A Critical View of the Scholarly Discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian Problem

Abstract

The scholarly discourse about Israel has at least two defects. First, although it is a colonial-settler state that has occupied the entirety of the former British Mandate of Palestine, it is still by and large treated as a “normal” state in the literature; and secondly, even the progressive scholars – who are very critical of Israel for is subjugation of Palestinian rights and massive breaches of human rights – have mostly confined their critique to the Palestinian territories occupied during the 1967 War. Therefore, the progressive scholarship ought to adopt a wider view of Israel’s irregular practices by extending its focus to the entirety of territories corresponding to the former Mandate of Palestine and the entirety of the history of the state of Israel in the context of its occupations, colonial policies, ethnic cleansing, population transfers, systematic racism and massive human rights violations against the Palestinian people. This “new” approach also requires, at least in the context of critical academics, an advocacy for multiple sanctions by international institutions, first and foremost, by the United Nations (UN), to be imposed against Israel as was the case with the Apartheid state of South Africa during the Cold War.