6 books that offer insightful context for the Israreli-Palestinian conflict.
Over the course of the past few weeks, the murders of four teenagers—three Israeli, and one Palestinian—have sparked a firestorm of upheaval and violence, redoubling ethnic antagonisms in the already fractious region. In the interest of providing context and insight for both the acute and chronic tensions shaping the intractable Israeli-Palestinian schism, our Middle East Studies Editor, Kate Wahl, has compiled a handful of select titles to shed light on the escalating conflict.
Considering the occupation
Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine
Even as we’re decades into the occupation—since 1967—most people speak of this rule, both in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debates, as temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. Many Israelis, on both the political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, but few would ultimately question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself and whether Israel is a democracy.
Too frequently ignored in debates about occupation are considerations of how the events of 1948 and 1967 have reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Looking closely at the history and contemporary formation of the ruling apparatus—the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories—one can see the “one-state condition” of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status.
Considering Israeli citizenship
Rhoda Kanaaneh, Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military
Most commentators perceive a clear and powerful divide in the political tensions and open hostilities between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people, but often fail to notice those who straddle this divide—Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. According to a 2013 report from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, the Arab population constitutes about 20 percent of the total population, about 1.6 million people.
Service in the military is a central component to Israeli citizenship, but one from which the Arab population is exempted. Yet still, a tiny proportion, an estimated 3,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel, currently volunteer to serve in the Israeli military. These soldiers comprise less than half a percent of the Arab population, but their stories provide a powerful vantage point from which to consider a question faced by all Palestinians in Israel. They put Israel to a critical test: are these “good Arabs” who will go to almost any length to become Israeli, allowed into the fold? To what extent are they, in fact, Israeli?
Considering how we report current events
Amahl Bishara, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics
Few topics in the news are more hotly contested than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and news coverage itself can become contested. The recent controversy over ABC World News misattributing footage from Gaza is a key case in point. But rarely do these debates consider the daily, on-the-ground perspective of what and who news-making entails.
The production of U.S. news about Palestinians depends on multifaceted collaborations, typically invisible to Western readers. Palestinian journalists work behind the scenes and below the bylines—as fixers, photojournalists, camerapeople, reporters, and producers—to provide the news that Americans read, see, and hear. The everyday realities of news-making in the West Bank and Gaza necessitate collaboration between foreign correspondents, who usually shape the narrative and receive the authorial credit, and the Palestinians who gather information and record images.
Considering infrastructure
Ronen Shamir, Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine
Infrastructure, whether a light-rail system or the separation wall, does more than impact the physical environment. It divides and connects people, making them not simply users but elements of networks. Electrification played a crucial role in assembling a material infrastructure of ethno-national separation in Palestine, long before any political partition plans had ever been envisioned.
The electrification of 1920s Palestine was not predetermined by tensions or power differentials between the Jewish-Zionist electric company and the opposing forces of Arab nationalism. Rather, the flows and connections of the newly created and rapidly expanding electric grid underwrote and amplified processes of ethno-national distinctions. The process of electrification “sheds light” on how the current-day form of Jewish-Arab relations developed in those early years.
Considering how we got here
Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State
Following the 1948 war and the creation of the state of Israel, Palestinian Arabs comprised just fifteen percent of the population but held a much larger portion of its territory. Offered immediate suffrage rights and, in time, citizenship status, they nonetheless found their movement, employment, and civil rights restricted by a military government put in place to facilitate the colonization of their lands.
Palestinians held a paradoxical status in Israel, as citizens of a formally liberal state and subjects of a colonial regime. Neither the state campaign to reduce the size of the Palestinian population nor the formulation of citizenship as a tool of collective exclusion could resolve the government’s fundamental dilemma: how to bind indigenous Arab voters to the state while denying them access to its resources. These tensions in the state’s foundation—between privilege and equality, separatism and inclusion—continue to haunt Israeli society today.
Considering the right of return
Diana Allan, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile
The popular conception of Palestinian refugees still emphasizes a fierce commitment to exercising a “right of return.” Exile has come to seem a kind of historical amber, preserving refugees in a way of life that ended abruptly in 1948 and their camps—inhabited now for four generations—as mere zones of waiting. While reducing refugees to symbols of steadfast single-mindedness has been politically expedient to both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it comes at a tremendous cost for refugees themselves, overlooking their individual memories and aspirations and obscuring their collective culture in exile. What would it mean for the generations born in exile to return to a place they never left?
In the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, any form of assimilation is taboo because it is seen as forsaking nationalist aspirations and legitimizing historical dispossession. At the level of state rhetoric and policy, opposition to civil rights for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is inextricably linked to support for their national rights in Israel/Palestine. Refugees, meanwhile, live lives existentially shaped, on the one hand, by their enduringly temporary status and, on the other, by the gathering infrastructural and institutional permanence of the camps.
Kate Wahl is the Publishing Director and Editor-in-Chief at Stanford University Press. She acquires books in Middle East Studies and edits the Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity.
Another Very Important Book Published by SUP
Palestinian Village Histories
Geographies of the Displaced
Rochelle A. Davis
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17079
Posted by: Mubbashir Rizvi | July 23, 2014 at 04:31 AM