In a Kyiv bomb shelter, a wartime president addresses his people via a smartphone. In London, thousands march with foreign flags, chanting in solidarity with a land under siege. In Tehran’s studios, state TV anchors broadcast messages across the Middle East. These scenes show that modern conflicts are fought not only with missiles, but also with narratives that leap across borders. Digital stories and images have become a strategic frontline. From a communications perspective, war is now “about perception, telling a story about who is the victim and who is the aggressor.” Across the world, this “correspondence of conflict”—the public narrative back-and-forth of war—is shaping alliances, foreign policy, and diplomacy.

Three conflict zones illustrate this trend and each case demonstrates how digital communication and international perception can sway the course of wars and the world’s response.

Ukraine: Zelensky’s War of Words and Images

From day one of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine fought on the information front. President Zelensky posted a defiant video from central Kyiv declaring, “We are here”—proof that he and his cabinet had not fled and would resist. That brief clip set the tone for a new kind of wartime leadership, harnessing social media to rally the nation and win support abroad.

Zelensky understood that winning the narrative was as crucial as winning battles. He turned communication into a strategic weapon, delivering daily addresses to rally Ukrainians and making personal appeals to international audiences. One public diplomacy expert noted that Zelensky uses every platform — from speeches to X — to press Ukraine’s case. Under his guidance, Ukraine offered a model for how a nation under attack can shape its image via digital media.

Equally remarkable was how Ukrainian society joined the effort. Government social-media accounts adopted memes and other humor to keep Ukraine in global headlines and counter Russian propaganda. Ordinary Ukrainians became citizen reporters, sharing raw videos of bombed neighborhoods, civilian resilience, and frontline heroics. “Every Ukrainian became a voice of the embattled country . . . an eyewitness of brave resistance,” observed one analysis. Unpolished clips of everyday bravery had a major impact, their authenticity cutting through Kremlin propaganda. Amplified by influencers and a volunteer “PR Army” of communication professionals, these real-time stories helped truth prevail over disinformation.

This digital people’s war paid off diplomatically. By winning hearts and minds abroad, Ukraine won unprecedented international support. Public opinion abroad pressured many governments to impose tough sanctions on Russia and send weapons to Kyiv. NATO and EU leaders that once hesitated became more unified behind Ukraine, reflecting how Zelensky’s media diplomacy translated into tangible aid. Even diplomatic forums became venues for Ukraine’s narrative: at a 2024 peace summit in Switzerland, Zelensky’s team ensured global media heard his call for a “just peace.” In short, strategic storytelling reinforced Ukraine’s physical defense by aligning the world’s support with the nation’s struggle.

Israel–Gaza: A War of Narratives and Global Reactions

On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants attacked Israel. Graphic videos of the assault spread online within hours, sparking global outrage and sympathy for Israel. Israel quickly cast the attack as “Israel’s 9/11” and launched a military response. But as Israeli bombs pounded Gaza, a parallel war of narratives unfolded over who was the victim and who was the aggressor. Analysts noted that the conflict was about perception, with civilian suffering becoming the center of gravity for international support.

In Gaza, Hamas and ordinary Palestinians flooded social media with images of destroyed buildings and wounded civilians to sway global opinion. In past Gaza wars, support for Israel “faded as sympathies turned toward the Palestinians” amid high civilian casualties, and 2023 followed that pattern. Hamas’s media wing effectively used such footage to change international opinion. Outrage over the suffering sparked protests from Istanbul to London, with demonstrators waving Palestinian flags and demanding an end to the bombardment. 

Israel, meanwhile, pushed its own narrative: officials emphasized Hamas’s brutality and use of human shields, and the Israel Defense Forces circulated videos of precision strikes to show efforts to minimize civilian harm. Both sides churned out reams of supporting footage and armies of online supporters around the world eagerly shared content echoing their side’s view.

The information war peaked with the Gaza hospital explosion. Within minutes of the blast, Hamas blamed an Israeli airstrike for the carnage, while Israel insisted a misfired Palestinian rocket was to blame. Social media lit up with competing claims long before any evidence emerged. “False assertions flew on the internet,” demonstrating how each side weaponized unverified information (later evidence pointed to a failed militant rocket, but by then each narrative had hardened). This episode epitomized “Truth Decay”—the collapse of shared facts as partisans embraced whatever fit their narrative.

As these narratives battled, governments felt the pressure. The mounting civilian toll in Gaza and the global outcry forced Israel’s allies to grapple with public demands for ceasefires or restraint. Western leaders supportive of Israel faced protests at home, prompting some to soften their stance. In international forums, debates often mirrored the dueling narratives seen online. Even firm alliances strained under public opinion. The Israel–Gaza war showed that controlling the story is now integral to war. Military operations ran hand-in-hand with messaging. And as chants of “Stop bombing Gaza” or “Stand with Israel” echoed worldwide, it became clear that public sentiment can sway diplomatic calculations—sometimes pushing leaders toward de-escalation.

Iran: The Public Diplomacy of Resistance

Iran demonstrates how a narrative campaign can be waged outside of active battle to build influence. Tehran’s theocratic regime uses public diplomacy as a strategic tool to shape regional opinion. It leans on a “menu of narratives” that appeal to Arab and Muslim sensibilities—anti-imperialism, Islamic unity, and support for the Palestinian cause. By casting itself as the champion of the oppressed and the chief opponent of U.S. and Israeli aggression, Iran seeks to win hearts and minds across the Middle East.

Tehran propagates its message through state-controlled media and cultural outreach. International outlets like Press TV (English) and Al-Alam (Arabic) broadcast Iran’s perspective globally, countering Western narratives. By using media as a diplomatic tool, Iran aims to shape its image and build sympathy abroad. 

The regime also runs cultural and religious programs—from conferences to schools—to reinforce its “resistance” narrative. On social media, Iranian leaders speak directly to foreign publics: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei operates official X accounts in multiple languages to spread his message internationally. Meanwhile, Tehran’s cyber proxies wage covert influence campaigns: investigators found Iranian-run accounts masquerading as locals online to push anti-Saudi and anti-Israel propaganda.

This narrative offensive has helped Iran punch above its weight. By hammering themes of Muslim solidarity and Western perfidy, Iran has stirred sympathy among segments of the Arab public. U.S. analysts admit that while Washington focused on sanctions and military pressure, Iran was busy winning the war on the Arab street. The United States effectively “ceded the battleground of public diplomacy,” one report concluded, allowing Iran’s narrative to go unchallenged. Thus, when Iran backs proxy militias in places like Lebanon or Iraq, it often frames that support not as interference but as solidarity in a common struggle—an image that resonates with many. By mastering the narrative, Tehran has managed to expand its influence even under sanctions and isolation, wielding soft power where hard power cannot openly go.

The New Battlefield of Narratives

In a hyper-connected age, the narrative battlefield is nearly as crucial as the physical battlefield. Alliances form or fray based on the stories that dominate social media and television. Leaders must recognize that a viral tweet or image can sway international action faster than diplomatic cables. But this new reality also means misinformation can cause chaos like a missile strike. With every smartphone a potential broadcast, truth and propaganda often blur. The challenge is to counter falsehoods even as we harness communication for good. As one commentator noted, engaging with the media can “contribute to a successful peacemaking process” and should not be overlooked by policymakers.

The cases of Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran show that public communication is now a critical front. A compelling narrative can rally supporters or pressure governments more than any negotiation. Ultimately, who prevails in a war may hinge on whose story the world believes. The pen and the camera have become mighty weapons – and wielding them effectively could help shape a peaceful future.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Address by President of the Republic of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

On January 21st, 2025, Israel Defense Forces launched a major military raid on Jenin in the occupied West Bank entitled “Operation Iron Wall”. The Israeli military operations have since expanded to other areas of the West Bank, including the towns of Tulkarm, Nablus and Tubas. According to The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), at least 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced since the beginning of these attacks, which largely target refugee camps. This is the bloodiest assault on the West Bank since being formally occupied by Israel in 1967. 

Operation Iron Wall marks the first time the Palestine Authority (PA)—the Fatah-led governing body of the West Bank—fights alongside IDF forces in their assaults on Palestinian cities, killing many unarmed civilians and even journalists. Twenty years after coming to power, the aging Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the PA, faces growing criticism for this collaboration. The West Bank is facing an existential dilemma: either fight one of the most heavily funded militaries in the world or become completely annexed by its occupier, and the Palestine Authority openly engaging in treacherous behavior against its own people may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

In 1958, 10 years following the creation of the state of Israel, which saw the violent displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians and the loss of nearly 80% of Palestinian land in what is called the “Nakba” (“catastrophe”), a group of Palestinian intellectuals who lived in surrounding Arab states formed the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Ḥarakat at-Taḥrīr al-Waṭanī l-Filasṭīnī), known as Fatah (“Victory”). Many of the founders of Fatah were originally from the Gaza Strip and were made refugees in their own homeland. The movement called on Palestinians of differing political backgrounds to unite and “organize a vanguard that would rise above factionalism, whims and leanings to include the entire people.” A core tenet of the movement stated that armed struggle would be necessary to ensure the total liberation of Palestine, with the writings of Frantz Fanon and historical achievements in Algeria and Vietnam drawing inspiration. 

In Cairo 1964, a coalition consisting of leaders in Arab governments across the Middle East and North Africa formed the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO initially enjoyed greater legitimacy in the Arab world than Fatah in regards to the Palestine Question because it represented pan-Arab unity. Unlike Fatah, the PLO did not see armed struggle as the appropriate solution to the Palestine Question. This is in alignment with the President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who also did not agree that it was the right time for Palestinian forces to take up arms and fight against Israeli forces. Some scholars like Ilan Pappé argue that Nasser “miscalculated Israel’s reaction” to Palestine, failing to predict Israel launching an offensive against neighboring Arab states in the Six-Day war, leading to the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula.

Following 1967, Fatah and other Palestinian armed groups like the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) would conduct operations targeting Israeli military outposts. A battle in 1968 in the town of al-Karama in Jordan saw Palestinian forces “[inflict] relatively heavy losses on the Israelis,” leading to a surge in support for Fatah among Palestinian civilians. The following year, Fatah would gain the majority of seats within the Palestine National Council (PNC), the governing body of the PLO. As a result, Yasser Arafat, co-founder of Fatah and son of two Palestinians from Gaza City, would become the leader of the PLO. Arafat would become the face of the movement for Palestinian liberation on the global stage, and he would openly meet with many non-aligned and communist leaders to gain support for the Palestinian cause. Although once a strong believer in the necessity for armed struggle to solve the Palestine Question, Arafat would also make pleas for peace in the international arena. In a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1974, Arafat would famously say, “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

Following the end of the First Intifada, the Israeli government and the PLO would sign two agreements known as the Oslo Accords, which created the Palestine Authority as the governing body of the Palestinian territories. Arafat, head of the PLO and Fatah, would become its first president. Mahmoud Abbas would become the second and current president of the PA following Arafat’s death in 2004. The defining image of this so-called “peace process” would see Prime Minister of Israel Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands at the White House in 1993. On paper, the Oslo Accords were meant to normalize relations between Israelis and Palestinians and lead to a last peace. However, in the thirty years since the initial signing of these accords, many scholars see Oslo as a failure. Political scientist Khaled Elgindy argues that the Oslo Accords did not address the “uniquely asymmetrical” relations between Israelis and Palestinians as “as occupier and occupied”. Historically, Oslo reflects a growing trend of Arab normalization of Israel, seen as recently as 2020 with the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE. 

Now, twenty years since his ascension to power, Mahmoud Abbas faces a political dilemma. In a December 2023 interview, Yasser Arafat’s nephew would state that Abbas’ rule over the West Bank must end, claiming that “85% of Palestinians want Mister Abbas to resign.” Even before Israeli tanks rolled into Jenin at the beginning of this year, there was increased violence against Palestinians in the West Bank perpetrated by PA forces. On December 14th, 2024, PA forces launched an assault on Jenin refugee camp, claiming that militant groups were attempting to spark an uprising. The assault would last over forty days, and 21-year old journalist Shatha al-Sabbagh was killed by the PA. Many journalistic organizations covering violence in the West Bank condemned the killing, but the PA cracked down on coverage of its assault, leading to Al Jazeera’s digital platforms being temporarily banned. Unfortunately, the current collaboration between Israel Defense Forces and Palestine Authority forces is nothing new for Palestinians in the West Bank.The history of the Palestinian liberation movement both inside and outside of Palestine is one marked with both collaboration and betrayal. The Palestinians in the West Bank are staring down a bleak future due to not only the occupation of their land but now their own government. Rhetoric coming from the United States does not bode much better, as Donald Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, recognizes the West Bank as part of a greater Israeli state. Palestinans must live without the threat of displacement or death in their own homeland. As it stands now, the Palestine Authority stands in direct opposition to its founding principles in allowing for such a reality to happen.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “People Demonstration in Palestine,” by Mohammed Abubakr, Image source from Pexels | CC License, no changes made

Since Hamas’ attacks against Israel on October 7, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, London has been deeply affected. Grief, anger, and pain permeate the city which so many Muslims and Jews call their home. It has also shaken the British political system to its core, with both major parties divided, and asked questions about the UK’s role as a bystander to the horrors.

Underlying Tensions

The leaves have fallen in London, and half-forgotten Christmas lights still hang from the branches of the skeletal trees lining my street. The crisp, cold air and hustle-and-bustle of  tourists could seem a long way from the humanitarian disaster currently unfolding in the Middle East. However, there are small signs everywhere of its heavy presence: if you look closely at the bus stop, you’ll see posters calling for the return of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, and if you stop under a lamppost, you’re likely to spot a ‘Free Palestine’ sticker or hastily scrawled graffiti. 

My corner of North London is a true melting pot; I am a stone’s throw from the North London Mosque as well as several large Hasidic Jewish communities. In some ways, the UK’s position in this conflict feels distinctly distant. The country is a former colonial power whose history of self-interest, broken promises, and blind drawing of borders is often cited as a cause of the conflict. Understandably, many no longer care what we have to say. On the other hand, it is deeply present — communities here are closely tied to the events happening in this conflict, and there is palpable tension. 

From Fear to Rage

The conflict is not just visible in posters and graffiti, but also in the treatment of individuals. At a Tube station recently, I witnessed a Hasidic Jew being harassed by a group of young men shouting “Palestine will be free.” When I asked him if he was alright, he smiled tiredly and said, “It’s okay, I’ve got used to it.” This is reflected in crime statistics: The Metropolitan Police say that there has been a 1,350% increase in hate crimes targeting Jewish people and that Islamophobic hate crimes are up 140%. London is a vibrant, multicultural, and multireligious city, but many now live with fear and anxiety about showing their faith.

This fear has also turned to anger. There have been regular protests in Central London calling for a ceasefire, with over 300,000 attending one march that took place on November 11. This provoked an angry counter-protest from the far right, with over one hundred arrested for aggressive and threatening behavior. In this way, the conflict between Israel and Hamas has become a new battleground for the ongoing culture wars in the UK, with violence on the streets of London indicative of the rising animosity. 

Politics Upturned 

These new divisions challenge the old Left-Right divide. Both of the UK’s major political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, struggle to know how to handle the crises and face internal discord. The divisive Conservative former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, was forced to resign after calling those attending ceasefire protests “hate marchers.” Senior Labour Party opposition politicians have had to leave their positions after voting in favor of the UK calling for a ceasefire. Even more confusingly, the far-right is now marching in defense of Jews and is disrupting Remembrance Day events honoring veterans. This degree of polarization and anger, which too often descends into hatred and prejudice, is very dangerous. 

Social media activism has also played a role in this trend. Sites have seen a massive increase in infographics, tweets, and images relating to the conflict. Although messaging can be a helpful and heartfelt way of raising awareness of the suffering and gathering funds to alleviate it, social media can also be highly reductionist, extreme, and misinformation-laden. And oftentimes, it is those living relatively privileged lives in Western states whose posts are the most divisive and antagonistic. This turns social media, which can be a force for good, into a forum of blind rage and attacks. The reality is that this is a hugely complex conflict steeped in a long history that touches countless people’s lives. For this reason, now is a time for tact, understanding, and sensitivity. 

