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Palestine and Israel
A Challenge to Justice
John Quigley
Duke University Press, 1990
The dispute over Palestine between the Palestinian Arabs and the Israelis is one of the most volatile and intractable conflicts in the world today. Palestine and Israel examines the history of this battle from the perspective of international law, and it argues that a long-term solution to the conflict must protect legitimate interests to remain viable—an element the author believes has so far been seriously neglected. This extensively documented work details the complex politics and agonizing struggles that have characterized the clash between Jews and Arabs, examining in depth the competing claims to Palestine and the extent to which legitimate interests remain to be fulfilled.
Beginning with the early Zionist settlement in Palestine that rose from the effort by Jews to escape long-standing discrimination in Europe, Qigley investigates the origins of the dispute, including the British occupation of Palestine, the British Mandate, and the involvement of the United Nations. He examines the 1948 War, the establishment of Israel, and explores the legal and political status of Jews there. After a detailed analysis of the 1967 War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he concludes with recommendations for resolving the conflict, including discussions of the responsibility of other states for the persisting injustice, the role of other states in settling the dispute, and steps to a possible solution.
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Palestine and Jewish History
Criticism at the Borders of Ethnography
Jonathan Boyarin
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Palestine and Jewish History was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This provocative and personal series of meditations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict argues that it represents a struggle not as much about land and history as about space, time, and memory. Juxtaposing entries from Jonathan Boyarin's field diary with critical and theoretical articulations, Palestine and Jewish History shows not only the unfinished nature of anthropological endeavor, but also the author's personal stake in the ethical predicament of being a Jew at this point in history.

Boyarin comes to Israel as a specialist in modern Jewish studies, an individual who has kin, friends, and colleagues there, a scholar with a long history of peace activism. He interweaves fascinating descriptions of ordinary life-parties, walks, classes, visits to homes-with a selection of his related writings on cultural studies and anthropology. Some sections are polemical; others are witty analyses of bumper stickers, slogans, the ambiguities in conversations. Boyarin foregrounds the messiness and lack of closure inherent in this process, presenting "raw materials" (field notes) in some sections of the book that reappear in other sections as various kinds of "finished" products (conference papers, published articles).

In the process, we learn a good deal about the Middle East and its debates and connections to other places. Boyarin addresses two fundamental issues: the difficulty of linking different sorts of memories and memorializations, and the importance of moving beyond objectivity and multiculturalism into a situated, engaged, and nontotalizing framework for fieldwork and ethnography.

Palestine and Jewish History enacts rather than reports on Boyarin's process of error, pain, impatience, uncertainty, discovery, embarrassment, self-criticism, intellectual struggle, and dawning awareness, challenging and engaging us in the process of discovery. Ultimately, it gives the lie, as the Palestinian presence does in Israel, to any concept of a "finishedness" that successfully conceals its unruly and painful multiple processes.

Jonathan Boyarin is the Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Storm from Paradise, co-author of Powers of Diaspora, and the co-editor of Remapping Memory and Jews and Other Differences, all available from Minnesota.

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Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture
Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
This important volume rethinks the conventional parameters of Middle East studies through attention to popular cultural forms, producers, and communities of consumers. The volume has a broad historical scope, ranging from the late Ottoman period to the second Palestinian uprising, with a focus on cultural forms and processes in Israel, Palestine, and the refugee camps of the Arab Middle East. The contributors consider how Palestinian and Israeli popular culture influences and is influenced by political, economic, social, and historical processes in the region. At the same time, they follow the circulation of Palestinian and Israeli cultural commodities and imaginations across borders and checkpoints and within the global marketplace.

The volume is interdisciplinary, including the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, ethnomusicologists, and Americanist and literary studies scholars. Contributors examine popular music of the Palestinian resistance, ethno-racial “passing” in Israeli cinema, Arab-Jewish rock, Euro-Israeli tourism to the Arab Middle East, Internet communities in the Palestinian diaspora, café culture in early-twentieth-century Jerusalem, and more. Together, they suggest new ways of conceptualizing Palestinian and Israeli political culture.

