Jamie Stern-Weiner is a graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. A dual British-Israeli national, he is a freelance researcher and editor and was founding co-editor of New Left Project.

Introduction

A simple observation, that ought to astonish more than it does: the Israel-Palestine conflict continues. 2017 marked the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, the United Kingdom’s pledge of support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, which might fairly be said to have inaugurated the national conflict there. It was the seventieth anniversary of the United Nations Partition Plan, which provided for a resolution of the conflict by means of dividing Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The proposed boundaries have since shifted in Israel’s favor, as military victories have imprinted on law and politics, but the two-state solution remains the international consensus framework for a peace agreement. June 2017 completed a half-century of Israeli military rule over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip: an occupation that has persisted for nearly three-quarters of Israel’s lifespan as a state, and which has dominated and constrained the lives of multiple generations of Palestinians. The high-water mark to date of the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination-the first intifada-erupted three decades ago, in December 1987. The lessons and legacies of that heroic defeat form a red thread running through the debates and discussions that follow. Finally, and perhaps most pressingly, June 2017 marked ten years of the siege of Gaza, which, together with the periodic military assaults to which that territory and its people have been subjected, has shattered Gaza’s society and all but extinguished its economy, along with a great many of its inhabitants.

If this chronological survey does not give the reader pause, if the breath and heart remain steady as the eye slips from “centenary” to “half-century” to “decade”, this is because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has endured so long that it has acquired about it an air of timelessness, and normalized into background noise. Global economic crises come and go; devastating wars scar and reconfigure every quarter of the Earth; expansive empires disintegrate and the world’s population of sovereign states more than triples; violence and inequality induce the most massive demographic movements in human history; a momentous opposition of superpowers emerges, ossifies, then abruptly collapses; ideologies mobilize tens of millions in sacrifice and struggle, and are then defeated or discredited; the living standards of billions are transformed beyond reckoning; humanity alights on alien worlds and extends its gaze to the very origins of the cosmos. . . and throughout it all, the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, in a speck of land scarcely larger than West Virginia, rages on; a miserable constant in a world of flux, perpetuated by its own motion and engulfing generation after generation in gratuitous suffering.

Jamie Stern-Weiner is a graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. A dual British-Israeli national, he is a freelance researcher and editor and was founding co-editor of New Left Project.

Introduction

A simple observation, that ought to astonish more than it does: the Israel-Palestine conflict continues. 2017 marked the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, the United Kingdom’s pledge of support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, which might fairly be said to have inaugurated the national conflict there. It was the seventieth anniversary of the United Nations Partition Plan, which provided for a resolution of the conflict by means of dividing Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The proposed boundaries have since shifted in Israel’s favor, as military victories have imprinted on law and politics, but the two-state solution remains the international consensus framework for a peace agreement. June 2017 completed a half-century of Israeli military rule over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip: an occupation that has persisted for nearly three-quarters of Israel’s lifespan as a state, and which has dominated and constrained the lives of multiple generations of Palestinians. The high-water mark to date of the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination-the first intifada-erupted three decades ago, in December 1987. The lessons and legacies of that heroic defeat form a red thread running through the debates and discussions that follow. Finally, and perhaps most pressingly, June 2017 marked ten years of the siege of Gaza, which, together with the periodic military assaults to which that territory and its people have been subjected, has shattered Gaza’s society and all but extinguished its economy, along with a great many of its inhabitants.

If this chronological survey does not give the reader pause, if the breath and heart remain steady as the eye slips from “centenary” to “half-century” to “decade”, this is because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has endured so long that it has acquired about it an air of timelessness, and normalized into background noise. Global economic crises come and go; devastating wars scar and reconfigure every quarter of the Earth; expansive empires disintegrate and the world’s population of sovereign states more than triples; violence and inequality induce the most massive demographic movements in human history; a momentous opposition of superpowers emerges, ossifies, then abruptly collapses; ideologies mobilize tens of millions in sacrifice and struggle, and are then defeated or discredited; the living standards of billions are transformed beyond reckoning; humanity alights on alien worlds and extends its gaze to the very origins of the cosmos. . . and throughout it all, the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, in a speck of land scarcely larger than West Virginia, rages on; a miserable constant in a world of flux, perpetuated by its own motion and engulfing generation after generation in gratuitous suffering.