Marc David Baer, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (New Texts Out Now)

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Nov 9, 2020 Turkey
Marc David Baer, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (New Texts Out Now)

Marc David Baer, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (New Texts Out Now)

By : Marc David Baer

Marc David Baer, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide, Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2020).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Marc David Baer (MDB): Nearly three decades ago, in graduate school, an Armenian friend asked me why Jews deny the Armenian genocide. I answered weakly that not all of us do. I wrote this book as a detailed answer to the question, posed to me so long ago, as an exploration of the feelings and circumstances that have compelled Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote the image of sultanic saviors and tolerant Turks. 

As a Jewish American growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, I was exposed to the Holocaust from a young age. A number of survivors inhabited my world. When my family moved to West Germany, Grandpa Harvey, my father’s father, a first-generation Russian Jewish American, refused to visit us. When his US Air Corps plane was shot down during the Second World War, he joined Soviet guerrillas fighting against the Nazis behind the lines in Slovakia. He would never go to Germany. When I began graduate school and lived in Turkey for the first time in the early 1990s, Grandpa Harvey would not visit me there either, on account of what the Turks had done to the Armenians. He told me it was the same as what the Germans had done to us.  

Unlike Grandpa Harvey—or Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” or Franz Werfel, the author of Forty Days at Musa Dagh for that matter—the most prominent Jewish historians of the Ottoman Empire including Stanford Shaw and Bernard Lewis publicly denied that the Armenian people had been subjected to genocide. I could not comprehend why Ashkenazi Jewish historians, not compelled by the same pressures as their Sephardic Jewish counterparts in Turkey, would deny the Armenian Genocide. Whether through silence or open denial of the Armenian Genocide, Turkish Jews and their historians proffered a utopian perspective on Turks as having been sent by God time and again to save God’s persecuted people from European barbarity. I wondered: what were the origins of this claim, where was the evidence to support it, and why was it still being repeated? 

I wrote this book to address these and a number of other questions: What moral responsibility do the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of the victims of another? What role have Jews played in genocide denial? What is the relationship between the utopian depiction of the experience of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic and efforts to counter recognition of the annihilation of the Armenians? Finally, what are the moral and ethical obligations of historians on these counts?

These are sensitive questions and not ones usually broached in the ethically challenged field of Ottoman studies. Armenian Genocide denial is widespread among scholars of the Ottoman Empire. One holder of a chair funded by the Turkish government was the point man for genocide denial activities in the United States. For these reasons I decided to wait to write this book until after I was granted tenure and then promoted to full professor. I did not want my career to be hindered by genocide deniers. For this reason, I put off writing about a topic which has been on my mind since the start of my career.
If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then it is hard for us to accept that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address? 

MDB: The book concerns what has compelled Jews to promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while they deny the Armenian Genocide and the existence of antisemitism in Turkey. The dominant historical narrative is that Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were embraced by the Ottoman Empire, and then later, protected from the Nazis during the Second World War. If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then it is hard for us to accept that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians. The book confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility Jews, the descendants of the victims of one genocide, have to Armenians, the descendants of victims of another. It delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to tease out the origin of these many tangled truths. The aim is to bring about reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts, but to confront it and come to terms with it. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, I set out to tell a new history that exposes Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian Genocide.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MDB: As in my previous books on Ottoman history, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford, 2008), The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford, 2010), and At Meydanı'nda Ölüm: 17. Yüzyıl İstanbul'unda Toplumsal Cinsiyet, Hoşgörü ve İhtida (Death on the Hippodrome: Gender, Tolerance, and Conversion in seventeenth-century Istanbul) (Koç, 2016), Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks interrogates relations between Muslims and Jews in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey and the interplay between history and memory. In The Dönme I analyze how the waning years of the Ottoman Empire witnessed changing perceptions of religious difference, intercommunal violence, and the rise of racialized nationalism (only accepting those with “Turkish blood”), ethnicized religion (conflating being Turkish with being Muslim), and antisemitism. These ominous changes served as the background for how the Dönme were pressured to dissolve as a group when bearing stigmatized racial and religious status in the Turkish Republic. Rather than focus on Jews and Muslims alone, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks takes into account the triangular relations among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, focuses on the annihilation of the Armenians, and the relation between antisemitism and genocide denial.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have? 

MDB: The target academic audience is made up of scholars and students of Jewish, Armenian, Ottoman, and Turkish history, and Holocaust and Genocide studies. But more important is the impact the book may have on the public. I have already received a great amount of positive feedback from Jewish and Armenian readers in the United States, Israel, Armenia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. I look forward to the book being translated into several languages. My hope is that the book will contribute toward Jewish-Armenian reconciliation, harmed for so long by, among other reasons, Jewish public denial of the Armenian Genocide.

