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421. Reflections on the War on Gaza

Author:
Camille Mansour
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This essay looks at the Gaza war of winter 2008-2009 within its broader politico-military context. At the political level, Israel's post- 2005 disengagement policies and initiatives with regard to Gaza (and Egypt) and their implications relative to the future of the West Bank are emphasized. Militarily, in examining the background and objectives of the war, the author gives particular importance to the testing of lessons drawn from the past, especially the summer 2006 war on Lebanon, in the aim of regaining a kind of "Dahiya" deterrence based on reprisals against civilians rather than on battlefield victory.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Israel and Egypt

422. Notes on the Aftermath: Gaza, Summer 2009

Author:
Elena N. Hogan
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This personal account describes aspects of closure, siege, and daily life witnessed in the Gaza Strip from May to July 2009, with emphasis on the impact of the blockade in the wake of Operation Cast Lead. As an international worker made to grapple with increasingly complicated Israeli bureaucracy, but "allowed" access into Gaza for purposes of humanitarian aid, the author describes her impressions of the current Gazan situation as an instance of isolation whose plight is increasingly hidden from the gaze of the outside world.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
Israel and Gaza

423. Feldman: Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule

Author:
Rochelle A. Davis
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule provides a fascinating and sophisticated examination of the foreign governing systems enacted by civil servants in the Gaza Strip during the periods of the British Mandate over Palestine (1917-48) and the Egyptian administration of the Gaza Strip (1948-67). The mainstay of Ilana Feldman's book is what she calls "the tenuous domain of the everyday that was never entirely lost" in the "ruptures of Palestinian history" (p. 2). Feldman is both an anthropologist and a historian, and thus her book, an "ethnographic history," examines both the "government at work" and what it meant for people to "work for the government." Her analysis encompasses historical material currently held in archives in four different countries, enriched with oral histories of civil servants, and made sense of by her own experiences of living in Gaza amid the modern-day bureaucracy of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israeli occupation authorities.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
Gaza and Egypt

424. Sayigh: The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries

Author:
Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
As the reconstruction of Nahr al-Barid refugee camp in northern Lebanon is halted once again, this time due to the discovery of an archaeological site, twelve thousand Palestinians from the camp have taken to the streets in protest. The remaining nineteen thousand refugees continue to reside in eleven other camps in Lebanon, unable to return two years after the Lebanese army destroyed it. The struggle for these refugees has shifted, albeit temporarily, from the right of return to Palestine to that of return to the camp.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
Israel and Gaza

425. Kelly: Law, Violence, and Sovereignty among West Bank Palestinians

Author:
Samera Esmeir
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Little is written about Palestinian law and society, and Tobias Kelly's Law, Violence and Sovereignty among West Bank Palestinians comes as an ethnographic and theoretical contribution to this small and growing field. Focusing on the everyday application of the law and life of West Bank workers, Kelly, an anthropologist who has conducted long-term fieldwork in the occupied Palestinian territories, exposes the abstract nature of regimes of power. While these regimes are often understood as suspending the law and legitimizing violence, they emerge in Kelly's analysis as having created an intimate relationship between legal orders of rights and violence. The book focuses on legal practice, rather than legal doctrine, and inquires into how law, rights claims, and spaces of jurisdictions are mobilized in the village where Kelly conducted his fieldwork (given the fictional name of Bayt Hajjar). Instead of viewing rights talk as alien and imposed from above and reducing all frameworks of moral and political reference to that of the law, the book reveals the many meanings acquired by the law in its everyday coexistence with other significant relationships: "For the residents of Bayt Hajjar, rights claims do not emerge in an abstract legal universe, but are created in the context of ongoing, morally charged relationships, involving elements of village and national solidarity. The result is a profoundly ambivalent attitude to legal claims".
Political Geography:
Palestine, Arabia, United Nations, and Lebanon

426. Cohen: Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948

Author:
Lenni Brenner
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Hillel Cohen must be congratulated for the quality of Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948. This accurate and finely detailed book will be assured a permanent place in Palestinian nationalist historiography. While Cohen is a declared Zionist, there are no signs that his politics distorted his scholarship, which is based on declassified Zionist reports, British colonial archives, and captured Arab documents. He carefully describes how Zionists took advantage of "the fissures that cut through Palestinian society-between villagers, city dwellers, and Bedouin, between the rival families of the urban elite, between classes, between ethnic and religious groups" (p. 7) to defeat the right-wing Palestinian nationalist leadership of that era.
Political Geography:
Palestine

427. Grabar: The Dome of the Rock

Author:
Finbarr Barry Flood
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This short, engaging book represents half a century of reflection on what is at once the most familiar and enigmatic of Islamic monuments by its preeminent modern biographer. Combining formal analysis with epigraphic and textual exegesis, and drawing upon recent archaeological discoveries in and around Jerusalem, Oleg Grabar constructs a broad context for his diachronic account of the monument.
Political Geography:
Arabia

428. Holzman-Gazit: Land Expropriation in Israel: Law, Culture, and Society

Author:
Geremy Forman
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Land Expropriation in Israel: Law, Culture and Society is one of the first monographs in a primarily article-based body of literature that examines the evolution of Israeli land law and its impact on Israeli society. Written by a leading Israeli legal historian and former independent academic advisor to the Israeli Interministerial Committee on Reform of Land Expropriation Law, the book is unique in that it does not focus on the state's mass appropriation of Arab-owned land over the years. Instead, it explores the history of land expropriation for "public purposes," a mechanism that has been applied to Israel's Jewish and Palestinian citizens alike, and which most scholars agree played a relatively minor role in appropriating Arab land. In this way, the book compels readers to view expropriation from Arabs and Jews as part of the same issue, an approach that ultimately sheds important new light on the subject.
Political Geography:
Israel and Arabia

429. Fischbach: Jewish Property Claims against Arab Countries

Author:
Sami Shalom Chetrit
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Michael R. Fischbach's fascinating research portrays in a chronological fashion, and in parallel to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the process by which the Jews of the Muslim world lost not only their property but also, most importantly, the individual right to claim compensation for their loss in their relocation to Israel. Israel, with the collaboration of government-sponsored organizations of Jews from the Arab and Muslim world (mainly the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries), has silenced property claims and held these as bargaining chips in future negotiations with the Palestinians over the 1948 Palestinian refugee issue. In his previous books, Fischbach, a history professor at Randolph-Macon College, had addressed Palestinian refugee and dispossession issues.
Political Geography:
Arabia

430. Ginbar: Why Not Torture Terrorists? Moral, Practical, and Legal Aspects of the 'Ticking Bomb' Justification of Torture

Author:
Marnia Lazreg
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Yuval Ginbar's book, Why Not Torture Terrorists? Moral, Practical, and Legal As-pects of the 'Ticking Bomb' Justification of Torture, critically examines the morality of the "ticking bomb" scenario, a fictitious case frequently used by advocates of torture to justify its use under exceptional circumstances "to save lives." Ginbar is an Israeli human rights activist with legal training. The book was first written as a dissertation and incorporates articles that originally appeared in human rights publications. Structured around twenty overlapping chapters, it focuses on two case studies, Israel and the post-9/11 United States, although it also refers to a wide array of cases and methods of torture drawn from Latin America, Africa, and Turkey, among others.
Political Geography:
Israel and Arabia