The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)
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12. Peled, “Towards a Redefinition,” p. 708.
13. Ibid., p. 709.
14. Hiro, Sharing the Promised Land, pp. 54–55.
15. See, for example, Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971); Dan V. Segre, A Crisis of Identity: Israel and Zionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Yosef Gorny, The State of Israel in Jewish Public Thought: The Quest for Collective Identity (New York: NYU Press, 1994). A notable exception is Akiva Orr, who left the Israeli Communist Party in 1962. He writes:
Instead of alleviating identity complexes this state has created new ones, not the least of which is a principled insistence on maintaining internal ethnic discrimination. Not only is every Israeli citizen required to register by ethnic origin and to carry an identity card stating ethnic origin, but the declaration of independence which pledges itself to “uphold full social and political rights to all citizens without discrimination of religion, race or sex” deliberately omits the phrase “or ethnic origin.” Social and demographic statistical surveys in Israel categorise the population into two ethnic groups, namely Jews and non-Jews, . . . which indicates that ethnic discrimination is not some minor flaw in the structure of Israel but its fundamental feature.
Akiva Orr, Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crisis (London: Pluto, 1994), p. 35.
16. Hiro, Sharing the Promised Land, p. 49.
17. Ben-Raphael, Language, Identity, p. 96.
18. Hiro, Sharing the Promised Land, p. 45.
19. Peled, “Towards a Redefinition,” p. 703; Etta Bick, “The Shas Phenomenon and Religious Parties in the 1999 Elections,” Israel Affairs 7, no. 2/3 (2001): 55.
20. Nina Sovich, “Shas Courts Israel’s Bedouin,” Middle East International, no. 593 (February 12, 1999): 24.
21. Bick, “Shas Phenomenon,” pp. 59–60.
22. Ben-Rafael, Language, Identity, p. 99.
23. Peled, “Towards a Redefinition,” pp. 706–7.
24. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, “Mizrahi and Russian Challenges to Israel’s Dominant Culture: Divergences and Convergences,” Israel Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 76.
25. For an insightful examination of the writings of Israeli scholars over issues of identity, see Gorny, State of Israel, pp. 197–231.
26. See, for example, the chapter on “Israeliness” in Orr, Israel, pp. 44–52.
27. Segre, Crisis of Identity, pp. 32–33.
28. In his famous speech before the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974, Yasser Arafat said: “The Palestine Liberation Organization has . . . gained its legitimacy by representing every faction, union or group as well as every Palestinian talent, either in the National Council or in people’s institutions. . . . The Palestine Liberation Organization represents the Palestinian people legitimately and uniquely.” “Address to the UN General Assembly (November 13, 1974),” in The Israeli-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, ed. Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, 5th ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 338.
29. James Kellas, The Politics of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 215.
30. Article 4 of the Palestinian National Charter, drafted by the PLO’s Palestine National Council in 1968, is revealing in its attempt to defend Palestinian identity: “The Palestinian identity is a genuine, essential, and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from parents to children. The Zionist occupation and the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people, through the disasters which befell them, do not make them lose their Palestinian identity and their membership in the Palestinian community, nor do they negate them.” “Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestinian National Council,” in Laqueur and Rubin, Israeli-Arab Reader, p. 218.
31. For more on Palestinian civil society organizations, see Denis Sullivan, “NGOs in Palestine: Agents of Development and Foundation of Civil Society,” Journal of Palestine Studies 25 (Spring 1996): 93–100, and Mehran Kamrava, “What Stands between the Palestinians and Democracy?,” Middle East Quarterly 6 (June 1999): 3–12.
32. Data collected from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics at www.pcbs.gov.ps. The most recent Palestinian census was conducted in 2007, the results of which are available in Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Population, Housing and Establishment Census, 2007 (Ramallah: Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2009).
33. United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA Statistics—2010: Selected Indicators (Amman: UNRWA, 2010), p. 5. Additional data on Palestinian refugees are available at UNRWA’s website under “Resources,” “Statistics,” “UNRWA in Figures,” www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=253.
34. The 2009 estimate is from the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel, under “Data Bank and Tools,” “Time Series—Data Bank,” “Population,” www1.cbs.gov.il/ts/IDa85430b0190dc5/databank/building_func_e.html?level_1=2.
35. Laurie Brand, Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 222.
36. In fact, Israelis often discuss with relative ease the exact opposite of Palestinian repatriation: “transfer,” by which they mean the removal of additional Palestinians from the Occupied Territories and Israel.
37. Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), p. 436. Secularism, of course, fit the general ideological tenor of the 1960s and much of the 1970s. Tessler quotes the Syrian poet and intellectual Adonis, who in 1968 wrote: “We must realize that the societies that modernized did so only after they rebelled against their history, tradition, and values. . . . We must ask our religious heritage what it can do for us in our present and future. . . . If it cannot do much for us we must abandon it.”
