Arab-Israeli Wars and US Foreign Relations

Author(s):  
Seth Anziska

American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict has reflected dueling impulses at the heart of US-Middle East relations since World War II: growing support for Zionism and Israeli statehood on the one hand, the need for cheap oil resources and strong alliances with Arab states on the other, unfolding alongside the ebb and flow of concerns over Soviet influence in the region during the Cold War. These tensions have tracked with successive Arab–Israeli conflagrations, from the 1948 war through the international conflicts of 1967 and 1973, as well as shifting modes of intervention in Lebanon, and more recently, the Palestinian uprisings in the occupied territories and several wars on the Gaza Strip. US policy has been shaped by diverging priorities in domestic and foreign policy, a halting recognition of the need to tackle Palestinian national aspirations, and a burgeoning peace process which has drawn American diplomats into the position of mediating between the parties. Against the backdrop of regional upheaval, this long history of involvement continues into the 21st century as the unresolved conflict between Israel and the Arab world faces a host of new challenges.

Author(s):  
Camelia Suleiman

This chapter lists the major events of Palestinian history. It also discusses what each of the following groups of people considers most significant in the history of the conflict. These groups are: Palestinians in Israel, Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Jordanians and the Israeli Jews. There is no doubting the fact that the ‘Israeli-Arab’ conflict has shaped the history and the identity of the people in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and to a lesser but still significant extent, the history and identity of the people in the Arab world for much of the past century. The chapter also discusses the Arab Nahḍa and the role of Palestine in it. It juxtaposes the Nahḍa project with Zionism as a national movement.


Author(s):  
Ibrahim Taha

This chapter discusses the beginnings of the novelistic tradition in Palestine. It first provides a brief historical overview of the Palestinian novel before discussing the three major spaces into which Palestinian literature in general is divided: inside Israel, in the Occupied Territories (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) since 1967, and in the Diaspora. It then considers the works of Palestinian writers in Israel that focus on the Intifada, including Zakī Darwīsh and Tawfīq Mu‘ammar, along with Palestinian novels written in the Diaspora by authors such as Jabrā Ibrahīm Jabrā and Ghassān Kanafānī. It shows that all three spaces of the Palestinian novel share some major themes related to national identity, political rights, and the tension between people and communities, on the one hand, and regimes and political authorities, on the other.


Born in 1945, the United Nations (UN) came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book's claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume includes chapters on the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states.


Author(s):  
Dora Vargha

Concerns over children’s physical health and ability were shared experiences across post–World War II societies, and the figure of the child was often used as a tool to reach over the Iron Curtain. However, key differences in how children with polio were perceived, and as a result treated, followed Cold War fault lines. Concepts of an individual’s role in society shaped medical treatment and views of disability, which contributed to the celebrated polio child in one environment and her invisibility in another. Thus, through the lens of disability, new perspectives have emerged on the history of the Cold War, polio, and childhood.


Author(s):  
James Mark ◽  
Quinn Slobodian

This chapter places Eastern Europe into a broader history of decolonization. It shows how the region’s own experience of the end of Empire after the World War I led its new states to consider their relationships with both European colonialism and those were struggling for their future liberation outside their continent. Following World War II, as Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe, and overseas European Empires dissolved in Africa and Asia, newly powerful relationships developed. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms, enabling imagined solidarities and facilitating material connections in the era of the Cold War and non-alignment. After the demise of the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ku Daeyeol

This important new study by one of Korea’s leading historians focuses on the international relations of colonial Korea – from the Japanese rule of the peninsula and its foreign relations (1905–1945) to the ultimate liberation of the country at the end of the Second World War. In addition, it fills a significant gap – the ‘blank space’ – in Korean diplomatic history. Furthermore, it highlights several other fundamental aspects in the history of modern Korea, such as the historical perception of the policy-making process and the attitudes of both China and Britain which influenced US policy regarding Korea at the end of World War II.


Author(s):  
David Goldfield ◽  

By the time the US formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, the American economy was in desperate circumstances. President Roosevelt hoped that the new relationship would generate a prosperous trade between the two countries. When Germany, Italy, and Japan threatened world peace, a vigor- ous “America First” movement developed to keep the US out of the international conflicts. By the time the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, this be- came increasingly difficult. The US, instead, became “the arsenal of democracy” and supported the efforts of the British and, by 1941, the Russians to defeat Nazi aggression, particularly through the Lend-Lease program. Although after the war, the Soviets tended to minimize American, the residual good will from that effort prevailed despite serious conflicts. The Cold War did not become hot, and even produced scientific and cultural cooperation on occasion.


2020 ◽  
pp. 165-188
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres

This chapter describes the efforts by the United States and Eduardo Frei to prevent Salvador Allende from attaining the presidency. The Nixon administration, after choosing not to involve itself in the 1970 presidential race to the extent the Johnson administration had in the 1964 election, reacted with great alacrity to Allende's victory in the popular election. Richard Nixon himself instructed CIA director Richard Helms to conduct covert operations in Chile, behind Ambassador Korry's back. In addition, Chilean politicians, particularly Christian Democrats of the Frei line, tried or at least explored ways of averting an Allende victory and sought for that purpose the support of the U.S. embassy in Santiago. Though many of the documents that tell this part of the story have been available to researchers since at least the early 2000s, only one scholarly work has treated these attempts by Chilean politicians, especially Eduardo Frei, in depth. The tendency of scholars of U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War to assume rather uncritically that the only decisions that mattered were taken in Washington has narrowed the perspectives from which the history of Cold War Chilean politics has been studied and interpreted.


Author(s):  
Raminder Kaur

The chapter considers the scope of film to act as what is described as a ‘docu-drama-ment’ for conveying affective engagements with political history. It does so with a focus on unique incidents in the history of Indian popular cinema with the example of the film, Aman (Mohan Kumar, 1967). The discussion centers on the cameo appearance of a British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, in the film along with phantasmal invocations of Indian anti-nuclear weapons protagonists such as India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and reproductions of the 1945 atomic attack in Hiroshima and subsequent nuclear tests in the Pacific. The chapter considers how the film may be viewed in terms of a ‘corporeal compound lens’ on the political vicissitudes of the 1960s. With such an approach – on the one hand to do with the assemblage of a historical film, and on the other, to do with the way this intersects with compound lines of reflexive reception – the author shows how the ‘docu-drama-ment’ moves away from linear equations of the filmic signifier with the signified - or the film and the represented - to one that revels in affective residues and resonances that are a constitutive force in socio-political realities of the Cold War era. 


Pauli Murray ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 145-205
Author(s):  
Troy R. Saxby

This chapter examines Pauli Murray’s life during the Cold War era. Preferential treatment for returned servicemen and McCarthyism further disadvantaged Murray’s employment opportunities in the post-World War II period. Most notably, Cornell University denied her employment because of her “past associations.” Murray responded by writing Proud Shoes, a history of her maternal grandparents. Physical and mental health concerns continued to plague Murray, and as one of only a few independent black women lawyers in New York City, Murray struggled to make a living. In the late 1950s she became a corporate lawyer, wrote poetry, and then went to Ghana to teach law and explore her own racial identity.


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