Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Discourse on the Right of Return, 1948–59

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maha Nassar

This article traces the evolving discourse on the "right of refugee return"among the Palestinian citizens of Israel during the first decade of Israeli statehood, with emphasis on the role of the local Arabic press in shaping and reflecting that discourse. More particularly, it focuses on al-Ittihad, the organ of the communist party (MAKI), which paid the greatest attention to the refugee issue. In tracing the party's shift from a humanistic/anti-imperialist stance on the issue to one emphasizing the refugees' inalienable right to return, the article sheds light on MAKI's political strategy vis-à-vis the Palestinian minority. It also illustrates the political vibrancy in the early years of the community, generally viewed simplistically in terms of a pre-1967 quiescence and post-1967 politicization.

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110026
Author(s):  
Kurt Weyland

Responding to Rueda’s questions, this essay explains the political-strategic approach (PSA) to populism and highlights its analytical strengths, which have become even more important with the emergence of populist governments across the world. PSA identifies populism’s core by emphasizing the central role of personalistic leaders who tend to operate in opportunistic ways, rather than consistently pursuing programmatic or ideological orientations. PSA is especially useful nowadays, when scholars’ most urgent task is to elucidate the political strategies of populist chief executives and their problematic repercussions, especially populism’s threat to democracy.


1962 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 430-439
Author(s):  
José M. Sánchez

Few subjects in recent history have lent themselves to such heated polemical writing and debate as that concerning the Spanish Church and its relationship to the abortive Spanish revolution of 1931–1939. Throughout this tragic era and especially during the Civil War, it was commonplace to find the Church labelled as reactionary, completely and unalterably opposed to progress, and out of touch with the political realities of the twentieth century.1 In the minds of many whose views were colored by the highly partisan reports of events in Spain during the nineteen thirties, the Church has been pictured as an integral member of the Unholy Triumvirate— Bishops, Landlords, and enerals—which has always conspired to impede Spanish progress. Recent historical scholarship has begun to dispel some of the notions about the right-wing groups,2 but there has been little research on the role of the clergy. Even more important, there has been little understanding of the Church's response to the radical revolutionary movements in Spain.


2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-39
Author(s):  
Nabila El-Ahmed ◽  
Nadia Abu-Zahra

This article argues that Israel substituted the Palestinian refugees' internationally recognized right of return with a family reunification program during its maneuvering over admission at the United Nations following the creation of the state in May 1948. Israel was granted UN membership in 1949 on the understanding that it would have to comply with legal international requirements to ensure the return of a substantial number of the 750,000 Palestinians dispossessed in the process of establishing the Zionist state, as well as citizenship there as a successor state. However, once the coveted UN membership had been obtained, and armistice agreements signed with neighboring countries, Israel parlayed this commitment into the much vaguer family reunification program, which it proceeded to apply with Kafkaesque absurdity over the next fifty years. As a result, Palestinians made refugees first in 1948, and later in 1967, continue to be deprived of their legally recognized right to return to their homes and their homeland, and the family reunification program remains the unfulfilled promise of the early years of Israeli statehood.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Charles Devellennes

This chapter gives introduces the gilet jaunes. The gilets jaunes, a group of French protesters named after their iconic yellow vests donned during demonstrations, have formed a new type of social movement. The gilets jaunes have been variously interpreted since they began their occupation of French roundabouts. They were at first received with enthusiasm on the right of the French political establishment, and with caution on the left. The fourth weekend saw scenes of violence erupt on the Champs Élysées, notably around and within the Arc de Triomphe, which towers over the first roundabout built in France. The headlines of newspapers and stories of the news media became almost exclusively focused on the violence of the protests. Images of state violence became ever-present on Twitter and independent media outlets, making it clear that it was the use of disproportionate force by police units that was at the centre of the events. The chapter explains that the aim of the book is to show that the use of violence is not the only tale to be told about the role of the protesters in the contemporary French context. Their contribution to the political landscape of France is quite different. They have provided a fundamental challenge to the social contract in France, the implicit pact between the governed and their political leaders. The movement has seen the numbers of participants diminish over time, but the underlying tension between the haves and the have-nots, the winners of globalization and those at risk of déclassement [social downgrading], are enduring and persistent.


Author(s):  
Sofia K. Ledberg

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is a key political actor in the Chinese state. Together with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese state institutions, it makes up the political foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the early years after the founding of the PRC in 1949, the military played an important role in state consolidation and the management of domestic state affairs, as is expected in a state founded on Leninist principles of organization. Since the reform process, which was initiated in the late 1970s, the political role of the PLA has changed considerably. It has become less involved in domestic politics and increased attention has been directed toward military modernization. Consequently, in the early 21st century, the Chinese military shares many characteristics with the armed forces in noncommunist states. At the same time, the organizational structures, such as the party committee system, the system of political leaders, and political organs, have remained in place. In other words, the politicized structures that were put in place to facilitate the role of the military as a domestic political tool of the CCP, across many sectors of society, are expected to also accommodate modernization, professionalization, and cooperation with foreign militaries on the international arena in postreform China. This points to an interesting discrepancy between form and purpose of the PLA. The role of the military in Chinese politics has thus shifted over the years, and its relationship with the CCP has generally been interpreted as having developed from one marked by symbiosis to one of greater institutional autonomy and independence. Yet these developments should not necessarily be seen as linear or irreversible. Indeed, China of the Xi Jinping era has shown an increased focus on ideology, centralization, and personalized leadership, which already has had consequences for the political control of the Chinese armed forces. Chances are that these trends will affect the role of the PLA in politics even further in the early decades of the 21st century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seán Molloy