38. Beverley Milton-Edwards, Islamic Politics in Palestine (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), p. 103.
39. Over the years, a few young Palestinians from Gaza and West Bank refugee camps were given grants and scholarships to study in universities abroad, especially in Egypt, and returned home as members of the middle or even upper-middle class (many as high school and university instructors, engineers, or physicians).
40. Glenn E. Robinson, Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 19.
41. Ibid., p. 20.
42. James A. Graff and Mohamed Abdollel, Palestinian Children and Israeli State Violence (Toronto: Near East Cultural and Educational Foundation of Canada, 1991), p. 169. This source contains valuable statistical data on injuries sustained by Palestinian children in the first two years of the intifada.
43. Ziad Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 15.
44. For the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood and its spread elsewhere in the Middle East, see Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 70–98. For the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood first in Palestine and later in the Occupied Territories, see Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism, especially pp. 1–52, and Milton-Edwards, Islamic Politics in Palestine.
45. Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism, p. 95.
46. Ibid., p. 115.
47. Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 9.
48. Both during the intifada and afterward, conflicts emerged between Hamas and first the ULU and later the PNA, especially following a number of suicide bombings attributed to the military wing of Hamas called the al-Qassam Brigade after the famous Muslim activist Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam (1882–1935).
49. Mishal and Sela, Palestinian Hamas, p. 57.
50. Few observers of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have paid sufficient attention to living conditions in the Occupied Territories and the consequences of these living conditions in sparking the intifada and the eventual signing of various peace ag
reements between the Israeli government and Palestinian representatives. For a moving portrait of life in Gaza written by an Israeli activist, see Amira Hass, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land under Siege (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). For a glimpse of life in the West Bank, see Saïd K. Aburish, Cry Palestine: Inside the West Bank (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).
51. For a typical Israeli explanation for the departure of the Palestinians in 1947–48, see excerpts from the speech before the United Nations (November 17, 1958) by Israel’s ambassador to the body and later its foreign minister, Abba Eban, in “Abba Eban: The Refugee Problem,” in Laqueur and Rubin, Israeli-Arab Reader, pp. 129–40. For one of the earliest critical analyses of this line of explanation, see the reprint of a 1961 article, “The Other Exodus,” by Irish journalist Erskine Childers, also in Laqueur and Rubin, Israeli-Arab Reader, pp. 122–28.
52. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See also Samih K. Farsoun and Christina E. Zacharia, Palestine and the Palestinians (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 130–40, and Orr, Israel, pp. 68–74.
53. Don Peretz, Palestinians, Refugees, and the Middle East Peace Process (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute for Peace Press, 1993), p. 13.
54. It is worth quoting at length passages from the U.S. Department of State’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices—2000:
Members of the Israeli security forces committed numerous serious human rights abuses, particularly following the outbreak of violence in late September. . . .
Israel’s overall human rights record in the occupied territories was poor. . . . Prolonged detention, limits on due process, and infringements on privacy rights remained problems. Israeli security forces sometimes impeded the provision of medical assistance to Palestinian civilians. Israeli security forces destroyed Palestinian-owned agricultural land. Israeli authorities censored Palestinian publications, placed limits on freedom of assembly, and restricted freedom of movement for Palestinians. . . .
Israeli settlers harass, attack, and occasionally kill Palestinians in the West bank and Gaza Strip. There were credible reports that settlers injured a number of Palestinians during the “al-Aqsa intifada,” usually by stoning their vehicles, which at times caused fatal accidents, shooting them, or hitting them with moving vehicles. Human rights groups received several dozen reports during the year that Israeli settlers in the West Bank beat Palestinians and destroyed the property of Palestinians living or farming near Israeli settlements.
U.S. Department of State, “Israel and the Occupied Territories,” in Country Report on Human Rights Practices—2000 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2001).
The same report, it must be mentioned, goes on to list a variety of acts of harassment and other human rights violations committed against Israeli settlers by Palestinians, including shootings, beatings, and stabbings.
The 2011 report contains the following:
The Israeli government killed Palestinian civilians as well as militants, mostly in the Gaza Strip, but also in the West Bank. Israeli security forces killed 105 Palestinians in Gaza and 10 in the West Bank during the year. Some of these killings were unlawful. Eighteen of those killed in the Gaza Strip were minors. The Israeli government launched missile, unmanned aerial vehicle, and fighter aircraft strikes in the Gaza Strip, killing 49 Palestinians whom the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (BʾTselem) described as participating in hostilities through their membership in Hamas’s military wing or the PIJ (a terrorist organization) and at least 40 of whom BʾTselem described as not participating in hostilities. The IDF used tanks and remote-controlled weapons stations to fire on Palestinians inside the Gaza Strip. IDF personnel maintained secure stations every several hundred yards along the border fence; each station contained machine guns with a nearly one-mile firing range. The IDF’s tanks also sometimes fired ammunition with “flechette” projectiles, which explode in midair, releasing thousands of 1.5-inch metal darts that disperse in an arc 328 yards wide.
