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Understanding 50 Years of Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Land

Review products

MehranKamrava. The Impossibility of Palestine: History, Geography and the Road Ahead (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). Pp. 299. $30.00 cloth. ISBN 9780300215625.
GershonShafir. A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine and the World's Most Intractable Conflict (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017). Pp. 296. $26.95 cloth. ISBN 9780520293502.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2019

Leila Farsakh
Leila Farsakh*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Boston
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Extract

The year 2017 was important for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, commemorating both the centennial of the Balfour Declaration and the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war. That war, which resulted in Israel's defeat of three Arab armies and its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, transformed the politics of the Middle East. According to UN Security Council Resolution 242, issued in November 1967, the occupation was illegal: Israel would have to withdraw from the territories it occupied if it were to achieve peace with its neighbors. In international law, military occupations are temporary by definition. Israel, however, only returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982. (One year prior, it unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights from Syria.) Despite a twenty-five-year-long political process initiated in 1993, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has continued unabated.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , November 2018 , pp. 369 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc. 2019 

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References

1 In addition to the books under review, see also Black, Ian, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Pappe, Ilan, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories (London: One World Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

2 Hajjar, Lisa, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Robinson, Shira, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth; Roy, Sara, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, 3rd ed. (University of California, 2017)Google Scholar.

4 Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth.

5 For more, see Anziska, Seth, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.