West Bank Areas A, B and C – How Did They Come into Being?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Joel Singer

Abstract This article tells the story of how and why, when negotiating the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords in 1993–95, the author developed the concept of dividing the West Bank into three areas with differing formulas for allocating responsibilities between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in each. The origin of how these areas were named is also discussed. This negotiation demonstrates that parties are prepared to modify ideological positions when detailed and practical options are presented that constitute a hybrid to the parties’ former positions.

Author(s):  
Mads Gilbert

This chapter discusses how Palestinians are being killed, wounded, maimed, and oppressed by Israeli governmental forces with little or no international pressure to limit, stop, or prosecute systematic attacks on Palestinian civilians. With its immense, deliberate destructiveness, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza have systematically attacked and eliminated people as well as predefined physical targets, all based on an Israeli military-political paradigm known as the Dahiya Doctrine. The aim of these Israeli attacks has been to “send Gaza decades into the past” while at the same time attaining “the maximum number of enemy casualties and keeping IDF casualties at a minimum.” Palestinian leaders have called on the Palestinian Authority to abolish the Oslo Accords since Israel has refused to commit to its obligations and instead has continued land grabs and settlement expansion in the West Bank and brutal attacks on civilian society in Gaza. Negotiations toward a final peace agreement have failed simply because Israel does not want peace.


2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (7) ◽  
pp. 915-932 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorota Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska

The article explores the intersections between sport, state and resistance in the context of military occupation and independence struggle. Based on a year of fieldwork in the local sports clubs in the West Bank, it analyses how sport may be used as a tool of resistance and state-building on the community level. For decades preceding the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, sport and youth centres were important sites of socio-political mobilization and took an active part in the national effort to build structures independent from the Israeli occupation. Following the Oslo Accords, state-building became institutionalized and outsourced to the emergent central institutions of the Palestinian Authority. The article analyses this transition from the perspective of local clubs that went from being active actors of state-building through sport to being subjects of the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to consolidate its state-like powers. To understand how local sport activists made sense of these changes, the distinction between a bottom-up and a top-down approach to state-building through sport is made. The article aims to contribute to the ongoing debates on the use of sport in the service of nation state, by investigating the case of state-building through sport in the context of military occupation.


Author(s):  
Assaf Razin

Since 1967 when Israel when the West Bank and Gaza Strip occupation begun, there has been increasingly taxing social-economic effects on Israel. The second uprising broke out after the collapse of the OSLO agreements, in the early 2002. The Israeli economy was hit twice. It was first hit by the dotcom crash in the US; second, by the 2000-2005 Palestinian . The drastic effects on the Palestinian economy which shortly after split in to two political units (the West bank, controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and the Gaza Strip controlled by Hamas). Especially the Gaza strip economy got down to the level of humanitarian crisis. that the early 2000s shock had relatively small effect on the long-term trajectory of Israel's real GDP. The effect on the Israeli economy of the second Intifada shock was mild, and short-lived. globalization proved to be a “shield” against the Palestinian-Israeli military conflicts and regional trade obstacles for the Israeli economy. This means, that the Israeli economy is exposed, however, to alarming long run risks. If, and when, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the long occupation of the of the West Bank territory would trigger political conflicts between Israel and its trade-and-finance partners, this “shield”, provided by Israel high level of integration with the global economy, may break down.


Headline QATAR/PALESTINIANS: Doha will isolate the West Bank


2000 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Trottier

This article investigates local hydropolitical constellations in the West Bank through two case studies of individual villages. After examining the position of the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA), it identifies two concurrent dynamics in water politics in the West Bank: a centripetal dynamic drawing power to the PWA and the would-be Palestinian state, and a centrifugal dynamic dispersing water power among various village organizations and the Israeli authorities. The result is a dangerous situation whereby the Palestinian Authority is acquiring power even while it is not extending its control over local institutions.


2020 ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
Ayfer Erdogan ◽  
Lourdes Habash

The 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump as the U.S. president opened a new chapter in U.S. policy making toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several developments that have taken place under the Trump Administration mark a clear rupture from the Oslo Accords in favor of support for Israeli plans to annex a large fraction of the West Bank and design a new settlement of the conflict according to its interests. While the U.S. policy toward the Palestinian issue is not radically different under Trump, he does break from former presidents in that he overtly indicates a sharp pro-Israel tilt and has been more transparent about the U.S. position in the conflict. In this context, in light of the developments that have taken place in the last three years, this article aims to investigate the main pillars of the U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to analyze how far the Trump Administration’s policies toward the conflict indicate a shift from those of his predecessors. It also offers some insights into the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by providing three prospective scenarios and discussing their repercussions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (01) ◽  
pp. 6-19
Author(s):  
Raja Shehadeh

AbstractSince 1967, despite international legal restrictions, Israel has sought to annex Eastern Jerusalem. Fifty-one years later, it publicly declared in its Nation State Law: “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.” In the West Bank, Israel initiated on the ground changes that furthered annexation without formally declaring any part of it as annexed. For decades, Al-Haq has documented the gradual encroachment of occupation by successive Israeli administrations. And yet the Palestinian leadership failed to successfully utilize the law to support its case. Nor could the 190 states, parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention, be convinced to enforce the provision in the Convention which bids the High Contracting Parties to “ensure respect for the present convention in all circumstances.” During the Oslo negotiations, Israel succeeded in leaving Jerusalem and the Jewish settlements outside of the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Given these patterns across nearly a half-century of history, it seems likely that Israel will declare the full annexation of the West Bank in part or in its entirety precisely because it has succeeded in accomplishing this in the case of Jerusalem.


2020 ◽  
pp. 219-240
Author(s):  
Jerome Slater

A number of international and US efforts to bring about an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement were undertaken between 1975 and 2000, but all failed, largely though not entirely because Israeli intransigence. Rejectionism and continuing settlement expansion in the West Bank and Jerusalem led to the first Palestinian intifada (uprising). The most important and initially hopeful peace effort was the 1993 Oslo Accords, negotiated by Palestinian and Israel doves. On paper, Oslo established a number of “principles” that would govern a peace settlement, which would be negotiated in the next five years. However, Oslo ultimately failed and no peace settlement was reached, largely because the Israeli governments of Rabin, Peres, and Netanyahu continued to resist a two-state settlement and extremists on both sides turned to violence and terrorism.


Author(s):  
Drew Paul

Since the early 1990s, Israel has greatly expanded a system checkpoints, walls and other barriers in the West Bank and Gaza that restrict Palestinian mobility. As a result, such border spaces have become ubiquitous elements of everyday life, with profound political, socio-cultural, and economic effects.  Israel/Palestine examines how authors and filmmakers in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel have grappled with the spread and impact of these borders in the period since the Oslo Accords of 1994. Focusing on novels by Raba’i al-Madhoun, Ghassan Kanafani, Sami Michael and Sayed Kashua, and films by Elia Suleiman, Simon Bitton, Emad Burnat, and Guy Davidi, Israel/Palestine traces how political engagement in literature and film has shifted away from previously common paradigms of resistance and coexistence. Instead, it has become reorganised around these now ubiquitous physical barriers. Using strategies of narrative fragmentation, multivocality, metafiction, fantasy, and silence to depict the effects of these borders, authors and filmmakers interrogate the notion that such spaces are impenetrable and unbreakable by revealing their deceptive and illusive qualities. In doing so, they also imagine distinct forms of protest, and redefine the relationship between cultural production and political engagement.


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