Contributors. Livia Alexander, Carol Bardenstein, Elliott Colla, Amy Horowitz, Laleh Khalili, Mary Layoun, Mark LeVine, Joseph Massad, Melani McAlister, Ilan Pappé, Rebecca L. Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Salim Tamari

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Palestinian Arab Music
A Maqam Tradition in Practice
Dalia Cohen and Ruth Katz
University of Chicago Press, 2005
This long-awaited project presents the results of a major research effort to determine the parameters of the stylistic variability of Arab folk music in Israel. Central to this old and highly improvised musical tradition is a unique modal framework that combines the concept of maqam—the foundation of Arab music theory—with other characteristics, including those of the text. Palestinian Arab Music is a comprehensive analysis of this music as actually practiced, examining both musical and nonmusical factors, their connection with the traits of individual performers, and their interaction with sociocultural phenomena.

Working initially with their own 1957 invention, the Cohen-Katz Melograph, and later with computers, Dalia Cohen and Ruth Katz recorded and digitized several hundred Palestinian music performances. The authors analyzed the musical tradition in light of its main variables. These include musical parameters, modal frameworks, the form and structure of the music, its poetic texts, and aspects of the social functions of the tradition. As a result of their study, the vexed aspect of intonation in practice is revealed to exist in a special relationship with the scale systems or maqamat, which are in turn of great importance to organizing the music and determining its modal systems.
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Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule
Law and Disorder in the West Bank
By George Emile Bisharat
University of Texas Press, 1989

As frequent intermediaries between Israeli military authorities and Palestinian citizens, Palestinian lawyers stand close to the fault line dividing Israeli and Palestinian societies. The conflicts and tensions they experience in their profession mirror the larger conflicts between the two societies. Thus, as George Bisharat reveals in Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule, a careful study of the work and lives of Palestinian lawyers ultimately helps to illuminate the causes of the intifada, or uprising, that began in December 1987.

The study revolves around the central question of why the Palestinian legal profession declined during twenty years of Israeli occupation when, in other Third World countries, the legal profession has often reached its peak during a period of Western colonization. Bisharat answers this question with a wide-ranging inquiry into the historical origins of the legal profession and court system in Palestine, the tenuous grounding of these institutions in Palestinian society and culture, and the structure, style, and policies of the late-twentieth-century Israeli military government in the West Bank.

For general readers interested in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as well as specialists in such fields as legal anthropology, sociology of the professions, Third World law and development, and Middle Eastern studies, Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule will be required reading.

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Palestinians in Israel
Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy
Ben White
Pluto Press, 2012

Palestinians in Israel considers a key issue ignored by the official 'peace process' and most mainstream commentators: that of the growing Palestinian minority within Israel itself.

What the Israeli right-wing calls 'the demographic problem' Ben White identifies as 'the democratic problem' which goes to the heart of the conflict. Israel defines itself not as a state of its citizens, but as a Jewish state, despite the substantial and increasing Palestinian population. White demonstrates how the consistent emphasis on privileging one ethno-religious group over another cannot be seen as compatible with democratic values and that, unless addressed, will undermine any attempts to find a lasting peace.

Individual case studies are used to complement this deeply informed study into the great, unspoken contradiction of Israeli democracy. It is a pioneering contribution which will spark debate amongst all those concerned with a resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

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Passion of Israel
Jacques Maritain, Catholic Conscience, and the Holocaust
Richard Francis Crane
University of Scranton Press, 2010

In his lifetime, French philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) achieved a reputation as both a leading Catholic intellectual and as an outspoken critic of antisemitism. Here historian Richard Francis Crane traces the development of Maritain’s opposition toward antisemitism and analyzes the Catholic appreciation of Judaism that animated his stance. Crane probes the writings and teachings of Maritain—from before, during, and after the Holocaust—and illuminates how his ideas altered Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism during his lifetime and continue to do so today.

