Palestine, Prime Minsters, Presidents, and Projects

I have been thinking for a while about maybe doing a thesis on the relationship between the president and prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, going back to the period when Abbas was appointed as prime minister to Arafat's president. I could do some kind of comparative analysis based on the literature on other semi-presidential polities and make observations on how the office-holders have or have not managed to leverage the power of their offices.

Having come up with this vague idea some time ago, I then got a bit bored with it, and started thinking if there is a so-what quality to the relationship between two offices in a non-state that governs no territory and is in any case on the brink of collapse. It seems maybe a bit like doing research on the deck-chair arrangement patterns on the Titanic as compared to those favoured on other cruise liners, to get all analogical.

The topic has started to interest me a bit more recently, as the tensions between Hamas and Fatah have escalated (as you know, the Palestinian prime minister is from Hamas and the president from Fatah). Last week there was the ghoulish episode of a prominent Fatah leader's children being murdered by gunmen outside their school. On Thursday, there seems to have been an attempt on the life of Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister, with Haniyeh publicly accusing the senior Fatah figure Mohammed Dahlan of ordering the attack. Today President Mahmoud Abbas has called for joint elections to the parliament and presidency to resolve the political deadlock. Presumably he is assuming that in simultanaeous election the same side will win both elections, and hoping that he has the prestige to win these elections.

So - it is like the internal politics of the Palestinians, and the struggle between the competing legitimacies of the parliament and president is actually important to what is going on, with the failure to reconcile the prerogatives of the presidential and prime-ministerial offices a key driver of the malaise of Palestinian politics. Maybe it is time to dig up those books on semi-presidentialism.

You Cannot Stand In The Way Of Progress

Sorry, not much action here lately. I blame Tunisia. It seems to be an interesting country. Like many places, its leadership in the 19th century attempted a defensive modernisation in reaction to increasing European encroachments. Like almost all such places that tried this (eg Turkey, Egypt, Hawaii, China, etc.) this process failed alarmingly, leaving the country as a protectorate of the French.

My learned colleague Nicholas Whyte is discussing a similar (fictional) process in his review of The Curse of Peladon, in which a backward planet is being invited to join The Federation, over opposition from traditionalists who fear the planet's way of life will be eliminated. My recollection of the story is that it shows a very old school binary idea of things - tradition = bad, modernity & progress = good. It helps that the Federation in the story is shown as being fundamentally benign, and unlike certain of today's international institutions is not proposing hare-brained one-size-fits-all transformations of the Peladonese society.

Nicholas mentions how certain commentators have seen this story as some kind of parable for the British entry into the then Common Market (in much the same way that it's sequel is seen as having parallels with mid-70s industrial unrest in the UK). That got me thinking about how during the Thatcher era and beyond, the worst thing anyone can say about some EU politician is that they are a "Federalist". I wonder if this fear of any thing that smacks of being a Federation is some kind of relic of previous viewings of Blake's 7?

I love conferences

I love conferences. You get to hang out with important people and feel like you are part of some great scholarly community, even if you are a just a master student who lurks at the back and says nothing. And you get to go to receptions with free bouze - it's like being an undergraduate again.

I am going to the Royal Irish Academy conference on The Rise of Asia in International Affairs this coming friday. Spy school have not really covered this area so much, so I am looking forward to the RIA filling in the gaps.

The RIA are also hosting the annual Graduate Research Seminar in International Relations on thursday. This event features people talking about the exciting research they have undertaken in the field. My hope is that it will help to trigger research ideas in my own mind.

Look forward to write-ups of these events, hopefully less interminable than the account of my last conference attended.

Markus Wolf

Markus Wolf, the chief spy of the DDR for most of its existence, has died. Despite his many successes, he was unable to prevent the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of his country, though he had by then retired. Wolf's memoirs make fascinating, if self-serving reading. Among his agency's many achievements were running an agent in the immediate circle of the West German chancellor and recruiting senior figures in West German counter-intelligence.

