Too often, the study of Israel/Palestine has focused on elite actors and major events. Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel takes advantage of new sources about everyday life and the texture of ...changes on the ground to put more than two dozen human faces on the past and present of the region. With contributions from a leading cast of scholars across disciplines, the stories here are drawn from a variety of sources, from stories passed down through generations to family archives, interviews, and published memoirs. As these personal narratives are transformed into social biographies, they explore how the protagonists were embedded in but also empowered by their social and historical contexts. This wide-ranging and accessible volume brings a human dimension to a conflict-ridden history, emphasizing human agency, introducing marginal voices alongside more well-known ones, defying "typical" definitions of Israelis and Palestinians, and, ultimately, redefining how we understand both "struggle" and "survival" in a troubled region.
Why do some national movements use violent protest and others nonviolent protest? Wendy Pearlman shows that much of the answer lies inside movements themselves. Nonviolent protest requires ...coordination and restraint, which only a cohesive movement can provide. When, by contrast, a movement is fragmented, factional competition generates new incentives for violence and authority structures are too weak to constrain escalation. Pearlman reveals these patterns across one hundred years in the Palestinian national movement, with comparisons to South Africa and Northern Ireland. To those who ask why there is no Palestinian Gandhi, Pearlman demonstrates that nonviolence is not simply a matter of leadership. Nor is violence attributable only to religion, emotions or stark instrumentality. Instead, a movement's organizational structure mediates the strategies that it employs. By taking readers on a journey from civil disobedience to suicide bombings, this book offers fresh insight into the dynamics of conflict and mobilization.
Drawing on a rich base of British archival materials, Arabic periodicals, and secondary sources,Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestinebrings to light the ways in which the British colonial ...state in Palestine exacerbated sectarianism. By transforming Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious identities into legal categories, Laura Robson argues, the British ultimately marginalized Christian communities in Palestine. Robson explores the turning points that developed as a result of such policies, many of which led to permanent changes in the region's political landscapes. Cases include the British refusal to support Arab Christian leadership within Greek-controlled Orthodox churches, attempts to avert involvement from French or Vatican-related groups by sidelining Latin and Eastern Rite Catholics, and interfering with Arab Christians' efforts to cooperate with Muslims in objecting to Zionist expansion. Challenging the widespread but mistaken notion that violent sectarianism was endemic to Palestine,Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestineshows that it was intentionally stoked in the wake of British rule beginning in 1917, with catastrophic effects well into the twenty-first century.
British General Sir Allan Cunningham was appointed in 1945 as high commissioner of Palestine, and served in this capacity until the end of the British mandate on May 15, 1948. The three years of ...Cunningham's tenure were tremendously complex politically: players included the British government in London, the British army, the British administration in Jerusalem, and diverse military forces within the Zionist establishment, both Jew and Arab. Golani revisits this period from the perspective of the high commissioner, examining understudied official documents as well as Cunningham's letters, notes, and cables. He emphasizes especially the challenges of navigating Jewish and Arab terrorists, on the one hand, and the multiple layers of British institutional bureaucracies, on the other, and does an excellent job of establishing Sir Allan's daily trials within the broad frame of the collapse of the British Empire following World War II.
This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military engagements, it also focuses on the war's ...political dimensions. Benny Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab side-where the archives are still closed-is illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials.
Morris stresses thejihadicharacter of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Throughout, he examines the dialectic between the war's military and political developments and highlights the military impetus in the creation of the refugee problem, which was a by-product of the disintegration of Palestinian Arab society. The book thoroughly investigates the role of the Great Powers-Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union-in shaping the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949. Morris looks both at high politics and general staff decision-making processes and at the nitty-gritty of combat in the successive battles that resulted in the emergence of the State of Israel and the humiliation of the Arab world, a humiliation that underlies the continued Arab antagonism toward Israel.
Britain relied upon secret intelligence operations to rule Mandatory Palestine.Statecraft by Stealthsheds light on a time in history when the murky triad of intelligence, policy, and security ...supported colonial governance. It emphasizes the role of the Anglo-Zionist partnership, which began during World War I and ended in 1939, when Britain imposed severe limits on Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine.
Steven Wagner argues that although the British devoted considerable attention to intelligence gathering and analysis, they never managed to solve the basic contradiction of their rule: a dual commitment to democratic self-government and to the Jewish national home through immigration and settlement. As he deftly shows, Britain's experiment in Palestine shed all pretense of civic order during the Palestinian revolt of 1936-41, when the police authority collapsed and was replaced by a security state, created by army staff intelligence. That shift, Wagner concludes, was rooted in Britain's desire to foster closer ties with Saudi Arabia just before the start of World War II, and thus ended its support of Zionist policy.
Statecraft by Stealthtakes us behind the scenes of British rule, illuminating the success of the Zionist movement and the failure of the Palestinians to achieve independence. Wagner focuses on four key issues to stake his claim: an examination of the "intelligence state" (per Martin Thomas's classic,Empires of Intelligence), the Arab revolt, the role of the Mufti of Jerusalem, and the origins and consequences of Britain's decision to end its support of Zionism.
Wagner crafts a superb story of espionage and clandestine policy-making, showing how the British pitted individual communities against each other at particular times, and why.
The Palestinian national movement gestated in the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was born during the Great Revolt of 1936-39, a period of Arab rebellion against British policy in the ...Palestine mandate. InThe Crime of Nationalism,Matthew Kraig Kelly makes the unique case that the key to understanding the Great Revolt lies in what he calls the "crimino-national" domain-the overlap between the criminological and the nationalist dimensions of British imperial discourse, and the primary terrain upon which the war of 1936-39 was fought. Kelly's analysis amounts to a new history of one of the major anticolonial insurgencies of the interwar period and a critical moment in the lead-up to Israel's founding.The Crime of Nationalismoffers crucial lessons for the scholarly understanding of nationalism and insurgency more broadly.
Is religion a source of political stability and social continuity, or an agent of radical change? This question, so central to contemporary conversations about religion and extremism, has generated ...varied responses over the last century. Taking Jewish and Islamic education as its objects of inquiry, Mandatory Separation sheds light on the contours of this debate in Palestine during the formative period of British rule, detailing how colonial, Zionist, and Palestinian-Muslim leaders developed competing views of the form and function of religious education in an age of mass politics. Drawing from archival records, school syllabi, textbooks, newspapers, and personal narratives, Suzanne Schneider argues that the British Mandatory government supported religious education as a supposed antidote to nationalist passions at the precise moment when the administrative, pedagogic, and curricular transformation of religious schooling rendered it a vital tool for Zionist and Palestinian leaders. This study of their policies and practices illuminates the tensions, similarities, and differences among these diverse educational and political philosophies, revealing the lasting significance of these debates for thinking about religion and political identity in the modern Middle East.
