Much has been written on American Jewish views on Palestinian rights since 1967, yet few scholars have ever explored how American Jews engaged with Palestinian affairs in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian minority and the Palestinian refugee question was not something that liberal American Jewish groups could simply ignore, however. In fact, one of the most prominent American Jewish organizations even hired one an expert on Palestinian affairs to help it figure out how to best address the Palestinian refugee plight. That expert was Don Peretz, the first American to ever write a dissertation on the Palestinian refugee question. Peretz (1922-2017), is already known to MESA, not as a historical actor, but as a longtime professor of Middle East studies at SUNY-Binghamton who was among MESA’s founding members. As the paper shows, Peretz’s scholarly interest in the refugees stemmed from both his family background and his experience as an American Friends Service Committee volunteer to aid displaced Palestinians in 1949. In the 1950s, Peretz wrote his dissertation “Israel and the Palestine Arabs” at Columbia before being hired by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in 1956. There, Peretz helped the AJC prepare a new initiative to aid Palestinian refugees, which was quietly tabled amidst Israeli complaints. Israeli officials also pressured the AJC to fire Peretz; the organization eventually demoted Peretz and he subsequently left. This paper uses Peretz’s personal papers, Israeli diplomatic files, and AJC archives to outline Peretz’s trajectory and the AJC’s complicated relationship with the Palestinian refugee issue, which left it caught between Israeli pressure and a commitment to liberal universalist ideals that stood at the center of the AJC’s mission. While Peretz is just one individual, his story sheds light on the much broader Jewish political universe in which he operated. It shows how one American Jew understood the Palestinian refugee issue, how the American Jewish community responded to his attempts to objectively study and address the question, and how Israeli authorities, in turn, reacted to even limited American Jewish engagement with this sensitive matter. Though Peretz was never particularly well known within Israel or the American Jewish community, the way in which Peretz and his work was received unveils crucial dimensions of the Israeli-American Jewish relationship never before explored by historians.

More than six decades have passed since Turkey, as the first Muslim-majority and Middle Eastern country, recognized Israel in 1949. Turkish foreign policy was fundamentally shaped by bureaucratic cadres working under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1990s. The rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) starting from 2002 and regional developments until the Arab Spring led Turkey to reconfigure its foreign policy-making mechanism. New state institutions were added into decision-making. The relationship between those new institutions and omnipotent decision-makers, i.e. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the army, the Prime Ministry radically changed while the roles of the latter diminished. My paper discusses changing foreign policy-making process in Turkey. I will analyze the period between 2002 and 2014 with the help of the interviews that I conducted with retired Turkish diplomats who worked in Turkish missions in Israel and the Middle East desk of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The interview data will help us to understand how the Turkish diplomats perceive the change in decision-making mechanism and the role of diplomats in this environment. Accordingly, this paper will also give extended background on the relationship between classical diplomatic traditions and leader-focused, “fast-track diplomacy” practice.

This paper examines Israeli government policy towards the Nakba narrative over two distinct periods of Israeli history: the tenure of David Ben-Gurion as prime minister, from 1955 to 1963, and that of Benjamin Netanyahu starting in 2009. At the center of this riveting story is one document made up of several dozen pages aimed at crafting a pro-Israeli narrative of the Palestinian exodus during the 1948 War. It was Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion who first realized that the narrative of Palestinians being forcibly expelled by Jewish forces in 1948 was gaining traction around the world. To counter it, Ben-Gurion endeavored to construct an Israeli narrative of the Palestinian Nakba which centered on the premise that Palestinians left on their own accord during the war. If Israel did not bear any of the responsibility for their departure, the logic went, it could legitimately continue to block their return. To give an academic veneer to this story, Ben-Gurion contracted several prominent Israeli Middle Eastern scholars and instructed them to locate evidence that supported his premise. The scholars were given unparalleled access to the archives of the Israeli Intelligence community, as well as funds to conduct interviews with Palestinian leaders and refugees around the world. Indeed, the scholars were able to “prove” Ben-Gurion’s supposition and their study was meant to be leaked to the international press to ward off any pressure to return the refugees. Using correspondence pertaining to the writing of the study, as well as early drafts and oral interviews with the scholars who were involved in the project, I argue that the scholars went to great lengths to produce an academic study; however, they also willfully ignored evidence that did not support Ben-Gurion’s thesis (some of which was used decades later by the so-called “new historians”). In the second period surveyed in this paper, I examine the extensive bureaucratic and legal attempts to block access to the full text of Ben-Gurion’s commissioned study, efforts which culminated in an Israeli cabinet decision in February 2017 to block the specific file from being declassified indefinitely. All in all, I argue, Israel remains as invested in the narrative that Palestinians “chose” to leave as it was in the 1960s. Moreover, this analysis demonstrates that the state is willing to go to great lengths to prevent scholars from unearthing the “backstory” of how that narrative was originally crafted.