Sound and Fury

Unfortunately, politicians do not seem to understand this. Government and elected politicians can and should condemn both Hamas’s attacks and the nature of the Israeli response. Criticism of the way Israel is conducting its war does not necessarily equate to criticism of Israel as a state, Israelis as a people, or anti-Semitism. Equally, recognizing the horror of Hamas’ attack does not mean a lack of support for the Palestinian cause or a justification for the intensity of Israeli military violence. People are intelligent enough to hold these different ideas in their minds and to see that they are not all mutually exclusive. We need sensitivity and an understanding of how deeply and emotionally invested so many people worldwide are in this conflict, including in London. Empathy is vital. Politicians and the wider public have to understand the position of Jews in Britain and elsewhere, as well as the pressing and understandable fears they have. They also have to understand the generations of pain and suffering that the Palestinian people have faced and how that resonates with Arabs, Muslims, and many others worldwide.

Instead, politicians have sought to use the conflict to serve their interests. Most obviously, Suella Braverman used it as a way to appeal to right-wing voters by accusing the police of showing favorable treatment to pro-Palestinian protesters. This dangerous and wholly unfounded accusation of bias was done purely to help rile up her base as she potentially eyes up the leadership of the Conservative Party. The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, and his senior team have been too nervous about losing their lead in opinion polls to make a clear statement. Instead, they have either refused to answer or bluntly asserted Israel’s right to self-defense without thoroughly condemning its war crimes. 

Political Silence

Most worryingly, the British Prime Minister has offered very little in response to the conflict. Rishi Sunak has maintained Britain’s “unequivocal support” for Israel while calling for “specific pauses” in the fighting and urging Israel to try to avoid killing civilians. This shows that Britian’s politicians are unwilling to stand up and offer either a critical voice on foreign affairs or reassurances at home. Tensions and rising enmity must be cooled, and we should start listening to each other and engaging in dialogue. Instead, most senior British politicians are undertaking a different strategy — they are largely silent, offering little leadership or visible compassion to all those suffering in the UK and abroad.

This is a reflection of modern Britain on the international stage. The post-Brexit promise was of a new “Global Britain,”one that would be deeply engaged in foreign affairs. This is yet to be fulfilled. Instead, the nation’s confidence has been knocked, and politicians no longer know where the country stands. Of course, the UK must recognize its limited power to influence the conflict in the Middle East, but nevertheless, it has a responsibility to help push for peace. Perhaps the country could finally live up to its fantasies by playing the “wise, elder statesman” role and leading the calls for a ceasefire and peace talks. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has now taken that stand, and it’s about time Britain followed suit. An end to the fighting is in nearly everyone’s long-term interests.

Fighting the Flames

At the moment, London feels like a tinderbox; the tensions, anger, and anxiety are simply waiting for a spark. Politicians have a responsibility to help combat this. Rhetoric has to be cooled, and politicians should talk honestly and empathetically to help bring communities back together. They should also have the moral courage to take a stand on the international stage. London’s multiculturalism and diversity is what makes it great, and our leaders should celebrate and defend this to ensure the city remains a safe place for Jews, Muslims, and everyone else who calls it home.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “Bring Them Home” demonstration on Parliament Square supporting Israel after the Hamas massacre in the south of Israel, uploaded Oct 15, 2023 | Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons

Recent coverage of Israel and Palestine has focused on the new Netanyahu government’s efforts to weaken Israel’s supreme court, expand settlements in the West Bank, and strengthen the country’s far-right. But developments in Palestinian leadership are equally important. With an 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas at its head, the Palestinian Authority (PA), the primary governing body in Palestinian territory, faces a looming succession crisis. Moreover, the PA’s authority has gradually declined as Israeli territorial intrusions have weakened its sovereignty and as poor economic conditions have simultaneously bankrupted the PA and increased poverty in the West Bank.

Growing discontent has led to the creation of various armed splinter groups such as the Lions’ Den and Jenin Brigades—just as they appeared during the Second Intifada, a Palestinian mass resistance movement against Israel that took place between 2000 and 2005. These developments are extremely dangerous as informal, decentralized groups performing isolated acts of violence could lead to further escalation with Israel—a problem that cannot be deterred by Israeli-PA security agreements that would ordinarily limit such violence. As an increasingly splintered PA meets an increasingly centralized Israel, there is no telling when the next major escalation will arrive.

In the Lions’ Den

On February 22, 2023, Israeli security forces entered the ancient city of Nablus in the northern West Bank, planning to arrest members of an armed Palestinian group known as the Lions’ Den, which vigorously opposes Israeli occupation. Soon after Israeli officials entered the city, three individuals fired gunshots at them. A four-hour-long gunfight commenced. By the end of the carnage, eleven Palestinians had been killed, and over one hundred were injured.[i] In an apparent response to the raid, six rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza, to which Israel retaliated with missile strikes directed at the Gaza Strip.[ii]

Raids of this kind have become commonplace in the West Bank—and they have become increasingly linked to cycles of violence and escalation. Consider an eerily similar Israeli army raid just four months earlier in the same city. On August 9, 2022, Israeli forces entered Nablus and killed Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, a well-known Palestinian resistance fighter known to locals as the “lion of Nablus.” Ibrahim al-Nabulsi had co-founded the Lions’ Den with three other men—all of whom have since been killed.[iii] But the organization has grown rapidly in spite of Ibrahim al-Nabulsi’s death. The Lions’ Den now consists of Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and Hamas members, and they have often engaged in armed gunfights with Israeli forces.[iv] Since Ibrahim al-Nabulsi’s death, militants have converted his safe house into a shrine, considering him a martyr for the Palestinian cause.[v] The organization has gained a significant following on social media. After his death, TikTok erupted with tributes to “the lion of Nablus,” and the Lions’ Den soared in popularity. After being banned on TikTok, the group moved to telegram, where they have 130,000 followers.[vi]

The rapid growth of the Lions’ Den symbolizes broader discontent in the region and contextualizes the recent proliferation of violence. After the February 22nd raid, the Lions’ Den took responsibility for six of the fighters who died.[vii] But the violent emergence of splinter groups has neither been limited to the city of Nablus nor to the Lions’ Den. Other groups have emerged such as the Jenin Brigades (based in Jenin, north of Nablus), a group which has been supported by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and Hamas.[viii] Furthermore, in the aftermath of the February 22nd raid, splinter groups have competed with each other to claim responsibility for the fighters who died.[ix]

However, West Bank settlements, land confiscation, and frequent military operations conducted by Israel are not the only causes of resentment for Palestinians living in the West Bank. Many Palestinians are simultaneously infuriated with the Palestinian Authority, the primary governing body overseeing Palestinian territories in the West Bank, which has chronically failed to protect them. 

The Old Guard 

The Palestinian Authority (PA) was created in 1994 by the Gaza-Jericho agreement. The agreement gave it “nominal control over both security-related and civilian matters in urban areas of the [Occupied Palestinian Territories] (Area A), and only civilian control over Palestinian rural areas (Area B).”[x] The rest of the territory in the West Bank is under Israeli control. With Yasser Arafat as its president in the 1990s, the PA worked collaboratively with Israel to defeat Hamas. However, when negotiations with Israel failed in 2000 at Camp David, the Second Intifada began.[xi] By 2005, after years of intense fighting, and after Yasser Arafat had died and been replaced by Mahmoud Abbas as leader of the Palestinian Authority, violence had mostly come to an end. Since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005, Mahmoud Abbas has strived to maintain security ties with Israel in order to crack down on violence committed by splinter groups.[xii] 

However, Israeli-PA security ties have largely eroded. On February 6, 2023, in response to an Israeli assault on a Jenin refugee camp, Mahmoud Abbas announced that the PA would be suspending security cooperation with Israel, an action he had taken only once before.[xiii] As of February 26, 2023, reports indicated that Israeli and PA leaders had met in Aqaba, Jordan, in the hopes of reestablishing security ties.[xiv] Israeli and PA officials also met in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt on March 19, 2023.[xv] But these attempts are insufficient for the PA to regain its legitimacy and strength. By severing cooperation with Israel, the PA risks its very existence as the United States and Israel may implement crippling retaliatory sanctions in the event of permanent separation. The government cannot maintain cooperation while preserving its domestic legitimacy either, as Palestinians are growing more and more dissatisfied with a Palestinian government that has failed to protect them.[xvi] With Israel frequently raiding areas that are ostensibly under PA control, many Palestinians are convinced that the it lacks both sovereignty and legitimacy.[xvii] Thus, whether or not Israel and the PA maintain security cooperation, it is a “lose-lose” situation for the Palestinian Authority and Abbas.[xviii]

The Palestinian Authority has experienced a dramatic decline in economic and political support. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Palestinians in the West Bank have experienced widespread food insecurity and poverty, while “economic growth and the PA’s revenues remain below potential.”[xix] Moreover, foreign aid has declined from “27 percent of GDP in 2008 to 1.8 percent in 2021.”[xx] As a result, the Palestinian Authority is “on the brink of bankruptcy.”[xxi]

Meanwhile, Palestinian citizens have grown dissatisfied with an increasingly autocratic Abbas who has prevented elections and continued cooperating (for the most part) with Israel.[xxii] The 88-year-old has not given any indication of who his successor may be, sparking fears of a possible succession crisis and PA collapse.[xxiii] These sentiments are reflected by recent polling. Foreign Affairs reported in February that “more than 70 percent of Palestinians favor the formation of armed groups such as the Lions’ Den,” reflecting a greater belief among Palestinians in young resistance fighters than in the octogenarian, Abbas-led Palestinian Authority.[xxiv] In fact, in one poll, a surprising 36 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank said they would rather be “part of Israel” than to be in lands ruled by the PA.[xxv]

Dissatisfaction with the PA helps to explain the scale of the emergence of violent splinter groups in the West Bank—groups similar to those that partook in violence during the Second Intifada. And critically, these groups show no signs of stopping. When the PA’s mayor of Nablus offered an amnesty deal with Lions’ Den members, they rejected the offer.[xxvi] Other groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, and Fatah’s Tanzim continue to plan attacks.[xxvii] Moreover, even if individual splinter groups are eradicated, the hope they give to Palestinians is more important than their numbers.[xxviii] As a result, these splinter groups introduce enormous instability into the status quo. Indeed, as noted in a recent Foreign Affairs article regarding the potential for a Third Intifada, “such splintering mirrors a problem Israel faced in the second intifada, when it could no longer trust its Palestinian partner because the PA would not, and at times could not, crack down on violence.”[xxix] Additionally, these splinter groups tend to be extremely decentralized, embracing “broad violence” and “lone wolf attacks,” a recipe for escalatory violence.[xxx]

The Third Intifada?

While a youthful rebellion against the Palestinian Authority has challenged the authority of the old guard, a right-wing, traditionalist wave has centralized power in the hands of the Netanyahu government. Many have claimed that members of Netanyahu’s government are united in their goal to “weaken Israel’s judiciary and strengthen government control over both the courts and the civil service.”[xxxi] As a result, thousands of protestors have stormed the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and many other cities across Israel.[xxxii]

As this relative strengthening of the Israeli government meets the erosion of the Palestinian Authority, there is no telling the speed at which the situation may escalate. In its weakened state, the Palestinian Authority often refuses to go after militants, emboldening splinter groups and increasing the frequency with which Israeli forces enter cities like Jenin or Nablus to arrest militants, resulting in more violence.[xxxiii]

At a tense moment like this, in which the situation in Israel and Palestine could be moving towards a Third Intifada, several important steps can be taken to prevent further escalation. In terms of stabilizing Palestinian leadership, foreign actors could consider supporting a “post-Abbas process” that would potentially legitimize his successor (if they are named) through democratic elections in the West Bank.[xxxiv] In addition, the United States and Israel could consider negotiating with Palestinians outside of Abbas’ orbit.[xxxv] To prevent other escalations, Israeli leaders, as well as leaders from foreign governments around the world, may be wise to temporarily hold off on “provocative visits and settlements in hot-button areas.”[xxxvi] 

But while the situation in Israel and Palestine has grown increasingly violent, there may be room for hope. Recent reports indicate that representatives of the Netanyahu government and of Mahmoud Abbas have been meeting secretly for some time.[xxxvii] Whether any true de-escalation will result from such meetings between Israeli and Palestinian Authority leadership is its own question, especially in light of the recent spiral of provocations, the weakening of the PA, and the growing strength of rogue splinter groups. But for now, that dialogue channels remain open may be the best local and foreign observers can wish for.

Photo: APAImages/Rex/Shutterstock (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas holds a meeting.)

[i] Patrick Kingsley, “At Least 10 Palestinians Killed During Israeli Raid in West Bank,” The New York Times, February 22, 2023, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/world/middleeast/west-bank-nablus-palestinians-killed.html.

[ii] “Israeli Strikes Hits Gaza after Rockets Fired Overnight,” Reuters, February 23, 2023, sec. Middle East, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-strikes-hits-gaza-after-rockets-fired-overnight-2023-02-23/.

[iii] “Lions’ Den – Mapping Palestinian Politics – European Council on Foreign Relations,” ECFR (blog), October 10, 2022, https://ecfr.eu/special/mapping_palestinian_politics/lions-den/.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Patrick Kingsley, “Killing of Young Gunman Highlights Shifts in Fast-Changing West Bank,” The New York Times, September 16, 2022, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/world/middleeast/ibrahim-al-nabulsi-west-bank-violence.html.

[vi] Emanuel Fabian, “Armed Upstart Lion’s Den Challenges IDF Bid to Crack down on Nablus Terror,” The Times of Israel, October 20, 2022, https://www.timesofisrael.com/armed-upstart-lions-den-challenges-idf-bid-to-crack-down-on-nablus-terror/.

[vii] Kingsley, “At Least 10 Palestinians Killed During Israeli Raid in West Bank.”

[viii] Daniel Byman, “The Third Intifada?,” Foreign Affairs, February 7, 2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/third-intifada-israeli-palestinian-conflict.

[ix] Kingsley, “At Least 10 Palestinians Killed During Israeli Raid in West Bank.”

[x] “Palestinian Authority (PA) – Mapping Palestinian Politics – European Council on Foreign Relations,” ECFR (blog), March 20, 2018, https://ecfr.eu/special/mapping_palestinian_politics/palestinian_authority/.

[xi] Byman, “The Third Intifada?”

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Khaled Elgindy, “Why Security Cooperation With Israel Is a Lose-Lose for Abbas,” Foreign Policy (blog), February 6, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/06/palestinian-authority-israel-west-bank-security-cooperation-suspended-mahmoud-abbas/.

[xiv] Toi Staff and AFP, “At Aqaba Summit, Israel, PA Agree to Weigh Restarting Security Coordination, Meet Again in Egypt,” The Times of Israel, February 26, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/at-aqaba-summit-israel-pa-agree-to-weigh-restarting-security-coordination-meet-again-in-egypt/.

[xv] Jacob Magid, “Israel, PA Renew Vow to Curb Violence and Halt Unilateral Moves at Egypt Summit,” www.timesofisrael.com, March 19, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-pa-renew-vow-to-curb-violence-and-halt-unilateral-moves-at-egypt-summit/.

[xvi] Elgindy, “Why Security Cooperation With Israel Is a Lose-Lose for Abbas.”

[xvii] Byman, “The Third Intifada?”

[xviii] Elgindy, “Why Security Cooperation With Israel Is a Lose-Lose for Abbas.”

[xix] “The Palestinian Economy Will Continue to Operate Below Potential Without Concrete Policy Actions,” World Bank, May 9, 2022, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/05/09/the-palestinian-economy-will-continue-to-operate-below-potential-without-concrete-policy-actions.

[xx] Ibid.

[xxi] Elgindy, “Why Security Cooperation With Israel Is a Lose-Lose for Abbas.”

[xxii] Daniel Estrin, “A New Group of TikTok-Savvy Palestinian Fighters Tests Israeli Forces in the West Bank,” NPR, October 26, 2022, sec. World, https://www.npr.org/2022/10/26/1131362639/west-bank-lions-den-palestinian-group-israel.

[xxiii] “Managing Palestine’s Looming Leadership Transition,” February 1, 2023, https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/east-mediterranean-mena/israelpalestine/238-managing-palestines-looming-leadership-transition.

