The Political Psychology of Postcolonial Ideology in the Arab World: An Analysis of ‘Occupation’ and the ‘Right of Return’

Author(s):  
Irwin J. Mansdorf
2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laleh Khalili

The Oslo negotiations——and the specter of a Palestinian renunciation of the right of return——greatly increased the insecurities of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The new uncertainties in turn triggered the emergence in the refugee camps of commemorative practices different from those previously sponsored by the Palestinian leadership. The new forms of commemoration, centered on the villages left behind in Palestine in 1948 and including popular ethnographies, memory museums, naming practices, and history-telling using new technologies, have become implicit vehicles of opposition and a means of asserting the refugees' membership in the Palestinian polity. Beyond reflecting nostalgia for a lost world, the practices have become the basis of the political identity of the younger generations and the motivation for their political mobilization.


2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Fischbach

Unlike its demands for Holocaust reparations, Israel's compensation claims for properties that Jews left behind in the Arab world have aimed not to provide individual financial reparations, but rather to counter and offset Palestinian refugees' claims for restitution and the right of return. In U.S.-sponsored negotiations in 2000, Israel announced it would drop its counterclaim policy and agreed with the Palestinians that individual compensation would be paid out to all sides from an international fund. More recently, however, a new counterclaim strategy has emerged, based not on financial reparations, but rather on an argument that a fair population and property exchange occurred in 1948. By pursuing this strategy, Israel and international Jewish organizations risk exacerbating tensions between European Jews who have received Holocaust reparations, and Arab Jews angry that their claims are held hostage to diplomatic expediency.


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.


Author(s):  
Sobhi Albadawi

The right of return has been a fundamental claim by Palestinian people since 1948. The ‘right’ refers to the political position or principle that all generations of Palestinian refugees have the right to return to the property they or their forebears left behind during the 1948 Palestinian exodus, and following the 1967 Six-Day War. This study examines and updates Palestinian refugees’ views of the right of return claim, adopting a quantitative research design surveying 1200 participants from five refugee camps located in Hebron and Bethlehem in the West Bank. The study finds that even after 72 years of displacement, the right of return remains an active but changing political construct among surveyed Palestinians living in the West Bank. As such, future negotiations must consider the generational narratives and ensure that the right of return claim, resettlement, and compensation particularly are not treated as mutually exclusive in the delivery of a just solution to the displacement of Palestinian refugees.


2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 646a-646a
Author(s):  
Julie Peteet

This paper critically examines the term “diaspora” to describe contemporary Palestinian society. Exploring academic scholarship on diaspora more generally, and theway Palestinians can or cannot be subsumed by this conceptualization, opens the way for a critique of the concept itself. The goal is to complicate the notion of a Palestinian diaspora rather than to accept it as an unquestioned categorization. Focusing on demographic, spatial, and legal phenomena, in particular refugees' legal identity, provides a broad lens through which to probe the term's appropriateness in the Palestinian context. What are the political ramifications of assuming a Palestinian diaspora? Does an insistence on the right of return represent a refusal of diaspora?


2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover


Author(s):  
Daniel A. Dombrowski

In this work two key theses are defended: political liberalism is a processual (rather than a static) view and process thinkers should be political liberals. Three major figures are considered (Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne) in the effort to show the superiority of political liberalism to its illiberal alternatives on the political right and left. Further, a politically liberal stance regarding nonhuman animals and the environment is articulated. It is typical for debates in political philosophy to be adrift regarding the concept of method, but from start to finish this book relies on the processual method of reflective equilibrium or dialectic at its best. This is the first extended effort to argue for both political liberalism as a process-oriented view and process philosophy/theology as a politically liberal view. It is also a timely defense of political liberalism against illiberal tendencies on both the right and the left.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anaheed Al-Hardan

The 1948 Nakba has, in light of the 1993 Oslo Accords and Palestinian refugee activists' mobilisation around the right of return, taken on a new-found centrality and importance in Palestinian refugee communities. Closely-related to this, members of the ‘Generation of Palestine’, the only individuals who can recollect Nakba memories, have come to be seen as the guardians of memories that are eventually to reclaim the homeland. These historical, social and political realities are deeply rooted in the ways in which the few remaining members of the generation of Palestine recollect 1948. Moreover, as members of communities that were destroyed in Palestine, and whose common and temporal and spatial frameworks were non-linearly constituted anew in Syria, one of the multiples meanings of the Nakba today can be found in the way the refugee communities perceive and define this generation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-120
Author(s):  
Yousef M. Aljamal ◽  
Philipp O. Amour

There are some 700,000 Latin Americans of Palestinian origin, living in fourteen countries of South America. In particular, Palestinian diaspora communities have a considerable presence in Chile, Honduras, and El Salvador. Many members of these communities belong to the professional middle classes, a situation which enables them to play a prominent role in the political and economic life of their countries. The article explores the evolving attitudes of Latin American Palestinians towards the issue of Palestinian statehood. It shows the growing involvement of these communities in Palestinian affairs and their contribution in recent years towards the wide recognition of Palestinian rights — including the right to self-determination and statehood — in Latin America. But the political views of members of these communities also differ considerably about the form and substance of a Palestinian statehood and on the issue of a two-states versus one-state solution.


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