the US were unable to reconcile the local parties to an agreement on the future of the Palestinian refugees.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Palestinian Refugee Problem as an Impediment to Peace
• 1. The Palestine Factor in Anglo-American Post-War Middle Eastern Policy, 1945–48
• 2. Friends Reunited? Britain and the US Respond to the Palestinian Refugee Problem
• 3. Diplomatic Deadlock: The Palestine Conciliation Commission and the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Part 1)
• 4. Economics over Politics: The Palestine Conciliation Commission and the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Part 2)
• 5. Compensation: The Key to Break the Logjam?
• 6. The Refugee Factor in Direct Arab-Israeli Negotiations
• 7. The Birth of UNRWA: The Institutionalization of Failed Diplomacy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

 

SIMON A. WALDMAN is Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at King’s College London, UK. He teaches the Arab-Israeli Conflict, statebuilding in the Middle East and Turkish history and politics.

 
See also: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137431523
 

 

 

New Article: Dumper, Refugee Entitlement and the Passing of Time

Dumper, Mick. “Refugee Entitlement and the Passing of Time: Waldron’s Supersession Thesis and the Palestinian Refugee Case.” In Forced Migration, Reconciliation, and Justice (ed. Megan Bradley; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015): 323-44.

 

 

Extract

This is not to say that Zionism as an ideology is unravelling, but more that the current debate in Israel and the Jewish diaspora over its nature reflects these changes in political architecture. And such changes will accelerate after a peace agreement. As Rashid Khalidi points out, a peace agreement will not arrive out of thin air but as part of a dialectical process with Israel, perhaps offering more generous terms resulting in a softening of negative Arab attitudes that in turn will lead to a greater understanding of Israeli security needs and so forth. Of course this dialectic must also be underwritten by an essential component of any agreement: reconciliation. A viable peace agreement between the parties will likely to include clauses detailing a series of reconciliatory steps such as public apologies, a truth commission, commemorations, joint educational programs, and other forms of transnational dialogue. These may erode the high social walls and ideological divide between the protagonists.

Thus, to return to the central question of the impact of changing circumstances, the Palestinian claim for justice needs to be seen in light not only of growing Israeli entitlements but also of the less-than-cataclysmic implications of the demands being made and a dynamic political situation that is broadly leading to greater cooperation and the potential for greater understanding. The Palestinian claim, therefore, can be met if it on one hand is disaggregated, and on the other precipitates a further change in circumstances. A claim that considers the changed nature of the land Palestinian have exiled from, the rights of new generations of Israelis, and the concerns of Israelis to safeguard their Jewish culture, and that devises a series of proposals to respond to these issues, can to some extent square the circle of mutually exclusive Palestinian and Israeli entitlements. At the same time, Israeli Jewish claims based on an exclusivist Zionist ideology will need to be softened in ways in which non-Jews can be embraces so that all Israelis may live and work within a state that is committed to equality and justice for all its citizens.

 

 

New Article: Molloy et al, The Palestinian Refugee Issue

Molloy, Michael, John Bell, Nicole Waintraub, and Ian B. Anderson. “The Palestinian Refugee Issue: Intangible Needs and Moral Acknowledgment .” In Forced Migration, Reconciliation, and Justice (ed. Megan Bradley; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015): 298-322.

 

Extract

The Palestinian refugee issue has long been framed in the West as a humanitarian problem to be resolved through a variety of practical measures. These measures include compensation for losses and suffering as well as providing the refugees with a range of options spelled out in the “parameters” circulated by President Bill Clinton just before the end of his term of office and after the Camp David negotiations failed. These options include return to a new Palestinian state; return to “swapped” areas (i.e., areas of present day Israel that would be ceded to the Palestinian state in return for parts of the West Bank now occupied by Israeli settlements); integration in host countries, Jordan and Syria in particular, where refugees already live; resettlement in western countries; and return of limited numbers and categories of refugees to Israel. From a Palestinian perspective, while practical solutions to their displacement are important, the issue is first and foremost a matter of rights, dignity, and international law. Palestinians view their case as in many ways unique, requiring resolution in accordance with their understanding of their rights as spelled out in UN General Assembly resolution 194 and international instruments like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 13.2) and the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the colonization of territory under military occupation.