After publishing an op-ed based on the book’s arguments, I received emails from leading members of the US Jewish community, who told me of their own struggles to convince other leaders of US Jewish organizations to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Recognition has finally begun in the past five years. I am hopeful that more Jews will turn away from denial and toward working together with Armenians on the common causes that bind us.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MDB: Conducting oral history research for The Dönme, I learned of Dönme and Turkish Jewish networks in Berlin, which compelled me to undertake years of research in that city. In previous articles, I critically examined the conflation of Turk with Muslim, explored the Turkish experience of Nazism, and examined Turkey’s relation to the darkest era of German history. Whereas many assume that Turks in Germany cannot share in the Jewish past, and that for them the genocide of the Jews is merely a borrowed memory, I have shown how intertwined the history of Turkey and Germany, and Turks and Jews are. I plan to write a monograph exploring these issues further.

The leading German Muslim during that same era was Jewish convert Hugo Marcus. Based mainly on Marcus’s private papers in German, I recently completed the first biography of this remarkable man, German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus (Columbia, 2020). I use Marcus’s life and work to shed new light on German Jewish history and antisemitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle. His unconventional story reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. The book on Marcus continues a central thrust of my work, exploring the limits of religious belonging by revealing the entangled histories of Jews and Muslims. 

J: Finally, how do you respond to people who rather than engage with the aims and argument of Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks, which concerns the writing of Jewish history, insist that the Armenian Genocide never occurred?

MDB: The Armenian Genocide is one of the most well-documented events in Ottoman history. Accordingly, there is no reason to enter into so-called debates about whether it happened. Denialists are like tobacco industry lobbyists, global warming skeptics, and anti-vaxxers who try to make denialism a legitimate position within an actual debate, fund biased research supposedly striving for objectivity, work with public relations firms (and professors!) to sow confusion, and throw up a fog of controversy (Mamigonian 2015, 62, 63). In this case they distract from the perpetration of the Armenian Genocide through boasts about heroics in another—the alleged rescue of Turkish Jews in Europe during the Second World War—and distort historical evidence surrounding both events. I did not see a need to adduce more evidence for the Armenian Genocide. What I have done instead is to write a book about the genocide from a unique and personal perspective, questioning why members of a group who were not perpetrators deny another people’s suffering. 

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 1-5)

In January 2014, high-level Turkish government officials participated for the first time in the Turkish Jewish community’s public commemoration of the Holocaust—an annual event first authorized only a few years earlier. Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, the Turkish minister of foreign affairs, began his speech on that day filled with meaning for the Turkish Jewish community by honoring “the memory of millions of Jews, Roma people and other minorities who lost their lives in a systematic annihilation by the Nazi regime. This crime against humanity is the common grief and shame of humankind.” He then quickly pivoted to Turkey, which “not only embraced Jews who were sent into exile from Spain in 1492 in the Ottoman period, but also helped and protected its Jewish citizens and became a safe haven for all Jews, especially scientists and academicians, during World War II.” Based on these events, his conclusion was unambiguous. “There is no trace of genocide in our history. Hostility towards the other has no room in our civilization.”

In his statement, originally available in English on the Turkish Jewish community’s official website, Çavuşoğlu contrasted European Christian persecution of Jews from the medieval era to the Holocaust, which he termed “the shame of humankind,” with five centuries of Turkish tolerance of Jews. Embedded in his short speech is the straightforward implication that because Turks have always rescued Jews, they could not possibly have committed crimes against humanity, certainly not the Armenian genocide, perpetrated in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire by their ancestors. Thus, in a spare five sentences at an event meant to commemorate the murder of European Jewry—itself remarkable, as Holocaust denial is rampant in Turkey—the foreign minister of Turkey shifted the focus from the Holocaust to a performative conscience-clearing of his own country. To deny the Armenian genocide, the foreign minister deployed a specific, dominant, utopian narrative of Ottoman and Turkish Jewish history. That historical narrative, how it came to be, and how it functions, is the focus of this book.  

Representatives of the Turkish Jewish community also deny the genocide by contrasting Turkish Muslim tolerance with Christian persecution of Jews. In 1989, Turkey’s chief rabbi, David Asseo, wrote in a letter sent to all one hundred US senators that the resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide then pending before the US Congress “is of great concern to our community . . . We cannot accept the label of ‘genocide;’ the groundless accusation is as injurious to us as to our Turkish compatriots.” Asseo went further in his grateful praise of the Turks. “As Turkish Jews, we have received for the last five hundred years the protection, the rights and the freedom granted to all Turkish citizens, at times when the concepts of human rights, liberty and tolerance were unknown in most Western countries.” Using the same logic that the Turkish foreign minister would use a quarter of a century later, the rabbi argued that the Armenian genocide never happened because Turks have always tolerated Jews.What both Çavuşoğlu and Asseo are asking us to accept is an if/then assumption about tolerance and genocide: if one buys the myth that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony as friends for five hundred years, then one trusts that Turks could not possibly have committed genocide against the Armenians.

