Israel, Palestine and Global Politics

Figure 1: A crow flying over the Silwan Neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. Yoav Galai 2007

Course Description: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more than a persistent struggle for control over land or a religious clash. It also serves different functions for outside actors who inject the conflict with their own meanings and pursue their own interests. Conversely, the conflict is projected outwards, with ideas, identities and technologies emanating from the region travelling and impacting well outside of it. This course examines the Israel/Palestine conflict both on its own as well as through its intersections with wider actors and issues in global politics, drawing on a variety of scholarship to interrogate the different ways in which the conflict is globalised. Instructor: Dr. Yoav Galai Email Address: galaiy@ceu.edu Office Hours: By Appointment

Course Seminars: Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, 17:20-19:00

Learning Outcomes: The main teaching outcome is for students to gain the ability to approach cross-disciplinary and cross-contextual analysis in international politics. Students will also gain an understanding of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the debates surrounding it and work to develop their critical assessment skills.

Teaching Method: The course is built around academic texts and the interrogation of additional texts and source materials. Each week will start with student presentations that draw together the strands of the different readings as well as additional external readings and texts.

Assessment: Students are expected to attend classes and actively participate in discussions. Students must read the required readings and give presentations on the recommended readings. Class presentations should critically analyse and contextualize the assigned readings, drawing on literature not listed in the syllabus. Class participation: 15%

• Students should be actively involved in class discussions and to read ALL required reading.

• One paragraph length “Blurb” framing the seminar subject, to be sent on the Monday (see seminar 16 for example)

One short position Paper / editorial (600 - 800 words): 15%

• Students will choose an event or series of ongoing events related to the Israel/Palestine conflict, and analyse it using the frameworks and contexts that we cover in the course. They will distribute the paper amongst the class in advance for discussion.

• The position paper should be written as an editorial, advancing a clear argument and using conceptual tools in a clear, jargon free language.

One Class presentation: 20%

• Students will prepare a 15-minute class presentation that will analyse the course material from the given week. A good presentation should draw material from elsewhere in the syllabus as well as outside the syllabus and offer questions for further discussion.

Final paper (4000 words): 50%

• Research paper, the topic will be decided in consultation with the instructor.

Course plan:

Date Subject Blurb Presenter Position paper

1 9/1 Introduction - - - 2 11/1 Global Meanings of the

conflict, a first take: IR and beyond

- - -

3 16/1 Zionism 4 18/1 Colonialism

5 23/1 Palestinian Identity

6 25/1 Palestinian / Arab Nationalism 7 30/1 Al Nakba / War of

Independence

8 1/2 Historiography and Nationalism

9 6/2 Palestinians Before and After 1967

10 8/2 Israel and 1967 11 13/2 Palestinians and Terrorism

12 15/2 Israelis and Terrorism

13 20/2 Palestinians and the Diaspora 14 22/2 Jews, Israelis and Diaspora

15 27/2 Mizrahi Jews 16 1/3 Ethnocracy

17 6/3 Resistance, Alliance

18 8/3 Europeans and the Conflict - 13/3 National Holiday -- -- --

19 15/3 Indigeneity

20 20/3 Landscape and Conflict

21 22/3 Beyond Conflicting Narratives

22 27/3 Food 29/3 End of semester -- -- --

Week 1: Introduction

Seminar 1 (9/1/2018): (required readings are marked by *) * Edward Said ‘On Palestinian Identity: An Interview with Salman Rushdie’, New Left Review, I / 160: https://newleftreview.org/I/160/edward-said-on-palestinian-identity-a-conversation-with-salman-rushdie * Deutscher, I. ‘On the Israeli Arab War’, New Left Review I/44 (July-August, 1967), available at: https://newleftreview.org/I/44/isaac-deutscher-on-the-israeli-arab-war

Seminar 2 (11/2/2018): Global Meanings of the conflict, a first take: IR and beyond * Miller, B. Israel–Palestine: One State or Two: Why a Two-State Solution is Desirable, Necessary, and Feasible. Ethnopolitics, 15:4, (2016), 438-452. Ben-Yehuda, H. and Sandler, S. The Arab-Israeli Conflict Transformed: Fifty Years of Interstate and Ethnic Crises (SUNY Press, 2002), chapter 1, 5. Collins, J. ‘Global Palestine: A Collision for our Time’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 16:1 (2007): 3-18. Ron, J. Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), Conclusion.

Week 2: Jewish Nationalism

Seminar 3 (16/1/2018): Zionism * Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. University of Chicago Press, 1995, Chapter 2. * Raz-Krakotzkin, A. (2013). Exile, History, and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist Notion of History and Return. Journal of Levantine Studies, 3:2, pp. 37-70. Stanislawski, M. Zionism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Kattan, V. From coexistence to conquest: international law and the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1891-1949, (London: Pluto Press, 2009) Chapter 1 Ram, U. (1995). Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: The case of Ben Zion Dinur. History and memory, 7(1), 91-124.

