Development Under Adversity
Development Under Adversity

Author: Ishac Diwan

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780821344187

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"War, border closures, violence, and unemployment have hampered the Palestinian economy for over a decade. Despite these obstacles and setbacks, the future outlook is optimistic." Based on the research of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS), the World Bank, and other organizations, 'Development Under Adversity' reviews the development of the Palestinian economy since the 1993 Declaration of Principles. The Palestinian economy has enormous potential. Its general development indicators, including life expectancy, literacy, and child mortality rates, are among the best in the Middle East and North Africa. The book identifies the conditions under which the Palestinian economy can grow. They include trade channels that reduce the economy's reliance on Israel; the creation of a more efficient civil service; more investment-oriented public expenditure; and more resourceful support from NGOs in the delivery of health, education, welfare, and infrastructure services. 'Development Under Adversity' provides historical background, an objective examination of recent economic and political developments, and a comprehensive analysis of the contribution that the donor community can make toward alleviating poverty. Throughout its analysis, the book focuses on the human consequences of economic uncertainty. It studies the social and household costs of border closures, and includes complete chapters about the education and health sectors. The result is a book that will be relevant to a wide range of institutional and private lenders, as well as to anyone with a general interest in the well-being and future of the Palestinian economy.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

Author: Rashid Khalidi

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1627798544

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A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

My Promised Land
My Promised Land

Author: Ari Shavit

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2013-11-19

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 0812984641

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A deeply reported, deeply personal history of Zionism and Israel that does something few books even attempt: It balances the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart.”—Ezra Klein, The New York Times Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

Justice for Some
Justice for Some

Author: Noura Erakat

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 1503608832

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“A brilliant and bracing analysis of the Palestine question and settler colonialism . . . a vital lens into movement lawyering on the international plane.” —Vasuki Nesiah, New York University, founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Justice in the Question of Palestine is often framed as a question of law. Yet none of the Israel-Palestinian conflict’s most vexing challenges have been resolved by judicial intervention. Occupation law has failed to stem Israel’s settlement enterprise. Laws of war have permitted killing and destruction during Israel’s military offensives in the Gaza Strip. The Oslo Accord’s two-state solution is now dead letter. Justice for Some offers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle for freedom, told through the power and control of international law. Focusing on key junctures—from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza—Noura Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. Over the past century, the law has done more to advance Israel’s interests than the Palestinians’. But, Erakat argues, this outcome was never inevitable. Law is politics, and its meaning and application depend on the political intervention of states and people alike. Within the law, change is possible. International law can serve the cause of freedom when it is mobilized in support of a political movement. Presenting the promise and risk of international law, Justice for Some calls for renewed action and attention to the Question of Palestine. “Careful and captivating . . . This book asks that the Palestinian liberation struggle and Jewish-Israeli society each reckon with the impossibility of a two-state future, reimagining what their interests are—and what they could become.” —Amanda McCaffrey, Jewish Currents

Palestine and the Palestinians in the 21st Century
Palestine and the Palestinians in the 21st Century

Author: Rochelle Davis

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9780253010803

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Recent developments in Palestinian political, economic, and social life have resulted in greater insecurity and diminishing confidence in Israel's willingness to abide by political agreements or the Palestinian leadership's ability to forge consensus. This volume examines the legacies of the past century, conditions of life in the present, and the possibilities and constraints on prospects for peace and self-determination in the future. These historically grounded essays by leading scholars engage the issues that continue to shape Palestinian society, such as economic development, access to resources, religious transformation, and political movements.

Waste Siege
Waste Siege

Author: Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-12-10

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 150361090X

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Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.

Reading Palestine
Reading Palestine

Author: Ami Ayalon

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0292782810

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Prior to the twentieth century, Arab society in Palestine was predominantly illiterate, with most social and political activities conducted through oral communication. There were no printing presses, no book or periodical production, and no written signs in public places. But a groundswell of change rapidly raised the region's literacy rates, a fascinating transformation explored for the first time in Reading Palestine. Addressing an exciting aspect of Middle Eastern history as well as the power of the printed word itself, Reading Palestine describes how this hurried process intensified the role of literacy in every sphere of community life. Ami Ayalon examines Palestine's development of a modern educational system in conjunction with the emergence of a print industry, libraries and reading clubs, and the impact of print media on urban and rural populations. Drawn from extensive archival sources, official reports, autobiographies, and a rich trove of early Palestinian journalism, Reading Palestine provides crucial insight into the dynamic rise of literacy that revolutionized the way Palestinians navigated turbulent political waters.

The Rise and Fall of Human Rights
The Rise and Fall of Human Rights

Author: Lori Allen

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2013-04-24

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0804785511

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The Rise and Fall of Human Rights provides a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of the Palestinian human rights world—its NGOs, activists, and "victims," as well as their politics, training, and discourse—since 1979. Though human rights activity began as a means of struggle against the Israeli occupation, in failing to end the Israeli occupation, protect basic human rights, or establish an accountable Palestinian government, the human rights industry has become the object of cynicism for many Palestinians. But far from indicating apathy, such cynicism generates a productive critique of domestic politics and Western interventionism. This book illuminates the successes and failures of Palestinians' varied engagements with human rights in their quest for independence.

Gaza
Gaza

Author: Sara Roy

Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)

Published: 2021-06-20

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780745341378

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The Gaza Strip is the linchpin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, as Sara Roy argues in this book, key to its resolution.Gaza is central to Palestinian nationalism and resistance. Roy demonstrates that this crucial political role is precisely why Israel has deepened the isolation of the territory, severing it almost completely from its most vital connections to the West Bank, Israel and beyond.With decades of experience in researching and writing on the subject, Roy demonstrates how Israel has deliberately undermined and shattered Gaza's economy, transforming a people with political rights into a humanitarian issue. Roy shows that in the 13 years since Israel's disengagement, both Gaza and the conflict have undergone a profound change that threatens to alter the future of Israel/Palestine and the wider region for decades to come.

Palestine Ltd.
Palestine Ltd.

Author: Toufic Haddad

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-07-28

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1786730979

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Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Occupied Palestinian Territory has been the subject of extensive international peacebuilding and statebuilding efforts coordinated by Western donor states and international finance institutions. Despite their failure to yield peace or Palestinian statehood, the role of these organisations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is generally overlooked owing to their depiction as tertiary actors engaged in technical missions. In Palestine Ltd., Toufic Haddad explores how neoliberal frameworks have shaped and informed the common understandings of international, Israeli and Palestinian interactions throughout the Oslo peace process. Drawing upon more than 20 years of policy literature, field-based interviews and recently declassified or leaked documents, he details how these frameworks have led to struggles over influencing Palestinian political and economic behaviour, and attempts to mould the class character of Palestinian society and its leadership. A dystopian vision of Palestine emerges as the by-product of this complex asymmetrical interaction, where nationalism, neo-colonialism and `disaster capitalism' both intersect and diverge. This book is essential for students and scholars interested in Middle East Studies, Arab-Israeli politics and international development.