This first complete history of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip allows us to see beyond the smoke screen of politics in order to make sense of the dramatic changes that have ...developed on the ground over the past forty years. Looking at a wide range of topics, from control of water and electricity to health care and education as well as surveillance and torture, Neve Gordon's panoramic account reveals a fundamental shift from a politics of life—when, for instance, Israel helped Palestinians plant more than six-hundred thousand trees in Gaza and provided farmers with improved varieties of seeds—to a macabre politics characterized by an increasing number of deaths. Drawing attention to the interactions, excesses, and contradictions created by the forms of control used in the Occupied Territories, Gordon argues that the occupation's very structure, rather than the policy choices of the Israeli government or the actions of various Palestinian political factions, has led to this radical shift.
InConscientious Objectors in Israel, Erica Weiss examines the lives of Israelis who have refused to perform military service for reasons of conscience. Based on long-term fieldwork, this ethnography ...chronicles the personal experiences of two generations of Jewish conscientious objectors as they grapple with the pressure of justifying their actions to the Israeli state and society-often suffering severe social and legal consequences, including imprisonment.While most scholarly work has considered the causes of animosity and violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,Conscientious Objectors in Israelexamines how and under what circumstances one is able to refuse to commit acts of violence in the midst of that conflict. By exploring the social life of conscientious dissent, Weiss exposes the tension within liberal citizenship between the protection of individual rights and obligations of self-sacrifice. While conscience is a strong cultural claim, military refusal directly challenges Israeli state sovereignty. Weiss explores conscience as a political entity that sits precariously outside the jurisdictional bounds of state power. Through the lens of Israeli conscientious objection, Weiss looks at the nature of contemporary citizenship, examining how the expectations of sacrifice shape the politics of both consent and dissent. In doing so, she exposes the sacrificial logic of the modern nation-state and demonstrates how personal crises of conscience can play out on the geopolitical stage.
The Peace Puzzle Kurtzer, Daniel C; Lasensky, Scott B; Quandt, William B ...
12/2012
eBook
"Having observed earlier periods of determined, persistent, creative and wise American diplomacy on the Arab-Israeli conflict, we are left to ponder whether that kind of American leadership and ...diplomatic wisdom can be recaptured. We also are left to wonder whether the supportive domestic environment in which previous administrations operated will recur, or whether Congressional and public support for Israel has limited administration options and thus changed the very nature of the American role in the peace process. Our overall conclusions in this volume represent a mix of process, politics, and substantive lessons learned, offered in the hope that a better understanding of the past can inform future policy."-fromThe Peace Puzzle
Each phase of Arab-Israeli peacemaking has been inordinately difficult in its own right, and every critical juncture and decision point in the long process has been shaped by U.S. politics and the U.S. leaders of the moment.The Peace Puzzletracks the American determination to articulate policy, develop strategy and tactics, and see through negotiations to agreements on an issue that has been of singular importance to U.S. interests for more than forty years.
In 2006, the authors ofThe Peace Puzzleformed the Study Group on Arab-Israeli Peacemaking, a project supported by the United States Institute of Peace, to develop a set of "best practices" for American diplomacy. The Study Group conducted in-depth interviews with more than 120 policymakers, diplomats, academics, and civil society figures and developed performance assessments of the various U.S. administrations of the post-Cold War period. This book, an objective account of the role of the United States in attempting to achieve a lasting Arab-Israeli peace, is informed by the authors' access to key individuals and official archives.
The tragedies of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are never far from the pages of the mainstream press. Yet it is rare to hear about the reality of life on the ground -- and it is rarer ...still when these voices belong to women. This book records the journey of a Jewish American physician travelling and working within Israel and the Occupied Territories. Alice Rothchild grew up in a family grounded by the traumas of the Holocaust and passionately devoted to Israel. This book recounts her experiences as she grapples with the reality of life in Israel and the hardships of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. The new edition includes a new preface, two chapters on Israeli dissent and a chapter which explores the impact of a Palestinian home demolition and the work of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters who have joined together to form Combatants for Peace. Ultimately, the book raises troubling questions regarding US policy and the mainstream Jewish community's insistence on giving unquestioning support to all Israeli policy.
This book explores the development of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) from a liberation movement to a national authority, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
Based on intensive ...fieldwork in the West Bank, Gaza and Cairo, Nigel Parsons analyzes Palestinian internal politics and their institutional-building by looking at the development of the PLO. Drawing on interviews with leading figures in the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, delegates to the negotiations with Israel, and the Palestinian political opposition, it is a timely account of the Israel/Palestine conflict from a Palestinian political perspective.
Inspired by the political interventions of feminist women of color and Foucauldian social theory, Anna Marie Smith explores the scope and structure of the child support enforcement, family cap, ...marriage promotion, and abstinence education measures that are embedded within contemporary United States welfare policy. Presenting original legal research and drawing from historical sources, social theory, and normative frameworks, the author argues that these measures violate the rights of poor mothers. Drawing on several historical precedents the author shows that welfare policy has consistently constructed the sexual conduct of the racialized poor mother as one of its primary disciplinary targets. The book concludes with a vigorous and detailed critique of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's support for welfare reform law and an outline of a progressive feminist approach to poverty policy.
This book is designed to introduce American readers to the terms of the discussion of a two-state solution. It features essays by well-known Israeli academics, both Jewish and Palestinian, as well as ...contributions from non-Israeli citizen Palestinian, and American scholars. It is the first to bring together a wide-range of views and perspectives by influential scholars from various disciplines as well as from activists to bear on a very topical subject with international ramifications.
As the Oslo Peace Process has given way to the violence of the second intifada, this book explores the continuing legacy of Oslo in the everyday life of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Taking a ...perspective that sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a conflict over the distribution of legal rights, it focuses on the daily concerns of West Bank Palestinians, and explores the meanings, limitations and potential of legal claims in the context of the region's structures of governance. Kelly argues that fundamental contradictions in the process through which the West Bank has been ruled and misruled have resulted in an unstable mixture of legality, fear and uncertainty. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork, this book provides an insight into how the wider Middle East conflict manifests itself through the daily encounters of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, offering an evocative and theoretically informed account of the relationship between law, peace-building and violence.
Civil wars vary greatly in their duration. This book argues that conflicts are longer when they involve more actors who can block agreement (veto players) and identifies specific problems that arise ...in multi-party bargaining. Quantitative analysis of over 200 civil wars since World War II reveals that conflicts with more of these actors last much longer than those with fewer. Detailed comparison of negotiations in Rwanda and Burundi demonstrates that multi-party negotiations present additional barriers to peace not found in two party conflicts. In addition, conflicts with more veto players produce more casualties, are more likely to involve genocide and are followed by shorter periods of peace. Because they present many barriers to peace, the international community has a poor track record of resolving multi-party conflicts. David Cunningham shows that resolution is possible in these wars if peace processes are designed to address the barriers that emerge in multi-party conflicts.
