The Palestine Liberation Organization is a Palestinian nationalist political and militant organization founded in 1964 with the initial purpose of establishing Arab unity and statehood over the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, in opposition to the State of Israel. In 1993, alongside the Oslo I Accord, the PLO's aspiration for Arab statehood was revised to be specifically for the Palestinian territories under an Israeli occupation since the 1967 Arab–Israeli War.
Zionism is a nationalist movement that espouses the establishment of, and support for a homeland for the Jewish people centered in the area roughly corresponding to what is known in Jewish tradition as the Land of Israel on the basis of a long Jewish connection and attachment to that land.
Efraim Karsh is an Israeli–British historian who is the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Since 2013, he has served as professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University. He is also a principal research fellow and former director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank. He is a vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the traditional Israeli narrative of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Hamid Dabashi is an Iranian-American professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City.
Palestinian Jews or Jewish Palestinians were the Jewish inhabitants of the Palestine region prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Rashid Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He served as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies from 2002 until 2020, when he became co-editor with Sherene Seikaly.
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod was a Palestinian academic, characterised by Edward Said as "Palestine's foremost academic and intellectual" and by Rashid Khalidi as one of the first Arab-American scholars to have a really serious effect on the way the Middle East is portrayed in political science and in America". His student Deborah J. Gerner wrote that he "took on the challenge of interpreting U.S. politics and society for the Palestinian community as well as eloquently articulating Palestinian aspirations to the rest of the world."
Nadia Abu El-Haj is an American academic with a PhD in anthropology from Duke University. She is a professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society is a 2001 book by Nadia Abu El Haj based on her doctoral thesis for Duke University. The book has been praised by some scholars and criticised by others.
The intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine was the civil, political and armed struggle between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Yishuv during the British rule in Mandatory Palestine, beginning from the violent spillover of the Franco-Syrian War in 1920 and until the onset of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Muslim supporters of Israel refers to both Muslims and cultural Muslims who support the right to self-determination of the Jewish people and the likewise existence of a Jewish homeland in the Southern Levant, traditionally known as the Land of Israel and corresponding to the modern polity known as the State of Israel. Muslim supporters of the Israeli state are widely considered to be a rare phenomenon in light of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the larger Arab–Israeli conflict. Within the Muslim world, the legitimacy of the State of Israel has been challenged since its inception, and support for Israel's right to exist is a minority orientation. Pro-Israel Muslims have faced opposition from both moderate Muslims and Islamists, with many being subjected to harassment, threats and violence.
Nur ad-Din Masalha commonly known in English as Nur Masalha is a Palestinian writer, historian, and academic.
Yitzhak Reiter is an Israeli political scientist who is full professor of Islamic, Middle East and Israel Studies serving as the Head of Research Authority and Chair of Israel Studies at Ashkelon Academic College. He is also a senior researcher at both the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research and the Harry S. Truman Institute for Peace Research of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as Editor-In-Chief of Israel Academic Press.
Labor Zionism or socialist Zionism refers to the left-wing, socialist variation of Zionism. For many years, it was the most significant tendency among Zionists and Zionist organizations, and was seen as the Zionist sector of the historic Jewish labor movements of Eastern Europe and Central Europe, eventually developing local units in most countries with sizable Jewish populations. Unlike the "political Zionist" tendency founded by Theodor Herzl and advocated by Chaim Weizmann, Labor Zionists did not believe that a Jewish state would be created by simply appealing to the international community or to powerful nations such as the United Kingdom, Germany, or the former Ottoman Empire. Rather, they believed that a Jewish state could only be created through the efforts of the Jewish working class making aliyah to the Land of Israel and raising a country through the creation of a Labor Jewish society with rural kibbutzim and moshavim, and an urban Jewish Proletariat.
The New Historians are a loosely defined group of Israeli historians who have challenged traditional versions of Israeli history, including Israel's role in the 1948 Palestinian exodus and Arab willingness to discuss peace. The term was coined in 1988 by Benny Morris, one of the leading New Historians. According to Ethan Bronner of The New York Times, the New Historians have sought to advance the peace process in the region.
Avraham "Avi" Shlaim is an Israeli-British historian, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and fellow of the British Academy. He is one of Israel's New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel.
Palestinian nationalism is the national movement of the Palestinian people that espouses self-determination and sovereignty over the region of Palestine. Originally formed in opposition to Zionism, Palestinian nationalism later internationalized and attached itself to other ideologies; it has thus rejected the occupation of the Palestinian territories by the government of Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War. Palestinian nationalists often drawn upon broader political traditions in their ideology, examples being Arab socialism and ethnic nationalism in the context of Muslim religious nationalism. Related beliefs have shaped the government of Palestine and continue to do so.
Greater Palestine is an irredentist notion used by some Palestinian nationalists seeking to establish a Palestinian nation state over the whole of former Mandatory Palestine.
Zionism as settler colonialism is the paradigm that views Zionism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a form of settler colonialism. Patrick Wolfe, an influential theorist of settler colonial studies, considered Israel an example and discussed it in his essay "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native". Other scholars who have used a settler-colonial analysis of Israel/Palestine include Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, George Jabbour, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Baha Abu-Laban, Jamil Hilal, and Rosemary Sayigh.
Refqa Abu-Remaileh is a university teacher and author with a focus on Modern Arabic literature and film studies. Since 2020, she is associate professor in the department for Semitic and Arabic Studies at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. She is mainly known for her publications on the literature and films created by Palestinian people who often live as refugees and exiles, both in the Middle East and the world-wide Palestinian diaspora.
