Israel's Colonial Predicament

Master's Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - Region: Near East, Near Orient, grade: Distinction (Very good), King`s College London (King's College London), course: The Occupied Territories Since 1967, language: English, abstract: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complicated and multi-dimensional conflict. In many contexts, it is very hard, if not impossible, to assess the violence between Palestinian and Israeli society today without resorting to a developed theory rather than emotion. However, many scholars and politicians hold the assumption that Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be properly understood with the frameworks, categories and concepts employed to understand other countries and conflicts . We shall endeavour to counter such beliefs and develop exactly that, a framework for analysing Israeli-Palestinian relations and conflict, allowing us to put the conflict into perspective and further develop a structural investigation into the root causes of conflict. We will do this at the example of the Algerian uprising against French colonialism. To develop such a framework, we will draw on classic texts such as the writings of Fanon and Memmi, as well as works by writers such as Bregmann, Barnett and Khader, but also on others, cross-referencing continuously between texts on colonialism, Israel-Palestine, and Algeria. As the title of this text indicates, the author holds the view that the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories is essentially a colonial one. This is not to say that we should consider the Territories a colony. Algeria was not a colony. What we want to say is that we believe in the existence of a colonial relationship between the two populations, based on the principles of colonialism. Why Algeria? We have chosen French colonialism in Algeria for the structural basis of our framework for a number of reasons. First, because France, like Israel, denied the colonial character of Algeria s situation; second, because analysts appear to have regularly felt the urge to draw attention to the parallels between the Battle of Algiers and Israel s reaction to the Palestinian s uprising, while the evacuation of French settlers from Algeria is being cited in Israel as a precedent for the Israeli disengagement from the Occupied Territories; and third, because of the immense impact the Algerian War had on the conceptual world of resistance movements around the world including the then-young PLO hoping to repeat the FLN s tactics of national liberation in Palestine.