Israel's Colonial Predicament

Master's Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - Region: Near East Near Orient grade: Distinction (Very good) King`s College London (King's College London) course: The Occupied Territories Since 1967 language: English abstract: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complicated and multi-dimensional conflict. In many contexts it is very hard if not impossible to assess the violence between Palestinian and Israeli society today without resorting to a developed theory rather than emotion. However many scholars and politicians hold the assumption that Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be properly understood with the frameworks categories and concepts employed to understand other countries and conflicts . We shall endeavour to counter such beliefs and develop exactly that a framework for analysing Israeli-Palestinian relations and conflict allowing us to put the conflict into perspective and further develop a structural investigation into the root causes of conflict. We will do this at the example of the Algerian uprising against French colonialism. To develop such a framework we will draw on classic texts such as the writings of Fanon and Memmi as well as works by writers such as Bregmann Barnett and Khader but also on others cross-referencing continuously between texts on colonialism Israel-Palestine and Algeria.As the title of this text indicates the author holds the view that the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories is essentially a colonial one. This is not to say that we should consider the Territories a colony. Algeria was not a colony. What we want to say is that we believe in the existence of a colonial relationship between the two populations based on the principles of colonialism.Why Algeria? We have chosen French colonialism in Algeria for the structural basis of our framework for a number of reasons. First because France like Israel denied the colonial char