BBC obituary

Guardian obituary

Recently in Spy School

"Recently" in this context is rather relative.

A couple of Fridays back we had a double lecture on Development. The lecturer (OK, let's call him Peadar then, affecting an impertinent familiarity) talked about how the development project burst into being after the second world war, summoned into existence by Truman's inauguration speech (I'm guessing in 1949 rather than when he succeeded Roosevelt in '45). The context was interesting - both post war optimism (the sense that if we stuffed the Nazis then anything is possible) and Cold War paranoia (making sure the Soviets do not lure people to their kind of development).

The theoretical underpinnings of the development project were discussed. Marx was mentioned in passing, in the context of his blandly confident sense of capitalism as being a progressive force in the world (although one he questioned when looking at Ireland and India). I think maybe Marx is more important in this context for the idea that societies can and do change - when you have that intellectual possibility you are in a position to start thinking of fundamentally changing society. Other intellectual stars of the pre-Development theoretical views of the world are Max Weber (protestant work ethic and all that) and Emile Durkheim, with the latter having apparently more or less invented the idea of the "modern" and "traditional" as two radically different things, thereby launching the Modernist project; development comes to be seen as a process of moving from traditional to modern.

Moving on from the precursors, we get actual rogues gallery of early development theorists, who seem to all come at it from different directions but share a vision of development as being about modernisation: Talcott Parsons (sociology), Walt Rostow (economist), David McClelland (psychology), & Seymour Lipset (political science). McClelland is one of the more entertaining of these, with his idea that reading children stories about self-reliant heroes will make them become entrepreneurs in later life. They all think in terms of a natural progression of societies from backward traditionalism into something akin to the USA in the 1950s. The development project is seen as being about helping the backward societies along this road a bit more quickly than they could manage on their own.

An influential reaction to the broadly liberal and pro-capitalist development model emerged in the dependency theory model especially popular in Latin America. This to some extent took Marxist ideas but left out his bland confidence in the progressive transformative power of capitalism in the non-west. Instead the dependency theorists talk about transnational exploitation, of a world "core" and of nations of the "periphery". The latter are seen as being in a dependent relationship to the former, with people in the periphery being at the end of a chain of exploitation from the rulers of the core. Whereas the modernisation theorists saw engagement in the world economy as straightforwardly positive, dependency theorists saw international trade as exploitative, and argued that peripheral countries should detach themselves from the world economy; they were however a bit vague as to what this actually meant, not really going so far as to suggest that peripheral states should actually adopt fully autarkic policies.

In practice, modernisation and dependency theory turned out to be a bit rubbish. Modernisation theory could not cope with the emergence of countries with economies that were obviously growing, but which were also seeing increasing inequality and poverty. Dependency theory suffered from a lack of any real policy programme and a tendency to encourage fatalism about the unjust nature of the world. AG Frank, one of the leading dependency theorists, subsequently claimed that it had failed empirically. One might add that it is simplistic to talk of peripheral countries being dependent on the core, when all countries are joined in a complex web of interdependence, with even the richest being dependent on trade. Our lecturer, though, is an unreconstructed leftist and felt that dependency theory still has much in the way of positive results, even though it failed to deliver on economic development. These would be in the areas of political mobilisation and the development of civil society in the "periphery".

So now there is a theoretical void at the centre of the development project, and two positions have emerged which implicitly or explicitly challenge the conceptual validity of development. Postmodernists lambaste the development project as a typically totalising Enlightenment grand narrative, an attempt to coerce the world into one way of living. The proponents of neo-liberalism, meanwhile, seem to give up development as a heroic project, instead suggesting that the untrammelled workings of the market will lead to the most optimal of outcomes.

First they came for the niqab wearers

I'm learning German. In German class last saturday, we discussed the veil (der Kopftuch). This seems to have become something of an issue in Germany, following a ruling by the Constitutional Court that the federal government has no right to ban teachers from wearing the hijab. Apparently some opinion poll has shown that a large majority of Germans think that women teachers should not be allowed to wear the hijab.