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Peaceful Resistance
Building a Palestinian University Under Occupation
Gabi Baramki
Pluto Press, 2009

This book tells the remarkable story of Birzeit University, Palestine’s oldest university in the Occupied Territories.

Founded against the backdrop of occupation, it is open to all students, irrespective of income. Putting the study of democracy and tolerance at the heart of its curriculum, Birzeit continues to produce idealistic young people who can work to bring about a peaceful future. Gabi Baramki explains how the University has survived against shocking odds, including direct attacks where Israeli soldiers have shot unarmed students. Baramki himself has been dragged from his home at night, beaten and arrested. Yet Birzeit continues to thrive, putting peace at the heart of its teaching, and offering Palestinians the opportunities that only education can bring.

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Plant Metaphors in Prophetic Condemnations of Israel and Judah
Tina M. Sherman
SBL Press, 2023

Tina M. Sherman offers a first-of-its-kind, detailed analysis of prophetic passages that depict people as plants—from grasses and grains to fruit trees and grapevines—examining how the biblical authors exploited these metaphors to portray the condemnation and punishment of Israel and Judah in terms of the everyday work of crop farming and plant husbandry. Additionally, she explores how the prophetic authors employed plant imagery to construct national identities that emphasize the people’s collective responsibility for the kingdoms’ fate. Plant Metaphors in Prophetic Condemnations of Israel and Judah demonstrates the usefulness of combining conceptual metaphor theory with aspects of frame semantics in the analysis of patterns of thought and expression in biblical metaphor.

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Policy Making in Israel
Routines for Simple Problems and Coping with the Complex
Ira Sharkansky
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

All governments face problems and are judged by their ability to solve them and the policies they develop in doing so.  Compared with other Western democracies, Israel has faced a devastating number of problems of unusual severity in a relatively short time: war, terrorism, heavy immigration, unsettled boundaries, economic stresses, internal disputes about ethnicity and religion, and the lingering scars of the Holocaust and other persecutions.  Sharkansky’s analysis of the Israeli government’s routines and methods for coping with such an array of difficulties, from simple to complex to intractable, offers general insights into how governments make policy in a democracy.

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The Political Economy of Israel's Occupation
Repression Beyond Exploitation
Shir Hever
Pluto Press, 2010

The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967 has many important economic aspects that are often overlooked. In this highly original book, Shir Hever shows that understanding the economic dimensions of the occupation is crucial to unravelling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Hever rejects the premise that Israel keeps control over Palestinian territories for material gain, and also the premise that Israel is merely defending itself from Palestinian aggression. Instead, he argues that the occupation has reached an impasse, with the Palestinian resistance making exploitation of the Palestinians by Israeli business interests difficult, but the Israeli authorities reluctant to give up control.

With traditional economic analysis failing to explain this turn of events, this book will be invaluable for students, activists and journalists struggling to make sense of the complex issues surrounding Israel's occupation.

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The Politics of Denial
Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Nur Masalha
Pluto Press, 2003

The 1948 war ended in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their villages and homes. Israeli settlers moved in to occupy their land and the Palestinian refugees found themselves in refugee camps, or in neighbouring Arab countries. Today there are nearly four million Palestinian refugees -- and they want the right to go home. Their problem is the greatest and most enduring refugee problem in the world.

Since 1948 Israeli refugee policy has become a classic case of denial: the denial that Zionist "transfer committees" had operated between 1937 and 1948; denial of any wrong-doing or any historical injustice; denial of the "right of return"; denial of restitution of property and compensation; and indeed denial of any moral responsibility or culpability for the creation of the refugee problem.

The aim of this book is to analyze Israeli policies towards the Palestinian refugees as they evolved from the 1948 catastrophe (or nakba) to the present. It is the first volume to look in detail at Israeli law and policy surrounding the refugee question. Drawing on extensive primary sources and previously classified archive material, Masalha discusses the 1948 exodus; Israeli resettlement schemes since 1948; Israeli approaches to compensation and restitution of property; Israeli refugee policies towards the internally displaced (‘present absentees’); and Israeli refugee policies during the Madrid and Oslo negotiations.

