The Israel-Palestine conflict is frequently characterised by the violence between the two sides, beneath€which lie a whole series of issues and disagreements. This book uniquely brings together Israeli and Palestinian viewpoints on key topics, providing an invaluable guide to the latest thinking on the major topics that the peace process will be based around.
This Foucault-inspired analysis of the degeneration of the Oslo Process into direct Palestinian-Israeli violence critically examines the ideas and practices that define Palestinian-Israeli relations. The text offers a radically different peace proposal that moves far beyond exhausted calls for confidence-building measures and/or an end to settlement construction.
A great deal of political and academic responses to the Israel/Palestine conflict have construed the Palestinians as an object of Western and Israeli discourses, rather than their own Palestinian discourse. This has hindered understanding of the internal mechanisms involved in the production of the Palestinian conditions. Palestinian Political Discourse presents an in-depth examination of Palestinian political discourse since an-Nakba in 1948 and stitches together the underlying mechanisms and rules that have shaped Palestinian politics, in turn synthesizing, interpreting and scrutinizing these rules. Studying the question of Palestine discursively offers new ways to rethink political agency, structures, identity, institutions and power relations while interpreting Palestinian actions. This book adds new understanding to Palestinian political agency by explaining how political actions were constructed. Discourse analysis methodology underlies the critical examination of the genealogy of concepts and frames that have oriented Palestinian political thought. Contrary to established views that ascribe shifts in Palestinian politics primarily to external factors and international changes, this book demonstrates how transformation has been a continuing inbuilt feature within the discursive regime and that dramatic shifts were only effects of much deeper, slowly evolving changes. Examining discourse, and thus language, offers an exceptional possibility to see from the Palestinian perspective. As such, this book provides material vital to the deeper interpretation of the Palestinian question. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Israel-Palestine studies, Middle East studies, and discourse analysis.
How can irregular political situations, which impact the lives of millions, become normalized? Specifically, within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how can 50 years of Israeli control over the Occupied Territories become accepted within Israeli society as a normal, possibly even banal phenomenon? Conversely, how can such a situation be estranged from daily reality, denied any relation to who "we" are? This volume explores these questions through the lens of two central discourses that dominate the Israeli debate regarding the future of the Occupied Territories: 1) Occupation Normalization Discourse, which portrays Israeli control of the territories as a "normal" part of life; 2) Occupation Estrangement Discourse, which portrays this situation as distant from Israeli reality. In addressing these discourses, the authors develop a new methodological tool, Dialectic Discourse Analysis, which examines discourse as a process of perpetual positing and synthesis of oppositions through the discursive construction, differentiation and mediation of self and other. Through this approach, the authors illustrate that these discourses are dialectically constituted in opposition to one another, feeding off one another, each enabling the other to exist. This dynamic has resulted in a fixed discourse, preventing any progress towards a synthesis of oppositions.
Israel-Palestine in the Print News Media: Contending Discourses is concerned with conceptions of language, knowledge, and thought about political conflict in the Middle East in two national news media communities: the United States and the United Kingdom. Arguing for the existence of national perspectives which are constructed, distributed, and reinforced in the print news media, this study provides a detailed linguistic analysis of print news media coverage of four recent events in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in order to examine ideological patterns present in print news media coverage. The two news communities are compared for lexical choices in news stories about the conflict, attribution of agency in the discussion of conflict events, the inclusion or exclusion of historical context in explanations of the conflict, and reliance upon essentialist elements during and within print representations of Palestine-Israel. The book also devotes space to first-hand testimony from journalists with extensive experience covering the conflict from within both news media institutions. Unifying various avenues of academic enquiry reflecting upon the acquisition of information and the development of knowledge, this book will be of interest to those seeking a new approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
According to common perception, the Federal Republic of Germany supported the formation of the Israeli state for moral reasons--to atone for its Nazi past--but did not play a significant role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, the historical record does not sustain this narrative. Daniel Marwecki's pathbreaking analysis deconstructs the myths surrounding the odd alliance between Israel and post-war democratic Germany. Thorough archival research shows how German policymakers often had disingenuous, cynical or even partly antisemitic motivations, seeking to whitewash their Nazi past by supporting the new Israeli state. This is the true context of West Germany's crucial backing of Israel in the 1950s and '60s. German economic and military support greatly contributed to Israel's early consolidation and eventual regional hegemony. This initial alliance has affected Germany's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the present day. Marwecki reassesses German foreign policymaking and identity-shaping, and raises difficult questions about German responsibility after the Holocaust, exploring the many ways in which the genocide of European Jews and the dispossession of the Palestinians have become tragically intertwined in the Middle East's international politics. This long overdue investigation sheds new light on a major episode in the history of the modern Middle East.
Many observers have portrayed the Oslo Process as a milestone in the peacemaking process between Palestinians and Israelis. In this controversial and groundbreaking new work, McMahon challenges the interpretation of the Oslo Process as a breakthrough or new beginning in Palestinian-Israeli relations. He argues that the Oslo Process affected no discursive or non-discursive change and that the Oslo Process in fact institutionalized the analytics practices involved in Israeli and Palestinian relations. It should, McMahon concludes, be no surprise that the process ended with direct Palestinian-Israeli violence. This book will be crucial reading for scholars of Israeli and Palestinian relations as well as anyone who is interested in understanding what discursive change must occur for peace between Israel and Palestinians to be established and sustained.
By revisiting the past hundred years of shared Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli history, Baruch Kimmerling reveals surprising relations of influence between a stateless indigenous society and the settler-immigrants who would later form the state of Israel. Shattering our assumptions about these two seemingly irreconcilable cultures, Kimmerling composes a sophisticated portrait of one side's behavior and characteristics and the way in which they irrevocably shaped those of the other. Kimmerling focuses on the clashes, tensions, and complementarities that link Jewish, Palestinian, and Israeli identities. He explores the phenomena of reciprocal relationships between Jewish and Arab communities in mandatory Palestine, relations between state and society in Israel, patterns of militarism, the problems of jurisdiction in an immigrant-settler society, and the ongoing struggle of Israel to achieve legitimacy as both a Jewish and a democratic state. By merging Israeli and Jewish studies with a vast body of scholarship on Palestinians and the Middle East, Kimmerling introduces a unique conceptual framework for analyzing the cultural, political, and material overlap of both societies. A must read for those concerned with Israel and the relations between Jews and Arabs, Clash of Identities is a provocative exploration of the ever-evolving, always-contending identities available to Israelis and Palestinians and the fascinating contexts in which they take form.
This book surveys discourse and opinion in the United States toward the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1991. Contrary to popular myth, it demonstrates that U.S. support for Israel is not based on the pro-Israel lobby, but rather is deeply rooted in American political culture. That support has increased since 9/11. However, the bulk of this increase has been among Republicans, conservatives, evangelicals, and Orthodox Jews. Meanwhile, among Democrats, liberals, the Mainline Protestant Church, and non-Orthodox Jews, criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians has become more vociferous. This book works to explain this paradox.