Our discussion was conducted in the halting style you would expect with people for whom German is the second, third or fourth language, and I suppose given our lack of vocabulary and skill with the language it is not surprising that discussion tended towards cliché and unsophisticated argument. Still, I was struck by how many of my classmates were taken with the idea that immigrants into a country should conform to the mores of the host culture. I find this kind of idea disturbing. To go further, I think it dangerous, and I feel that thinking along these lines is the first step on the road to Fascism.

Fascism is an oft bandied word, and saying that any kind of thinking is akin to it is alarming, if not alarmist. What do I mean? Simply this - that in any country, there is no monolithic host culture which immigrants can be required to adopt. I can't speak for everyone who reads this, but I do not live a life that conforms to the majority culture of my country. My fear is that any attempt to impose "our" culture on immigrants leads to a narrow definition of what that culture is, and that after immigrants have been obliged to love it or leave it the culture cops turn on other people who do not match up to their constructed view of how to live Our Way Of Life. I reckon the gays would probably be the second or third up against the wall, but it would not be long before general low level deviance would be having its collar felt. I would be having to give up my nerd hobbies and instead have no option but to take up an interest in GAA and Coldplay. The horror.

Nice work if you can get it

I have a new hero: Stephen McVeigh of the University of Swansea, who is delivering a paper on The Galactic Way of War: Warfare in the ‘Star Wars’ Universeon the wednesday at the annual British International Studies Association conference, taking place next month in Cork*. Christ, I could write that in my sleep, talking about pre-Westphalian models of political organisation coexisting with oddly modern ideas of ideology. I must get my act together and submit them a paper on the International Relations of Star Trek: The Next Generation for next year.

You are probably too late to book for this event, as they are being a bit Realist about reservation deadlines. And it costs a fortune as well.

*Cork is not actually in Britain.

Pattern Variables

Spy School has made me feel old. In Development last friday, the lecturer was going on about yer man Talcott Parsons and his pattern variables. I had a wonderful flashback to hearing all about these in the first ever Sociology lecture I went to back when I was an undergraduate. Then I realised that this would have been 20 years ago last October.

I still do not know what pattern variables are.

Britain goes veil mad

Following on from Jack Straw's intervention on women who wear veils that obscure their faces, it seems like Britain has become obsessed with the question of what women do or do not, should or should not wear on their heads. It all seems a bit prurient.

One thing that often strikes me about those propounding an anti-Muslim discourse is the idea that They (Muslim Men) oppress "their" women. That the same people who say this are quite happy to tell women what they can and cannot wear is an irony that never seems to strike them.

Anyway, I was very taken by a piece by Zaiba Malik that appeared in The Guardian on Tuesday: 'Even other Muslims turn and look at me' In this, the journalist, a Muslim woman, wears the full-on niqab for the first time in her life. She finds it dehumanising, but is struck by how it makes her a magnet for pervs and racists.

and what did I learn this week in spy school?

not much... I missed the Development class, in which the lecturer talked a bit more about the magic of academia, ending apparently in a ta-daa moment where everything suddenly fell into place and became relevant to studying Development's theory and practice.

In the International Political Economy class the lecturer talked a bit about the development of the world economy, not really saying anything you would not already know. More interesting, but also more annoying, were the questions from some of my classmates. These cast the world trading system as Bad, and the lecturer as a representative thereof, so there was a lot of "but what about...?" style questions, which maybe missed the point that we were there to learn the history of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and not engage in a debate about whether trade was classic or dud. The interesting bit was maybe in looking at how for all that arguments broadly in favour of free trade between countries have essentially won the battle where it matters, they have not really won hearts and minds, particularly of graduate students who may well find themselves making decisions in the future. So perhaps if all that Kuhnian paradigm shift stuff has anything going for it we could be going back to the 1930s at some point over the next ten years or so.