 

 

New Article: Beinin, Regrouping in the Absence of a Two-State Solution

Beinin, Joel. “Coexistence, Equality, and Universal Principles in Israel/Palestine: Regrouping in the Absence of a Two-State Solution.” Tikkun 30.2 (2015): 9-15.

 

URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tikkun/v030/30.2.beinin.html

 

Excerpt

The inordinate focus on a Palestinian state has diverted attention from the fate of the Palestinian people. The conditions of many Palestinians — citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, and refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq — have deteriorated dramatically since 2000. Evictions of Palestinians from the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan by messianic religious-nationalist settlers, the expansion of settlements to surround East Jerusalem and prevent its return to Palestinian rule, home demolitions and disruption of normal economic and academic life throughout the West Bank, the siege (tighter or looser as Israel chooses) imposed on the population of the Gaza Strip, attacks on refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, insecure and dysfunctional conditions throughout Iraq — all these have taken a toll on Palestinians. The most urgent task is to focus on the present and future conditions of actual Palestinians, not to speculate on the nature of a state or states that have little chance of coming into existence anytime soon.

This means exposing and resisting Israeli efforts to diminish the Palestinian presence through various mechanisms of expulsion. It means dismantling the separation barrier and other infrastructures that separate Palestinian communities, including the massive checkpoints at Qalandiya and Bethlehem in the West Bank that are effectively international frontier posts, and opposing the continuing confiscation of lands for new settlements and the violent campaign of settler fanatics like the “Hilltop Youth” to terrorize Palestinian farmers and shepherds. It means demanding an end to Israeli occupation of all the lands conquered in 1967. It means advocating the full equality, including individual and collective rights, of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Perhaps most painfully for some, but nonetheless absolutely necessary, it means educating ourselves about and recognizing the full extent of the Palestinian Nakba, whose effects continue today. Resolution of the conflict necessitates that we confront our moral obligations as Jews, as Americans, and as global citizens to acknowledge responsibility, make restitution, and pay compensation.

 

ToC: Biography 37.2 (2014); special issue: Life in Occupied Palestine

Volume 37, Number 2, Spring 2014

Table of Contents

Life in Occupied Palestine

Guest Editors: Cynthia G. Franklin Morgan Cooper& Ibrahim G. Aoudé

Dedication

p. v

Editor’s Introduction

Life in Occupied Palestine: Three Cafés and a Special Issue

pp. vii-xlviii

Cynthia G. Franklin, Morgan Cooper, Ibrahim G. Aoudé

Articles

Section One: Borders, Journeys, Home

Exiled at Home: Writing Return and the Palestinian Home

pp. 377-397

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud

After the Nakba in Nuba: A Palestinian Villager’s Diary, 1949

pp. 398-450

Alex Winder

Not Just a Picnic: Settler Colonialism, Mobility, and Identity among Palestinians in Israel

pp. 451-473

Magid Shihade

Locked Out

pp. 474-475

Lina Hesham AlSharif

Once Upon a Border: The Secret Lives of Resistance—the Case of the Palestinian Village of al-Marja, 1949–1967

pp. 476-504

Honaida Ghanim

Section Two: Invasions, Incarcerations, and Insurgent Imagination

Incidental Insurgents: An Interview with Ruanne Abou Rahme

pp. 507-515

Morgan Cooper

Towards a New Language of Liberation: An Interview with Raja Shehadeh

pp. 516-523

Cynthia G. Franklin

Gaza Writes Back: Narrating Palestine

pp. 524-537

Refaat R. Alareer

Write What You Know

pp. 538-539

Lina Hesham Alsharif

Dreaming of Never Land

pp. 540-555

Sonia Nimr

“Food is not our issue”: Reflections on Hunger Striking

pp. 556-559

Sa’ed Omar

Section Three: Reciprocal Solidarities and Other Revolutionary Relations

From the West Bank: Letters and Acts of Resistance

pp. 563-605

Yassmine Saleh Hamayel, Islah Jad

Life in Abu Dis Continues Quietly

pp. 606-663

Rima Najjar

Traveling as a Palestinian

pp. 664-679

Yousef M. Aljamal

Reciprocal Solidarity: Where the Black and Palestinian Queer Struggles Meet

pp. 680-705

Sa’ed Atshan, Darnell L. Moore

Section Four: Forging a Just Future

The “I” in BDS: Individual Creativity and Responsibility in the Context of Collective Praxis — an Interview With Omar Barghouti and Falastine Dwikat

pp. 709-719

Ibrahim G. Aoudé, Morgan Cooper, Cynthia G. Franklin

---

Contributors

pp. 720-723

New Article: Abdel-Nour, The Jewish State and the Palestinian Right of Return

Abdel-Nour, Farid. “Irreconcilable Narratives and Overlapping Consensus. The Jewish State and the Palestinian Right of Return.” Political Research Quarterly 68.1 (2015): 117-27.