[xxiv] Byman, “The Third Intifada?”

[xxv] David Pollock and Catherine Cleveland, “What Do Palestinians Want?,” The Washington Institute, July 23, 2021, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/what-do-palestinians-want.

[xxvi] Estrin, “A New Group of TikTok-Savvy Palestinian Fighters Tests Israeli Forces in the West Bank.”

[xxvii] Aaron David Miller, “Netanyahu Faces His Own ‘Israeli Spring,’” Foreign Policy (blog), February 23, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/23/israel-judicial-reform-protests-netanyahu-government-supreme-court/.

[xxviii] Estrin, “A New Group of TikTok-Savvy Palestinian Fighters Tests Israeli Forces in the West Bank.”

[xxix] Byman, “The Third Intifada?”

[xxx] Ibid.

[xxxi] Eliav Lieblich and Adam Shinar, “The End of Israeli Democracy?,” Foreign Affairs, February 8, 2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/end-israeli-democracy.

[xxxii] Miller, “Netanyahu Faces His Own ‘Israeli Spring.’”

[xxxiii] Estrin, “A New Group of TikTok-Savvy Palestinian Fighters Tests Israeli Forces in the West Bank.”

[xxxiv] “Managing Palestine’s Looming Leadership Transition.”

[xxxv] Byman, “The Third Intifada?”

[xxxvi] Ibid.

[xxxvii] Miller, “Netanyahu Faces His Own ‘Israeli Spring.’”

Introduction

Both limited and sovereign, Benedict Anderson’s theory encompasses a wide range of nationalisms, using such concepts as print capitalism and official nationalism to explain their manifestation, which I will apply to Arab-Palestinian nationalism. The current Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most controversial, violent, and divisive issues of modern era with many ways to frame the struggle and a multitude of actors to consider, all of which have evolved over time. Although this conflict occurs over a small strip of land, it has unavoidable international elements due to the land’s evolution from being a part of the Ottoman Empire (OE), a British colony in the interwar period, to an arena of Cold War tensions. Furthermore, although the struggle with Zionism and Israel dominate the conversation now, the modern Palestinian national consciousness has deep historical roots going back centuries, and ignoring these origins only further erodes trust and impairs negotiations. The current cycle of violence seems insurmountable, with the Israeli stance on settlement expansion and denial of Palestinians as a national community “deserving of a state,”^[1]coalesced with the Palestine Liberation Organization’s internal strife and factional discord. These circumstances suggest that the goal of statehood has never been more unattainable. How, then, does the vigor behind calls for Palestinian Nationalism remain resolute? Using Anderson’s theories of print capitalism and official nationalism, this paper will show that Palestinian nationalism is rooted in anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist struggles, orienting itself as an ideology that predated the creation of a Jewish homeland under the British Mandate. Furthermore, this paper will endeavor to show how the renewed violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict throughout the Cold War cannot be separated from the overarching ideological themes of that era, namely the struggle between imperialism and decolonization and that between communism and capitalism. 

Orienting Perceptions of Palestinian Nationalism  

In tracing the origins of Palestinian nationalism, a number of academics have argued that it arose entirely in response to the creation of an explicitly Jewish Homeland during and after WWI. Premier among these thinkers is Bernard Lewis, a British-American historian who derides that Arabs as a whole had any concept of nationalism let alone Palestinian nationalism, until WWI.^[2]Daniel Pipes, another Harvard-educated historian, also claims, unequivocally, that there was no “Palestinian” identity before 1920, suggesting that the Arabs of that region [Leila Isk1] identified only as Muslims, with little to no positive or negative relationship to nearby Christians and Jews.^[3]In his book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, lauded for its evenhanded examination of both sides of the conflict,^[4]James L. Gelvin writes that “Palestinian nationalism emerged during the interwar period in response to Zionist immigration and settlement.”^[5]In saying so, he reaffirms that same narrative of a people with no examinable national consciousness or attachment to the land until confronted with large-scale colonialism. However, Gelvin warns readers not to belittle the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism on the basis that it followed Zionism, emphasizing that nearly all nationalisms occur in opposition to some determinable ‘other.’^[6]

In making this statement, Gelvin presumably seeks to offset efforts by Israeli nationalists and others to disparage the legitimacy of the Palestinian demand for statehood as an anti-Semitic rebellion of modern times, rooted in Arab nationalism or supremacy. This attitude has been a prevailing objection to Palestinian nationalism since its conception — that Palestinian nationalism is suspect because it did not exist before the Balfour Declaration. For example, Arthur Balfour, writing in 1919, asserted that “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions … [and] of far greater import than the desires and prejudice of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”^[7]Balfour is of the opinion that the Arabs, as recentresidents, have a tenuous claim to the land, their desires negligible in the face of Zionist tradition. This idea reverberated far into the 20th century — consider former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who claimed that “There was no such thing as Palestine… they did not exist.”^[8]Balfour, as the British Foreign Minister, marked the burgeoning contours of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the onset. These statements shed light on how Palestinian nationalism was and is perceived — as a latent manifestation of identity rooted in prejudice, inherently anti-Semitic, devoid of historical significance.

Origins of Palestinian Nationalism

Through the Advent of Print Capitalism

 Anderson considers the dawning of national consciousness as stemming from a unique interplay between technology, capitalism, and the diversity of human language, which all converged to help people imagine a community which had none “but the most fortuitous relationship to existing political boundaries.”^[9]Printcapitalism, stressing the proliferation of the printing press, allowed a common language to create a discourse between peoples far away through the ever-expanding capitalist marketplace. This understanding of how nationalism emerges — not just in opposition to others, but through a collective understanding of each other as a community with shared knowledge, values, and grievances — is applicable to the Palestinian case. This nuanced understanding of nationalism is crucial to chart the formation of Palestinian nationalism at its infancy, place it on equal footing with Zionism and give Palestinians a foundation upon which to claim statehood. This essay, in employing Anderson’s understanding of nationalism, does not deny that Palestinian nationalism grew out of opposition to Zionism, given that nearly all nationalisms, including Zionism and European nationalisms,^[10]emerged in response to some definable other, and were thus finite in their scope.^[11]Rather, this essay seeks to contextualize Palestinian nationalism as a more grounded anti-imperial opposition that began in earnest with 19^th-century  Jewish immigration, building on an embedded territorial consciousness, thus demonstrating that a collective ‘Palestinian’ identity existed before WWI, using print capitalism to broadcast itself. 

Through an analysis of early Palestinian newspapers, elements of a modern Palestinian national consciousness driven by peasant worries over land and displacement due to increased Jewish immigration to Jerusalem, are clearly identifiable. When chronicled in newspapers, these concerns reached political elites, creating a horizontal comradeship, or fraternity,^[12]under the common identification of “Palestinian.” During the Ottoman Empire, the Arabic press in Palestine emerged latently only after the Young Turk revolution, but did so robustly, with no less than 15 Arabic newspapers by December 1908.^[13]These newspapers played a crucial role in propagating what had been to this point largely peasant concerns over increased Jewish immigration from 1839-1914,^[14]crossing class and religious boundaries and allowing elites and peasants to relate to one another. Rashid Khalidi, in a survey of these early newspapers like al-Karmiland Filastin^[15]notes that “Arabic language papers began to reflect a mounting concern about the dangers posed by Zionist colonization.”^[16]The prevailing view among Palestinians —that Zionism was  a colonial expansion endangering their way of life — predated the creation of a Palestinian colony under the British Mandate. As such, calls for Palestinian self-determination today cannot be dismissed out of hand as a reaction to the creation of Israel; rather, they need to be understood as stemming from a far more entrenched identity that Palestinians have held for centuries. 

In Response to Official Nationalism

Beyond misgivings surrounding Zionism, these newspapers also demonstrate a burgeoning anti-imperialist sentiment among Palestinians against the Ottoman Empire, where local nationalist leanings threatened the dynastic state, provoking an official Ottoman nationalism and Turkification process. An analysis of these early Palestinian newspapers indicates a growing dissatisfaction with the Ottoman central authorities, specifically noting a common feeling that local needs were being ignored in favor of new Ottoman alliances with Jewish organizations.^[17]Frustration in the face of the empire’s lax stance on Zionist colonialism went a long way to invigorate the newly emerging Palestinian and local Arab nationalisms. Anderson’s “official nationalism” becomes relevant here; this Andersonian contribution to the analysis of the emergence of the modern nation states, suggesting that large multi-ethnic empires might attempt to assert dynastic control of their population, a procedure described as “stretching the short, tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire.”^[18]A kind of “official nationalism” emerged on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, although instead of co-opting popular anti-Imperialist sentiment, as Anderson describes of European dynasties, they looked to suppress and replace it entirely. For example, the Ottomans took steps to suspend Palestinian newspapers that criticized Jewish land purchases, including Al-Karmiland Filastin,^[19]and imposed mandatory Turkish-language requirements in schools, courts, and local government offices.^[20]The friction between Ottoman imperialism and Palestinian nationalism was reflected in the aforementioned newspapers and permeated every class and ethnicity within the empire — for example, the editor of Al-Karmil,one of the most sharp critics of the Ottoman Empire and Zionism, was a Protestant Christian Arab.^[21]The banning of the newspapers exposes their impact in bringing Palestinians of all religious affiliations, political statuses, and economic classes together in opposition to empire. The pervading concern of Zionist immigration, now inextricably linked with imperial overreach, inspired locals to protest Zionist immigration directly to the Ottoman Authorities.^[22]Thus, Zionism itself did not provoke nationalism, instead working with anti-imperialist sentiments as a focal point for Arab nationalism as a whole, and Palestinians in particular, to rally around. 

 There also exists significant evidence of a territorial consciousness of a distinct Palestine set apart from the rest of the Arab region under the Ottoman Empire, upon which nationalism could emerge. This evidence dates back to the 17th century, and ancient religious and legal texts from that time period make reference to Filastin (Palestine), in a sense that went beyond “‘mere’ objective geography.”^[23]In a book of legal opinion written by Khary al-Din al-Ramli (c. 1671), there are numerous references to Filastin, indicating that the reader is aware of the concept of Palestine, despite the fact that the term was not used by the Ottoman Empire, which had long before split the land into several districts (sanjaqs).^[24]In fact, al-Ramli was referred by his contemporaries as the “Alim [Scholar] of Filastin.”^[25]Consequently, when the national consciousness of Palestine emerged in the face of increased Jewish immigration to Jerusalem and surrounding cities, it emerge on top of an entrenched territorial consciousness. Palestinian nationalism is thus given an element of antiquity, which Anderson notes nearly all nationalists share despite the objective modernity of the nation-state concept.^[26]Therefore, the political communities that emerged in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire, despite spending centuries administered by a central authority, were cognizant of a deeper territorial history and divide that would attempt to reassert itself with the fall of empire. 

 Although most of the aforementioned scholars date the birth of Palestinian nationalism to the 1920s, by this time, it was already a firmly accepted and common narrative among Arabs in Palestine, Muslims and Christians alike, due in large part to print capitalism. During this time, in response to Jewish immigration and anti-imperialism, there were many inherently nationalist Muslim Christian Associations, which were linked in their opposition to Zionism and imperial overreach.^[27]In fact, at an anti-Zionist rally in February 1920, Maronite vicar Paul ‘Abboud described Palestine as the “sanctuary of Christianity and the direction of prayer for Islam,” designating Jews as “the enemy of the cross and crescent.”^[28]This influential and commonly-held feeling among Palestinians was so prevalent that it provoked retaliation by Herbert Samuel, who proposed a legislative council based on the Balfour Declaration of 22 members, only 10 of whom could be Arabs;^[29]in other words, Arab Muslims and Christians, who made up 94% of the population, could have only 45% of the seats.^[30]By this point, nationalist ideology was so strong in Palestine that the British Empire was making a concerted legislative effort to control and diminish it. This event is also reminiscent of another character of official nationalism, whereby the dominant group might take such an anticipatory strategy in the face of an “emerging nationally-imagined community.”^[31]In this way, the imperial interference on behalf of the Jewish population further cemented the Palestinian perception of Zionism as a colonial enterprise supported by empire.

In any discussion about the emergence of Palestinian nationalism in relation to the Ottoman Empire and Zionism, it is important to note that often nationalism and the modern nation-state emerged unevenly, overlapping with each other and empire even as it came into conflict with them. Anderson, in coining “official nationalism,” notes this reality of empire and nations blending together at some point, overlapping and intersecting in an effort to define themselves and cling to relevance. For example, Ottomanism, the ideology of the Ottoman Empire until its collapse in the 20th century, evoked an Arab response by emphasizing Turkish nationalism,^[32]and in trying to consolidate and reinforce control of their empire, the Ottomans pushed Arab elements away. Similarly, within Arab regions (Syria, Jordan, Palestine), local crises prevented any full adoption of Arab nationalism. For example, Palestinian nationalism was evoked by shared concern for Jewish immigration limited to their boundaries, distinct from the issues facing Jordan or Syria, spelling the failure of a more universal Arab nationalism.^[33]Furthermore, even when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, “nations” as we conceive of them now did not replace it.  A new Empire took its place, despite clear territorially-rooted nationalist movements, and instituted a new colonial master through the British mandate, which continually gave priority to another ‘rival’ nationalist claim, in order to consolidate its own authority. So even as empire waned, nationalism did not replace it evenly, and the triumph of one nationalism was not the triumph of all nationalist movements. 

Decolonization and the Cold War: Palestine-Israel Conflict

Anderson’s theories of nationalism also provide a deeper understanding of international relations during the Cold War, with the framework of Palestinian nationalism rooted in anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist struggles having been adopted by a new class of nationalist leaders. Fayaz A. Sayegh, a US-trained Christian Palestinian,^[34]in his 1965 study Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, outlines the pervading relationship between empire and colonialism in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Sayegh traces the historical contours of ‘Zionist Colonialism’ to the scramble for Africa of the early1880s, setting off the hunt for a Jewish Nation, a program that would quickly take on the characteristics of the British Empire.^[35]He notes the ‘Jewish Colonial Trust’ and ‘Colonial Commission’ set up in 1898 as the first institutions of the Zionist enterprise, and laments that with the alliance to British imperialism and the creation of the United Nations,^[36]the nearly 100-year effort for the creation of a Jewish nation at the expense of Palestinian political and physical rights was achieved. 

What fascinates the most about Sayegh’s writings is his designation of the UN as an instrument of imperial power, and how this classification has changed over the course of the Cold War. At the time of the creation of Israel, the Ottoman Empire was just beginning to recede, and the nature of the UN was still quite imperial, as seen by an analysis of the 1947 vote on the partition of Palestine into two states. Nearly every European country, and most of Latin America (although there were many accusations of bribes and US political and economic pressure to do so),^[37]voted for the partition, and every Middle Eastern country voted against it, with the final vote tallying up to 33-13. The acknowledgement of a new non-Arab nation in the Middle East, a region which links together Asia and Africa, thus happened “without the free consent of any neighboring Asian or African country.”^[38]Of course, further into the Cold War and through subsequent decolonization wars, UN membership swelled until decolonized nations greatly outnumbered former imperial powers. This shift in the power dynamic would mean the US had to employ vetoes to defend Israel in the face of truly international condemnation of its actions.^[39]One wonders what the outcome of Resolution 181 might have been, had there been at that time a robust non-aligned movement with newly independent colonies, like Algeria, which might have sympathized with Palestinian nationalism.  

Thus, Palestinian nationalists were not excluded from the Cold-War ideological battle. Through their participation in decolonization dialogues, like at the 1955 Bandung Conference,^[40]they were forced to pick sides. The Bandung Conference’s final communiqué declared its support for the Palestinian people.^[41]In response, a Jewish newspaper wrote that “Red China supports Arabs.”^[42]The US, in turn, supported Israel, whom they saw as an outpost for democratic and capitalist values in the Middle East, and more similar to them than the strange Arabs.^[43]This dynamic also played a role in international institutions, adding to the “Cold War paralysis” of the UN Security Council, as the US would continually veto resolutions that censured Israel.^[44]In this way, through the Cold War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict evolved to have even more far-reaching international dimensions, involving China and the US. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fueled by Cold War tensions, thus fits with the definition of a Cold War proxy war: a civil war used by international actors to pursue ideological agendas. 