The Final Programme?

Hunting Monsters is under threat. One of my pals has started a new International Relations weblog, and invited me (and many other people) to write for it. It is called The Dublin School of International Relations, and has only one post on it, not by me. It would be churlish not to sign up for that project, but I suspect that there is only so much IR stuff I can write, meaning that Hunting Monsters may fall even more on the back burner. Ah, such is life.

Conference: Palestine as 'State of Exception': a Global Paradigm (part three)

You may recall part one and part two.

Gargi Bhattacharyya talked about how the Palestinian issue has become an emblematic one for anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist people, with it often being said that it is the defining struggle of our time. While this has obvious benefits, it has the downside that the Palestinians themselves get reduced to ciphers, with their actual struggle rendered almost invisible by its appropriation by the opponents of the current world system. There is also the problem that although the Palestinian struggle is currently chic, it may soon go out of fashion, leaving the Palestinians high and dry. As someone with a sceptical view of the anti-globalisation movement, I found myself wondering if the Palestinians conscription by the that lot alienates support from middle-of-the-road people; the dispossession of the Palestinians has little or nothing to do with neo-liberalism, so bundling the two things together produces unlikely bedfellows.

Dr. Bhattacharyya also talked about race, and about how the West has in the context of the War on Terror moved towards seeing Muslims as an existential threat to Our Way Of Life; this is akin to how the Israeli establishment paints the Palestinians. The UK authorities, meanwhile, has moved away from multicultural models of integration for immigrants, seeing these as promoting self-segregation, and instead have moved towards a new model of authoritarian assimilation, with those clinging to other ways of life seen as hating freedom.

Bobby Sayyid talked about the resonance Palestine has for Muslims throughout the world. He finds this resonance interesting and not readily explainable – Muslims who have never been to Palestine or met anyone who was there still feel a great personal attachment to the issue. Dr. Sayyid also talked about how this general Muslim engagement with the Palestinian struggle can be somewhat abstracted and removed from the real-life experience of that people. Instead, the Palestinian issue becomes a metaphor for all Muslims who are struggling against oppression. Sayyid felt that without the engagement of Muslims world-wide with Palestine, the issue would have lost its salience.

I did find myself wondering how the Palestinian issue would resonate with people who are themselves being colonised by Muslims – the good folk of West Papua, say. If the struggle of the Palestinians has become a metaphor not of resistance against oppression but of Muslim resistance against repression of Islam then maybe the Palestinian struggle could lose its cachet with the kind of anti-globalisation people Dr. Bhattacharyya was talking about, if bolshy Muslims and anti-globalisation ever become decoupled.

Conor McCarthy was the last speaker, talking about Edward Said and his theories of the state. A lot of this was situated in a world of literary critical theory with which I am not that familiar, so I struggled a bit, with the lateness of the hour not helping. The paper name-checked such exciting characters as Gramsci, Foucault, and Poulantzas. Dr. McCarthy talked about how Said looked at the Zionist project from the point of view of those on whom it impacted, and on how he looked at the genealogy of Zionism as a concept. Beyond that, Said was perturbed by the disconnection between Israeli and Palestinian self-narratives.

General Points on the Conference

One thing that really struck me about this conference was the absence of any real Palestinian voice or any sense of Palestinian agency. Dr. Lentin had in her opening remarks to the conference discussed how this was going to be a conference about Palestinians in which their voices would be articulate. In practice, though the papers seemed to be all about things being done to the Palestinians or things other people were doing purportedly on their behalf.

Another feature was the absence of Israeli voices. Dr Lentin pointed out in her closing remarks that three of the academics who scheduled to speak were Israeli citizens, but these were either Palestinian Israelis or dissidents like Ilan Pappe whose opinions are completely beyond the pale of normal Israeli opinion. If the conference had lived up to its billing as a vehicle for articulating and analysing Palestinian viewpoints, then the marginalisation of any kind of Israeli voice would make more sense. In practice, though, large parts of the conference were devoted to things the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, and the lack of any attempt to see things from their point of view made them seem disembodied and ahistorical, a decontextualised and inhuman force rather than the human citizens of a country.