 

URL: http://prq.sagepub.com/content/68/1/117.abstract

 

Abstract

The Israeli demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and the Palestinian demand that Israelis recognize the Palestinian refugees’ moral right to return express the two peoples’ need to have their respective causes affirmed by the “other side.” Yet, the two causes are irreconcilable as are the core political narratives that give them meaning. The question then arises as to whether an end to the conflict can even be conceptualized, let alone implemented, with the two peoples adhering to their core narratives and expecting affirmation of their respective causes. This paper’s argument is that John Rawls’ later work contains resources that allow for such a conceptualization. An overlapping consensus over a list of common acknowledgments is possible between adherents to the two peoples’ core narratives. In that list, which is proposed in the paper, each of the two peoples can see its cause implicitly affirmed and its need for recognition met, without having to abandon its core narrative or to explicitly grant the demand for recognition made on it by the other side. Thus, the irreconcilability of narratives does not present an insurmountable obstacle to conceptualizing potentially just and stable relations between the two peoples.

ToC: Israel Affairs 21.1 (2015)

Israel Affairs, Volume 21, Issue 1, January 2015

 

This new issue contains the following articles:

Articles
Ethnic Income Disparities in Israel
Pnina O. Plaut & Steven E. Plaut
Pages: 1-26
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984418

‘Mayhew’s outcasts’: anti-Zionism and the Arab lobby in Harold Wilson’s Labour Party
James R. Vaughan
Pages: 27-47
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984420

Israel Negev Bedouin during the 1948 War: Departure and Return
Havatzelet Yahel & Ruth Kark
Pages: 48-97
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984421

Good news: the Carmel Newsreels and their place in the emerging Israeli language media
Oren Soffer & Tamar Liebes
Pages: 98-111
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984422

From ‘Rambo’ to ‘sitting ducks’ and back again: the Israeli soldier in the media
Elisheva Rosman & Zipi Israeli
Pages: 112-130
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984423

Israel and the Arab Gulf states: from tacit cooperation to reconciliation?
Yoel Guzansky
Pages: 131-147
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984424

Building partnerships between Israeli and Palestinian youth: an integrative approach
Debbie Nathan, David Trimble & Shai Fuxman
Pages: 148-164
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984436

Book Reviews
Flexigidity: the secret of Jewish adaptability
David Rodman
Pages: 165-166
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937913

Russia and Israel in the changing Middle East
David Rodman
Pages: 166-167
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937914

Social mobilization in the Arab–Israeli war of 1948: on the Israeli home front
David Rodman
Pages: 167-169
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937915

These are my brothers: a dramatic story of heroism during the Yom Kippur War
David Rodman
Pages: 169-171
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937916

Jews and the military: a history
David Rodman
Pages: 171-173
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937917

The Jewish revolt: ad 66–74
David Rodman
Pages: 173-173
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937918

The city besieged: siege and its manifestations in the ancient Near East
David Rodman
Pages: 173-175
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937919

The forgotten kingdom: the archaeology and history of northern Israel
David Rodman
Pages: 175-176
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937920

New Article: Rürup, Zionist and Israeli Responses to Statelessness

Rürup, Miriam. “The Citizen and its Other: Zionist and Israeli Responses to Statelessness.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 59 (2014): 37-52.