U.S. Department of State, “Israel and the Occupied Territories,” in Country Report on Human Rights Practices—2011 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2012).
55. BʾTselem, Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, 2011 Annual Report (Jerusalem: BʾTselem, 2011), p. 14. Also, according to the U.S. Department of State’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices, compared to the Palestinians who live under Israeli rule, Israeli Jews living in the Occupied Territories “receive preferential treatment from Israeli authorities in terms of protection of personal property rights and of legal redress.” U.S. Department of State, “Israel and the Occupied Territories” [2000].
56. David McDowall, The Palestinians: The Road to Nationhood (London: Minority Rights Group, 1995), pp. 82–84.
57. Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report, 2012: The State of the World’s Human Rights (London: Amnesty International, 2012), p. 187.
58. Anthony Coon, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Demolition and Dispossession: The Destruction of Palestinian Homes (London: Amnesty Inter-national, 1999), p. 1.
59. Amnesty International, “Palestinian Homes Demolished without Warning,” March 11, 2008, www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/palestinian-homes-demolished-without-warning-20080311.
60. Data collected from BʾTselem, under “Statistics,” “Destruction of Property,” www.btselem.org/statistics. Because of house demolitions from 1987 to the first three months of 1999, an estimated 14,500 people, including at least 6,000 children, were rendered homeless. Coon, Israel and the Occupied Territories, p. 9.
61. Coon, Israel and the Occupied Territories, p. 12.
62. BʾTselem, “Statistics on Revocation of Residency in East Jerusalem,” December 3, 2012, www.btselem.org/jerusalem/revocation_statistics.
63. Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel, Statistical Abstract of Israel, 2000, no. 51 (Tel Aviv: Government Publishing House, 2000), pp. 16–17.
64. Palestinian homes are often destroyed under the pretext of not having the proper building permits. The same requirement does not apply to the homes of Israeli settlers, however. According to a statement by the Israel Committee against Home Demolitions,
With three unusual exceptions, in the past 30 years NO Jewish house on the West Bank has ever been threatened with demolition. The entire notion is absolutely unthinkable to an Israeli. Moreover, any comparison of the legal status of the Palestinian and Jewish residents of the West Bank reveals completely different sets of rights, protections, and penalties.
Israeli settlers are citizens of Israel and are subject only to Israeli law. None of the planning guidelines, procedures for obtaining building permits from the civilian administration or house demolition penalties applies to them. The first 21 Jewish settlements on the West Bank were done so without plans or permits and, indeed, against the stated policies and wishes of the Israeli government. Erecting structures in order to “create facts” on the ground is still a favorite tactic of the settlers, and thousands of Jewish housing units have been built without permits.
Jeff Halper, On the Policy of House Demolition by the Israeli Army in the West Bank (Hebron: Israel Committee against House Demolitions, 1998).
65. Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 4th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), pp. 303–4.
66. Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel, Survey of New Dwellings for Sale in the Private Sector, January–March 2009, table 1.1, p. 15.
67. Craig Horowitz, “A Tale of Two Cities,” New York, April 7, 1997, p. 34.
68. Ian S. Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1988), pp. 45–46.
69. McDowall, Palestinians, p. 87.
70. BʾTselem, Human Rights, p. 39.
71. Colin MacKinnon, “Costs of the Cl
osure: Gaza Hard Hit,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 1996, p. 85.
72. The 2012 poverty data for the West Bank Gaza are from World Bank, “West Bank and Gaza at a Glance,” March 29, 2012, http://devdata.worldbank.org/AAG/wbg_aag.pdf; World Bank, Coping with Conflict: Poverty and Inclusion in the West Bank and Gaza (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011), p. 15.
73. World Bank, Towards Economic Sustainability of a Future Palestinian State: Promoting Private Sector–Led Growth (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012), pp. 122–23. See also World Bank, Investing in Palestinian Economic Reform and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007).
74. In February–March 1996, for example, Hamas claimed responsibility for three suicide car bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that killed fifty-seven civilian Israelis. For an account of some of the more recent terrorist activities committed by Palestinian guerrillas and suicide bombers against Israeli targets, see U.S. Department of State, “Israel and the Occupied Territories,” in Country Report on Human Rights Practices—2000 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2001).
75. U.S. Department of State, “Israel and the Occupied Territories,” in Country Reports on Human Rights Practices—2002 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2003).
76. Mishal and Sela, Palestinian Hamas, p. 62.
77. See, for example, Shimon Peres, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); and Shimon Peres and Robert Littell, For the Future of Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
78. Uri Savir, The Process: 1,100 Days That Changed the Middle East (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), p. 77.
79. Nicholas Guyatt, The Absence of Peace: Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998), p. 35.
80. For a detailed account of Sadat’s trip to Israel and other events leading up to the Camp David Accords, see Kenneth Stein, Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin, and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 187–228.