Olivier Legrand

By Ellis Weintraub and Ximena Vega Several months ago, an Arab lawyer named Khaled Kasab Mahameed was heading to Ramallah with the head of a Holocaust survivor organization in order to make arrangements between the PLO and that organization. With the two men was a former PLO combatant who had spent three years in an Israeli jail. At the Qalandiya checkpoint, the soldiers held them up for questioning. When asked for his ID, Khaled surprised the soldier with a picture that he had slipped into his ID card - a picture of a Jew murdered in the Holocaust. The astounded soldier called over his fellow soldiers and officers, and they listened to Khaled explain his motivations and thoughts. The soldiers became deeply moved; one officer turned red in the face and told Khaled, “I have no gun.” “You see,” explained the middle-aged Khaled to us over a long afternoon, “this is the power of the Holocaust. A picture is truly worth a thousand words.”   Khaled decided to create a museum dedicated to […]

Sucharov M.1998. Regional Identity and the Sovereignty Principle: Explaining Israeli-Palestinian Peacemaking .Geopolitics, Vol.3(1),pp.177-196     Focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian case, I argue that the sense that a state has of its own sovereignty confers a 'national role conception' of the state, which in turn helps to determine its orientation toward territorial disputes. p.177   Role theory therefore predicts a state's foreign policy on the basis of its self-perceived function in the international system, combined with the behavior expected from it by other. p.177 State conceptions of sovereignty Sovereignty is both a crucial element in territorial conflict (and particularly in cases of contested self-determination) and an illustrative example of role in international politics. p.178   Sovereignty 'is a relational identity that exists only by virtue of intersubjective relationships at the systemic level. p.178   Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Went and Peter J. Katzenstein, […]

Yiftachel O. (2006), Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, Pennsylvania Press, p.368   The analysis presented in this book is guided by a critical, materialist perspective, which emphasized the interdependence of geographical, economic, cultural, and political processes. The emphasis is on political geography and political economy as key pillars of shaping ethnic relations and politics. The approach draws inspiration from neo-Gramscian perspective (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Hall 1992; Lustick 1993), from related critical approaches (see Lefebvre 1991; Said 1992; I.M. Young 2002), and from critical analysts in the social science mainly in geography, political science, and urban studies (see Friedmann 2002; Harvey 2001; Marcuse and Van Kempen 2000; Samaddar 2000; Sibley 1995). p.6       « I define ethnocracy as a particular regime type, frequently found on the world political map but rarely studied by social scientists and geographers. This regime facilitates […]