Masalha asks what rights Palestinians possess under international law? How can a refugee population be compensated, and will they ever be able to return to their homes? Masalha questions the official Israeli position that the only solution to the problem is resettlement of the refugees in Arab states or elsewhere. This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the subject that lies at the heart of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

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The Politics of Planting
Israeli-Palestinian Competition for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery
Shaul Ephraim Cohen
University of Chicago Press, 1993
On the open landscape of Israel and the West Bank, where pine and cypress forests grow alongside olive groves, tree planting has become symbolic of conflicting claims to the land. Palestinians cultivate olive groves as a vital agricultural resource, while the Israeli government has made restoration of mixed-growth forests a national priority. Although both sides plant for a variety of purposes, both have used tree planting to assert their presence on—and claim to—disputed land.

Shaul Ephraim Cohen has conducted an unprecedented study of planting in the region and the control of land it signifies. In The Politics of Planting, he provides historical background and examines both the politics behind Israel's afforestation policy its consequences. Focusing on the open land surrounding Jerusalem and four Palestinian villages outside the city, this study offers a new perspective on the conflict over land use in a region where planting has become a political tool.

For the valuable data it presents—collected from field work, previously unpublished documents, and interviews—and the insight it provides into this political struggle, this will be an important book for anyone studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Popular Protest in Palestine
The History and Uncertain Future of Unarmed Resistance
Marwan Darweish and Andrew Rigby
Pluto Press, 2015
Popular Protest in Palestine provides an overview and analysis of the role and significance of unarmed civil resistance in the Palestinian national movement. Marwan Darweish and Andrew Rigby focus on the contemporary popular resistance movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, prefaced by a historical review of the thread of unarmed civil resistance that has run throughout the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle. The authors explore this underemphasized dimension of the Palestinian struggle, arguing that at the present juncture the popular resistance movement, especially in the West Bank, is the most significant form of struggle against the ongoing occupation.
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The Power of Dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians
Stories of Change from the School for Peace
Sonnenschein, Nava
Rutgers University Press, 2019
In The Power of Dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, scholar and activist Nava Sonnenschein shares a collection of twenty-five powerful interviews she conducted with Palestinian and Jewish Israeli alumni of peacebuilding courses, a decade after their graduation. Participants with diverse personal and professional backgrounds completed a series of conflict transformation workshops using the model developed by the School for Peace at the world’s only intentional Jewish-Palestinian community, Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam (“Oasis of Peace” in Hebrew and Arabic). Critically, the interviews vividly demonstrate that peacebuilding does not end with the courses. Most of the graduates choose to work professionally in roles that contribute to peace-building. Sonnenschein shows the transformational potential of encounter between members of groups in conflict, sharing how ordinary Israelis and Palestinians coming together in an open and honest environment undergo life-changing experiences that provide concrete hope for a sustainable path to a peaceful shared existence as equals in Israel and Palestine. 

 
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Projecting the Nation
History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen
Eran Kaplan
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Projecting the Nation: History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen is a wide-ranging history of over seven decades of Israeli cinema.  The only book in English to offer this type of historical scope was Ella Shohat’s Israeli Cinema: East West and the Politics of Representation from 1989.  Since 1989, however, Israeli cinema and Israeli society have undergone some crucial transformations and, moreover, Shohat’s book offered a single framework through which to judge Israeli cinema: a critique of orientalism. Projecting the Nation contends that Israeli cinema offers much richer historical and ideological perspectives that expose the complexity of the Israeli project.  By analyzing Israeli films which address such issues as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide, the kibbutz and urban life, the rise of religion in Israeli public life and more, the book explores the way cinema has represented and also shaped our understanding of the history of modern Israel as it evolved from a collectivist society to a society where individualism and adherence to local identities is the dominant ideology. 
 
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