In some ways, though, the above is just nitpicking on my part, and should not be taken as indicating any overall lack of satisfaction with the conference proceedings.

(ends)

Conference: Palestine as 'State of Exception': a Global Paradigm (part two)

Remember part one?

On the second day, Raef Zreik opened by talking about the constitutional setup in Israel. Legal theory imagines other countries as moving from a chaotic revolutionary situation where all metaphorical gloves are off to one bound by constitutional niceties, while in Israel the revolutionary state of emergency has remained in being while the forms of constitutionality have been adopted. He also mentioned an odd feature of the country – that the state notionally exists not just for the benefit of its actual inhabitants, but also for all Jews everywhere, giving Israel a notional constituency several times larger than its actual citizenry.

Honaida Ghanim began with an account of a named Palestinian woman who found herself giving birth at an Israeli army checkpoint, losing the child. She discussed the incident in terms of it being almost the perfect atrocity, and then went on to talk about the Palestinians living in a situation of endlessly terminable bare life, subject to total biological control by the Israeli powers that be. More sociology.

Laleh Khalili discussed the relationship of Hezbollah with the Palestinian issue. This was for me one of the most interesting of all the papers delivered at the conference, perhaps because it was more to do with politics than sociology. Dr. Khalili talked about how Hezbollah have painted themselves as the champions of the Palestinians, taking numerous symbolic and actual acts in their favour. However, she cast the relationship as being not entirely symbiotic, with Hezbollah being prepared to subordinate Palestinian concerns to the party’s own interests. Thus, Hezbollah organised commemorations of the Sabra & Shatila massacres that focussed on the small number of Lebanese Shia Muslims killed, obscuring the far greater number of Palestinians killed. For Lebanese political reasons, Hezbollah invited speakers from the Amal party to speak at the commemorations, despite its role in killing numerous Palestinians during the camps war of the mid-1980s. Dr. Khalili went on to talk about how Hezbollah’s symbolic attachment to Jerusalem obscures the city’s status as an actually existing place in which real people struggle to maintain their lives, echoing themes covered in my beloved’s unpublished MA thesis.

Ronit Lentin then talked about Zochrot, this being an Israeli Jewish organisation which seeks to commemorate the Palestinian Nakba (the Nakba being the Arab language term for catastrophe used to denote the founding of the state of Israel and the associated dispossession and exiling of numerous Palestinians). Zochrot organises trips for Israeli Jews to places that were once Palestinian towns or villages. They place signs in Arabic and Hebrew showing the localities’ old names and arrange for the places’ former inhabitants to talk of their dispossession. Lentin was somewhat critical of this fascinating organisation, partly because their trips can often traumatise Palestinians who must re-experience the Nakba for them, and partly because Zochrot proletarianises the Palestinian victims of the Nakba by making them performers of misery recreation for Zochrot tourists. More crucial, however, was Lentin’s disdain for Zochrot’s politics, or Zochrot’s de facto lack of politics. They commemorate the Nakba, but they are a bit vague on whether they are calling for the Nakba’s victims (and descendants) to be able to return to the country in which they used to live. Meh, that seems like ultra-leftism to me – what Zochrot does is more important than what they call for.