The reality of the Cold War, of course, was that it was actually quite hot, infusing new life and death into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Civil conflicts with foreign intervention tend to be bloodier and longer than those without,^[45]especially when a strong foreign power intervenes heavily on one side,^[46]as the United States has done for Israel, sending more than $3.8 billion in aid.^[47]This endless flow of arms, military training, and money from the US is buttressed by unintentional international support for terrorist/insurgent organizations in Gaza and the West Bank, which receive money from Saudi Arabia, Iran, the EU, and the UN, ostensibly for humanitarian aid though often rerouted toward weapons and arms purchases.^[48]This translates to a constant stream of money and arms to either side, a constant fuel to this decades-old flame. The conflict thus continues to take lives, and numerous negotiations efforts are constantly thwarted by an inability to reconcile the needs and desires of either side. Of course, this may be another aftereffect of the long-standing civil nature of the conflict, which are rarely resolved with negotiated settlement, but rather one side declaring all out military victory.^[49]

Conclusion

The reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of a deep and entrenched history intertwined with colonialism, empire, and multiple nationalisms. Anderson’s theories of print capitalism and official nationalism help to navigate the origins of a national consciousness within Palestine. Evidence of this consciousness as well as imperial and nationalist opposition to its formulation can be found in early Palestinian newspapers, communications of the British Empire and the activities of Palestinian leaders throughout the 20th century and earlier. An examination of these sources reveals a deep-seated territorial and social awareness among Palestinians of their own distinct boundaries, which gained traction and transformed into a recognizable nationalist movement in the wake of Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 19th century and frustration with the Ottoman central authorities. Orienting Palestinian nationalism as a reaction to what they perceived as an imperially-supported Zionist colonialism adds another lens through which to interpret the conflict in relation to the decolonization movements of the Cold War, as an early and ongoing manifestation of that effort. The internationalization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not just as a product of empire but through Cold War tensions as well, reinvigorated the violence. Furthermore, the narrative of Palestinian nationalism that emerges from Anderson’s theory of nationalism also helps in understanding the nature of international relations from WWI through the Cold War until contemporary times, where nationalism emerges in fits and starts, the world order evolves constantly between supremacy and multilateralism, and regional conflicts become global controversies. Whatever the international implications, all conversations must acknowledge the plight of the millions of Palestinians both dispersed around the world and concentrated in Gaza and the West Bank, placing historical and national weight behind their calls for binding self-determination. 

^[1]Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo. (Princeton University Press, 2018), 290. 

^[2]Bernard Lewis, Semites and anti-Semites: an inquiry into conflict and prejudice. (WW Norton & Company, 1999), 169.

^[3]Daniel Pipes, “The Year the Arabs Discovered Palestine.” The Jerusalem Post (1950-1988),Sep 13, 2000.

^[4]Mark Sedgewick.”A Review of: “James L. Gelvin. the Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War.”.” Terrorism and Political Violence20 no. 3 (2008): 443-445.

^[5]James L. Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: 100 Years of War. (Cambridge University Press: 2014) 92-93. 

^[6]Gelvin, Israel-Palestine Conflict, 92-93. . 

^[7]Arthur Balfour to Lord George Curzon, memorandum, 11 August 1919, Britain Foreign Office PRO. FO 371/4185, quoted by Anthony Nutting,Britain and Palestine: a legacy of deceit. (Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, 1970) http://www.balfourproject.org/balfour-and-palestine/.

^[8]Frank Giles, “Golda Meir: who Can Blame Israel?” The Sunday Times(London, England), June. 15, 1969.

^[9]Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. (London: Verso Books, 2006), 46.

^[10]See, for example, Gelvin, 92-93, and Edward Said, Orientalism. (New York: Vintage, 1979), 1-2.  

^[11]Anderson,Imagined Communities, 7. 

^[12]Anderson, 36. 

^[13]Ami Ayalon, & Nabih Bashir, “Introduction: History of the Arabic Press in the Land of Israel/Palestine,” הספרייה הלאומית, accessed March 25, 2019,http://web.nli.org.il/sites/nlis/en/jrayed/pages/history-of-the-arabic-press.aspx.

^[14]Muhammad Y. Muslih, The origins of Palestinian nationalism. (Columbia University Press, 1988),14. 

^[15]Unfortunately, english translations are not readily available, but original Arabic issues of FilastinandAl-Karmilcan be found at the Arabic Newspapers Archive of Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine at http://web.nli.org.il/sites/nlis/en/Jrayed#. 

^[16]Khalidi,Palestinian Identity, 121. 

^[17]Muslih,The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, 84.

^[18]Anderson,Imagined Communities, 86.

^[19]Neville J. Mandel, “Turks, Arabs and Jewish Immigration into Palestine,” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1965), 101-102.

^[20]Muslih,The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, 61.

^[21]Mandel,”Turks, Arabs and Jewish Immigration into Palestine,” 204.

^[22]Mandel 205.

^[23]Haim Gerber, “‘Palestine’ and Other Territorial Concepts in the 17th Century.”International Journal of Middle East Studies30, no. 4 (1998): 563.

^[24]Gerber, “”Palestine” and Other Territorial Concepts in the 17th Century,” 565. 

^[25]Gerber, 566.

^[26]Anderson,Imagined Communities, 5.

^[27]TaysīrJabārah,Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin Al-Husayni: Mufti of Jerusalem, (Princeton: Kingston Press, 1985), 66. 

^[28]Jonathan M. Gribetz, Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter,(Princeton University Press, 2014), 236.

^[29]Jabārah,Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin Al-Husayni, 66.

^[30]Justin Mccarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate, (Columbia University Press, 1990).  

^[31]Anderson, 101.  

^[32]Muslih,The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism,212.

^[33]Muslih, 214.

^[34]Todd Shepard, Voices of decolonization: A Brief History with Documents,(Macmillan Higher Education, 2014), 157.

^[35]Fayez A. Sayegh,Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. Vol. 1. (Beirut, Lebanon: Research Center, Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965), 6. 

^[36]Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, 16.

^[37]See, for example; U.S delegation threatening to cut aid in relation to this vote via Liberian Ambassador; John Quigley,Palestine and Israel: a challenge to justice, (Duke University Press, 1990), 37, Philippines change their vote after phone call from washington see; Phyllis Bennis, Before and After: U,S Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis, (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003), Promise of a $5 million loan for Haiti see: Ahron Bregman, & Jihan El-Tahri. The fifty years war: Israel and the Arabs. (UK: Penguin, 1998), 25, to name a few instances.

^[38]Sayegh, 17.

^[39]Jeffry Frieden, David Lake, and Kenneth Schultz, World Politics: Interests, Interaction, Institutions, (WW Norton & Company, 2016), 215.

^[40]See, for example picture of Mufti Amien El Husaini as part of a Palestine Observer Delegation, Asian-African Conference Archives | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, accessed April 04, 2019, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/memory-of-the-world/register/full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-1/asian-african-conference-archives/.   

^[41]Shepard, 66.

^[42]“Anti-Israel resolution Adopted at Bandung: Red China supports Arabs,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 22, 1955, https://www.jta.org/1955/04/22/archive/anti-israel-resolution-adopted-at-bandung-red-china-supports-arabs.

^[43]Michael Barnett, “Identity and Alliances in the Middle East,” in The Culture of National Security, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein, (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1996) 400. 

^[44]Frieden et. al, 215.

^[45]Dylan Balch-Lindsay, and Andrew Enterline, “Prolonging the killing? Third party intervention and the duration of intrastate conflict, 1944-92,” In Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Seattle, WA, (1999):25.

^[46]Reed M. Wood, Jacob Kathman, and Stephen Gent, “Armed Intervention and Civilian victimization in Intrastate Conflicts,” Journal of Peace Research49, no. 5 (2012): 648. 

^[47]Nathan Thrall, “How the Battle over Israel is Fracturing American Politics,” The New York Times, March 28, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/magazine/battle-over-bds-israel-palestinians-antisemitism.html.  

^[48]Rachel Ehrenfeld, “Where Hamas Gets its Money,”Forbes, last modified, January 16, 2009, https://www.forbes.com/2009/01/16/gaza-hamas-funding-oped-cx_re_0116ehrenfeld.html#2a6424f57afb.

^[49]Roy Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil War, 1945-1993,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (1995): 681.

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Bilqis 5 (Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 328 cm, 2014) by Kamal Boullata, featured from the Barjeel Art Foundation website.

Palestinian artist, writer, and historian Kamal Boullata passed away today in Berlin.

Boullata was born in Jerusalem in 1942. His ouvre engages with themes pertaining to his own Palestinian identity, exile, and loss. He grew up in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, which fell under Jordanian control after 1948, when Israel occupied West Jerusalem. As a boy, he taught himself the basics of art in the absence of opportunities for a formal education. His parents sent him to study at renowned iconic painter Khalil al-Halabi’s studio in the summers of his youth.  Repeatedly painting icons and breaking down the figurative art process led him into further investigations of geometry and abstract painting.

In several interviews, he has spoken of sitting as a child near Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, sketching out its geometric patterning and calligraphic adornments. In his work, he has transformed angular Kufic designs into colorful geometries that tesselate across his silkscreens and canvasses. His art is suffused with influences from traditional Palestinian embroidery patterns and elements of Western geometric modernism, according to the Barjeel Art Foundation.

“I belong to Jerusalem, to Palestine,” he said in an interview with Art Dubai. “It’s been half a century of my life that I have spent away from home. In the meantime, I have found my home in my own work, in my own painting.”

After selling some of his paintings at exhibitions in Jerusalem and Amman, he was able to fund his study of art in Rome at the Academia di Belle Arti, followed by three additional years at the Corcoran Art Museum School in Washington, DC. He worked briefly as the art director for a publishing house, Dar al-fata al-‘Arabi, in Beirut, designing the templates for future publications.

Engaging in hurufiyya (hurufism, or letterism), his artworks often abstracted the letter and offered lettering – regardless of its legibility – as itself a work of art. After 1967, he often used the form of a square, which he “dissected” through “lines and thin layers of oppositional colors…transform[ing] the surface of the paper into a prism refracting colour and light,” according to the Barjeel Art Foundation.

Later in his life, he cited Berlin’s influence on his art, particularly referencing the impact of music and the presence of more than 80 concert halls and three opera houses in the city. In 2012-2013 he was elected to be a Fellow of the Wissenschaftkolleg (Institute of Advanced Study) in Berlin.

Boullata’s works have been shown at the British Museum, the Museum of the Alhambra in Granada, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the New York Public Library, the Bibliotheque Louis Notari in Monaco, the Sharjah Art Museum, the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey, and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman. He has received awards in Morocco and New York.

As a writer, he has also pursued research on the history of art. He authored the seminal, authoritative text of Palestinian art history, Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present, elevating the history and lives of countless Palestinian artists to the level of world art historical discourse. In 2001, he received a grant from the Ford Foundation to conduct field research on post-Byzantine painting in Palestine. His writing has been displayed in catalogues, anthologies, and academic journals, and has also been translated into French, German, Italian, Hebrew, and Spanish.

“For me, writing is like a way to go home,” Boullata said in an interview with Art Dubai.

Boullata will live on through his legacy as an intellectual titan of the Palestinian diaspora. Boullata’s latest book, There Where You Are Not: Selected Writings of Kamal Boullata, is set to be released in November 2019.

Written by Katrina Starbird

Asmahan Simry, Palestinian citizen of Israel and human rights activist focused on the treatment of Palestinians, introduced her humanitarian technology organization to undergraduates on March 5^th at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale.

The organization is Comet-ME, an energy organization grounded in its goal of providing basic utilities to communities in the West Bank.

Comet-ME, an Israeli-Palestinian organization, began operations in 2007 with the goal of providing electricity to off-grid communities spread throughout the West Bank. In 2013, the organization expanded its work to provide water distribution services. The organization uses solar and wind energy to provide this infrastructure. 60 communities, about 6,000 individuals of a total 200,000 Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank, have benefitted from their services.

Comet-ME operates in the Israeli-Palestinian region, specifically rural areas of the West Bank without large Palestinian cities nearby. Known as Area C, these are areas of the West Bank under Israeli civilian and military control. In the communities Comet-ME serves, Bedouins live beside Palestinians, often leasing the Palestinian’s land after Israel expelled the Bedouins from their own homelands in the 1950s. Residents typically live in tents or caves. The primary source of income is from the wool and butter of their sheep and goats. Hours are spent doing chores that could be done much more efficiently with the help of electricity. Individuals travel far to find a space to recharge electronics. Many travel to access cisterns that hold collected rain to supply for their water needs. The limited access to unmonitored water, coupled with the residents’ inability to dispose of biological waste properly, creates severe health risk.

When Comet-ME partners with a community, they install solar panels, wind turbines, and an energy center to store accumulated energy. They supply power to the tents and caves that make up the inhabitants’ living quarters. If an electricity system is in place, Comet-ME can install water pumps connecting households to the existing cisterns, filter the water, and provide long term water quality monitoring. Most importantly, they train a member of the community to maintain the resources.

Simry emphasized that the organization views the communities they work with as both partners and beneficiaries. The work that they do is not charity – while Comet-ME does not charge for the instillation of the infrastructure, individuals do pay their own energy bills. Simry explained that this ensures that the communities have a sense of ownership over the resources newly made available to them. The residents retain their self-dependence and pride.

Area C of the West Bank is a land ridden with stark inequalities. Here, the tents and caves of Palestinian inhabitants find neighbors in Israeli settlements. Where the Palestinian communities usually lack basic utilities, the settlements are well equipped with the electricity, water, access roads, and other resources needed to live a modern lifestyle in a desert area.

The different living realities are a result of the hostilities within the region. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict manifests itself in long-term aggressive action. The Israeli Civil Administration (ICA) controls building and infrastructure development in Area C. They mandate building permits for the construction of any facilities. It can sometimes take five years for any decision on the permit application to be released. Even then, the ICA often rejects the application. The ICA qualifies the Palestinian buildings as illegal even while their own settlements are illegal according to international law.

At the same time, the Palestinian Authority is obligated to provide schools and health clinics to Palestinians living in the region. Continuous denial of building permits from the ICA has led them to construct these facilities without Israeli permission. Without permits, these buildings are often torn down. Subsequently, schools and health clinics that have successfully maintained operation in this region are sparse.

Still, Palestinian communities persevere in these conditions in the name of holding onto ancestral lands. Many stay because departing from these areas would leave Area C, which makes up 60 percent of the West Bank, in full control of the Israeli settlements.

Comet-ME aims to alleviate the difficulties of living in such a conflict-ridden environment. As a part of their mission, Comet-ME cites, “The poverty and marginalization [of Palestinian refugees] … and in particular the absence of energy infrastructure, is more a product of the political situation than of geography or economics.” The organization delivers basic utilities to enable the Palestinian’s resilience against the Israeli government. When asked if any of the Palestinians in Area C seemed likely to consider moving away, Simry said, “No. The people that are there, they are staying. But they do want to have access to services.”

Comet-ME has also experienced difficulty with building in the region. In June of 2017, Israeli authorities came to Jib al-Deeb, a community Comet-ME had been servicing, and cut the power lines to the solar panels generating the community’s energy. 96 solar panels and other expensive electronics were seized, and the community was left powerless for three months in the heat of summer. Three months later, Comet-ME managed to get the batteries returned and the photovoltaic system functioning again. Still, tensions between the community and the Israeli government remain.

Comet-ME addresses many of these issues with legal battles. Comet-ME works with their international partners to prepare for such encounters. Their partners include governmental representatives from Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. When the microgrid system was stolen from Jib al-Deeb, it was with the help of these partners that Comet-ME was able to press their case and get the technology returned.

Despite the difficulties faced in implementing their service, Comet-ME has succeeded in improving the lifestyles of many different communities. With access to energy, chores such as laundry, cooking, and churning butter have increased efficiency. The butter in particular is valuable as it is one of the primary products sold to support the Palestinians’ livelihood. Students can study after dark. With the services provided by Comet-ME, residents of the area gain not just utilities, but time, physical energy, and money.

