Suchergebnisse

In this overarching March 2014 inaugural lecture at the newly established Center for Palestine Studies at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, while reminiscing about the genesis and evolution of the new narrative on the 1948 war, provides fresh analyses of both the Balfour Declaration and UN Security Council Resolution 242. He also addresses such pressing Palestinian issues as the one-state/two-state debate, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), and the Hamas/Fatah relationship. He concludes by highlighting the potentially catastrophic nature of the disputes centering on Jerusalem's Muslim holy places and the threat to the Middle East posed by the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, "the most dangerous political leader in the world today."

Hasib Sabbagh, who died on 12 January 2010 after a long illness, was arguably the preeminent Palestinian entrepreneur in the business and contracting fields in the post-1948 period. Born to an old and distinguished Greek Catholic family of Safad in Eastern Galilee, Sabbagh established the Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) in 1945 in Haifa with several partners after graduating in engineering from the American University of Beirut. Under his dynamic leadership and with the cooperation of his life-long partner, Said Khoury, the CCC (which Sabbagh reconstituted in Lebanon after the fall of Palestine) evolved from a modest local enterprise into the giant global multinational corporation that it is today. Using the CCC as his base, he began as of the early 1970s to devote his great energy to the service of Palestine, not only through his philanthropic ventures promoting social and educational causes, but also through his behind-the-scenes political mediation and reconciliation efforts. The following reminiscences trace the unusual partnership and friendship between the author, whose orientation was largely academic, and Sabbagh, whose approach reflected his big-business milieu. The two met in 1972 around the time when Sabbagh was embarking on his public service phase. They became fast friends and remained so until Sabbagh's death, joined by their common dedication to Palestine. The memoir includes Sabbagh's own account of his departure from Palestine in 1948 and sheds light on some relatively little known activities of the Palestinian business and academic elite in the post-1967 period.

Challenging the widely accepted premise that the 1948 war was a war of Jewish self-defense, the author demonstrates that the 1947 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) partition resolution was fundamentally a green light for the Yishuv's fully mobilized paramilitary organizations (supported by the resources of the World Zionist Organization) to effect the long-planned establishment of a Jewish state by force of arms. He further argues that as a national movement, Zionism was inherently conquest-oriented from the moment of its birth in Basel in 1897 and that it most closely resembles——in the alchemy of its religious and secular motivation and its insatiable land hunger, irredentism, and indifference to the fate of the "natives"——the Iberian Reconquista of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

Almost fifty years ago, Walid Khalidi published ""The Fall of Haifa"" in the December 1959 issue of the now-defunct Middle East Forum. On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the fall of Haifa on 22 April 1948, a major landmark in the Palestine war, JPS is republishing the article, long unavailable, to which Professor Khalidi has added endnotes and an introduction.