Don Peretz

The Impact of the Gulf War on Israeli and Palestinian Political Attitudes

Events in the Middle East and Europe during 1990-91 converged to bring what some Israelis perceived as a new era in the countrys domestic and foreign affairs. The influx of some 200,000 Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union threatened to alter the dimensions of Israels internal politics, while the Gulf war had a traumatic impact on its foreign and security policies. The war also raised hopes once again that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would finally be settled. What, then, was the impact of all these developments, against the background of the three-year-old intifada, on Israeli-Palestinian relations?

Palestinian Social Stratification: The Political Implications

During the interval of a generation, from the era of the Palestine Arab flight in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-48 until the end of the third round in June 1967, there was little discussion of Palestinians as a national entity or as a unified society. Rather, the prevailing image was of a dispersed refugee group. Since 1967 the concept of Palestinian nationalism and proposals for a Palestinian state have been revived. Although these ideas have received increasing international support, not only among the Arab states and their third world allies, but also among Israelis and their supporters, discussion tends toward abstractions with little consideration of the concrete realities of a prospective Palestinian state. Such theoretical themes as whether or not the state will be democratic or totalitarian, secular or Islamic, Marxist or bourgeois, are more debated than the structure of the society and the nature of its people. Yet it is the social structure of the society and the economic and social origins of its population rather than the present rhetoric or the proclaimed ideologies of todays leaders which are likely to determine the form of the state. The people who will live in Palestine, the occupations they pursue, the class structure they develop, and the social organisms they produce will be more influential in determining the kind of state than the ideologies now proclaimed by the wide range of political groups within the PLO. Indeed, in some other study it would be useful to examine some of these ideologies in the light of Palestinian historical experience and the structure of its society to determine their relevance and whether or not they, like many ideologies and political slogans of the past, are likely to become political ephemera.