Comet-ME seeks to make available resources that would ease the lives of those that inhabit the zone of conflict between Israel and Palestine. As an organization that provides service to support those affected by political strife, Comet-ME seeks to empower the resilience of communities seeking to stay in their homeland.

Written by Numi Katz

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  announced on December 24 that Israel would hold early elections on April 9th, 2019. The announcement came after Netanyahu convened his coalition’s leaders in an emergency meeting to discuss their governing prospects after a period of legislative gridlock.

In the announcement to press, Netanyahu reflected on his coalition’s “four full years in tenure with incredible achievement.” The decision to call for elections arose “out of budgetary and national responsibility” and with a goal of increasing its mandate to “continue to govern in our own path.” The coalition presented a display of solidarity after two months of internal struggles and in anticipation of the challenging campaign ahead. The call for snap elections is best understood in the context of both legislative and personal turmoil.

Netanyahu claims that now is the time for snap elections after the apparent subdual of national security tensions in Gaza and at the Israel-Lebanon border. His administration came under criticism for their handling of both situations with just 36% of the public approving of the administration’s actions in Gaza. Compounded with public dissatisfaction, the situation in Gaza brought to light internal strife within Netanyahu’s coalition. Out of disapproval of a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas, Netanyahu’s defense minister Avigdor Liberman resigned from his post and withdrew his party from the governing coalition. Liberman’s resignation and withdrawal of his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, means the governing coalition holds just a one seat majority in the Knesset.

On the legislative front, Netanyahu’s struggle to pass a controversial new conscription law has captured national attention. The new law attempts to resolve the dispute over the conscription of yeshiva age Ultra-Orthodox teenagers who would otherwise serve in the army. In September 2017, the Israeli Supreme Court struck down a policy exempting ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students from military conscription, tasking the government with drafting new legislation to remedy the situation. Between the first and second drafts of the bill Netanyahu lost the necessary votes to pass the bill with the resignation of Avigdor Liberman. Now, he faces defections from all sides with both left leaning and religious parties pulling their support for the bill after its second reading. The law is extremely important to Netanyahu’s constituency and legislative paralysis helped push the coalition towards calling elections to increase their mandate.

Not only has his coalition faced challenges from all sides, but Netanyahu himself is also the subject of his third corruption investigation. Israel’s Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit recently announced that he would begin reviewing the case for corruption charges against Netanyahu. The call for snap elections constrains and politicizes Mandeblit’s investigation. Given the short time frame it is unlikely that the prime minister will be indicted or cleared before votes are cast. Perhaps more consequential to the legitimacy of the investigation, any announcement made in the context of ongoing elections is at risk of being construed as politically motivated. The call for snap elections not only emerges from legislative needs but hopes to preempt the corruption investigation from making Netanyahu a non-viable candidate.Despite underlying instability, early public opinion polls and past approval ratings suggest that Netanyahu’s coalition is likely to remain in power for another term. Victory, however, will be hard fought. The largest threat to Netanyahu comes from ex-IDF chief Benny Gantz who leads the Israel Resilience Party. Polls put Gantz’s newly created party second in the polls, but still well behind Netanyahu’s Likud. Rather than poaching Likud voters, Gantz’s decision to enter the race appears to pull voters from Yair Lapid’s centrist party. With three months until election day, a difficult campaign lies ahead for Israeli politicians.

Image Caption: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat shake hands at the signing of the 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles.

Introduction

The Oslo Peace Process was the first direct, bi-lateral set of negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Distinct from the multilateral Arab-Israeli track at the Madrid Conference, it represented a historic break-through between principal players. With the 1993 Declaration of Principles, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) officially recognized Israel’s right to exist. Meanwhile, Israel recognized the PLO’s right to self-government as an autonomous Palestinian people. While Oslo left many final-status issues such as the return of refugees, borders, settlements, and the status of Jerusalem undetermined, the exchange of land for peace, beginning with the 1994 withdrawal of troops from Gaza and Jericho, was promising. In theory, it would resolve the frustrating contest over territory ongoing since the expansion of Israel’s borders in the 1967 Six Day War, while committing both sides to resolve outstanding issues through non-violent means. Despite this early promise, historians recount the Oslo Accords with an overwhelming sense of failure and defeat. Ultimately, rejectionists from both sides managed to undo the delicate trade-off of land for peace. The peace process was hijacked and used as a springboard for terrorism and fear.

Analysis of Oslo’s failure typically begins with an analysis of its limited capacity to endure throughout the 1990s. Indeed, Oslo stretched beyond the 1993 Declaration of Principles, to the 1995 agreement at Taba, or Oslo II, the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, and finally the 1999 Sharm El-Sheikh Memorandum.^[1]  Oslo’s experimentation with the incremental building of trust, its gradualism, was fatal as it “provide[d] opportunities for destroying, as much as constructing confidence.”^[2] Leaders were forced back to Camp David in 2000 for an entirely new peace process as the momentum behind the interim agreement disintegrated. In fact, many argue that Oslo died as early as November, 1995, when Prime Minister and chief negotiator Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by right-wing activist Yigal Amir in Tel-Aviv.^[3] This notion that individuals hold instrumental value in history has been essential to contemporary reflections on Oslo. For instance, historian Avi Shlaim insists it was not the fall of Rabin, but the subsequent rise of Likud Leader Benjamin Netanyahu, which is to blame for the failure of the accords.^[4] He notes that Netanyahu was a vocal opponent of the peace process as a young Member of the Knesset in the opposition and later as Prime Minister. From 1996 to 2000, the period for which Oslo II had promised significant withdrawal from the West Bank, Prime Minister Netanyahu oversaw the building of a record number of settlements.^[5]

This paper rejects this individual-centered historiography. It must be noted that this approach was used by the signatories of the Oslo Accords themselves, who couched the process as a ‘‘peace of the brave.”^[6] Relying on the personal qualities of leaders, whether brave, or extremely fallible, to explain the strategic developments which occurred while they held office is a shallow approach which neglects the broader geo-political and national realities of the moment. In particular, the argument that an anemic leadership kept Oslo from surviving the turbulent resistance of the 1990s, ignores the compatibility of Oslo’s terms with the fractious reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is this mismatch which arguably gave rise to resistance in the first place. Further, the neat paradigm of two coherent adversaries promulgated by the Oslo Accords, contradicted the internal battles gripping both the Israelis and Palestinians at the time. It was Oslo’s masking of the vital re-negotiations of sense and significance at the heart of Israeli and Palestinian society, which led to a debilitating distrust and stalling negotiations. It was not only the spoilers who explicitly intended to disrupt the peace process, but a poorly tailored peace process, which was to blame. This can be evidenced by the fact that genuine non-violent resistance to Oslo emanated from the moderate core of both Palestine and Israel. It was not exclusively the product of those at the fringes of radical society. Prospect theory in international relations, which seeks to explain deviations in rational decision-making, says that peace agreements must be “sold” by the elite to the general public.^[7]  Oslo was “sold” as a peace between two peoples rather than a peace between delegations of statesmen, which is precisely why the failure to understand and incorporate the national aspirations of these peoples into the terms of the agreement, also led to its failure overall.

Rather than fixating on the markers of its failure in the 1990s, this paper will explore the decision-making process which determined Oslo’s contents in the late 1980s. After this brief historical overview, it will proceed with a discussion of the internal disagreements facing both Israelis and Palestinians at the time. These clashes widened the gap between the official bi-lateral objectives of Oslo, and the vastly more complicated reality of each of the groups that was a party to it. First, the conflict over Israeli ideology and identity, and the emergence of the “new historians” and other Zionist revisionist who questioned the Israeli project in the rare reprise of peace which followed the tumult of the Lebanon War. Second, the contest over political representation in the Palestinian Territories. By recognizing the PLO as the sole legitimate political representative of the Palestinian people, Oslo manufactured an undemocratic consent about who ought to govern, and it enflamed existing tensions.

Historical Overview

The 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles was inspired by an earlier peace plan by David Shultz of the Reagan administration, devised during the early days of the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising which began in 1987. The intifada led to renewed international attention and regional peace initiatives. Between February and June 1988, Shultz mimicked Henry Kissinger’s technique of “shuttle diplomacy” to promote his plan by travelling three times to the Middle East in five months.^[8]  With the recent blunder of the U.S. Marines in Lebanon in mind, Shultz pursued a cautious U.S. Middle East policy which envisioned international diplomacy as a means to facilitate bi-lateral meetings to establish peaceful working relations and a government in the Palestinian territories. The goal was to keep the American mediators at a comfortable distance from the chaos of the Middle East.^[9]  Ultimately, the plan was frustrated by the oncoming victory of George H. W Bush in the 1989 Presidential elections and the continued isolation of the PLO, which was in the early days of the intifada still reluctant to accept non- violent resistance.^[10]

This changed in November 1988, when in a speech to the General Assembly, Yasser Arafat, the Chairman of the PLO, finally met U.S. demands to renounce terrorism, and accept United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 which called for Arab-Israeli peace and mutual recognition.^[11]  Arafat’s declaration re-invigorated hopes of a bi-lateral Shultz style plan, and it seemed truly genuine. Earlier in the year, Arafat had been denied entry to the United States to speak in New York. The Reagan administration proclaimed that Arafat “knows of, condones and lends support to acts of terrorism.”^[12]  Shultz himself decided not to recommend a waiver of the law that prohibited individuals identified as terrorists from entering the country because ”no participant in a peace process can wave the flag of justice in one hand and brandish the weapons of terrorism in the other.”^[13]  Of course this objection was referring to Arafat’s 1974 speech to the UN General Assembly, in which he came ”bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun.” In this more intense speech, Arafat cautioned the audience, and the international community, not let the olive branch fall from his arms.^[14]  He still presumably, held the fighter’s gun. It was unclear in 1974 where PLO violent resistance was headed and many were still reeling from the 1970 conflict in Jordan: Black September. In 1988, however Arafat made himself very clear. He sought a peaceful and just settlement, drawn from “realistic and attainable formulas that would settle the issue on the basis of possible rather than absolute justice.”^[15] In essence, Arafat was turning the page on revolutionary pipe dreams of reclaiming the whole of Eretz Israel, from the Mediterranean sea to the Jordan River. Additionally, the 1988 speech was accompanied by a new Palestinian Declaration of Independence written by renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Dariwsh and proclaimed by Yasser Arafat on 15 November 1988.^[16]

Throughout 1989–1990, U.S. peacemaking efforts centered on a plan similar to the Shultz plan, put forward by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. It called on the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to elect representatives who would negotiate interim arrangements for self-governance with Israel. This would be followed by a permanent status agreement.^[17] However, In March 1990, controversy over how to proceed with Shamir’s plan led to the fall of Israel’s national unity government.^[18]  The failure of the plan, combined with sharp U.S.-Israeli exchanges over Israeli settlement-building in the Occupied Territories, strained relations between Bush and Shamir.^[19]

Yet again, the ambitious land-for-peace style deal was put on hold in favor of a traditional multi-lateral track. The United States proceeded with the October 30, 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. Co-chaired by President George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the conference was attended by Israeli, Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese delegations. It was the first time all parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict gathered to hold direct negotiations.^[20] Importantly, the Palestinian team was part of a joint Jordanian delegation which expressly excluded the PLO.^[21] Exiled in Tunis since their expulsion from Southern Lebanon in 1982, the PLO was not considered the prevailing voice of the Palestinians.^[22] Furthermore, Madrid was curated by America’s NATO Gulf War coalition which had just succeeded in driving Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. The PLO was a vocal supporter of Hussein and the Ba’ath Party in Iraq, and was therefore unwelcome.^[23]

Shimon Peres, Israel’s Foreign Affairs Minister described multi-lateral negotiations according to the “the bicycle principle … when one pedal moves the other moves by itself.”^[24]

The problem with Madrid was that the bicycle peddle was stuck. Israel and the U.S. focused on the Syria track to resolve missile threats in the Golan Heights but Hafez Al-Assad of the Syrian Ba’ath party was an incredibly difficult negotiator. Al-Assad was unwilling to make compromises.^[25]  As the squabbles of the Arab world slowed Madrid down to a halt, Yossi Bellin and Shimon Peres began to think of an alternative strategy, back to the original essence of the Shamir and the Shultz plans.^[26]

The stalemate in the Madrid talks ultimately led to the opening of the Oslo back channel and secret talks, held over an eight month period in 1993 in Oslo, Norway. Norwegian Foreign Affairs Minister Johan Joergen Holst and Social Scientist Terge Rod Larsen played hosts and were able to provide an easy and honest connection between Israel and the PLO.^[27]  The reason for the ease of the secret negotiations and the frankness of talks between the three partners was that a back-channel had actually started as early as 1979, when Yasser Arafat requested a direct line to the Israeli government through the Norwegian government. Arafat’s request came after the revelation that the Norwegians were selling oil to the Israelis during the international shortage which followed the collapse of the Iranian monarchy and the Islamic Revolution. Norway was situated as a peacekeeping force in Southern Lebanon around PLO operatives, and this commercial decision compromised Norwegian impartiality. Norway, the PLO and Israel negotiated this back-channel to make up for it. Peres and Rabin were also inclined to give greater attention to Oslo with the growing threat of Hamas and Islamic jihad in occupied territories.^[28]  This allowed the West to perceive Arafat as less of a frightening figure and it refocused them on his recent declarations of peace in New York. Furthermore, by June 1990, according to Benny Morris, “the Intifada seemed to have lost direction. A symptom of the PLO’s frustration was the great increase in the killing of suspected collaborators.”^[29]  Between 1988 and 1992, intra-Palestinian violence and the execution of suspected collaborators claimed the lives of nearly 1,000 people.^[30]  An assessment by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Director of Military Intelligence of the time stated that Arafat’s dire situation made him “the most convenient interlocutor for Israel at that particular juncture.”^[31]

Oslo’s primary significance was the promotion of a formula of land for peace and the mutual recognition of both sides. Land for peace is a legal interpretation of UN Resolution 242. It affirms that peace should include the application of two principles: withdrawal of Israeli forces (giving up land) and termination of all claims or states of belligerency (making peace). In addition, Oslo essentially provided the constitution for a de facto government in the Palestinian territories. The Palestinian Authority would be self-governing in terms of raising taxes and spending revenues on portfolios like health, police, and social welfare.^[32]  Palestinian jurisdiction for the interim agreement was split into Area A, where it maintained full control; Area B where Palestinian civilian control was combined with Israeli security control; and finally Area C with full Israeli security and civil control.^[33]  After a five-year interim period, the hope was that negotiators would move on to a permanent settlement which addressed the tricky details including Areas B and C.

This proved very difficult. While there was one high-level committee for figures like Abbas and Peres, a “nuts and bolts” committee met at the Red Sea resort of Taba regularly. Negotiations on the transfer of security authority to a growing Palestinian police force were particularly challenging. Underlying the “labyrinth,” negotiations at Taba in 1995 was a basic conceptual divide.^[34] The Israeli representatives wanted a gradual and strictly limited transfer of power to Palestinian police to maintain overall responsibility for security, while Palestinians wanted an early and complete transfer of power to enable them to lay the foundations for an independent state.^[35]  Furthermore, seeds of mistrust on security matters were sown by disruptive resistance and violence from both sides.

Hamas set out to embarrass Arafat and delegitimize non-violent resistance. The day before the Declaration of Principles was signed, Hamas killed three Israeli soldiers in Gaza. The day afterwards, a suicide bomber self-exploded in a police station.^[36]  Between 1993 and 1996 a total of 300 Israelis were killed in such attacks.^[37]  The Israeli consciousness was particularly wounded by the 1994 Dizengoff bus attack which killed 13. Many pondered the fact that the No.5 bus targeted by Hamas, ran to a prosperous area of north Tel Aviv which was home to many supporters of the Labor Government.^[38]  Palestinian terrorism was becoming more severe, uncontainable and chaotic. This escalation made the essential cause of violence, calls to justice against the occupation, more difficult to sympathize with, even for left-wing Israelis.

