The Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies
As unjust as it was for Palestinians, partition had already been expected, if not almost inevitable. From the outset, the Zionist Jewish settlement enterprise was separate and sought to establish its separation with assistance from, under the aegis of and in the context of the British Mandate. The Zionist settlement enterprise did not involve a group of displaced persons and immigrants, who were willing to integrate into the then existing system and its laws. They arrived as settlers, who carried with them their collective dreams, code, law and moral and symbolic world. Their integration into the Palestinian local community was unthinkable, neither by themselves nor by the Palestinian community who viewed them as an existential threat. This way, two religiously, ethnically and economically parallel communities were born out of the British Mandate. These were mostly like parallel lines, which seldom intersected. The 1936 revolution was a milestone that entrenched this sharp division, albeit some historians such as Hillel Cohen attribute it to the Buraq Uprising events of 1929. The obvious fact stands still: the British Peel Commission had proposed partition ten years before it turned into an official UN resolution. Together with its partition proposal, the Peel Commission was one factor that took the idea of a separate and independent Jewish State out of the deliberate grey area within the Zionist project and turned it into an approved and public project in the Biltmore Conference of 1942.
Fifty years of occupation and seventy years from partition, which led to the Nakba and establishment of Israel. Israel is a man in the seventies. He spent the last fifty years of his life as an occupier. Is the occupation merely an incident, a transient illness, in his life? Is it a constituent part of its being and nature? Is the occupation an illness, which Israel has to recover from? Is it evidence for its health, strength and agility?
The more the years pass, the twenty year interval between the Nakba and Naksa appears as a truce that is not quiet. This time marked the massacres of Kafr Qasem and Qubeiba, murder of infiltrators who returned to their homeland, and 1956 war. Overtime, this truce looks like a marginal detail in a project that is more than 120 years old. For example, who recalls that California was not part of the United States when it was established and that it was occupied almost a century later?
This year marks a 100 since the Balfour Declaration, 70 since the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, 50 since the Israeli occupation of the 1967 Palestinian territories, and we could add 120 years since the inaugural conference of the Zionist Organization in Basel. It is rather tempting to view the last three incidents as mere manifestations of a project that was planned for in Basel, and as one of the many occurrences of the 20th century in which a text translated to reality and a legend transformed into settlements. The temptation is strong but it must be resisted.
What is the nature of the foreign relations between Israel and former Soviet Union states?
How can we understand these countries’ policy transformations that were once supportive of Palestinian rights, and that have now sided with Israel in the International arena and the United Nations? The theme of this issue is a preliminary attempt to answer these questions. Within this theme, researcher Muhannad Mustafa offers an analysis of Israel-Azerbaijan relations and its impact on regional politics considering that it is a Muslim country with a Shia majority and for its strategic locality.
The Thought of Salvation in Zionism
The ancient Greek philosophy did not define the concept of historical progress; that is, time moves forward in a perpetual progress towards salvation. Greek philosophy envisaged time to be more of a circle. In other words, time did not move in a uniform direction towards progress and salvation. Augustine, who viewed and construed Christian theology as one that embraced the notion of progress: history has its teleology and particular direction. Its final station is salvation.
Abstract
The theme of the 62nd issue of the Israeli Affairs Quarterly Journal is Israel’s relations with Jewish Groups outside of Israel.
The notion of “the negation of exile” constitutes a central keystone in Zionist thought: It is a degrading state of being that must end, because the meaning of collective Jewish existence is only fulfilled in the land of Israel. He needs the land and the land needs him, she is his and he is hers, he is lacking without her and she is lacking without him. This is the logic that made immigration and colonization the ideological and practical foundations of Zionism (Aliyah in Hebrew – as in immigration – means “ascent”).
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The Repercussions of the War against Gaza on Israel's Relations with Russia and Turkey: Will There Be Fundamental Changes?
On the collapse of the concept of "moving away from America and the West and replacing them with new friends": "Netanyahu was looking for comfortable political partners, even at the cost of harming Israel's national security."
Israeli Affairs (Issue no. 91)
