A forceful, penetrating critique of the Oslo Accordsand their devastating aftermath.

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.

Presents the history of modern Palestine and biographies of important Palestinians.

This book explores the development of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) from a liberation movement to a national authority, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Based on intensive fieldwork in the West Bank, Gaza and Cairo, Nigel Parsons analyzes Palestinian internal politics and their institutional-building by looking at the development of the PLO. Drawing on interviews with leading figures in the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, delegates to the negotiations with Israel, and the Palestinian political opposition, it is a timely account of the Israel/Palestine conflict from a Palestinian political perspective.

All across the globe, individuals mobilize international support in defense of Palestinian rights and a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, these international activists are neither the beneficiaries of their efforts nor do they closely identify with the Palestinian population. Through an ethnographic analysis of social movement organizations and international activists active in the West Bank, this paper tries to understand the emergence of transnational collective action fighting for Palestinian rights since the second Intifada. To do so, this paper addresses structural as well as personal factors behind activists’ mobilization. Combining elements from social movement theory and Bourdieusian sociology, I conduct a meso-level inquiry of the principal solidarity organizations alongside a micro-level investigation of international volunteers participating in such organizational structures. Highlighting the specificity of transnational activism in the West Bank both in terms of opportunity structures and the lived experiences of international activists, I have tried to provide insight on how and why the Palestinian rights movement is able to gather so much international support.