Seminar 4 (18/1/2018): Colonialism? * Shaffir, G. ‘Zionism and Colonialism: A Comparative Approach’ in Pappe, I. The Palestine/Israel Question: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 72-85. * Wolfe, P. Settler ‘Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4, (2006), pp. 387-409. Gregory, D. The Colonial Present, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), chapter 5 Veracini, L. ‘The other shift: Settler colonialism, Israel, and the occupation’, Journal of Palestine Studies 42:2, (2013). pp. 26-42. Ram, U. ‘The colonization perspective in Israeli sociology: Internal and external comparisons’, Journal of Historical Sociology 6:3 (1993), pp. 327-350.

Week 3: Palestinian Nationalism

Seminar 5 (23/1/2018): Palestinian Identity * Khalidi, R. Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (available as e-book on CEU library), chapters 2, 7 Eid, M. Mahmoud Darwish: literature and the politics of Palestinian identity, (London: Tauris, 2016) chapter 4. Kimmerling, B. The Palestinian People: A History, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), chapter 4. Farsoun, S. K., and Aruri, N. Palestine and the Palestinians: A social and political history. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2006) chapter 1. Sa'di, A. H. Catastrophe, memory and identity: Al-Nakbah as a Component of Palestinian Identity. Israel Studies, 7:2, (2002), pp. 175-198.

Seminar 6 (25/1/2018): Palestinian / Arab Nationalism * Sayigh, Y. Armed Struggle and The Search for State, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter 1. Dawisha, A. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), chapter 5. Baumgarten, H. (2005). The Three Faces/Phases of Palestinian Nationalism, 1948––2005. Journal of Palestine Studies, 34(4), 25-48. Farsoun, S. K., and Aruri, N. Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History, (Coulder, CO: Westview Press, 2006), chapter 4.

Week 4: 1948

Seminar 7 (30/1/2018): Al Nakba / War of Independence * Rashid Khalidi, “The Palestinians and 1948: the underlying causes of failure”, in: Rogan and Shlaim (eds.) The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 12-36 * Teveth, S. ‘Charging Israel with Original Sin’ in Commentary (1 September 1989) https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/charging-israel-with-original-sin/ Abdel Jawad, S. ‘The Arab and Palestinian Narratives of the 1948 War‘, in Rotberg, R. I. Israel and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict: History’s Double Helix (Bloomington: University of Indian Press, 2006), pp. 72-114. Hoffman, A. My Happiness Bares no Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 52-64; 305-312. Sa'di, A. H., and Abu-Lughod, L. Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the claims of memory, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2007), Introduction.

Seminar 8 (1/2/2018): Historiography and Nationalism * Brunner, J. (1997). Pride and memory: Nationalism, narcissism and the historians' debates in Germany and Israel. History and Memory, 9(1/2), 256-300. * Renan, A. ‘What is a Nation?’ in Bhabha, H. Nation and Narration (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. ‘Necropolitical Debris: The Dichotomy of Life and Death’ State Crime Journal 4:1 (2015), pp. 34-51. Rogan, E. L. and Shlaim, A. (Eds) The War for Palestine (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007). 1948 in the national historiographies of Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi (chapters 5-10), Pick one chapter. Ram, U. "Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur’, History and memory 7:1 (1995), pp. 91-124. Hirsch, M. B "From Taboo to the Negotiable: The Israeli New Historians and the Changing Representation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem." Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 2 (2007): 241-258.

Week 5: 1967

Seminar 9 (6/2/2018): Palestinians Before and After 1967 * Raz, A. The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), chapter 4. * Degani, A. Y. ‘The Decline and Fall of the Israeli Military Government, 1948–1966: a case of Settler-Colonial Consolidation?’, Settler Colonial Studies, 5:1 (2015), pp. 84-99. Jamal, A. "In the shadow of the 1967 war: Israel and the Palestinians." British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2017): 1-16. Segev, T. (2007). 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. Metropolitan Books.

Seminar 10 (8/2/2018): Israel and 1967 * Feige, M. Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories, (Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2009), pp. 21-39. * Meron, T. (2017). The West Bank and International Humanitarian Law on the Eve of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Six-Day War. American Journal of International Law, (2017) 1-19. Zertal, I., & Eldar, A. (2009). Lords of the land: the war over Israel's settlements in the occupied territories, 1967-2007. Hachette UK, chapter 7. Raz, A. The bride and the dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the aftermath of the June 1967 War. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), chapter 3. Fischer, S. ‘From Yehuda Etzion to Yehuda Glick: From Redemptive Revolution to Human Rights on the Temple Mount’ Israel Studies Review 32:1 (2017), pp. 67-87.