Primarily known as a pioneer of International Relations (IR) theory, Hans Morgenthau also wrote on a series of other political themes. Especially prominent in his later career is a concern with the right and duty of a theorist to exercise academic freedom as a critic of government power and, especially in this particular case, of US foreign policy. For Morgenthau the responsibility to hold governments to account by reference to the ‘higher laws’ that underpin and legitimize democracy in its truest form was a key function of the theorist in society. Dissensus and healthy debate characterize genuine democracy for Morgenthau who was perturbed by what he perceived to be a worrying concern with conformity and consensus among the political and academic elites of Vietnam War era America. This article investigates the theoretical and philosophical commitments that explain why Morgenthau felt compelled to oppose the government of his adopted state and the consequences of his having done so. For all the vicissitudes he endured, Morgenthau ultimately emerged vindicated from his clash with the political elite and his experience serves as an exemplary case of the effective use of academic freedom to oppose government policy by means of balanced, judicious critique. In the final section I argue that Morgenthau’s approach to theory, theorization and the role of the intellectual in society provides valuable insights into the nature of reflexivity in IR that are of relevance to contemporary debates in the discipline.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Catá Backer

Abstract China’s new Charity Law represents the culmination of over a decade of planning for the appropriate development of the productive forces of the charity sector in aid of socialist modernization. Together with the related Foreign ngo Management Law, it represents an important advance in the organization of the civil society sector within emerging structures of Socialist Rule of Law principles. While both Charity and Foreign ngo Management Laws could profitably be considered as parts of a whole, each merits discussion for its own unique contribution to national development. Moreover, while analysis tends to focus on legal conformity of the Charity Law to the state constitution, little work has been done to analyze the relationship of the Charity Law to the political constitution of China. This essay seeks to fill that gap by considering the role of the Charity Law through the lens of the Constitution of the Communist Party of China. More specifically, the essay examines the extent to which the provisions of the Charity Law, and its underlying policies, contribute to the implementation and realization of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) Basic Line and in the context of the overall political policy of “socialist modernization which has served as the core of the political line of the ccp since the last decades of the 20th century. The essay is organized as follows: Section ii considers the specific provisions of the Charity Law, with some reference to changes between the first draft and the final version of the Charity Law. Section iii then considers some of the more theoretical considerations that suggest a framework for understanding the great contribution of the Charity Law as well as the challenges that remain for the development of the productive forces of the civil society sector at this historical stage of China’s development.


2016 ◽  
Vol 227 ◽  
pp. 653-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Russo

AbstractA number of prolonged political experiments in Chinese factories during the Cultural Revolution proved that, despite any alleged “historical” connection between the Communist Party and the “working class,” the role of the workers, lacking a deep political reinvention, was framed by a regime of subordination that was ultimately not dissimilar from that under capitalist command. This paper argues that one key point of Deng Xiaoping's reforms derived from taking these experimental results into account accurately but redirecting them towards the opposite aim, an even more stringent disciplining of wage labour. The outcome so far is a governmental discourse which plays an important role in upholding the term “working class” among the emblems of power, while at the same time nailing the workers to an unconditional obedience. The paper discusses the assumption that, while this stratagem is one factor behind the stabilization of the Chinese Communist Party, it has nonetheless affected the decline of the party systems inherited from the 20th century.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (14) ◽  
pp. 0-0
Author(s):  
Marian Tadeusz Mencel

This lecture includes an attempt to answer the question: what the connection of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De was, and what conditions contributed to the fact that both Zhou Enlai and Zhu De did not share the fate of the political opponents of Mao Zedong, inter alia Liu Shaoqi, Wang Ming, Gao Gang and others. Recognizing the political reality of China of the period from the creation of the CPC to the death of the heroes, the synthetic approach shows their resumes, and an attempt was taken to involve the most important facts to answer the questions, inter alia about civil, war of national liberation, domestic and foreign policy of China implemented in accordance with the provisions of the Communist Party of China and the role of the heroes in shaping the cultural and civilisation order after the declaration of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.


Significance The new government will have only 34 of the 179 seats, because policy differences among the right-wing parties, and the political strategy of the electorally strengthened anti-immigration, Euro-sceptic Danish People's Party (DF), mean DF will remain outside. Policy-making will be difficult. The government will be more economically liberal and pro-EU than it would have been with DF, but to make policy it will rely on partners across the political spectrum, especially the ousted Social Democrats -- who remain the largest party -- and DF. Impacts If DF is seen as a welfarist protector of ordinary citizens, it is more likely to repeat, at least, its 22% vote in the next election. The much-tighter immigration regime which is in prospect could taint Denmark's image and make it less attractive to foreign investment. The new government is likely to be an ally for much of UK Prime Minister David Cameron's EU reform agenda.


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