The Papers

The first paper, on DP policy, I consider an introduction to all the others; it is scene setting, but not necessary to reading the rest.  It attempts to ask what the Allies wanted to do with Jews at the end of WWII.  The rest of the papers detail how the international community set up the framework of the conflict so that the conflict would continue.  They all follow the same format: a discussion of the policies applied in the interwar years, lessons learned from that experience, and then a comparison showing that they ignored the lessons they had just learned when applying solutions in the Middle East.  Of these, the first paper is about refugee policy, the second conceptions of sovereignty, the third is policy about Jerusalem, which is a specific application of the sovereignty issue, the next is about boundary-setting, fundamental to any state, the next about proposed economic structures, the next covers minority policy, the next on conceptions and uses of guilt in the first half of the twentieth century, and the next on the general problem of how responsive the international community ought to be to changing power dynamics.  Unfortunately, there are more papers to write that follow this pattern.  The last paper, on security, is meant to be something of a conclusion to the project. 

Starting with a paper on another aspect of refugee policy, I have begun to investigate how this thesis plays out in the 1950s.  The last of these, on stopping the world, is about the predictable results of long-term unpredictability.

Papers about the 1950s:

Keep the Fire’s Home Burning: Maintaining a Grievance in the Middle East with Help from the International Society, 1950-1956

Below is an earlier project, when I was just beginning to rethink the conflict.  The common thread with the papers is that the international community is treating the situation anomalously and creating an incentive to continue the conflict.  The introduction gives a sense of the data and the conclusions that I have drawn from it, while the spreadsheets are simply listings of the data themselves.  Twenty-one years of continuous data from the same sources investigating three different measures and with two approaches applied to each ought to give some sense of the situation, and it is consistent.