Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
From the Editors (May/June 1993)
We have long wanted to produce an issue dedicated to the proposition that Jerusalem’s political future must be firmly inscribed on the agenda of any Palestinian-Israeli peace talks that presume to be credible. We hope this issue can contribute to a more widespread appreciation among advocates of a negotiated resolution of the conflict that Jerusalem’s importance is not only symbolic or religious but has to do with basic material realities.
Intifada Memoirs
Helen Winternitz, A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991).
Gloria Emerson, A Year in the Intifada: A Personal Account from an Occupied Land (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991).
Peace Projects
We may come to recall 1992 as the year of the peace activist in the burgeoning literary and cinematographic record of the Palestinian intifada. By rupturing the structure of the occupation, Palestinian popular collective action and the decisions of the nineteenth Palestine National Council expanded the possibilities for political initiatives by Palestinian and Israeli supporters of a “two-state solution,” including new forms of Palestinian-Israeli collaboration. As this perspective gained credibility as a realizable historical project, its proponents received increasing attention.
Rethinking Jews and Muslims
“Your Highness completed the war against the Moors,” Columbus wrote in a letter addressed to the Spanish throne, “after having chased all the Jews…and sent me to the said regions of India in order to convert the people there to our Holy Faith.” [1] In 1492 the defeat of the Muslims and the expulsion of Jews from Spain converged with the conquest of the so-called New World. The separate quincentenary commemorations in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, however, have seldom acknowledged the linkage between these events. Although intellectually challenging and politically inspiring, “goodbye Columbus” counter-quincentenary debates have, for the most part, followed the same easy path of separating these issues.
Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?
Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (California, 1990).
Photos and Art from Palestine
John Running, Pictures for Solomon (Northland, 1990).
Phyllis Bennis and Neal Cassidy, From Stones to Statehood (Olive Branch, 1990).
Kamal Boullata, Faithful Witnesses: Palestinian Children Recreate Their World (Windrush, 1990).
Romann and Weingrod, Living Together Separately
M. Romann and A. Weingrod, Living Together Separately: Arabs and Jews in Contemporary Jerusalem (Princeton, 1991).
After armies come the academics. Usually the first wave comprises archaeologists and historians who wish to legitimize a particular excursion or expansion. These are followed by economists and anthropologists prying open the benefits and exoticism of the conquered areas. Further down the line are the sociologists and community relations scholars who wish to ascertain the progress so far. Israel’s conquest of the remnant of Palestine has been no different.
Aftermath
Eighteen-year old Anwar is new to bastat, street peddling. Two days ago his mother bought several crates of corn on the cob, which she boiled for him to sell in Tulkarm refugee camp streets. Recently released from a six-month term at Ansar III detention camp in the Negev desert, Anwar returned home the first day having sold nothing.
“There were problems in the streets,” explains his mother, Umm Jamil. “Anyway, no one goes out as they used to. Something happens, the army comes, and everyone runs. Who will buy?” Tulkarm camp, near the northern West Bank town by that name, is home to nearly 12,000 Palestinians.
Why We Negotiate
Sami al-Kilani is a member of the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks. A poet and short-story writer, he has spent several years in Israeli prisons and under town arrest in his home in Ya‘bad in the occupied West Bank. His brother Ahmad was shot dead by Israeli troops in October 1988. Joost Hiltermann interviewed him in Washington, DC, in December 1991.
I understand that members of the delegation held town meetings in the West Bank and Gaza after the Madrid conference.
Winds of War, Winds of Peace
The Gulf war transformed the political landscape of the Middle East, and thus the politics of the Palestinian question. Saddam Hussein’s promised “linkage” between the Gulf and Palestinian questions was in fact established, as the US sought to preserve its regional allies from a popular backlash, and thus reinforce its project of a “new international order” to encompass this troubled region. This means unblocking the Arab-Israeli stalemate and moving to solve the Palestinian question, generally recognized as the core component of the conflict.
Palestine in the New Order
Since the Gulf war, the Palestinian cause has entered an entirely new phase, one that is not merely a consequence of the war in the narrow sense. The Gulf crisis was the setting for a series of confrontations between local and international forces of such intensity that it is difficult to find a precedent. If the war fit into the formal category of a regional war with foreign intervention, it also had the character of a world war, given the international interests involved.
Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Prison Text, Resistance Culture
The Israeli prison apparatus is a critical and contested site in the manifold struggle to control communication and information in the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. During the two decades of occupation before the intifada, prisons in Israel and the Occupied Territories housed an average of 4,000 Palestinian political detainees at any one time. Since the start of the uprising this number has increased dramatically, with over 40,000 arrests. This put great pressure on the prison facilities and necessitated the opening of new prison camps such as Ansar III (Ketsi’ot) in the Negev desert, and detention centers like Dhahriyya, just outside of Hebron.
Forbidden Territory, Promised Land
Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews (trans. A. M. Berrett) (London: Zed Books, 1987).
Shlomo Swirski, Israel: The Oriental Majority (trans. Barbara Swirski) (London: Zed Books, 1989).
Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989).
