International law has played a part in the Arab-Israel dispute for over a hundred years. The disputes with Egypt, Jordan and Arab Gulf States have been settled and international law played its part. The Palestinians see themselves as the weaker party. They therefore demand that any agreement between the parties must reflect “international legitimacy” and that the relevant United Nations resolutions reflect such legitimacy. To reach agreement on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza both sides will have to make painful compromises. It is ironic that although international law has played a useful and positive part in all stages of the Arab-Israel conflict, these different interpretations of what is international law, in fact, are hindering the possibility of settling Israel-Palestinian issues.

The Palestinian Authority defines itself as the State of Palestine and has the outward organs of an independent State. The State of Palestine conducts foreign relations, albeit the Oslo accords prohibited the Palestinian authority from doing so. Some States will not recognise another State if it was created as a result of an illegal action. This may be relevant to the consideration of whether Palestine should be recognised as a State. It is a subject of controversy as to whether the State of Palestine has a sufficiently effective government and defined territory to be considered a State in accordance with classical international law definitions. It can be argued that the large number of States and international organisations that recognise and treat Palestine as a State overcomes such deficiencies. The issue of whether Palestine is, at present, a State remains controversial.

The period since the 1990s has proved, in an ironic way, the strength of Israel–US relations. In 1991, American president, George H. W. Bush, clashed with Israel, and since 1996, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had strained Israel–US relations in an unprecedented manner. In both cases, the constants that determined the course of the Israel–US relationship, religion, shared values, and history, proved to be stronger than any individual, regardless of their position. The period covered in this chapter was characterized by a close friendship and strategic partnership between the two nations. During those years, the two countries signed several memoranda of understanding which solidified the American commitment to Israel’s security and ensured its qualitative military edge, as well as expanding the cooperation on economic and cultural matters. The military-industrial cooperation as well as security cooperation between the two countries deepened. The growing Israeli attachment to American culture and values was another manifestation of the deepening relations between the two countries. The Israeli economy changed from socialist to neoliberal under the influence of American economic thinking. Neoconservatism spread across Israel’s political and intellectual elites through institutions and people, most notably Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israelis adopted many of the characteristics of American culture and economy, bringing their country closer to the United States in form and content. The ties between Israel and the Christian Zionist Evangelicals deepened as well. With the Evangelicals returning to the forefront of American politics since the mid-1970s, they became a major force in the support of Israel, a tendency that was especially encouraged by the right wing in Israel. Evangelical support for Israel has only increased during the 1990s and 2000s.

The introduction to A Battlefield of Memory provides the reader with an understanding of the societal importance of the foundational pasts under review while highlighting existing trends of denial. Readers are also familiarized with polls conducted among Palestinians and Israeli-Jews on attitudes toward the other’s foundational trauma and failed reconciliatory attempts, which shed light on the materialization of mnemonic delegitimization efforts. Interviews conducted with the Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian individuals responsible for these initiatives demonstrate that they have, ironically, been accused of the same perfidious conduct, namely “selling out to the enemy.” The introduction further provides a synopsis of scholarly approaches to collective memory theory and the key research methodologies that have been applied in the collection of primary source material. It is in this particular context that the reader is informed of important caveats that should be taken into account during the reading of this work. One such provision concerns this work’s simultaneous deliberation of the Holocaust and the Nakba, which does not mean equating them or promulgating a causal linkage. Such a conflation would not only be historically – and ethically – erroneous, but equally fail to recognize the divergence in historical culpability. Nevertheless, as this work illustrates, a more relational linkage does exist: as dominant national metanarratives, the Holocaust and the Nakba have bolstered exclusive identities within the two groups, both centering on unique claims of ongoing victimhood and loss and a consequential devaluation – if not denial – of the other’s catastrophe

The conclusion provides a comprehensive overview of the mnemonic plasticity and the societal usages of exclusionary in the two case studies under review. The conclusion emphasizes the different political frameworks that have driven the rise and perpetuation of the exclusionary narratives in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian society within the mnemonic realms reviewed while also highlighting the context-specific manifestations of the ensuing denial practices. Although this work does not propose a method of fusing the two foundational narratives or suggest ways in which the identified exclusionary narratives can be challenged and modified, the conclusion does set forth the practical and theoretical applications of this work, both in the Israeli-Palestinian arena and beyond. In addition to offering a practical applicability to non-regional scholarship and cross-cultural initiatives, it is the intent of this work to provide fertile ground for future scholarship on Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian mnemonic discourse in an effort to challenge the idealization of the past’s invocation and, instead, expose its neurasthenic and disabling effects in “service of the nation.” Concluding remarks to A Battlefield of Memory thus also address existing scholarly voids and potential future application of this work as a result of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

Through an analysis of the mnemonic activities of three leading civil society organizations – Baladna, ADRID, and Badil – Chapter 4 examines two collective mnemonic Nakba practices established in the wake of the Oslo Accords inside Israel and the West Bank: annual Nakba Day commemoration and collective returns to former Palestinian villages. By detailing the mnemonic symbolism and political goals of these commemorative activities, this chapter illustrates that the established forms of Nakba commemoration in the post-Oslo period articulate the urgent desire to further awareness of the Nakba among younger generations with the specific aim of encouraging the continuing struggle for the right of return (Arabic: haq al-ʻawdah). With reference to the organizations’ varying social and geographical focuses, this chapter also attests to the fact that Nakba mnemonics seek to resist ongoing marginalization while reflecting Palestinian communities’ contemporary political, economic, and cultural grievances and diverging historical mnemonic traditions. The theoretical focus on the confrontational and defensive nature of Nakba mnemonic practices does not denote that the exclusionary narrative unfolds overtly. The analyzed commemorative acts are not “sites” of a narrative collision. Nevertheless, the societal invocation of the Nakba as a “present continuous” – or an “ongoing Nakba” – does shed light on existing trends of marginalization discussed throughout the work, which hinge on a retaliatory screening out of any past suffering of the out-group.

After the close of the Cold War, a delegation of Israelis met with a delegation of Palestinians in Oslo, Norway, and hammered out a plan to bring peace between the two national communities. The result –– the Oslo Accords –– consisted of two parts: recognition of Israel by the Palestinians and recognition of a Palestinian nation by the Israelis; and a roadmap for step-by-step negotiations between the two sides for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and a final settlement of issues that had been outstanding since 1948 and 1967. Peace, however, was not to be for a variety of reasons: spoilers on both sides; publics that grew disenchanted with waiting or with only half a loaf; politicians who never rose to the occasion by becoming statesmen; the imbalance in power and negotiating positions; the passing of a singular window of opportunity that, over time, diminished to a vanishing point. The “era of Oslo” came to an end in 2020, when Donald Trump offered a “peace plan” that, in fact, gave the Israelis everything and the Palestinians nothing.

This chapter analyses a specific case study, in an effort to discover localised versions of moral remembrance. Whereas the European Balkan states have faced financial conditionalities during the various steps of the EU accession process, Israel and Palestine were much less pressured by the international community to exhibit an even nominal acceptance of a cosmopolitan history, through which global concerns and values become part of local experiences. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and in 1995, which projected an independent state of Palestine by 1999, were of great importance in leading to new memorialisation agendas, never discussed per se in any of the legal documents but indirectly promoted in multiple ways. Even in 2000, when it became clear that the Oslo Accords had failed, memorialisation practices, promoted by human rights institutions and funds, continued to blossom. This chapter deals with the ways in which the memorialisation agenda was promoted in Israel and Palestine, demonstrating how specific historical and political conditions affected it and shaped it in several ways.