During lunch, they showed two short films by Tamar Goldschmidt, apparently downloadable from http://www.mahsanmilim.com - Abu Dis Report and Qalandiya Report. These are both about crossings through the Wall that Palestinians use if they are coming to Jerusalem. Abu Dis is a surreal spot – it is a section of wall standing on its own, with fencing on either side of it, fencing that has had holes knocked through it so that people can climb through it and enter Jerusalem without showing papers to Israeli soldiers. The film is an endless succession of people climbing through the gap, carrying an endless variety of stuff to or from Jerusalem. The surrealism of the whole thing is accentuated by the musical accompaniment – an early Zionist song about the wonderful country they were going to build in Palestine. Qalandiya Report showed people moving through the checkpoint at Qalandiya, the entry point to Jerusalem from Ramallah and the northern West Bank. The passage looked amazingly chaotic, with enormous numbers of people having to crowd through a handful of turnstiles as they waved their papers at Israel conscripts. However, the piece lost some of its power with me because it was filmed about a year before I was in Palestine. The Qalandiya checkpoint had changed greatly by then (and has probably changed even more since), becoming much less chaotic and more efficient, though still somewhere that anyone interested in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should visit.

One odd thing for me with both these films and the earlier use by Professor Goldberg of an image of an Israeli settlement on a West Bank hilltop was the nostalgia they evoked – while intended as images of oppression, they reminded me of places I had been to on holidays.

What I learned this week in Spy School, 29/9/2006

Spy School is back! Oh the excitement, the fun of trekking out to DCU to learn things about stuff.

This week I had two classes. One was notionally on the theory and practice of Development, though it was actually an overview of how the social science produces knowledge. The lecturer talked about the academic community, the importance of academia's independence from vested interests, and the role of theory in shaping understanding of the world. Deadly stuff, though over pints afterwards some felt that maybe he could have cut most of this out and got us straight into a discussion of where Development is at these days; it was even argued that academic theorising is responsible for all the ills of the world.

The second class was on International Political Economy - the study of how the world economy works and stuff, though more from a world politics point of view than a rigourously economic one. This class was introductory, outlining some of the general theories in the area (basically, Realism/Nationalism/Mercantilism, Liberalism, and Marxism (with its friends Critical Theory, Dependency Theory, Structuralism, et al.); attentive readers will already have some understanding of this) before going on to say that no one pays any of them that much attention any more. He then bombed through some theoretical discussions of why countries trade, beginning with Adam Smith's theory of absolute advantage and David Ricardo's comparative advantage. The more sophisticated Hecksher-Ohlin theory was then outlined, with this adding in factors of production costs, a massive leap from Smith-Ricardo models; unfortunately, empirical evidence has not been favourable to its predictions that countries like the USA with lots of capital and not so much labour would exclusively export industrial manufactures and exclusively import commodity goods. There was then some theory about intra-industry trade in advanced markets with monopolistic competition between companies manufacturing differentiated products, but this seemed a bit too woolly to count as a full on theory.

Habermas: To arms!

You will be familiar with Jurgen Habermas, the last of the Frankfurt School gang. You will be familiar with how they produced all that is bad in the world, including the film of V For Vendetta.

Momus reports that Habermas' latest project is to call for the transformation of the EU into a European state, complete with a fully functional European army (word) It is the only way to contain American militarism, contends Habermas.

The discussion on Click Opera that follows is interesting, apart from the tiresome coda on sharia law.

Conference: Palestine as ‘State of Exception’: a Global Paradigm (part one)

I went to this conference recently in Trinity College Dublin’s Institute for International Integration Studies. In her introductory comments, Ronit Lentin of IIIS and TCD talked about Edward Said’s ideas regarding the distinctness of Palestinian history as distinct to that of the Arab world generally – the Palestinian experience of oppression and rolling dispossession has created a uniquely Palestinian identity. The idea behind this conference was to discuss the Palestinian experience in the context of ideas around state security regimes developed by Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben. The term ‘state of exception’ is a literal translation of the German Ausnahmezustand, or state of emergency; the Palestinian identity has been shaped by near continuous experience of such a state of exception. However, the rest of us are seeing states of emergency becoming institutionalised as part of the War on Terror – as rights are taken away, the state of exception becomes increasingly unexceptional.

Usual caveats apply – my description of what the speakers had to say relies on my scratchy notes and what my faulty memory recalls about the event. I therefore apologise in advance to any of the speakers who stumble across what I have written and find that I have completely misrepresented them.

