This study addresses the Palestinian emigration from Ottoman and British Palestine to Latin America, with a focus on the Diaspora created in Honduras. Through migration, diaspora and acculturation theory it analyzes the diaspora and the migration itself. A historical approach analyzes the factors that led to the emigration while field research allows for an in-depth analysis of the Diaspora today and how it has evolved. It hypothesizes that the Palestinian Diaspora in Honduras has enjoyed great economic success at the cost of deteriorating relations with the non-Palestinian population. Additionally, it hypothesizes that these Palestinians have no intentions on returning to their homeland, and thus will remain in their host country. The study also compares the Palestinian Diaspora in Chile with that of Honduras. Furthermore, through a comparative analysis it draws differences and similarities between the Jewish and Palestinian migration and subsequent Diasporas in both Chile and Honduras. Through surveys, interviews and focus-groups, it concludes that the hypotheses are correct and that while Palestinians have enjoyed economic success, their image within Honduran society has suffered. Additionally they do not intend to return to their homeland. It also introduces the difference between Honduras' two main cities; Tegucigalpa, the capital, and San Pedro Sula, economic and commercial center of the country. Relations between the Palestinian Diaspora and the native population are strained in San Pedro Sula more so than in Tegucigalpa.

This volume surveys the interplay between state and non-state actors in Latin American foreign policies and attitudes towards the Middle East in the twenty-first century. How will domestic instability and international tensions affect the choices and behavior of Latin American countries towards the Arab world? The chapters here offer insight into this and similar questions, as well as a comparative value in analyzing countries beyond those specifically discussed. Common topics in policy making are considered–namely, Israel and Palestine, Iran, the Gulf countries, and the Arab "Spring”–as authors from distinct disciplines examine the crucial relation between ends and means on the one hand, and foreign policy actions and context on the other.

A critical examination of the history of US-Palestinian relations The United States has invested billions of dollars and countless diplomatic hours in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a two-state solution. Yet American attempts to broker an end to the conflict have repeatedly come up short. At the center of these failures lay two critical factors: Israeli power and Palestinian politics. While both Israelis and Palestinians undoubtedly share much of the blame, one also cannot escape the role of the United States, as the sole mediator in the process, in these repeated failures. American peacemaking efforts ultimately ran aground as a result of Washington’s unwillingness to confront Israel’s ever-deepening occupation or to come to grips with the realities of internal Palestinian politics. In particular, the book looks at the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics—namely, how a badly flawed peace process helped to weaken Palestinian leaders and institutions and how an increasingly dysfunctional Palestinian leadership, in turn, hindered prospects for a diplomatic resolution. Thus, while the peace process was not necessarily doomed to fail, Washington’s management of the process, with its built-in blind spot to Israeli power and Palestinian politics, made failure far more likely than a negotiated breakthrough. Shaped by the pressures of American domestic politics and the special relationship with Israel, Washington’s distinctive “blind spot” to Israeli power and Palestinian politics has deep historical roots, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. The size of the blind spot has varied over the years and from one administration to another, but it is always present.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians migrated to the Americas in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. By 1936, an estimated 40,000 Palestinians lived outside geographic Palestine. Transnational Palestine is the first book to explore the history of Palestinian immigration to Latin America, the struggles Palestinian migrants faced to secure Palestinian citizenship in the interwar period, and the ways in which these challenges contributed to the formation of a Palestinian diaspora and to the emergence of Palestinian national consciousness. Nadim Bawalsa considers the migrants' strategies for economic success in the diaspora, for preserving their heritage, and for resisting British mandate legislation, including citizenship rejections meted out to thousands of Palestinian migrants. They did this in newspapers, social and cultural clubs and associations, political organizations and committees, and in hundreds of petitions and pleas delivered to local and international governing bodies demanding justice for Palestinian migrants barred from Palestinian citizenship. As this book shows, Palestinian political consciousness developed as a thoroughly transnational process in the first half of the twentieth century—and the first articulation of a Palestinian right of return emerged well before 1948.

"A first-class job of primary archival and media research on the origins of American involvement in Palestine, an area of major interest and importance to Zionists, Palestinians, and the United States."--Michael W. Suleiman, Kansas State University "Davidson develops an important thesis concerning the impact of perceptions on foreign policy, with reference to U.S. policy toward Palestine. . . . [His] emphasis on the pre-state period makes his study unique."--Ann M. Lesch, Villanova University In a revisionist look at the history of U.S. relations with Palestine, Lawrence Davidson offers a critical study of the evolution of American popular and governmental perceptions of Zionism and Palestine, from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the founding of Israel in 1948. Zionism, which sought to transform Palestine into a Jewish state, emphasized the biblical and religious connections of the West to Palestine. Davidson argues that this orientation predisposed the American people to see Zionism as a form of "altruistic" imperialism that would bring civilization to a backward part of the world. However, American Zionists met resistance from the State Department, particularly the Division of Near Eastern Affairs, whose neutral stance until 1945 was shaped by a fear of foreign entanglements. Exploring rising tensions on both sides, Davidson describes how the American Zionists overcame this resistance and outmaneuvered the State Department by using lobbying techniques and appeals to popular sentiment. Showing how a powerful and determined interest group turned the U.S. political system to its advantage and shaped foreign policy, America's Palestine is an important study of one of the 20th century's most controversial international stories. Lawrence Davidson, professor of history at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, is the author of Islamic Fundamentalism and of numerous articles on U.S. attitudes toward and relations with the Middle East.