The History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
The History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Course description
The course will provide an introduction to the modern history of the Middle East and to the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict from its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries until the present. It will explore Islam as a religion and a civilization; the collapse of the Othman Empire and the creation of modern Middle Eastern nation states; the main ideologies that shaped Arab societies throughout the 20th century; the origins of Zionism; the rise of Arab opposition to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine; the outbreak of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem; the Six Day War, Yum Kippur War and their implications; the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; the ascendance of the Palestinian National Movement, the first Intifada and the rise and fall of the Oslo Accords; and the ideology and practice of Hamas.
Prof. Uriya Shavit
Week one: Islam: An introduction
Colin Turner, Islam: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 100-131.
Neal Robinson, Islam – A Concise Introduction (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999), pp. 17-39.
Week Two: Can We Still Study Middle Eastern History?
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), chapter I, section I, pp. 31-49; chapter III, section III, pp. 284-328.
Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism" (The New York Review of Books, June 24, 1982):
Week Three: The Collapse of the Othman Empire and the Creation of a New Order
Albert Hourani, Syria and Lebanon (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 41-58.
Documents:
"The Sykes-Picot Agreement", in:
Walter Laquer and Barry Rubin (eds.), The Israel-Arab Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), pp. 13-16.
The Balfour Declaration, in:
http://naip-documents.blogspot.com/ ,Document No. 4.
Week Four: Islam and Modernity
Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 103-160, 222-244.
Uriya Shavit, "Is Shura a Muslim Form of Democracy?", Middle Eastern Studies, 46:3 (May 2010), pp. 349-374.
Week five: The Muslim Brotherhood and Its Violent Offspring
Derek Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society 1945-1981 (London: George Allen, 1982), pp. 84-104.
Albert J. Bergesen, "Qutb's Core Ideas," in Albert J. Bergesen, The Sayyid Qutb Reader (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 14-31.
Uriya Shavit, "al-Qaeda's Saudi Origins", Middle East Quarterly, Vol. XIII, Number 4 (Fall 2006), pp. 3-13.
Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History of Al-Qaeda (London, 2006), pp. 31-56.
Week Six: The Origins of the Zionist Movement
Amos Elon, Herzl (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 1-10, 97-161, 373-409.
Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (excerpt), in The Israel-Arab Reader, 4-9; The Basle Declaration, ibid, 9-10
Theodor Herzl's diplomatic activity as presented in a Hamas TV Drama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0pVZBN-3CM (15 minutes)
Week Seven: The Rise of Jewish Presence in Palestine and the Palestinian Response
Ian J. Bickerton and Carla L. Klausner, Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005), pp. 36-99.
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 89-117.
Benny Morris, Righteous Victims; A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001), pp. 67-160.
Pillar of Fire (IBA) – Episode Four: Who’s Afraid of a Jewish State? 1937-1939
Week Eight: The 1948 War and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Ian J. Bickerton and Carla L. Klausner, Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005), pp. 100-115.
Benny Morris, 1948; A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 184-258, 392-420.
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 61-131, 237-253, 286-296.
Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure," in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, The War for Palestine; Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 12-36.
A Pillar of Fire – Episode 7 – A Nation Reborn 1947-1948
Week Nine: The Six-Day War and Its Implications
Michael Oren, Six Days of War; June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 61-126.
Documents:
"UN Security Council Resolution 242", in:
http://naip-documents.blogspot.com/ Document No. 19.
"The Palestinian National Charter", in:
Walter Laquer and Barry Rubin (eds.), The Israel-Arab Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), pp. 117-121.
Week Ten: From the War of Attrition to the October Surprise
Benny Morris, Righteous Victims; A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001), pp. 387-443.
Mohamed Heikal, The Road to Ramadan (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), pp. 208-262.
Ephraim Kam, Surprise Attack: The Victim's Perspective (Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 213-235.
Week Eleven: The Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty
Ian J. Bickerton and Carla L. Klausner, Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005), pp, 183-209.
Laura Zittrain Eisenberg and Neil Caplan, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace; Patterns, Problems, Possibilities, Second Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 35-51.
Kenneth Stein, Heroic Diplomacy; Sadat, Kissinger, Carter and Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 187-228.
Week Twelve: The Reconstruction of Palestinian Politics, the Intifada and the Oslo Accords
Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), pp. 140-181.
Akram Hanieh, "The Camp David Papers," Journal of Palestine Studies, 30:2 (Winter 2001), pp. 75-97.
Itamar Rabinovich, "The Failure of Camp David: Four Different Narratives", in Shimon Shamir and Bruce Meddy-Weitzman (eds.), The Camp David Summit: What Went Wrong (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), pp. 14-17.
Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace; The Inside Story of the Struggle for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2004), pp. 712-758.
Asher Susser, Israel, Jordan and Palestine; The Two-State Imperative (University Press of New England, 2001), pp. 24-71.
Documents:
"The Declaration of Principles", in:
Walter Laquer and Barry Rubin (eds.), The Israel-Arab Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), pp. 413-422.
"The Clinton Parameters", in:
http://naip-documents.blogspot.com/
Document 97.
Week Thirteen: Hamas: The Palestinian Muslim Brothers
Document:
The Hamas Charter, in:
Walter Laquer and Barry Rubin (eds.), The Israel-Arab Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), pp. 341-348.
Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 13-82.