The conference’s first proper speaker was David Theo Goldberg. He talked about how Palestinian racial identities have been constructed, more in terms of how Zionist settlers and later Israelis defined “Palestinians” rather than how the locals defined themselves. Early ideas of the Arabs of Palestine as people over whom a benign hegemony could be asserted evaporated in the face of determined (if ineffectual) resistance to the Zionist project, leading to a switch in which the Palestinians were recast as an endlessly demonized and bestial Other. That leads to the Palestinians being in practice stripped of any rights they might expect to have in a normal liberal democratic polity, reduced to the status of what Agamben would call homo sacer, a state of bare life where one exists merely at the whim of the dominant party. This was all pretty interesting, but a bit heavy on the sociology for me. And I did think that maybe Professor Goldberg was going a bit overboard when he said that in the current War on Terror, with the continuous erosion of civil liberties, we are all Palestinians, or potential Palestinians; I don’t think there is any real likelihood of some cockfarmer putting a wall and a load of checkpoints between me and where my parents live.

Ilan Pappe spoke next. While not exactly a household name, he is one of the most important of the Israeli “New Historians”. He talked about the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing that the Palestinians have had to contend with since the fighting that erupted in the last months of the Mandate. In the past, such things were swept under the carpet within Israel, but more recently the past expulsion of Palestinians has come to be seen as a necessary part of the creation of the Israeli state. More recently, some Israelis have become exercised by the fear that Palestinians will outbreed them and become a majority in the territory west of the Jordan river – the so-called “demographic problem”. Dr. Pappe ties this fear to the essentially unquestioned idea with Israel – that the less Palestinians there are within the country’s borders, the better; Right and Left differ only in how they propose to advance this goal – by expulsion or by redrawing borders.

Dr. Pappe then went on to talk about how the Palestinians have responded to their rolling dispossession. The first strategy was based on nationalism and attempting to cast their struggle as one of anti-colonialism. This was the approach of Yasser Arafat, Fatah, and the mainstream of the PLO. It led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the limited self-rule of pockets of Palestinian territory, but it has proved to be a failure. Dr. Pappe sees its failure as being intrinsic to its status as a nationalist discourse – the world, seeing a conflict between a Palestinian nationalism and an Israeli nationalism attempted to broker a kind of compromise between them, but one based on partition that had no viability (I am not entirely clear whether Dr Pappe is talking of the non-viability of partition based on creating a Palestinian state on all of the territory in Mandate Palestine beyond Israel’s pre-1967 borders, of if he means the attempts by Clinton et al. to railroad Arafat into an agreement that sees Israel gobble up all of Jerusalem and large swathes of the West Bank. Dr Pappe would probably feel that the problem with either of these is that they do nothing for the victims of past expulsions – those rotting in refugee camps in Lebanon are not going to be returning).

The second strategy of the Palestinians has been to rely on Islamism as mobilising strategy. While this is still ongoing, Dr Pappe does not see it as having any great likelihood of bringing about an improvement in the situation. He therefore turns to the third strategy, one only now emerging – one of post-nationalism where human rights rather than religious zeal or national rights would be the focus of demands for a halt to the dispossession of Palestinians and a reversal of past expulsions. Dr Pappe talks of campaigning for the emergence of a single state west of the Jordan River, where no religious, national, or ethnic group enjoys any kind of ascendancy over any other.

Now, this might sound utopian, but Dr Pappe sees this as a more credible goal to strive for than something based on national or religious particularism. I do not know if I agree with him on this, but the failure of the other strategies to yield any positive results is striking. Dr Pappe notes how ethnic cleansing is now widely seen as an unacceptable act. The US State Department’s own mission statement stating an uncompromising commitment to the absolute right of refugees to return to their countries of origin, so it’s not like advocating the right of return for Palestinian refugees should be seen as some kind of ultra-leftist madness.