Week 6: Political Violence

Seminar 11 (13/2/2018): Palestinians and Terrorism * Chamberlin, P. T. The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Chapter 5. Law, R. ‘Ethno-Nationalist Terrorism, 1960s to the Present’, in Terrorism, A History (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), pp. 217-253. Khalidi, R. (2009). Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East. Beacon Press, pp. 114-140. Dunning, T. (2015). Islam and resistance: Hamas, Ideology and Islamic Values in Palestine. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 8(2), 284-305. Pedahzur, Ami, and Arie Perliger. Jewish terrorism in Israel. Columbia University Press, 2011, chapter 5.

Seminar 12 (15/2/2018): Conflict Technologies Film Screening: Yotam Feldman, “The Lab” 2013 * Weizman, E. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007), Chapter 1. Machold, R. "Learning from Israel? ‘26/11’ and the anti-politics of urban security governance." Security Dialogue 47, no. 4 (2016): 275-291. Cook, J. ‘”The Lab": Israel Tests Weapons, Tactics on Captive Palestinian Population." The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 32, no. 7 (2013): 16. Katriel, T., & Gutman, Y. (2015). The Wall Must Fall: Memory Activism, Documentary Filmmaking and the Second Intifada. Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 205-225. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2017); The Occupation of the Senses: The Prosthetic and Aesthetic of State Terror, The British Journal of Criminology, azw066 Pedahzur, Ami, and Arie Perliger. Jewish terrorism in Israel. Columbia University Press, 2011, chapter 5.

Week 7: Diasporas

Seminar 13 (20/2/2018): Palestinians and the Diaspora * Khalidi, A. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Oxford: OneWorld, 2007), chapter 5. * Khalili, Laleh. "Grass-roots commemorations: Remembering the land in the camps of Lebanon." Journal of Palestine Studies 34.1 (2004): 6-22. Knudsen, A. (2009). Widening the protection gap: the ‘politics of citizenship’ for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, 1948–2008. Journal of Refugee Studies, 22(1), 51-73. El-Abed, O. (2009). The Palestinians in Egypt: Identity, Basic Rights and Host State Policies. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 28(2-3), 531-549. Peteet, J. (2007). Problematizing a Palestinian diaspora. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 39(4), 627-646. Koinova, M. (2014). ‘Why do conflict-generated diasporas pursue sovereignty-based claims through state-based or transnational channels? Armenian, Albanian and Palestinian diasporas in the UK compared’, European Journal of International Relations, 20:4, pp. 1043-1071. Said, E. W. After the last sky: Palestinian lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Mavroudi, E. "Palestinians in diaspora, empowerment and informal political space." Political Geography 27, no. 1 (2008): 57-73.

Seminar 14 (22/2/2018): Jews, Israelis and Diaspora * Hacohen, D. Immigrants in Turmoil: Mass Immigration to Israel and its Repercussions in the 1950s and After (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), chapter 1. Safran, W. (2005). The Jewish diaspora in a comparative and theoretical perspective. Israel studies, 10(1), 36-60. Sasson, T., Shain, M., Hecht, S., Wright, G., & Saxe, L. (2014). Does taglit-birthright Israel foster long-distance nationalism?. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 20(4), 438-454. IMI working paper ‘Israel and the Diaspora’ http://www.migration.ox.ac.uk/odp/pdfs/WP53%20Israel%20and%20the%20diaspora.pdf Smith, A. D. (1995). Zionism and diaspora nationalism. Israel Affairs, 2(2), 1-19.

Week 8: Ethnic Dimensions of the Conflict

Seminar 15 (27/2/2018): Mizrahi Jews * Roby, B. K. The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel's Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle 1948-1966, (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016), Introduction. * Fischbach, M. R. Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) Introduction, chapter 2. Shenhav, Y. (2002). Ethnicity and national memory: The World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) in the context of the Palestinian national struggle. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 29(1), 27-56. Shohat, E. ‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the standpoint of its Jewish victims’ Social Text 19/20 (1988), pp. 1-35. Chetrit, S. S. Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews. Routledge, 2009. Cohen, U. and Leon, N. "The new Mizrahi middle class: Ethnic mobility and class integration in Israel." Journal of Israeli History 27, no. 1 (2008): 51-64.

Seminar 16 (1/3/2018): Ethnocracy The concept of ‘Ethnocracy’ pertains to the allocation of rights to the population of a state according to ethnicity. Many scholars have found the framework useful and applied it to other places. This is an example of the travel of critical thinking and we will explore the ‘journey’ of the approach beyond Israel Palestine and see what the implicit comparison in the operationalistions of the theory say about the relationship between the conflict and other cases. * Yiftachel, O. (1999), ‘Ethnocracy’: the politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine. Constellations, 6(3), pp. 364-390. * Cosmopolitan Civilian Societies, Special issue 8:3 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/mcs/issue/view/399 - Choose one article Dowty, A. ‘Is Israel Democratic? Substance and Semantics in the" Ethnic Democracy" Debate’ Israel Studies 4:2 (1999), pp. 1-15.