In fact, Jews have been giving the Ottomans and Turks favorable press for five centuries. Here, I analyze the emotional frames of mind that have driven them to do so, demonstrating how for the past century Jews have been joined by Ottoman and Turkish Muslims in promoting an historical narrative of sultanic saviors, tolerant Turks, grateful and loyal Jews, and anti-Semitic Armenian and Greek traitors, a narrative that has simultaneously served to deny the very possibility of an Armenian genocide. Even during the genocide Talat Pasha asked Jewish American US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau why he bothered complaining about persecution of the Armenians when the Ottomans had always treated the Jews well. Such views have in fact been predominant in Jewish historiography until only recently.

[…]

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Jews depicted the Ottoman sultan as their redeemer, as “God’s rod” who had struck down their enemies the Byzantine emperors as part of a divine plan. Giving refuge to Jews expelled from Christian Spain in 1492, the sultan thus also opened the way to Jerusalem and the dawning of the messianic age. After Jews proclaimed Sabbatai Zevi the messiah in 1665, they ceased referring to the Ottoman ruler in messianic terms. But in the nineteenth century, Ottoman Jewish intellectuals recycled medieval and early modern tropes, thereby converting the sultan—and by extension all Turks—into tolerant hosts of their Jewish “guests.” In 1892, during the four hundredth anniversary of the 1492 “welcome” given Iberian Jewry, Ottoman Jews promoted this new version of the Turk as humanitarian protector. Identifying with the Muslim, with whom there could be no conflict, Jews depicted themselves as loyal subjects. Armenians and Greeks, both Christian minorities within the empire, became eternal traitors and enemies, alleged anti-Semitic heirs of the Byzantines. Ninety-seven years later, the 500. yıl vakfı(Quincentennial Foundation), established by the Turkish state and Turkish Jewish elites in 1989, saw itself as the celebration of “five hundred years of friendship” between Turks and Jews. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, Jewish accounts in Turkey and abroad of the Ottomans and the Turks offered the same stock figures of tolerant Turks, loyal and useful Jews, and anti-Semitic Christians. It is my contention that to accomplish this staging of five hundred years of harmony, the most significant and influential Jewish historians needed to both deny the Armenian genocide and ignore or deny the existence of Turkish anti-Semitism.

In the 1970s, belief in the power of “world Jewry” was one of the motivating factors that led the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the president to turn to Turkish Jews to serve as lobbyists on their behalf, primarily so as to counter international recognition of the Armenian genocide. As part of this effort, in the early 1990s the myth of the Turk as rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust was introduced. The Turkish president and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Turkish Jewish elites and their foreign allies, historians of the Ottoman Empire, major American Jewish organizations and the state of Israel—together, they promoted the myth of the virtuous, humanitarian Turk for audiences in Europe and North America. A resurrected version of the 1892 propaganda efforts, this campaign was a brew made of one part Armenian genocide denial and one part stale Jewish tropes of a Muslim-Jewish alliance against the Christian enemy. Promoted by the Quincentennial Foundation, diplomats, politicians, journalists, filmmakers, novelists, and historians, until the turn of the millennium it had all but drowned out critical countervoices in both national and international arenas. This is similar to how fifteenth- and sixteenth-century utopian Sephardic accounts worked to muffle lachrymose fifteenth-century Byzantine Greek (Romaniot) Jewish narratives. Or how the Sephardic 1892 celebrations silenced socialist and Zionist protestations at the turn of the twentieth century. Counternarratives failed to gain traction because they were inconvenient. The dominant narrative succeeded, especially in the modern period, because it allied with the foreign interests of Ottoman and later Turkish Muslims.

Beginning with the turn of the new millennium, major transformations in Turkey have led to new approaches to the past. Among these, is the rise of critical Jewish and Muslim voices and the breaking of taboos in Ottoman and Turkish studies, both within and outside of Turkey. These new appraisals demonstrate the continued relevance of the concepts of friend and foe and the triangulated relationship among the three groups, which have in turn contributed to realignments in narrating Muslim-Jewish-Christian relations. What they establish is that the only way for Jews in Turkey or those defending Jews living in Turkey to end old enmities and forge new friendships is to divest themselves of those old affective dispositions in favor of new stances.

To those who would object that Ottoman and Turkish Jews generally enjoyed a better life than their European counterparts, I would point to the consequences of making such a blanket assertion. In my view, the more significant question and the one worthier of analysis is how such a claim has been politicized, instrumentalized, and deployed by Jews and Muslims alike over the past century so as to counter recognition of the Armenian genocide. Without critically engaging with the political uses of history we cannot hope to compel historians to uphold the ethical standards of the profession. Nor can we aspire to bring about reconciliation between Jew and Armenian, forged when each sees the other as victim of a common experience, rather than competitor in a zero-sum game of recognition. 
Oct 16, 2016 Lebanon
Mandy Turner By :
Mandy Turner

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.