Likewise, the 1994 Hebron massacre killing 29 Palestinian worshippers in the Mosque of Ibrahim during the holy month of Ramadan by Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler and member of the far-right Kach movement, hardened the Palestinians. UN Resolution 904 condemned the incident and expressed shock and grave concern about how a lack of security control for the Palestinian people would influence the peace process.^[39]  The Israeli Knesset consequently banned the Kach party from politics.

The Hebron attack, similarly to the Dizengoff attack, irreparably damaged trust. Dizengoff confirmed Israelis’ fears about negotiating with “terrorists.” Even though PLO and Hamas commands were separate, Israeli media painted all “Palestinians” as one. Meanwhile, the Hebron attack by a settler on a Mosque, spoke to the broader challenges posed by increasing numbers of settlements to the survival of the Oslo accords. By-pass roads violently cut through land; and walls erected to separate communities claimed additional land.^[40]

Settlements did not contravene the terms of the Oslo interim agreement, but many Palestinians argued that the interim arrangement had enabled them. The settlements were a symbol of the occupation, a source of daily friction, and a “constant reminder of the danger to the territorial contiguity of their future state.”^[41]

As the Oslo interim agreement inched closer to a final-status negotiation, the violence and tension between the Israelis and Palestinians only increased. For example, Oslo II, which was signed on the 28th  of September, 1995 was substantively insignificant. Oslo II extended on the principle of Palestinian authority explained in Oslo I by providing elections to a Palestinian council, permitting the transfer of legislative authority to this council, and providing for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from more Palestinian urban centers.^[42]  However, Oslo II was incredibly significant in the reaction it incited. The day the Knesset endorsed the agreement, demonstrators gathered in Zion square in Jerusalem. Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud, “was on the grandstand while demonstrators displayed an effigy of Rabin in an SS uniform.”^[43]  A month later, Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a religious-nationalist. After the death of Yitzhak Rabin, settlement activity continued under several prime ministers, Labor as well as Likud.^[44]

Importantly, Oslo II was endorsed by the Knesset by a majority of just one vote. Oslo was not only doomed by a growing distrust between Israelis and Palestinians, but rather by its neglect of the divisions in internal politics, and the slim margins of consensus on both sides. Shimon Peres followed Rabin down the “pot-holed road to peace” but his efforts ended with his electoral defeat in May 1996.^[45]  Rabin’s successor, Ehud Barak, struggled with providing staunch leadership on the peace process and let his hand slide on settlements. The same was true of Ariel Sharon who succeeded him. Ironically, when Netanyahu came to power, intense American pressure actually compelled him to concede territory to the PA on two occasions, the Hebron Protocol of January 15 th,1997, and the Wye River Plantation Memorandum of October 23rd, 1998. The Likud government committed to withdrawing from a further 13% of the West Bank in three stages over a period of three months.^[46] However, a revolt in Netanyahu’s own ultra-nationalist and religious coalition brought down the government after just one settlement withdrawal. The fall of the coalition government was in some way inevitable because of the basic contradiction between its declared policy of striving for peace with the Arab world and its ideological makeup, which militated against trading land for peace in favor of a purely Jewish state.^[47]  Meanwhile, on the other side of the green line, the bloody tug of war for legitimate rule over the Palestinian people continued to be fought between Hamas and the PLO.

The end of the Cold War and the Gulf War represented seismic shocks to the international system which at the time seemed to reduce the risks of seeking peace and increasing the incentives to take such risks for both the Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, the geopolitical arena had changed, shaping a “new world order,” more impartial to the conflict and willing to provide the time and resources to broker a peace.^[48] Moscow’s embrace of “new thinking” in foreign policy, and coalition making based on a united front for justice rather than bi-polar Cold War competition, gave negotiators the hope that this Middle East peace — free of Soviet arms deals, proxy wars, or covert support to terrorist organizations like the PFLP — would be different. The purpose of the bi-lateral meetings in Norway was in a way to drown out the noise of the international community, now supposedly at peace with itself, to leave the Israelis and Palestinians to their own devices. While recent developments may have been conducive to global peace, this model neglected the internal divisions which had been sown in Israeli and Palestinian society. These will be explored in the coming two sections. They were the greatest barriers to building trust, and finding peace.

Israel: Contested Identity

Yaron Ezrahi writes in his book Rubber Bullets, on power and conscience in modern Israel, about the understudied effect of the intifada on Israeli society. The intifada ushered a transformation in the way Israelis envisioned their relationship with the Palestinians. It led many to acknowledge the quest for Palestinian national self-determination for the first time ever and changed Israel from a warrior to a peace-making nation. To Ezrahi, nothing symbolized this cultural shift better than the army’s use of rubber bullets to confront stone-throwing Palestinians during the second intifada.^[49]  He credits democratic liberalism, which flourished as Israel inched further away from the intense military years of the Arab-Israeli wars of the 1960s and 1970s. Why was Israel unable to sustain a peace-making policy orientation after Rabin’s death and throughout the Oslo peace process? One simple explanation is the disruptive terrorist attacks discussed above. The attacks hardened both sides and sowed distrust. However, if Ezrahi’s thesis about liberal democracy is true, the return to warrior Israel is also about the defeat of an individualist and free-thinking identity in favor of a collectivist nationalist one.

The Oslo peace process did not provide an ideology or symbol of nationhood to match its policy of peace with the Palestinians.^[50]  In the absence of a common narrative, “Jewish Israel” and “democratic Israel” re-engaged in an identity battle, each in an effort to cast their narrative as the mainstream. This identity struggle was exacerbated by the emergence of the “new historians,” who presented radically new national facts and modes of historical interpretation.^[51]  Coined by author Benny Morris, “new historians,” describes a group of young Israeli writers recasting the standard Zionist narrative. Morris, along with Shlaim and several others, told a history of Israel’s triumphs that for the first time, did not hide a Palestinian history living by its side.^[52]  In doing so, they challenged the foundational beliefs that Israelis held as self-evident. For decades, Israelis both politically left and right were raised on a celebratory version of their history – a story of the heroic return to Zion and the resettlement of the desolate Jewish homeland. Morris and his colleagues shifted the focus of historical inquiry away from the wonder of Jewish national rebirth to that of Palestinian suffering.^[53]  This historical interjection essentially raised the stakes over narrative control, and furthered societal divisions. Israelis squabbled over the legitimacy of activist organizations like “Peace Now,” and the appropriateness of history school books and the national curriculum.^[54]  The long-term structural forces of demography in the country, namely the disproportionately high growth rate of the ultraorthodox and Religious-Zionist segments of the population and their membership in majority coalitions in government, probably led to the victory of collectivist, warrior Israel over time.^[55]  More importantly for this discussion, however, Israelis emerged as a disorganized unit with no common conception of their national aspirations. This hurt Oslo’s chances. The identity crisis proved debilitating.

It is important not to present this renegotiation of Israeli identity as purely factional, and especially not to present it as a conflict between secular and religious Israelis. Monumental questions about Israel, its place relative to Palestine, and its position in the Middle East, were prevalent amongst individual Israelis and engaged with in different ways. This is why the narrative of extremists dismantling peace is too simple.

Considering Israeli politicians’ views on the intervention in Lebanon helps to illustrate this point about how individuals, including political leaders, engage with contested ideologies. Ariel Sharon came to office in 2001 from a military background as former Minister of the IDF. In 1983, the Israeli Kahan Commission was appointed to investigate the Sabra and Shatila massacre committed in a Palestinian refugee camp during Israel’s intervention in the Lebanese civil war. The Commission found that Israeli military personnel, aware that a massacre was in progress, failed to stop it, and that Ariel Sharon bore personal responsibility for the bloodshed.^[56]  Amos Oz speaks to this collective guilt, and later on selective memory of trauma, in The Slopes of Lebanon, a book about memory and historiography in Israel. Oz argues that Israelis cannot point to Menachem Begin, or Sharon who carried out his orders during the Lebanese War only. He insists, “this war was a war of the people.”^[57]  He then asks who the people actually were. For example, the Labor party and the centrist Shinui party (Democratic Party for Change), either voted with the government or abstained in the vote of no confidence when the war broke out. Meanwhile, “M. K. Imri Ron, of the left-wing Mapam, was photographed in his army uniform and his officer’s insignia, calling upon his party to support the war and not to incense the people.”^[58] Labour party leader Yitzhak Rabin, who would be Oslo’s peace man, recommended “tightening the siege on Beirut.”^[59]

Final-status negotiations were consistently delayed in the context of the Oslo Accords, because they would force such moderates to engage with their contradictions. Importantly, it would also warrant that political leaders take a decisive position in the fight between the liberal and conservative conceptions of Israel. The argument which insists that the failure of Oslo was as a result of the failure of leadership in the face of resistance, disregards what was a complex reality for leaders who had to balance their personal political ideology, that of their party, and their prospects of political success. To win elections, politicians must align their platforms with popular sentiments. Final-status negotiations which would deal with the return of refugees, or indeed the simple recognition of the total number Palestinians living in Israel as citizens, posed a major dilemma to both the identity calculus and the political calculus.^[60]  How could Israel remain both a Jewish and democratic state if the majority was Arab? This was perhaps the most important final-status question. As the internal struggle over identity persisted, Israelis and their leaders never emerged united to answer such difficult final-status questions.

Palestine: Contested Leadership

The intifada was a mass uprising of Palestinians through mostly nonviolent means like boycotts and demonstrations.^[61]  The PLO’s willingness to engage in the Oslo peace process with the intifada raging in the background fueled disenchantment and the view that Arafat and his henchmen were collaborators of Israel.^[62]  Many Palestinians did not consider the international arena, no matter the promises of post-Cold War peace, an even playing field in which to seek a just end to the occupation. Where identity and ideology were contested on the Israeli side, the Palestinians were uneasy with the legitimacy Oslo gave to the PLO as their rightful leaders.

Furthermore, the loss of life and the despair that ensued after the popular resistance movement fell apart, led many to the Islamic militant group, Hamas, which grew rapidly in its pledge to Palestinian liberation through “sacrifice, blood and jihad.”^[63] Hamas of course became a significant spoiler of the frail pacifism which held Oslo together. Again, a recasting of “extremism” is required in this discussion in order to arrive at a better understanding of the essential internal divisions gripping the Palestinians. Criticisms of the accords were not exclusive to the periphery of Palestinian society, and indeed came from its very center, notably, from poet Mahmoud Darwish, who had written the 1988 PLO Charter which accompanied Arafat’s renunciation of violence at the United Nations, and academic Edward Said.^[64]

In the London Review of Books the morning after the signing of the Declaration of Principles, Said wrote about his many apprehensions with the deal. He saw in the PLO another corrupt Arab government, with injustices emanating from the considerable divide between the elite and the people, where Palestinians themselves were but “guests,” and never key partners in governance.^[65]  He considered the gains of the intifada squandered by the PLO’s unwillingness to seek multiple alternatives in negotiations. This demonstrated that prospect theory – the “selling” of peace accords from the elite negotiators to the people – clearly failed. Edward Said provides an important reflection on violent terrorism, arguing that the terms of the accord and the framing of the process by the PLO drove people to violent extremism by renouncing their right to popular resistance.^[66]  Though Hamas and Professor Edward Said stood at wildly different junctures in the world, it was the same point about the strait jacket of international diplomacy and the assignment of the PLO as the ultimate leaders by foreigners without the consent of the people, which both Hamas and Said questioned.

By no means was Said the singular voice of moderate resistance, nor should his particular criticisms be taken as the ultimate reasons for why the Oslo Accords failed. Nonetheless, his challenge to the idea of the PLO’s unquestioned predominance speak to the problem with Oslo’s negligence of Palestine’s long history of contested leadership, and indeed it’s constant negotiation between violent and non-violent resistance. Like its negligence of the Israeli contest over identity, this proved fatal.

The original Arab Nationalist Movement of George Habbash, was an umbrella organization which branched off into several other Palestinian groups like the PLO and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) during the 1970s.^[67]  Intense rivalries divided these factions as they sought influence. The PLO including Arafat was expelled from Beirut to Tunis by the South Lebanon Army and the Christian Phalange following the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, not to mention its earlier expulsion from Jordan following Black September in 1978. Distant from the active arena of warfare, and eager to gain a push towards legitimacy by the international community, the PLO developed an argument for non-violent resistance. Meanwhile, the PFLP which represented a secular socialist resistance, stood by its legacy of airplane hijackings and car bombs.^[68]

The first Intifada took a “new mythological character embodied in the ‘stone child’ or stone-throwing youth, which assumed the role of the fedayee who had been worn out by his conflict abroad.”^[69]  This was of great help to the PLO, as the international and domestic trends favored the strategy of non-violence it had adopted by necessity. While this convenient alignment of values empowered the PLO at the moment, doubts about their commitment to full and meaningful justice for all Palestinians, including those displaced, led many to doubt the PLO’s intentions and the power given to them through Oslo’s interim governing arrangement. As Said and Darwish warned, this temporary structure imparted a long-term reality. The lethargy of the PLO and its elite organization, combined with a fervor for resistance that was ignored, led to a splintering of leadership between violent and non-violent. Palestine became “fragmented between two internal entities, having transformed the confrontation with the enemy into a confrontation within [itself].”^[70]  As the spoilers of peace continued on the other side of the green line, and anger from Palestinians in the ever shrinking green line grew, the Palestinian leadership, like the Israeli, never meaningfully moved forward towards final-status negotiations.

Conclusion

The understanding of states as cohesive units in international affairs with secure leaders at their helm cannot be assumed in a situation where the Israelis are constantly re-negotiating their identity and the Palestinians do not know who is in charge. The two-state solution did not necessarily die because Netanyahu and successive Israeli governments were determined to kill it, and it was not because Palestinians allowed terrorism to take place. The moral courage of individuals is not what should be in question, but rather the compatibility of an agreement with the aspirations of the people. In such a theater of pain and distrust, both the policy solution, and the mode of its communication to the public are equally important. With no grasp of the internal battles which were re-negotiating national aspirations, Oslo missed the mark. Whether willful, or completely unintentional, “ignorance of narratives on both sides lead to a situation in which both sides including their respective leaders were unaware of the red lines and domestic constraints limiting the other.”[71]  This discussion cannot be treated as a cultural after thought. Rather than theorize about what Oslo’s failure means, understanding the meaningful internal barriers to trust which leads to its downfall is critical if there is ever to be a revival of the peace process which fully acknowledges Palestinians and Israelis with full respect.

About the Author

Joudy Sarraj is in her final year at the University of Toronto as a Heaslip Scholar. She is a double major in international relations and ethics, society and law. Joudy is interested in institutional and economic development issues, particularly in post-conflict scenarios.

Endnotes

[1] Landon. E Hancock and Joshua. N. Weiss, “Prospect Theory and the Failure to Sell the Oslo Accords,” Peace & Change 36 (2011): 429.

[2] Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 317.

[3] Ibid., 319.

[4] Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Penguin, 2000), 603.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Landon. E Hancock and Joshua. N. Weiss, “Prospect Theory and the Failure to Sell the Oslo Accords,” Peace & Change 36 (2011): 433.

[7] Ibid.

[8] “Shultz Plan, 1988,” Palestine Facts, http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1967to1991_shultz_plan/

[9] William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 393.

[10] Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 326.

[11] “Declaration of Principles,” September 13, 1993, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/declaration%20of%20principles.aspx

[12]  Robert Pear, “U.S. Denies Arafat Entry For Speech to Session of U.N,” New York Times, Archives, November 27, 1988. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/27/world/us-denies-arafat-entry-for-speech-to-session-of-un.html

[13] Ibid.

[14] “2282nd  Plenary Meeting.” United Nations General Assembly. November 13, 1974.

https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/A238EC7A3E13EED18525624A007697EC

[15] “Speech by Yasser Arafat to the United Nations,” Haaretz, May 13, 2002, https://www.haaretz.com/1.5268352.

[16] “Palestinian Declaration of Independence,” MidEast Web, November 15, 1988, http://www.mideastweb.org/plc1988.htm.

[17] Avi Shlaim, “The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process,” International Relations of the Middle East, eds. Louise Fawcett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 50.

[18] “The Madrid Conference, 1991,” Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1989-1992/madrid-conference.

[19] William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 390.

[20] “The Madrid Conference, 1991,” Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1989-1992/madrid- conference.