Week 9: Forms of Resistance and International Action

Seminar 17 (20/3/2018): Resistance, Alliance * Sharoni, S., Abdulhadi, R., Al-Ali, N., Eaves, F., Lentin, R., & Siddiqi, D. (2015). Transnational Feminist Solidarity in Times of Crisis: THE BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT AND SANCTIONS (BDS) MOVEMENT AND JUSTICE IN/FOR PALESTINE. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17(4), 654-670. Jaeger, D. A., Klor, E. F., Miaari, S. H., & Paserman, M. D. (2015), ‘Can militants use violence to win public support? Evidence from the second Intifada’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59(3), 528-549. Ryan, C. (2015). Everyday resilience as resistance: Palestinian women practicing sumud. International Political Sociology, 9(4), 299-315. Sazzad, R. (2016). Mahmoud Darwish's Poetry as Sumud: Palestinian Resistance to Israeli Occupation and Subjugation. Interventions, 18(3), 359-378.

Seminar 18 (10/3/2018): (Guest speaker Professor Rosemary Hollis) The Europeans and the Conflict Gordon, N., & Pardo, S. (2015). Normative power Europe and the power of the local. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 53(2), 416-427. Kemp, M. (2015). Collusion as a Defense against Guilt: Further Notes on the West's Relationship with Israel and the Palestinians. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 12(3), 192-222. Del Sarto, R. A. "Defining borders and people in the borderlands: EU policies, Israeli prerogatives and the Palestinians." JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 52, no. 2 (2014): 200-216. Hollis, R. (2016) Palestine and the Palestinians in British political elite discourse: From ‘the Palestine problem’ to ‘the two-state solution’. International Relations, 30(1), 3-28. Hollis, R. (2016) 17 Europe in the Middle East. International Relations of the Middle East, 380.

Week 10: Indigeneity, belonging and Landscape

Seminar 19 (15/3/2018): Indigeneity * Yahel, H., Kark, R., & Frantzman, S. (2017). Negev Bedouin and Indigenous People: A Comparative Review. In Societies, Social Inequalities and Marginalization (pp. 121-144). Springer International Publishing. Nasasra, M. (2012). The ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the struggle for recognising the indigenous rights of the Arab Bedouin people. Settler colonial studies, 2 (1), 81-107. Kedar, A. S. "Dignity Takings and Dispossession in Israel." Law & Social Inquiry 41, no. 4 (2016): 866-887.

Seminar 20 (20/3/2018): Landscapes and Conflict * Galai, Y. "Narratives of Redemption: The International Meaning of Afforestation in the Israeli Negev." International Political Sociology (2017): olx008.

* Abramson, L. (2009). What does landscape want? A walk in WJT Mitchell’s Holy Landscape. Culture, Theory & Critique, 50(2-3), 275-288. Weizman, E. Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso Books, 2012), Introduction. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2000), Holy landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness. Critical Inquiry, 26(2), 193-223. El-Eini, R. Mandated landscape: British imperial rule in Palestine 1929-1948, (London: Routledge, 2004), Chapter 4. Benvenisti, M. Sacred landscape: The buried history of the Holy Land since 1948, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), Chapter 1.

Week 11: Narratives, Memory, Transculturalism

Seminar 21 (22/3/2018): Beyond Conflicting Narratives * Gutman, Y. (2011). Transcultural memory in conflict: Israeli-Palestinian truth and reconciliation. Parallax, 17(4), 61-74. * Bar-Tal, D., & Salomon, G. (2006). Narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Evolvement, Contents, Functions and Consequences. 2006). Israeli and Palestinian narratives of conflict: history’s double helix, 19-46. Rothberg, M. (2011). From Gaza to Warsaw: mapping multidirectional Memory, Criticism, 53(4), 523-548. Lustick, I. S. ‘Negotiating Truth: “The Holocaust," “Lehavdil", and "Al-Nakba"’, Journal of International Affairs (2006): 51-77.

Seminar 22 (27/3/2017): Food * Ranta, R. and Mendel, Y. "Consuming Palestine: Palestine and Palestinians in Israeli Food Culture." Ethnicities 14:3, (2014): 412-435. * Soleil Ho, ‘Craving the Other’, Bitch Magazine, Winter 2014, available at: https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/craving-the-other-0 Sardar, Z. Balti Britain: A journey through the British Asian experience, (Granta UK, 2008). Slocum, R. ‘Race in the Study of Food’, Progress in Human Geography 35:3 (2011), pp. 303-327. The Kitchen Sisters Podcast: ‘Operation Hummus’ https://soundcloud.com/fugitivewaves/operation-hummus