(part two to follow shortly)

Edge of Darkness

My old college pal David Landy is organising a conference: PALESTINE AS ‘STATE OF EXCEPTION ': A GLOBAL PARADIGM.

One amusing feature of this is that it stars Ilan Pappe, an Israeli academic. Pappe has played a leading role in advocating a boycott of Israeli academia similar to that which apartheid era South Africa was subjected. So I should really boycott any talk he delivers, but instead I am signing up to hear him speak. Here is a great short article by Pappe on the Israeli legal system: 'In Court'.

I think the conference title draws on the ideas of political and social scientists like Giorgio Agamben, who talk about how it is the ability of states to suspend the normal niceties of constutional rule that defines them. Malcolm Bull reviewed Agamben's States of Exception in the LRB earlier this year: 'States don’t really mind their citizens dying (provided they don’t all do it at once): they just don’t like anyone else to kill them'.

(You'll need to be a subscriber of the London Review of Books to read those linked to articles in full)

History Today

I was bemused by an article David Cannadine wrote for the BBC News website, "A Tale of Two Historians". He talks about two well-known but now deceased historians, A.J.P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. He mentioned how since their deaths, the reputation of one has soared and the other nose-dived. But bizarrely, it seems to be Taylor's stock which has fallen while suddenly everyone apparently loves Trevor-Roper.

The contention is interesting, but Mr Cannadine has little to say in favour of Trevor-Roper, apart from claiming that his collected letters are a cracking read. Big mickey, especially given that they seem to largely deal with the puerile university politics that kept him away from producing anything to rival Taylor's works.

Er, not that I am actually that familiar with Taylor's oeuvre in its totality. Years and years ago I read an entertaining book about British foreign policy dissidents, but the one big book of Taylor's I have read is his Origins of the Second World War. That is a cracker, a book covering interstate politics in Europe from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second, with the sense of pace and drama that makes it a page turner to rival the most exciting thriller.

One very odd thing about that book is the way people keep saying that it is some kind of apologia for Hitler. This is bollocks, basically. Taylor treats Hitler as an actual person pursuing goals rather than the kind of dehistoricised monster some are more comfortable with. And the focus of the book is on relations between the states of Europe, meaning that their internal affairs are largely outside its concern. That said, Taylor is quite clear on how Kristalnacht and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia were important events, in that they made the British public realise that Hitler really was a maniac and not someone who could be appeased. Taylor is quite clear on Hitler's boundless appetite, even if he does not believe that Der Fuhrer came into office in 1933 planning to launch a European war in September 1939.

Mmmm. I think I will add The Struggle for Mastery in Europe and Taylor's book about the Habsburgs to my mountain of unread books.

Virtual War

I hope eventually to trundle along through the magic of IR theory, bringing you eventually to the magic of post-modernism in so far as it relates to my discicpline. In the meantime, ILX brought me to an article by Eyal Weizman called Israeli Military Using Post-Structuralism as “Operational Theory” which originally appeared in the journal Radical Philosophy. I'm not saying this article is brilliant or anything (I've only barely skimmed it myself), but it seems illustrative of the type.

Voodoo Economics

I have been reading this book Silent Revolution: The Rise of Market Economics in Latin America by Duncan Green. It's about how Latin America, hit by the debt crisis of the early 1980s, found itself caught in the embrace of neo-liberal economics. The book is interesting enough, and I may talk about it at more length when I eventually tell you everything you need to know about Latin America.

Green's thesis is that neo-liberalism is BAD. Fair enough, it's not like the region has done particularly well since it embraced the creed. However, he displays a less than total understanding of basic economics, which undermines his credibility when he scoves at the discipline in general or attempts to draw conclusions about particular economic models. The error that most struck me was when he attempted to explain Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage by giving an example of a situation where the different concept of absolute advantage applies. The error is not fatal to his analysis, but it did make me wonder what other clunkers had crept in there. So I am somewhat more sceptical about his overall conclusions.