This submission for PhD by Publication includes two studies I conducted during 8 years of dedicated field research examining the US role in mediating the Arab-Israeli conflict. These studies developed from my collection of in-depth oral testimonies and were buttressed by my recovery and examination of troves of original documents that had been previously denied any public, much less academic, scrutiny. The scope of this qualitative research and my political and historical analysis of it resulted in two published books that chronicle the unsuccessful American efforts to negotiate Arab-Israeli peace agreements during the presidencies of William Clinton, George W. Bush, and the first term of Barack Obama. In order of publication, they are The Truth About Camp David (New York: Nation Books, 2004) and The Palestine Papers: The End of the Road? (London: Hesperus Press, 2011). The original academic contribution of both works was the presentation of new empirical evidence to advance understanding of how heavily biased American mediation severely damaged this diplomatic undertaking. Despite being a solidly pro-Israel country, the United States had previously been able to achieve some notable mediation successes when it made efforts to adopt an “even-handed” approach. Yet in the period covered by both my books, I demonstrated how top American mediators—comprised of mostly pro-Israel partisans—dismissed any pretext of impartiality, and in most instances even escalated their mediation bias. This behavior has exacerbated the Arab-Israeli conflict and made the stated aim of a comprehensive peace a very distant prospect. The Truth About Camp David was intended as a first rough draft of history. The title references the famous summit convened by President Clinton in July 2000 that failed to forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians and the overarching US-led “peace process” around it which contributed to the outbreak of the Second Intifada. The book also details the effort to conclude an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement at Geneva just months before, which also failed. My research advanced the thesis that both the Geneva and Camp David summits were historic miscarriages of diplomacy by my presentation of granular insider accounts revealing the intensity of American mediation bias. I also exposed the general disorganization of its negotiating team, a dysfunction that was largely unknown to the public prior to my book’s release. My primary purpose in writing The Truth About Camp David was thus to enable its reinterpretation by making public new evidence about this watershed moment and the period surrounding it. Relying primarily on oral history, I interviewed US, Arab, Israeli and European officials who were first-hand participants to collect their personal narratives. I sought to identify discrepancies in their accounts, and attempted to reconcile them through further interviews, document interrogation, and my own analysis. A key challenge of The Truth About Camp David was thus to weave a thread through the various testimonies and present, as best as I could, a coherent historical narrative. Following that, my aim was to have it reviewed and discussed among credible scholars and the foreign policy community. The testimonies within The Truth About Camp David directly challenged the official narrative and prevailing media orthodoxy at the time of Palestinian blame and Syrian intransigence. As a result, it helped reframe both political debate and academic scholarship concerning this crucial period of American diplomatic intervention. In 2006, The Truth About Camp David was translated into Arabic, giving its contents even greater reach. My 2011 book “The Palestine Papers: The End of the Road?” continued my earlier line of inquiry and was largely based on documents given to me the year prior, referred to as “The Palestine Papers,” the largest leak of confidential negotiating records in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Published in full by Al Jazeera Media Network, and in limited partnership with the UK’s Guardian newspaper, the content of the files generated headlines around the world from January 24-27, 2011. My additional research for The Palestine Papers was released in May 2011 as an anthology of select papers with my accompanying qualitative analysis and interpretation rather than a stylistic mediation critique. My aim in writing “The Palestine Papers: The End of the Road?” publication was to reach beyond Al Jazeera and Guardian audiences and equip interested scholars, practitioners, and skeptics with essential highlights from the papers as well as an analytical framework to put them into context. My research for The Palestine Papers sought to help reconcile the intervening gap of negotiating history from Truth About Camp David, following the trajectory of how Israelis and Palestinians alike had grown even more conditioned to expect if not rely upon biased American mediation that excessively tilts toward Israel. The Palestine Papers also catalogues for the first time the dynamics that enabled US negotiators to escalate its role from being the self-appointed judge of Palestinian negotiating behavior during the talks (in the Camp David 2000 era) to the unilateral “juror” of its final-status positions (evidenced by the presidencies of George W Bush and Barack Obama). A supplemental essay included in this submission analyzes an earlier diplomatic era to advance my thesis of how far US mediation bias has traveled since America assumed the principal negotiator role of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the early 1970’s. Indeed, based on the overarching narrative that evolve from both those publications and this essay, it is entirely predictable to see how America’s mediation posture has matured into the era of extreme pro-Israel bias that now characterizes the approach of the Trump Administration. I will interpret this collective diplomatic history using a range of multidisciplinary academic theories addressing biased mediation in international conflict resolution. Then, by drawing on the scholarship from my previous books, I will assess and critique the theoretical benefits of employing biased mediators in conflict resolution—as some prominent scholars have advocated for. By taking a fresh look at earlier Arab-Israeli negotiations led by Henry Kissinger under President’s Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, I am able to make even greater contrast to that very limited era when biased American mediation in the Arab-Israeli conflict appeared to yield limited success. The process of applying the scholarship of others against the knowledge created from my own published works enable me to demonstrate in this essay that the present day American negotiating bias toward Israel largely exceeds what the normative scholarship on mediation bias envisaged.