[21] Avi Shlaim, “The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process,” International Relations of the Middle East, eds. Louise Fawcett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 55.

[22] Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 314.

[23] Avi Shlaim, “The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process,” International Relations of the Middle East, eds. Louise Fawcett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 55.

[24] Ibid., 59.

[25] Ibid., 60.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., 63.

[29] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (New York: Knopf, 1999), 612.

[30] Ibid., 613.

[31] Avi Shlaim, “The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process,” International Relations of the Middle East, eds. Louise Fawcett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 60.

[32] Avi Shlaim, “The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process,” International Relations of the Middle East, eds. Louise Fawcett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 60.

[33] “Declaration of Principles,” September 13, 1993, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/declaration%20of%20principles.aspx

[34] Ibid.

[35] Dennis Ross, Margaret Warner, and Jim Hoagland, “From Oslo to Camp David to Taba: Setting the Record Straight,” The Washington Institute, Policy Watch 340,August 14, 2001, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy- analysis/view/from-oslo-to-camp-david-to-taba-setting-the-record-straight.

[36] Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs,

2008), 318.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid., 322.

[39] “Resolution 904 (1994),” March 18,1994, United Nations Security Council, https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/4690652A351277438525634C006DC10

[40] Geoffery R. Watson, Oslo Accords: International Law and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement (Oxford

University Press, 2000), 25.

[41] Avi Shlaim, “The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process,” International Relations of the Middle East, eds. Louise Fawcett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 72.

[42] Ibid., 47.

[43] Ibid., 48.

[44] Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 320.

[45] Avi Shlaim, “The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process,” International Relations of the Middle East, eds. Louise Fawcett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 48.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Michael Barnett, “Culture, Strategy and Foreign Policy Change: Israel’s Road to Oslo,” European Journal of

International Relations 5 (1999): 5-36.

[49] Yaron Ezrahi, Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel (New York: Straus & Giroux, 1997), 151.

[50] Landon. E Hancock and Joshua. N. Weiss, “Prospect Theory and the Failure to Sell the Oslo Accords,” Peace & Change 36 (2011): 427- 452.

[51] Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, “From Taboo to the Negotiable: The Israeli New Historians and the Changing

Representation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 2 (2007): 241-58.

[52] Ibid., 246.

[53] Paul Scham, “The Historical Narratives of Israelis and Palestinians and the Peacemaking Process,” Israeli Studies Forum 21, no.2 (2006): 64.

[54] Dov Waxman and Ilan Peleg, “Neither Ethnocracy nor Bi-nationalism: in Search of the Middle Ground,” Israel

Studies Forum 23, no.2 (2008): 55-72.

[55] Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 411.

[56] Amos Oz, The Slopes of Lebanon (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, Ltd., 1987), 40.

[57] Ibid., 41.

[58] Ibid., 42.

[59] Dov Waxman and Ilan Peleg, “Neither Ethnocracy nor Bi-nationalism: in Search of the Middle Ground,” Israel

Studies Forum 23, no.2 (2008): 55- 72.

[60] Paul Scham, “The Historical Narratives of Israelis and Palestinians and the Peacemaking Process,” Israeli Studies Forum 21, no.2 (2006): 59.

[61] Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 322.

[62] “Leaflet No. 1,” Jewish Virtual Library, 1988, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/hamasintifada.pdf.

[63] Sinan Antoon, “Mahmud Darwish’s Allegorical Critique of Oslo,” Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 2 (2002);

Edward Said, “The Morning After,” The London Review of Books 15, no. 20 (1993).

[64] Edward Said, “The Morning After.”

[65] Ibid.

[66] Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Penguin, 2000).

[67] Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: The Auto-biography of a Revolutionary, eds. George Hajjar (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973).

[68] Honaida Ghanim, “The Urgency of a New Beginning in Palestine: An Imagined Scenario by Mahmoud Darwish

and Hannah Arendt,” College Literature 38, no.1 (2011): 88.

[69] Ibid., 90

[70] Paul Scham, “The Historical Narratives of Israelis and Palestinians and the Peacemaking Process,” Israeli Studies Forum 21, no.2 (2006): 56.

[71] Ibid.

This post originally appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of the Yale Review of International Studies.

Photo caption: Maternity ward at Assuta Hospital

Introduction

In Der Judenstaat, Theodor Herzl proposed the creation of a Jewish state as a safe haven for Jews of the European diaspora threatened by discrimination and anti-Semitism.[1] Herzl reasoned that Jews would never fully assimilate into European culture given their minority status, so the only way to save the Ashkenazim from a hostile existence was to create a state in which they were the majority.[2] Thus, from its earliest roots, the survival of the State of Israel rested upon the assurance of a European Jewish majority in a land that was for centuries inhabited almost entirely by Arab Muslims. Although no formal Israeli fertility policy has been codified,[3] leaders from the nation’s founding have promoted Jewish over Arab population growth via immigration law, economic incentives, targeted modernization programs in Arab communities, and discerning governmental coverage of reproductive health services. While these efforts largely succeeded for many decades, “population momentum”[4] has now shifted away from the secular, European Ashkenazim—the leaders and intended beneficiaries of the Zionist project—toward non-Israeli Arab Muslims and ultra-Orthodox Charedi Jews, with significant social and political consequences.

Israeli Immigration Policy

The 1948 war culminating in Israeli independence and subsequent Jewish immigration law transformed Herzl’s dream of a majority-Jewish state into a reality. In November 1947, 45% of the population living on Jewish land (as defined by the United Nations) was Palestinian; by 1951 this percentage had fallen to 11%[5] due to the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, obsessed over Jewish demographic superiority in his new nation: he wrote in his autobiography, “For the survival and security of the State of Israel, a higher birthrate and increased immigration are essential”,[6] and he “likened Jewish women with less than four children to draftees who evade military service.”[7] However, because Israel was founded as a dual Jewish and democratic state, Ben-Gurion could not advocate for pro-natal laws that explicitly advantaged Jews over Arab non-Jews. Instead, preferring that such overt natal favoritism remain in the realm of non-profit organizations such as the wealthy and influential Jewish Agency,[8] he set a precedent of crafting legislation that introduced a Jewish population preference indirectly. The 1950 Law of Return, a cornerstone of Israeli legislation, asserted, “Every Jew has the right to immigrate to Israel.”[9] The law leniently defined “Jew”: non-Jewish spouses of Jews, their children, and their grandchildren were permitted to immigrate under the law[10] in order to encourage additional immigration of Jewish allies. The right to immigration was not extended to Arabs, and as a result of numerous waves of Jewish aliyot from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, millions of immigrant Jews padded the Jewish demographic advantage in their new state.[11] Importantly, however, Ben-Gurion’s original vision for the Jewish State did not include such extensive non-Ashkenazi immigration; indeed, when the full extent of the Holocaust’s destruction was revealed, Ben-Gurion exclaimed, “The extermination of the European Jewry is a catastrophe for Zionism. There won’t be anyone left to build the country!”[12] The decimation of the European Ashkenazim required full-scale efforts to import Eastern Mizrachim and Charedim—second-choice Jews who often did not conform to European Zionist ideals—to ensure a Jewish “critical mass”[13] in Palestine.

Pronatalist Economic Incentives

Israel’s early leaders did not rely on immigration law alone to boost the Jewish population growth rate; they also legislated pronatalist economic incentives cleverly targeting Ashkenazi Israelis in particular while avoiding outright ethnic discrimination. In 1962, Ben-Gurion established the Committee for the Problems of Natality, chaired by Italian-Jewish economist Roberto Bachi.[14] The Bachi Committee found two troubling trends: first, the Arab birthrate exceeded the Jewish one, and second, the Mizrachim, poorer, less educated, and more religious Eastern Jews, were reproducing far more rapidly than the more established Western Ashkenazim,[15] who comprised the governmental and economic elites. Given its charge, the committee could not reasonably recommend the limitation of the Jewish Mizrachi birthrate, so its members instead argued for increased economic assistance and incentives for large families in order to “improve the financial and educational status of the Mizrachim and to encourage the wealthier Ashkenazim to bear as many children as they could reasonably be expected to support.”[16] However, quotations from contemporary politicians revealed that the committee’s proposals were primarily designed to achieve the latter goal; social welfare for the disadvantaged Jewish Mizrachim was merely a positive externality. For example, in a 1964 Knesset debate regarding the child allowance program, Minister of Labor Yigal Allon lamented, “[I] only state with utmost regret that the birthrate among the veteran sections of the Jewish population in Israel and among the Western immigrants is amongst the lowest in the world.”[17] The committee’s report prompted an increase in child allowance payments and their expansion to all salaried workers, not only those of low socioeconomic status, so as to include the wealthier Ashkenazim. The Israeli government expected all Jews, and particularly those from advantaged backgrounds, to undertake “internal aliyah”[18] (i.e., to procreate abundantly) in order to secure the nation’s future as a Jewish state, and in return it was willing to invest heavily in its Jewish citizens’ reproduction.

Since the purpose of child allowances was to “arrest negative trends in demographic developments,” as Minister of Labor Mordechai Namir euphemistically stated in 1959,[19] Israeli Arabs saw limited economic benefits in the first several years following the implementation of Bachi’s recommendations. Initially, Israeli Arabs collected fewer child allowance benefits due to the inconvenient placement of national insurance offices, which were not typically located in remote Arab regions.[20] This de facto ethnic disparity in fertility allowance access soon became codified, formalizing the unspoken rule that pronatalist policies were intended to benefit Jews alone. In 1970, the Knesset passed the Veteran’s Benefit Law, which offered low-interest housing loans to couples looking to expand their families as long as a spouse or a spouse’s family member had served in the Israeli military.[21] Both Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Charedi Jews typically did not serve in the IDF, but under-the-table practices revealed the policy’s pro-Jewish bias: some Charedim were issued IDF reservist cards that qualified them for the allowance, but they were never called to serve,[22] and an additional stipend was authorized for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students and their families.[23] In 1983, the so-called “Law for Families Blessed with Children” offered significantly higher child allowance payments only to those eligible under the Veteran’s Benefit Law—that is, Jews.[24] The unspoken intent of Israeli pronatalist economic policies—to advantage Jewish over Arab population growth—had become overt, and when an Arab-sponsored law eliminating the veteran requirement to receive large-family benefits passed the Knesset in 1993, old-guard Israelis were outraged.[25] Conservative MK Rehavam Ze’evi shouted on the Knesset floor, “[The Arabs] will give birth to 70 children; they do anyway… They will make 50, 60, 70 children and we will pay them discharged soldiers’ grants.”[26] Thus, in the minds of governmental officials, the exclusion of non-Jewish Arabs from many pronatalist economic benefits constituted an essential component of Israeli fertility policy.

Modernization in the Arab Sector

While less accessible economic incentives for childbirth may have indirectly reduced Arab population growth, Israel’s targeted program of modernization, or “Israelization,”[27] of the Israeli Arab population has almost certainly contributed to the Arab birthrate’s significant decline since the mid-20^th century. In 1965, Arab Israeli women bore on average 9.2 children,[28] a remarkably high birthrate characteristic of a population in its earliest stages of economic development. By 2015, this statistic had dropped to an average of 3.3 children per Israeli Arab woman, with even lower, replacement-level fertility levels observed among Arab Christians and Druze.[29] Israeli environmental scientist Alon Tal argued that a portion of this decline was due to natural demographic transition in developing nations: the introduction of Western medicine and social institutions during the pre-1948 British Mandate lowered mortality rates, but it required multiple generations for birthrates to fall (and mindsets to adjust) to a new population equilibrium.[30] However, from its founding, Israel implemented aggressive modernization policies in Arab communities in order to hasten this natural transition. In 1949, Israel established compulsory public education for all citizens, including Arabs.[31] Coupled with the Marriage Act of 1950, which raised the minimum marriage age for girls to 17,[32] this policy reduced Arab birthrates by limiting a woman’s opportunity to bear children in her teenage years, as had previously been the custom.[33] Furthermore, education, particularly for females, raised awareness of effective contraception and opened new opportunities for employment, typically in urban sectors like industry and service.[34] The shift from traditional rural to modern urban life “integrat[ed] [Arabs] into the Jewish controlled economy”[35] and exposed them to Western, capitalist norms that encouraged higher consumption at the expense of lower fertility. Furthermore, the Israeli Ministry of Health “disproportionately focused on the ‘Arab sector’” when implementing their first family planning initiatives in the 1980s.[36] In her book Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel, Israeli-Arab anthropologist Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh argued, “Despite the Ministry [of Health]’s reluctance to start family planning programs in Jewish communities, it was eager to do so among Arabs. It was widely known that approval for a general clinic in an Arab area was difficult to get… but approval was all but guaranteed if [it] included a family planning unit.”[37] Through education, women’s initiatives, economic integration, and readily accessible family planning, Israel deliberately increased the pace of demographic transition within Arab communities, instilling Western reproductive norms that favored smaller families in order to halt the non-Jewish population momentum.

Reproductive Healthcare Access and Coverage

Israel’s nationalized healthcare system constituted the third and final prong of Israeli pronatalist policy: by limiting or refusing coverage of procedures and medications that discouraged childbirth, the government influenced Israeli families to bear more children. As mentioned above, the 1962 Bachi Committee noted a concerning gap in birthrates between Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews, partially due to the former’s higher usage of contraception and abortion as methods of birth control.[38] In response to this finding, Israel imposed significant restrictions and bureaucratic barriers to abortion access: women were required to submit a written request to a committee, appear before a hospital panel to argue their case, and pay a fee of 400 NIS not covered by insurance simply to apply for an abortion.[39] Permission for the procedure was only granted if the woman was below 18 or above 40, if the pregnancy occurred out of wedlock or resulted from adultery, or if a dangerous complication for the fetus or the mother had arisen.[40] Furthermore, Israeli national health insurance only covered abortion expenses for girls under 18, medical emergencies of the mother or her fetus, or in cases of rape or incest.[41] Thus abortion was either illegal or costly (or both) for the vast majority of Israeli women seeking to undergo the procedure, fueling an unregulated underground abortion network that has been estimated to provide at least half of the nation’s abortions each year.[42] Social stigmas and pressures have also contributed to lower incidences of Jewish abortion in Israel. For example, in the 1980s, Minister of Health Haim Sadan proposed that “all Jewish women considering abortion be forced to watch images of mangled and dead fetuses in addition to pictures of Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust.”[43] Recently, a strong pro-life movement has coalesced in Israel, and Jewish women seeking abortions have reported intimidation and physical assault by members of groups such as Efrat, who use both religious reasoning and ad hominem attacks to harass women in abortion clinics.[44] Thus Israeli leaders and social organizations have attempted to impose social costs in addition to the economic burden of abortion upon Jewish (and particularly Ashkenazi) women by likening the procedure to murder during the Holocaust or by claiming that abortion is a sin in Judaism.[45] These two widely advertised arguments conveniently have not typically dissuaded Arab Muslim women from obtaining the procedure.

Just as Israel enacted abortion restrictions to boost the relative Ashkenazi population, it also introduced contraceptive devices and medications (albeit slowly, and with a price) to achieve this same goal by curbing the much-higher birthrates of Mizrachi and Arab Israelis. Contraception, oral or otherwise, was not covered under the Israeli national health insurance program in the early years of the state, when Ashkenazim comprised the vast majority of the population, and several physicians refused to prescribe it even for a fee due to their personal pronatalist beliefs.[46] In the early 1970s, for example, a survey of government-employed medical professionals revealed that up to 27% believed the government (and by extension, they themselves) “should act to encourage a higher Jewish birthrate.”[47] However, by the 1980s, Israeli women enjoyed almost “universal access” to birth control,[48] though contraception still was not free, unlike most other services and medications offered under the Israeli socialized medical system. Canadian scholar Jacqueline Portugese has argued that 1980s-era Israeli leaders’ newfound leniency in contraceptive provision and accessibility was in fact a targeted effort to reduce the high birthrate among poorer immigrant Jews who had recently arrived from the Middle East and North Africa, limiting their growth relative to Israelis of European origin and assimilating them into mainstream Western Israeli culture.[49] Today, both IUDs and oral contraceptive pills are subsidized under the national healthcare system’s “basket of medicines,” but with restrictions; for example, only girls under 21 are eligible for the oral contraceptive subsidy.[50] Contraception is still expensive: it has been estimated that an Israeli woman spends between 7200 and 12000 NIS on contraception throughout her life.[51] In sum, Israeli healthcare policy selectively discouraged abortion and contraception among Ashkenazim via economic incentives such as insurance coverage as well as social pressures from physicians and other figures of authority. Meanwhile, family planning techniques, including contraception, were readily introduced into majority-Arab and -Mizrachi communities in order to mitigate what Israeli leaders deemed to be negative demographic developments.

