Arabs make up approximately 20 percent of the population within Israel's borders. Until the 1970s, Arab citizens of Israel were a mostly acquiescent group, but in recent decades political activism ...has increased dramatically among members of this minority. Certain activists within this population claim that they are a national and indigenous minority dispossessed by more recent settlers from Europe. Ethnically based political organizations inside Israel are making nationalist demands and challenging the Jewish foundations of the state.Palestinian Ethnonationalism in Israelinvestigates the rise of this new movement, which has important implications for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a whole. Political scientist Oded Haklai has written the first book to examine this manifestation of Palestinian nationalism in Israel. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with key figures, Haklai investigates how the debate over Arab minority rights within the Jewish state has given way to questioning the foundational principles of that state. This ground-breaking book not only explains the transitions in Palestinian Arab political activism in Israel but also presents new theoretical arguments about the relationship between states and societies. Haklai traces the source of Arab ethnonationalist mobilization to broader changes in the Israeli state, such as the decentralization of authority, an increase in political competition, intra-Jewish fragmentation, and a more liberalized economy.Palestinian Ethnonationalism in Israelavoids oversimplified explanations of ethnic conflict. Haklai's carefully researched and insightful analysis covers a neglected aspect of Israeli politics and Arab life outside the West Bank and Gaza. Scholars and policy makers interested in the future of Israel and peace in the Middle East will find it especially valuable.
Nearly half of the world's eight million Palestinians are registered refugees, having faced partition and exile.Landscape of Hope and Despairexamines this refugee experience in Lebanon through the ...medium of spatial practices and identity, set against the backdrop of prolonged violence. Julie Peteet explores how Palestinians have dealt with their experience as refugees by focusing attention on how a distinctive Palestinian identity has emerged from and been informed by fifty years of refugee history. Concentrating ethnographic scrutiny on a site-specific experience allows the author to shed light on the mutually constitutive character of place and cultural identification. Palestinian refugee camps are contradictory places: sites of grim despair but also of hope and creativity. Within these cramped spaces, refugees have crafted new worlds of meaning and visions of the possible in politics. In the process, their historical predicament was a point of departure for social action and thus became radically transformed. Beginning with the calamity of 1948,Landscape of Hope and Despairtraces the dialectic of place and cultural identification through the initial despair of the 1950s and early 1960s to the tumultuous days of the resistance and the violence of the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Most significantly, this study invokes space, place, and identity to construct an alternative to the received national narratives of Palestinian society and history. The moving stories told here form a larger picture of these refugees as a people struggling to recreate their sense of place and identity and add meaning to their surroundings through the use of culture and memory.
Occupied by Memory explores the memories of the first Palestinian intifada. Based on extensive interviews with members of the "intifada generation," those who were between 10 and 18 years old when ...the intifada began in 1987, the book provides a detailed look at the intifada memories of ordinary Palestinians. These personal stories are presented as part of a complex and politically charged discursive field through which young Palestinians are invested with meaning by scholars, politicians, journalists, and other observers. What emerges from their memories is a sense of a generation caught between a past that is simultaneously traumatic, empowering, and exciting - and a future that is perpetually uncertain. In this sense, Collins argues that understanding the stories and the struggles of the intifada generation is a key to understanding the ongoing state of emergency for the Palestinian people. The book will be of interest not only to scholars of the Middle East but also to those interested in nationalism, discourse analysis, social movements, and oral history.
One hundred thousand Palestinians fled to Syria after being expelled from Palestine upon the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Integrating into Syrian society over time, their experience ...stands in stark contrast to the plight of Palestinian refugees in other Arab countries, leading to different ways through which to understand the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, in their popular memory.
Conducting interviews with first-, second-, and third-generation members of Syria's Palestinian community, Anaheed Al-Hardan follows the evolution of the Nakba-the central signifier of the Palestinian refugee past and present-in Arab intellectual discourses, Syria's Palestinian politics, and the community's memorialization. Al-Hardan's sophisticated research sheds light on the enduring relevance of the Nakba among the communities it helped create, while challenging the nationalist and patriotic idea that memories of the Nakba are static and universally shared among Palestinians. Her study also critically tracks the Nakba's changing meaning in light of Syria's twenty-first-century civil war.
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.
While the international community and regional powers in the Middle East are focussing on finding a solution to Israel's 'external problem' - the future of the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip - ...another political conflict is emerging on the domestic Israel scene: the question of the future status of Israel's Palestinian minority within the 1967 borders. The Palestinian minority in Israel are currently experiencing a new trend in their political development. Here, Ghanem and Mustafa term that development 'The Politics of Faith', referring to the demographic, religious and social transformations among the Palestinian minority that have facilitated and strengthened their self-confidence. Such heightened self-confidence is also the basis for key changes in their cultural and social life, as well as political activity. This book traces the emergence of a new and diverse generation of political leadership, how Palestinian society has developed and empowered itself within Israel, and the politicization of Islamic activism in Israel.
Army of shadows Cohen, Hillel
2008., 20071204, 2008, 2008-01-03
eBook
Inspired by stories he heard in the West Bank as a child, Hillel Cohen uncovers a hidden history in this extraordinary and beautifully written book—a history central to the narrative of the ...Israel-Palestine conflict but for the most part willfully ignored until now. In Army of Shadows, initially published in Israel to high acclaim and intense controversy, he tells the story of Arabs who, from the very beginning of the Arab-Israeli encounter, sided with the Zionists and aided them politically, economically, and in security matters. Based on newly declassified documents and research in Zionist, Arab, and British sources, Army of Shadows follows Bedouins who hosted Jewish neighbors, weapons dealers, pro-Zionist propagandists, and informers and local leaders who cooperated with the Zionists, and others to reveal an alternate history of the mandate period with repercussions extending to this day. The book illuminates the Palestinian nationalist movement, which branded these "collaborators" as traitors and persecuted them; the Zionist movement, which used them to undermine Palestinian society from within and betrayed them; and the collaborators themselves, who held an alternate view of Palestinian nationalism. Army of Shadows offers a crucial new view of history from below and raises profound questions about the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Beginning in 1948, Israeli paramilitary forces began violently displacing Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. Nakba and Survival tells the stories of Palestinians in Haifa and the Galilee during, and ...in the decade after, mass dispossession. Manna uses oral histories and Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries, and memoirs to meticulously reconstruct the social history of the Palestinians who remained and returned to become Israeli citizens. This book focuses in particular on the Galilee, using the story of Manna’s own family and their village Majd al-Krum after the establishment of Israel to shed light on the cruelties faced by survivors of the military regime. While scholars of the Palestinian national movement have often studied Palestinian resistance to Israel as related to the armed struggle and the cultural struggle against the Jewish state, Manna shows that remaining in Israel under the brutality of occupation and fighting to return to Palestinian communities after displacement are acts of heroism in their own right. “Nakba and Survival is bound to be the standard authoritative study of the 1948 war in the city of Haifa and the Galilee.”—Salim Tamari, coauthor of Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine “Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how the events of 1948 continue to shape the Palestinian condition today.”—Maha Nassar, author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World “The empathy for, and solidarity with, Adel Manna’s historical subjects shapes the book’s narratives, the questions it asks, and its deft use of oral histories. A must-read for all those who want to understand daily lives under settler colonial rule.”—Orit Bashkin, coeditor of Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity
Diasporas can undermine authoritarian regimes from abroad, but when and how do they become transnational forces for change? By comparing diaspora activism for the Arab Spring revolutions, this book ...identifies the social forces that make diaspora activism a powerful tool for rebellion and relief.
