Suchergebnisse

"The quest for an inclusive and independent state has been at the center of the Palestinian national struggle for a very long time. This book reexamines this quest by exploring the meaning of Palestinian statehood and the challenges that face alternative models to it today. Rethinking Statehood in Palestine gives prominence to a young set of diverse Palestinian scholars, both men and women, to show how notions of citizenship, sovereignty, and nationhood are being currently rethought within the broader context of decolonization. Bringing forth critical and multifacetted engagements with what Palestinian self-determination entails within a larger regional context, this book sets the terms of debate for the future of Palestine beyond partition"--

This book examines the flow of Palestinian labour to Israel over the last three decades, and shows how it has fluctuated over time, with, most recently, a shift in the flow towards Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.

The year 2017 was important for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, commemorating both the centennial of the Balfour Declaration and the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war. That war, which resulted in Israel's defeat of three Arab armies and its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, transformed the politics of the Middle East. According to UN Security Council Resolution 242, issued in November 1967, the occupation was illegal: Israel would have to withdraw from the territories it occupied if it were to achieve peace with its neighbors. In international law, military occupations are temporary by definition. Israel, however, only returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982. (One year prior, it unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights from Syria.) Despite a twenty-five-year-long political process initiated in 1993, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has continued unabated.

This paper reexamines the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and the extent to which a viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was ever truly possible. Such a reexamination seems all the more pertinent today on the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. It is also seventy years since the UN partition plan to divide historic Palestine and fifty years since UN Security Council Resolution 242, which has been the basis for every peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors but makes no mention of or reference to the Palestinian people. The paper argues that the history of the past fifty years reinforces the claim that a State is central to any attempt to fight Palestinian erasure and ensure "the right to have rights," as Hannah Arendt put it, but it argues that such an entity needs to be elevated above the nation, rather than made subservient to it if it is to protect the rights of Palestinians and all those living on the land of Palestine.

After the Oslo peace process got underway in the early 1990s, international donors allocated billions of dollars in aid to the occupied Palestinian territories to kick-start the process of economic development deemed necessary to state building. This article argues that although much of the money was directed at democracy enhancement and civic engagement projects, contrary to stated intentions, it actually undermined rather than promoted those outcomes. Donor countries, led by the United States and the European Union, designed and implemented programs with complete disregard for the reality underlying the Palestinian predicament—the almost 50 years of military occupation and the broader context of Israel's settler-colonial project. Besides their entrenchment of a neoliberal agenda, such projects have contributed to the ongoing fracturing of Palestinian politics and the growing authoritarianism of the Ramallah government, leaving the Palestinian economy less viable and more dependent on Israel than ever.

This article reflects on the body of knowledge that has been constructed around the Palestinian economy. It traces the paradigm shifts between the two most commonly used theoretical frameworks—neoliberalism and colonialism—and assesses their success in analyzing and explaining the determinants of Palestinian economic growth. The Zionist project itself as well as the significant disparities between the various Palestinian communities that exist (inside Israel, in the occupied territories, and in the diaspora) have figured unevenly or not at all in scholarly analyses. The paper argues that as a result, the scholarship on the Palestinian economy has been quite inconsistent. The discussion seeks to demonstrate that this inconsistency has compromised the ability of economists both to explain the failure of Palestinian development and to identify possible remedies.