In contrast to its restrictions on abortion and contraception, the Israeli government has provided generous coverage of costly assisted reproductive technologies (ART) under its national health insurance program in order to ensure that all families desiring children could in fact bear them. In 1998, Israel boasted 23 in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics, the highest per capita in the world.[52] However, the clinics were less accessible for Arab women, who often lived in more remote areas of the country.[53] The 1995 National Health Insurance Law fully covered the price of an Israeli woman’s first two children born via IVF; each birth cost taxpayers on average between $10,000 and $15,000 USD.[54] Even though IVF in Israel yields only a 12-14% success rate per treatment cycle,[55] and despite the fact that the government’s lax protocols for treatment permit overly intensive hormone therapies that can endanger women’s health,[56] IVF remains a popular component of Israeli reproductive healthcare. Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli, a health specialist at Haifa University, credited this phenomenon both to citizens’ pride in “the steady stream of [IVF] innovations developed [by] Israeli doctors” and to social norms dating back to Biblical times that painted infertile Jewish women as “suffering… tragic figures” in need of compassion and care.[57] Health Minister and former general Motta Gur took a more pragmatic approach to ART costs: although he acknowledged the expense of IVF, “it was a whole lot cheaper than bringing in new immigrants.”[58] The overt pronatalist bias of the Israeli healthcare system has manifested itself in the Israeli government’s willingness to spare no expense to boost native Israeli fertility rates while at the same time imposing financial, social, and legal barriers to women (and particularly Jewish women of European descent) desiring smaller families.

Israeli Pronatalism Today: Charedim and the Changing Face of Israel

In a twist of fate, today’s Ashkenazi Israeli leaders, heirs to the original Jewish pronatalists, face a new demographic threat from within the Israeli Jewish population: ultra-Orthodox Israeli Charedim have bucked natural demographic trends in recent years, growing at the rapid rate of 6% per annum[59] and causing significant economic and social turmoil. On average, Charedi women bear six children, twice the national average, but many have families of 10 or more.[60] Furthermore, the Charedim abide by strict social conventions, which they believe to be the proper interpretation of Jewish law. Men typically do not work and instead study Torah; more than half are unemployed.[61] In addition to running the household and raising several children, women often earn the family’s only meager income besides government welfare such as child allowances.[62] Division of labor practices as well as cultural norms within the Charedi community explain why 52% of all ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews and 67% of Charedi children live below the poverty line.[63] Therefore, maintaining and ideally increasing pronatalist economic incentives constitutes a top policy issue for Charedi political parties, and indeed, Aryeh Deri, the current Israeli economics minister and the leader of Shas, a Mizrachi-Charedi political party, insists that he “will block any attempt to cut benefits,” such as the yeshiva student stipend and child allowances.[64] As the impoverished Charedim grow to a predicted 27% of the total Israeli population by 2059,[65] public debt is expected to increase from 67% to 170% of Israeli GDP.[66] These trends threaten the robust high-tech and industry-based Israeli economy built primarily by Ashkenazi elites.

In response to this perceived Charedi threat to the Israeli way of life, secular and predominately Ashkenazi opposition parties such as Yesh Atid (“there is a future”) campaign on the reduction of child allowances, ultra-Orthodox stipends, and other policies that permit Charedim to insulate themselves from mainstream Israeli society while still collecting benefits from the state.[67] Should left-wing parties defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative coalition in the next Israeli parliamentary election, child allowances will likely be reduced significantly, with certain benefits tied to desired social outcomes such as participation in the military or workforce. Eurocentric Israeli governmental elites have proven in the past that they are willing to limit even other non-European Jewish birthrates in order to a maintain what they believe to be an ideal ethnic equilibrium: for instance, many Ethiopian Jewish women, most of whom were airlifted to Israel in a 1991 covert rescue mission, received state-sponsored vaccinations of the long-acting contraceptive Depo-Provera, ostensibly without their knowledge or consent, over a period of many years.[68] Thus it is conceivable that, faced with a growing Charedi population, secular Ashkenazi parties like Yesh Atid will not hesitate to reverse seven decades of Israeli pronatalist policy. Since no future waves of European immigrants are expected to arrive in Israel, Western Jewish leaders may see no choice but to enact anti-natalist policies targeting the Charedim, lest they lose control of Israel’s historically secular, cosmopolitan society to a conservative and economically unsustainable ultra-Orthodox majority.

Pronatalism, Demography, and the Palestinian Question

While the rise of the Charedim threatens to alter domestic life in Israel, Palestinian Arab demographics challenge the Jewish State’s sovereignty and ambition in the international arena. Israeli Jews can no longer rely on pro-Jewish population policies to maintain demographic superiority within their UN-defined borders; most of the laws codifying some form of reproductive discrimination against Israeli Arab families have been eliminated or modified so that all citizens enjoy equal access to the benefits of child allowances, ART, and other reproductive healthcare services.[69] Accessibility remains the main barrier to entry for Israeli Arabs, as government offices and more advanced health centers tend not to be located in predominately Arab regions, and cultural norms frequently limit Arab women’s activities without the permission of their male relatives.[70] However, non-Israeli Arabs living in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza do not possess rights to any pronatalist financial benefits or healthcare coverage,[71] and hawkish Jewish leaders have no desire to expand these programs to the Territories and potentially increase Arab birthrates. For many years, Palestinians’ high population growth constituted a form of resistance against the Israeli occupation; Yasser Arafat was once quoted as saying, “[The Israelis] are concerned about our children and the Palestinian woman, who bears yet another Palestinian every ten months… [she] is a biological bomb threatening to blow up Israel from within.”[72] Moreover, women living in the occupied territories often had difficulty accessing contraception and abortion, since many medical relief organizations and charities that provided care in the region did not offer these options to their patients, and Israeli-funded contraception or family planning clinics were met with suspicion and frequently went unused.[73] However, in spite of these factors, population growth rates in the Palestinian Territories have in fact trended downwards in the past several decades. The total fertility per woman in the West Bank in 2014 was 2.83,[74] while in the Gaza Strip this number was 4.24.[75] In comparison, Jewish fertility per woman in Israel was 3.13 in 2015.[76] Israeli demographer Dov Friedlander and his colleagues noted parallel downward fertility trends between Israeli Arabs and their brethren in the Territories and postulated that the non-Israeli Arab birthrate decline was similarly due to postponed marriages, higher educational attainment, and integration of Arabs into the Israeli economy and society as discussed above.[77] Thus it appears that, on the whole, Israel’s demographic goals in the Palestinian Territories have been achieved even without direct anti-natalist policy intervention in the region.

However, even given the declines in Palestinian Arab birthrates, the current Israeli administration still views Palestinian population dynamics as a threat: sustained Arab population growth thwarts right-wing politicians’ plans to secure demographic (and thus political) hegemony in all of “Eretz Israel,” including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In 2000, Israeli scholar Sergio DellaPergola estimated that in Israel plus the Palestinian Territories combined, Jews comprised 55.1% of the population and Arabs 44.9%.[78] There is a high likelihood of demographic parity within a few generations due to the Palestinians’ “population momentum”;[79] the relatively large proportion of young people in the Arab population, who will soon bear their own children, indicates upward-trending future growth. Yet in order for Israel to maintain its dual Jewish and democratic nature with any credibility, its population must be majority-Jewish. In fact, demography has often been cited as the main reason for Israel to support a two-state solution:[80] in order to retain its legitimacy as arguably the sole democracy in the Middle East in the face of a growing Palestinian population, the nation must cede away territory primarily populated by Palestinian non-Jews. In 2005, when former general Ariel Sharon narrowly retained control of the Likud Party and thus the Office of Prime Minister, he warned his party against the threat of Netanyahu’s far right-wing faction that was seeking to forge a “Greater Israel” through occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza: “It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state and at the same time to control all of Eretz Israel. If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all. Everything. That is where the extremist path takes us.”[81] U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry echoed these words following the failed Obama-era peace negotiations, saying that if Israel rejected a two-state solution, “[it] can either be Jewish or democratic—it cannot be both—and it won’t ever really be at peace.”[82] The demographic problem that troubled early Israeli leaders has returned once more, but its implications today are even more dire. The decision to retain the territories or to relinquish them—which must be made soon, before population parity—will define Israel either as a principled democratic nation or as an oppressive occupying force.

Conclusion

Israel’s historically pronatalist agenda has manifested itself in a variety of incentives—economic, political, and social—that boosted Ashkenazi Jewish birthrates while simultaneously limiting population growth among Arab Palestinians and even occasionally among non-European Jews. These policies, coupled with intensive immigration campaigns, maintained Ashkenazi supremacy in Israeli political and cultural life for nearly seven decades. However, current population trends foreshadow a new Israeli political and social reality in which highly religious Charedi officials, who seek to fundamentally alter Israel’s Ashkenazi-dominated Western economy and way of life, gain greater political power and popular support, and in which the choice between a two-state solution and the violation of Israel’s dual Jewish and democratic nature becomes increasingly urgent.

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Endnotes

[1] Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, ed. Jacob De Haas, trans. Sylvia D’Avigdor (Federation of American Zionists, 1917), books.google.com/books?id=eXkLAAAAIAAJ&hl=en, passim.

[2] Paul P. Bernard, “Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 13, no. 2 (1995): 115.

[3] Jacqueline Portugese, Fertility Policy in Israel: The Politics of Religion, Gender, and Nation (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998), 186.

[4] Alon Tal, The Land is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel (Yale University Press, 2016), 215.

[5] Dov Friedlander et al., Population Policy in Israel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 47.

[6] David Ben Gurion, Israel, a Personal History (Herzl Press, 1972), 838.

[7] Tal, The Land is Full, 81.

[8] Leslie King, “From Pronatalism to Social Welfare? Extending Family Allowances to Minority Populations in France and Israel,” European Journal of Population/Revue européenne de Démographie 17, no. 4 (2001): 314.

[9] Tal, The Land is Full, 61.

[10] Ibid., 61.

[11] Ibid., 63-69.

[12] Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: the Israelis and the Holocaust (Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 97.

[13] Tal, The Land is Full, 48.

[14] Ibid., 85.

[15] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 76.

[16] Ibid., 76, emphasis added.

[17] R. Ben-Shem, Demographic Problems of the Jewish People in Israel and the Diaspora, ed. Ephrat (Tel Aviv, 1964), 6.

[18] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 82.

[19] Tal, The Land is Full, 92.

[20] Ibid., 92.

[21] Michal Ofir and Tami Eliav, Child Allowances in Israel: A Historical View and International Perspective (National Insurance Institute of Israel, 2005), 5.

[22] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 97.

[23] Tal, The Land is Full, 92.

[24] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 105.

[25] Tal, The Land is Full, 95.

[26] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 108.

[27] Sammy Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel (Westview Press, 1992), passim.

[28] Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Fertility Rates by Age and Religion, 2016, www.cbs.gov.il/shnaton68/st03_13.pdf, 1.

[29] Ibid., n.p.

[30] Tal, The Land is Full, 168.

[31] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 172.

[32] Ibid., 176.

[33] Tal, The Land is Full, 191.

[34] Ibid., 191.

[35] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 172.

[36] Barbara Swirski, Hatim Kanaaneh, and Amy Avgar, “Health Care in Israel,” Israel Equality Monitor 9 (1998): 21.

[37] Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Univ. of California Press, 2010), 37.

[38] Tal, The Land is Full, 86.

[39] Israel Ministry of Health, Procedures or Health Funds in Cases of Pregnancy and Abortion, 2012, www.health.gov.il/hozer/mk23_1993.pdf, 1.1-1.4.

[40] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 137.

[41] Tal, The Land is Full, 121.

[42] Knesset Committee to Promote the Status of Women, Testimony of Dr. Amy Avger, Israeli Knesset, 2003, www.knesset.gov.il/protocols/data/rtf/maamad/2003-05-19.rtf, n.p.

[43] Tal, The Land is Full, 115.

[44] Tal, The Land is Full, 123-124.

[45] Ibid., 123-124.

[46] Ibid., 108.

[47] Tziyona Peled, Family Planning in Israel: Behavior and Attitudes of Professionals, Part I (The Institute of Social Policy, 1973), 78.

[48] Barbara S. Okun, “Innovation and Adaptation in Fertility Transition: Jewish Immigrants to Israel from Muslim North Africa and the Middle East,” Population Studies 51, no. 3 (1997): 317.

[49] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 125.

[50] Tal, The Land is Full, 110-111.

[51] Orshlimi, Sharon, “Numbers Behind the Abortion Industry,” Onlife: A Website of Substance and Current Events for Women, August 6, 2013, www.onlife.co.il.

[52] Alison Solomon, “Anything for a Baby: Reproductive Technology in Israel,” in Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel, ed. Barbara Swirski and Marilyn Safir (Pergamon Press, 1991), 102.

[53] Tal, The Land is Full, 126.

[54] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 154.

[55] Sarit Rosenbloom, “A Multitude of Fertility Treatments—Few Pregnancies,” Yedioth Ahronot, November 25, 2014, 9.

[56] Hedva Eyal, interview by Alon Tal, July 2, 2013.

[57] Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli and Yoram S. Carmeli, Kin, Gene, Community: Reproductive Technologies among Jewish Israelis (Berghahn Books, 2010), 51-61.

[58] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 153.

[59] Tal, The Land is Full, 131.

[60] Ibid., 131.

[61] “Eat, Pray, Don’t Work,” The Economist Online, June 25, 2015, www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21656207-israel-cannot-afford-keep-paying-ultra-orthodox-men-shun-employment-eat.

[62] Tal, The Land is Full, 132.

[63] Israel Democracy Institute, Statistical Report on Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel (Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 2016), 16.

[64] “Eat, Pray, Don’t Work,” June 25, 2015.

[65] Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Fertility Rates, 1.

[66] “Eat, Pray, Don’t Work,” June 25, 2015.

[67] Lior Dattel and Tali Heruti-Sover, “Israel’s Welfare Ministry Vows to Prevent Haredim from Living off Child Benefits,” Haaretz, March 3, 2014, www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.538280.

[68] Phoebe Greenwood, “Ethiopian Women in Israel ‘given Contraceptive without Consent,’” The Guardian, February 28, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/28/ethiopian-women-given-contraceptives-israel.

[69] Tal, The Land is Full, passim.

[70] Ibid., 203.

[71] Friedlander, Population Policy, 247.

[72] Gad Gilbar, “The Palestinians: Demographic and Economic Developments 1986-1990,” in Middle East Contemporary Survey 15, ed. Ami Ayalon (Westview Press, 1991): 315.

[73] Portugese, Fertility Policy, 165-166.

[74] U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook: West Bank, November 14, 2017, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/we.html.

[75] U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook: Gaza Strip, November 14, 2017, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gz.html.

[76] Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Fertility Rates, 1.

[77] Friedlander, Population Policy, 252-253.

[78] Sergio DellaPergola, “Demographic Trends in Israel and Palestine: Prospects and Policy Implications,” in The American Jewish Year Book 103, ed. David Singer and Lawrence Grossman (American Jewish Committee, 2003), 18.

[79] Tal, The Land is Full, 215.

[80] Ehud Barak, “We Must Save Israel From Its Government,” The New York Times, December 1, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/opinion/ehud-barak-israel-netanyahu.html.

[81] Chris McGreal, “Sharon Narrowly Survives Attempt to Oust Him as Likud Leader,” The Guardian, September 26, 2005, www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/27/israel.

[82] Ian Schwartz, “Kerry: Israel Can Either Be Jewish Or Democratic, It Cannot Be Both,”RealClearPolitics, December 28, 2016, www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/12/28/kerry_israel_can_either_be_jewish_or_democratic_it_cannot_be_both.html.