Israel’s spatial imaginary, as an unsettled project, is in constant negotiation, revision, and transmutation. At the heart of this dissertation is an ethnographic endeavor driven by a reading of the past, present, and future of political and religious struggles in Israel/Palestine through an analysis of actors, practices, and material palimpsests of three sites: a French Mandate building and former Syrian military base in the Golan Heights, turned into a boutique hotel by a security entrepreneur; the longed-for and imagined Third Temple in Jerusalem—today’s Temple Mount—a once marginal messianic scheme currently in revival; and the Jaffa Ottoman train station, reopened as a high-end shopping center and later as a light rail station. Through these sites, this dissertation asks how Israel understands itself vis-à-vis its narrative of a biblical past, its present ‘indigenous’ presence, and its vision or imaginaries of the future.

The administration of President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1992 saw several firsts in both American foreign policy towards the Middle East, and in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. At the beginning of the Bush Presidency, the intifada was raging in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and by the time it was over negotiations were already in progress for the most comprehensive agreement brokered in the history of the conflict to that point, the Oslo Accords. This paper will serve two purposes. First, it will delineate the relationships between the players in the Middle East and President Bush during the first year of his presidency. It will also explore his foreign policy towards the Middle East, and argue that it was the efforts of George H. W. Bush, and his diplomatic team that enabled the signing of the historic agreement at Oslo.

This thesis aims to examine both continuity and change in Egyptian foreign policy between 1970 and 1981. The overarching question of this work is: Why and how did President Sadat affect changes in foreign policy? More specifically, the thesis examines the evolution of Egyptian foreign policy in three concentric circles: the Superpowers, the Arab world, and Israel. The broader aim of the thesis is to provide a detailed study of Egyptian foreign policy in this period, which witnessed a multitude of watershed events. The topic is important because Egypt is a leading state in the Arab world, a core actor in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and a strategic ally of the superpowers during the Cold War. The thesis offers a detailed chronological account of Egyptian foreign policy during the 1970s. It advances a revisionist interpretation of the early Sadat years, arguing that there was much greater continuity with the foreign policy of Gamal Abdel-Nasser than is commonly believed. The account ends in 1981, with the assassination of Anwar Sadat and the succession of Hosni Mubarak. It is argued that Sadat not only managed to reverse Nasser’s radical path in foreign policy, but that he also succeeded in institutionalising his most significant policy changes: peace with Israel and the removal of Egypt from the Arab-Israeli conflict. The methodology of the thesis is principally empirical and qualitative in nature. The thesis is based on extensive archival research, recently declassified official documents, memoirs of policymakers in English and Arabic, and oral histories in the form of interviews and transcripts of discussions with former Egyptian policymakers.

This thesis will explore the origins of the U.S.-Israeli alliance during the Kennedy administration. John F. Kennedy provided Israel with the first U.S. weapons sale, issued the first informal security guarantee, and established the first joint security consultations between both nations. Ironically, Kennedy gave these concessions to contain Israel, not to establish closer relations. His primary objective for the Middle East was to improve U.S. relations with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, seeing Nasser as the path for gaining pro-American sentiments among the Arab population in the region to the detriment of the Soviets. Kennedy unintentionally laid the foundations of the U.S.-Israeli alliance while trying to restrain Israel, fearing Israeli actions would impede his plans. The Palestinian refugee issue, the regional arms race between Egypt and Israel, and Israel's secret nuclear weapons program became three pivotal concerns for Kennedy that unintentionally led to the U.S.-Israeli alliance. / by Michael Bocco. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, FL : 2008 Mode of access: World Wide Web.

<p>This dissertation examines the history of Jews in Iraq from 1951 to 1973 and their associations in diaspora thereafter. Iraqi Jews trace their community back 2500 years to the Babylonian exile and Jews played prominent roles in modern Iraqi politics, society, and culture until 1950-1951, when most Iraqi Jews left following a period of anti-Jewish hostility. The history of the remaining Jewish community after 1951 is an important case study of Jews in the Middle East (sometimes referred to as Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews) during a period when many such communities faced violence and displacement amidst the Arab-Israeli conflict. Their history also provides unique insights into changes in Iraq’s political culture under the various revolutionary regimes that followed the 1958 revolution. This dissertation shows that Jews in Iraq after 1951 successfully re-established a communal and social presence until the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of June 1967 prompted renewed anti-Jewish hostility. However, this dissertation argues that it was the Ba’th Party coup in July 1968 that led to the depopulation of the remaining Jewish community as the party manipulated anti-Israeli sentiment in its effort to consolidate power in Iraq, unleashing a deadly campaign of terror on innocent Jews.</p>

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Tez (Yüksek Lisans) - Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Uluslararası İlişkiler Anabilim Dalı, 2008. / Kaynakça var.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed February 11, 2010). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 681-712).

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