Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Regional
BCE-638 CE
Background
Jewish settlement
Reign of King Solomon, construction of the Temple
Babylonians drive Jews from Judah and destroy the Temple
Temple rebuilt, independent Jewish state
Conquests by Greeks, Romans
Second Temple destroyed (70 CE)
Establishment of Arab rule, lasts through the Ottoman Empire in the 20th century
1890s-1918
Zionism
British occupation after WWI
1918Balfour Declaration
1920s-1930s
Massive migration of Jews to Palestine
Recommendation of establishment of two states, Palestinians reject this, arguing
for an end to immigration
1940s
Jews fleeing persecution settle in Palestine
UN decides to partition state, rejected by Palestinians
US pressures Palestine to accept refugees
Jews capture areas of Palestine
1948-1949
Israel Independence
David Ben-Gurion, commander of IDF
Palestinian protests and infiltration
Arab-Israeli War
Armistice signed with successive Arab countries
1949-1966
Hundreds of Israelis killed by Palestinian infiltrators
Hundreds of Palestinian villagers killed by Israelis
1956Suez Crisis: Invasion of Egypt by Israel for trade reasons; withdrawal
contingent on unimpeded trade
Khan Younis and Rafah massacres
Yasser Arafat begins guerilla war against Israel; founds Fatah party
1964PLO founded
1967-1973

Six Day War (1967)Egyptian naval blockade, Israeli counterstrike; Israeli

victory in capture of Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West
Bank, and the Golan Heights (see Mr. Sammlers Planet)
Khartoum Resolution
1968-1970Egyptian war of attrition
1969Organisation of Islamic Cooperation established
Black September becomes active, culminating in holding Israeli athletes hostage
at the 1972 Olympics to demand release of 250 Palestinian prisoners; the Munich
Massacre: two athletes killed by Black September, all captors and the rest of
athletes killed in police shoot-out
Operation Wrath of God launched in response to Munichreprisal killings
Yom Kippur War (1973)surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in the Golan

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Heights and Sinai Peninsula
1974-1985
Arafat, now the leader of the PLO, addresses the UN
UN adopts resolution that Zionism is a form of racism
1979Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty
1987-1991

First Intifada
Civil disobedience and violence by Palestinians protesting treatment
Israeli respond with suppression of protests
Hamas begins targeting both military and civilian institutions
Profoundly unbalanced death toll
Hussein attempts to draw Israel into Gulf War

1992-2000

Madrid Conference
Oslo Accords
Rabin, Peres, and Arafat awarded Nobel Peace Prize
IDF withdrawal from Hebron and parts of West Bank
Clinton attempts to broker peace between Netanyahu and Arafat
Camp David ends with no resolution

2000-present

Second Intifada
Taba Summit
Ariel Sharon withdraws from talks
Raids on the West Bank
Palestinian suicide bombings
US insists on UN resolution for two state solution
Operation Defensive Shield
West Bank barrier erected (declared unlawful by UN)
2005withdrawal of IDF from Gaza Strip
2006Hamas wins in election, resulting in West cutting off aid to Palestinians
Hamas and Fatah strife
Crisis in Gaza Stripmajority of inhabitants below poverty line
Increased attacks on Israel
2008-2009Gaza War
Palestine given non-member observer status in UN (2013)
Israeli invasion of Gaza Strip after killings of Israeli teens and retaliation against
Palestinian teen

Symbols and
Motifs

Concerns

Barbed Wire
Walls
Bombs
Rockets
Buses
Tunnels
Religious symbols
Never again

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Exposing what prejudice can do
Right to exist
Who decides the boundaries of a nation
Themes
The value of survivor narratives
Who counts as a survivor?
What individual narratives claim about extremity, about human experience,
about human morality
Who owns the narrative?
Unspeakable experience
What can be communicated through language? What cannot be explained
through language systems?
What can be told? What can a particular audience hear?
Western education v. Religion
How can they coexist when they are often contradictory?
Value of tradition versus value of progress
Gender and Sex
How differences between men and women are constructed in religious versus
secular arenas
Naturalization of character as determined by biology
National Borders
Who owns the land and the resources?
How is a nation formed?
The use of media
Rhetorical framing of the Middle East
What images are shown versus repressed
Illusion of access
Western media coverage as constructing a negative image of Middle Eastern
peoples
History of conquest
The right of people to self-determination
The nature of morality
Evil and its manifestations
Situational morality
The camps as an annihilation of morality
Religious Identity
Freedom of practice
Ethnic versus religious divides
Historical hostility to Jews
Ethnicity conflated with religion
Theoretical
Dimensions

Diaspora
Passover
Agamben: Homo sacer; stripping away successive layers of personhood
Greenspan: The tellable versus the hearable
Hilberg: Perpetrators, victims, and bystanders
Said: Orientalism

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Anderson: Imagined Communities