The Arab-Israel Conflict

The sheer volume of literature on the Arab-Israel conflict is enormous. Most of these writings are, however, contentious, if not polemical; scholarly research occupies only one wing of the edifice. But even this scholarly literature is vast, and it tends to be identified, for the most part, with one side or the other. This does not mean that research conducted by “involved” parties can be reflexively set aside. Such research can be valuable, sometimes precisely because of this involvement—but the reader needs to be aware of the scholar’s relationship to the subject of the research. The ideal of a truly disinterested, unaffiliated, “objective” adjudicator of Arab-Israel issues is not irrelevant, but it is an ideal that is met, if at all, only by a small proportion of the prominent scholars who have contributed the most-important works in the field. Without the “involved” scholars, there would be little for a bibliographer to report. A second issue is an imbalance arising from the greater number of scholarly works on the conflict coming from Israeli and Jewish academic researchers compared to the number written by Palestinian or Arab scholars (at least regarding books in English). In part this imbalance has lessened in recent years with more Palestinian academic works, and from the appearance of “post-Zionist” or “revisionist” Israeli or Jewish scholars who have published studies highly—even devastatingly—critical of the standard Israeli narrative. (“Revisionism” in this context should be distinguished from Revisionist Zionism, which is, in fact, at the other end of the spectrum.) Post-Zionists tend to fall into two schools: positivists, who simply use primary sources and declassified documents to debunk founding myths that have seldom been challenged; and “post-modernists” or “deconstructionists,” who see academic research as a manifestation of a power relationship and identify the Palestinians as the oppressed party. The conclusions of the second group, in particular, are often quite supportive of the conclusions of Palestinian and Arab scholars who work from the same premise. Apart from these differing approaches, scholarship on the conflict also corresponds in large part to the historical stages of its evolution: the Ottoman period, both before and after the beginning of Zionist settlement in 1882; the British Mandate between the two world wars; the interstate conflict phase from Israel’s creation in 1948 to the 1967 war; the reemergence of the Palestinians in the 1970s and 1980s; and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process since the early 1990s.