 

URL: http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/content/59/1/37.extract

 

Abstract

In the early post-war years, the DP camps worked toward shaping the “Zionist citizen” before a Zionist state existed. Israeli legislation defining who would and should belong to that new state of Israel considered membership of the Israeli nation as the fulfilment of Jewish history. Israeli citizenship was opened to all Jews worldwide. The concept of non-territory-bound belonging persisted and became trans-territorial. The humanitarian basis for introducing the Law of Return eventually led to a trans-territorial notion of Israeli citizenship for Jews worldwide. In a sense, not statelessness was overcome, but the link between the territorially based nation state and citizenship was erased. From a traditional perspective, the Jewish collective was never defined by territoriality, but by spirituality and ethnicity – which is what the Law of Return expresses. It defines the state of Israel both internally, as a Jewish state, and externally, by its inclusive character for Jews worldwide. If there is an irony to be observed here, it would be that, in many respects, the Law of Return validates the diaspora instead of negating it.

New Article: Ben-Meir, Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations: The US Framework for Peace Must Be Enforced

Ben-Meir, Alon. “The Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations: The US Framework for Peace Must Be Enforced.” Mediterranean Quarterly 25.3 (2014): 40-51.

 

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediterranean_quarterly/v025/25.3.ben-meir.html

 

Abstract

There are many who doubt that the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will lead to a solution, in spite of US secretary of state John Kerry’s efforts and the presumed commitment to peace of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. What has characterized the intractability of the conflict in the past, including the future of Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees, Israel’s national security concerns, and, in particular, the psychological dimension behind these conflicting issues, still remain in play. That intractability has been further aggravated by a faulty framework for the 2014 negotiations, the absence of leadership, the continued public recrimination of each side toward the other, mutual distrust, and the lack of commitment to reach an agreement that of necessity requires mutually painful concessions. This essay proposes a number of mechanisms and corrective measures that could appreciably enhance the prospect of reaching a peace agreement. Undergirding these proposals is the need for the United States to put its foot down and warn both the Israelis and Palestinians that, unless they negotiate in earnest based on Kerry’s proposed framework, there will be serious consequences resulting from a reassessment of its bilateral relations with both parties.

 

New Article: Orr and Golan, Human Rights NGOs in Israel:

Orr, Zvika and Daphna Golan. “Human Rights NGOs in Israel: Collective Memory and Denial.” International Journal of Human Rights 18.1 (2014): 68-93.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13642987.2013.871529

Abstract

This article discusses the complex interrelations between human rights, memory, forgetting and denial by analysing the discourses and practices of Israeli human rights organisations with respect to the past of the Palestinian people, particularly the events that took place in 1948. It examines how and why Israeli organisations dialectically remember and repress elements of the local past, and align themselves with the prevailing national silencing of the discussion on the Palestinian refugees’ future rights, particularly their right of return. The article concludes by exploring the implications of these practices on the organisations’ capacity to significantly impact the Israeli-Palestinian future.

ToC: Israel Affairs 18,3 (2012)

The online platform   for Taylor & Francis Online content

Israel       Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 3, 01 Jul 2012 is now available on Taylor & Francis Online. This new issue contains the following articles: Original       Articles The       war against the Jews Efraim Karsh Pages: 319-343 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689514 The       international assault against Israel Michael Curtis Pages: 344-362 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689515 Attacking       Israel with genocidal intentions Nidra Poller Pages: 363-371 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689517 From       Durban to the Goldstone Report: the centrality of human rights NGOs in       the political dimension of the Arab–Israeli conflict Gerald M. Steinberg Pages: 372-388 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689518 De-legitimization       currents in Europe Manfred Gerstenfeld Pages: 389-402 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689519 A       bias thicker than faith: Christians who punt for their persecutors Steve Apfel Pages: 403-411 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689520 The       BDS message of anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and incitement to       discrimination Joel S. Fishman Pages: 412-425 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689521 Jews       at sea: reflections on Israel’s Jewish detractors and defamers Alvin H. Rosenfeld Pages: 426-437 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689522 Jewish       defamation of Israel: roots and branches Kenneth Levin Pages: 438-454 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689523 De-legitimization       of Israel in Palestinian Authority schoolbooks Arnon Groiss Pages: 455-484 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689524 Fighting       on the front lines: anti-Semitism at the University of California and       efforts to combat it Tammi Rossman-Benjamin Pages: 485-501 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.689525

Cite: Rabinowitz, The Right to Refuse

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Rabinowitz, Dan. "The Right to Refuse: Abject Theory and the Return of Palestinian Refugees." Critical Inquiry 36,3 (2010): 494-516.

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URL: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/653409

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Keywords: Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Right of Return / זכות השיבה, Refugees, דן רבינוביץ