The findings of the Or Commission on the October 2000 clashes between Arab and Jewish Israelis provide context to the response of Arab citizens to the May 2021 Israeli-Palestinian fighting.
Note by the author: As a faculty member at Emory University, I wrote several articles per month for national and local newspapers. This article appeared in October 2002 in the Orlando Sentinel. The idea for a trusteeship to be possibly be considered to manage the Israeli-Palestinian relationship emerged from my decades of study of the Palestine Mandate, understanding the concept of separation of the two communities that was offered by the British on more than one occasion during the 1930s and 1940s, and the American suggestion in early 1948 to create a trusteeship for Palestine’s future. Martin Indyk, a US diplomat published an article about considering a trusteeship as a future political option in a Foreign Policy magazine article in July 2003.
“A Zionist State in 1939,” Dr. Kenneth W. Stein, CHAI (Atlanta), Winter 2002 “Had not the Nazi crimes been committed against Jews during World War II, the Jewish State would have never come true.” So…
Perspective provides valuable insights in evaluating contemporary diplomacy. Though neither the Palestinian-Israeli-U.S. summit of July 2000 nor the Egyptian-Israeli-U.S. summit of September 1978 ended discussions between Israel and its Arab adversaries, there were more differences than similarities between the two intense and highly charged meetings.
Kenneth W. Stein, “The Arab-Israeli Peace Process,” Middle East Contemporary Survey, Vol. XXIII, 2000, Bruce Maddy-Weitzman (ed.), Westview Press, pp. 48-76. For some aspects of Arab-Israeli relations and negotiations, the beginning and end of 1999…
Kenneth W. Stein, “The Arab-Israeli Peace Process,” Middle East Contemporary Survey, Vol. XXII, 1998, Bruce Maddy-Weitzman (ed.), Westview Press, pp. 56-89. For almost all of 1998, the Arab-Israeli peace process was analogous to a driver…
Kenneth W. Stein, “The Arab-Israeli Peace Process,” Middle East Contemporary Survey, Vol. XXI, 1997, Bruce Maddy-Weitzman (ed.), Westview Press, pp. 71-109. On a macro level, in 1997, Israel and much of the Arab world spent…
The rise of Hamas marks a shift in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a struggle between national movements or states to a battle between religions, making a resolution all the more difficult to achieve.
An Israel State Archives document collection shows how Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization negotiated under the Oslo Accords to achieve an agreement in May 1994 on Palestinian autonomy in Jericho and the Gaza Strip.
On September 9, 1993, four days before Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords on the White House Lawn, Israel and the PLO signed mutual recognition Letters. Joel Singer, who significantly assisted the negotiation of both the MRA and the Oslo Accords, as well as earlier agreements with Egypt, recalled that the MRA was “a massive leap forward in Israeli-Palestinian relations.”
Kenneth W. Stein, “One Hundred Years of Social Change: The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” in Laurence Silberstein (ed.), New Perspectives on Israeli History: The Early Years of the State, New York University Press,…
Comparing the 1936-39 Arab uprising in various parts of western Palestine and the intifada that began in 1987 in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, the most striking conclusion is the large number of general similarities between these manifestations of Palestinian national consciousness. The two most significant differences, however, are that the 1987 intifada generated a deeper and more prolonged Palestinian national coherence across all classes than did its predecessor and clarified and crystallized Palestinian opinion, which helped create a historic compromise in Palestinian public policy.
Both the intifada that started in December 1987 and the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939 unexpectedly jolted the political status quo. But unlike its precursor, the intifada unified a physically dispersed and ideologically diverse Palestinian community.
Kenneth Stein, “Rural Change and Peasant Destitution: Contributing Causes to the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936-1939,” John Waterbury and Farhad Kazemi (eds.), Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East, Florida International University Press (1989), pp. 143-170….
In early 1988, for the second time within eight years, the Reagan Administration reacted to events in the Middle East by proposing that the stalled Arab-Israel negotiating process be reactivated, an effort known as the Shultz Initiative.
Hamas absolutely opposes Israel’s right to exist, with its leadership repeatedly declaring that all of Palestine belongs to Moslems.
By Yehoshua Porath, 1973 Historian Yehoshua Porath wrote “Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement” as a chapter for the book Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, Menachem Milson…
Musa Alami, “The Lesson of Palestine,” Middle East Journal, Volume 3, No. 4, October 1949, pp. 373-405 Reprinted with permission of the Middle East Institute, October 2021 In this 1949 article published in Middle East…
Otherwise known as Israel’s War of Independence, or, “the nakbah” or disaster to the Arab world because a Jewish state was established, the war was fought between the newly established Jewish state of Israel opposed by Palestinian irregulars, and armies from five Arab states. Official beginning of the war is usually given as May 14, 1948, the date Israel declared itself an independent Jewish state, but the war’s first of four phases began in November 1947. Lasting for two years, the war ended with armistice agreements signed in 1949 between Israel and four Arab states.
The Palestinian Arab elite chose to boycott in virtually all British and U.N. overtures to them from 1920 to 1948, with egregious consequences. The Palestinian Arab elite shunned British officials who were staunch supporters of…
In “The Arabs and the Approaching War with Israel, 1945-1948,” Yaacov Shimoni reviews in detail the period from the early 1940s to May 1948, examining decisions made by Arab leaders toward Palestine and Zionism. He concludes that disunity among Arab states, jealousies, and disorganization plagued Arab preparations for the expected coming war with the Zionists.
Apart from the Zionist movement and the Jewish community in Palestine, the role of President Truman, however, was the most important factor enabling the establishment of the Jewish state.
Irrefutable evidence shows Palestinian Arab collaboration with Zionists during the British Mandate greatly assisted Jewish state building. Cohen further asserts a general absence among Palestinians of a sense of national feeling, with loyalties instead tied to families, villages and other localities. Quite certainly without Palestinian Arab collaboration, Zionists would not have succeeded in building a nucleus for the Jewish state. Arabic newspapers in Palestine and British scrutiny show the constancy of the Arab population’s engagement with the Zionists, and this included Arabs resident inside Palestine.
November 29, 1947 Official Records of the General Assembly, Second Session Supplement No. 11,Volumes l-lV. Deteriorating Relationship Between Britain and Palestine The British intention (Peel Report in 1937) to partition Palestine into Arab and…
