The 31 October vote of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO) general assembly approving by a wide margin the Palestinian request for full membership in the organization (as opposed to observer status) was the starting point for the Palestine-related segment of the State Department's daily press briefing. Spokesperson Victoria Nuland was hammered on the U.S. defunding of UNESCO and progress on the peace process. The transcript was distributed by the State Department.
Political Geography:
United States, Washington, Palestine, and United Nations
Veteran U.S. foreign policy experts Robert Blackwell (a former senior State Department official and National Security Council aide) and Walter Slocombe (a former Pentagon official) wrote the following feature piece in the Jerusalem Post at a time when regional instability generated by the Arab Spring revived debate over whether Israel was a strategic asset or liability to the United States. The authors argue for maintaining the U.S. - Israel special relationship not only on the grounds of "shared values and morality" but also because of the benefits derived from bilateral security coordination. The excerpts below highlight the deep military and intelligence ties existing between Israel and the United States.
This section lists articles and reviews of books relevant to Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Entries are classified under the following headings: Reference and General; History (through 1948) and Geography; Palestinian Politics and Society; Jerusalem; Israeli Politics, Society, and Zionism; Arab and Middle Eastern Politics; International Relations; Law; Military; Economy, Society, and Education; Literature, Arts, and Culture; Book Reviews; and Reports Received.
In November 2011, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) alerted us to an erroneous citation in an article by Ilan Pappé published in the autumn 2006 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies under the title "The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine." In that article, Dr. Pappé combined sections from several chapters of the manuscript that was soon to become his The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine , published in 2006 by One World Press of Oxford, England.
Political Geography:
America, Middle East, Palestine, Arabia, and England
What is perhaps most striking about Noam Chomsky is his consistency. Over the course of more than half a century of political activism, accompanied by a ceaseless output of books and articles as well as innumerable talks and interviews, he has-to the best of my knowledge-never changed his mind on a significant issue. This is all the more impressive when considering the astounding range of his political interests, which span the globe geographically as well as thematically.
THIS ISSUE OF the Journal of Palestine Studies goes to press between May 15 and June 7 2012, the sixty-fourth anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba and the forty-fifth anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. The lives of every Palestinian, and of many others, have been indelibly marked by these two seminal sets of events, which changed the course of the history of Palestine and the entire Middle East. These two markers of loss have defined many of the concerns of the Journal over its more than forty years of publication. During this time, it has been part of a broad effort to redefine the understanding of the meaning and valence of these two milestones.
This essay analyzes the impact of Israeli unilateralism-specifically that of its settlement project-on the two-state solution. After exploring the relationship between unilateralism and power, the authors show, inter alia, that in-migration has accounted for about half the settlement growth since the international embrace of the land-for- peace formula in 1991, that the level of in-migration does not fluctuate according to government composition (right or left), and that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have spurred rather than inhibited settlement expansion. The essay is framed by a contrast with the Palestinian bid for full UN membership, rejected as unilateralism by the Western powers but in fact aimed at undercutting Israeli unilateralism and creating the conditions for meaningful negotiations.
The imposition of British rule in Palestine following World War I did not immediately supplant one imperial system with another or Ottoman identities with national ones. Examining Palestinian responses to the Turkish war of independence, this article argues that the 1917-22 period should be seen as a "liminal" era suspended between imperial systems. Both Kemalists and Palestinians employed a discourse of loyalty to the Ottoman dynasty, Muslim identity, and resistance to European rule to frame their goals. It was only after the creation of the Turkish Republic and the promulgation of the British Mandate, the author argues, that nationalist identities displaced Ottoman ones for both Turks and Palestinians.
Coping with (and adapting to) climatological hazards is commonly understood in intergovernmental and aid agency for a as a purely technical matter. This article examines the UN Development Programme's stakeholder consultations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to challenge the donor-driven technical-managerial framing of Palestinian climate vulnerability by showing how Israeli occupation practices exacerbate environmental stresses. While emphasizing the importance of social, economic, and political contexts in shaping populations' responses to climate change in general, the authors demonstrate the multiple ways in which the occupation specifically compounds hazards reveals it as constitutive of Palestinian climate vulnerability.
Since its creation in 1987, Hamas has been at the forefront of armed resistance in the occupied Palestinian territories. While the movement itself claims an unbroken militancy in Palestine dating back to 1935, others credit post-1967 maneuvers of Israeli Intelligence for its establishment. This article, in assessing these opposing narratives and offering its own interpretation, delves into the historical foundations of Hamas starting with the establishment in 1946 of the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (the mother organization) and ending with its emergence as a distinct entity at the outbreak of the first intifada. Particular emphasis is given to the Brotherhood's pre-1987 record of militancy in the Strip, and on the complicated and intertwining relationship between the Brotherhood and Fatah.