Hesitant Hegemon: The United States and the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse

Authors

  • Alan Dowty University of Calgary

Abstract

Since June, 2002, U.S. policy toward Israeli-Palestinian issues has been based on a call for a change of Palestinian leaders, but without an operational strategy for helping to bring such change about. This has left Arab-Israeli diplomacy where it was before 1993: without a credible Palestinian negotiating partner, which plays into the hands of the opponents of the peace process on both sides. What is needed is nothing less than a concerted effort of nation-building in the West Bank and Gaza, carried out in an international format under U.S. leadership. Trends in opinion on both sides are increasingly favorable to such an initiative.

Author Biography

Alan Dowty, University of Calgary

Alan Dowty holds the Kahanoff Chair in Israeli Studies at the University of Calgary, established in 2003. He has served since 1975 as Professor of Political Science, and (since 1987) as Fellow at the Kroc Institute of International Peace Studies, at the University of Notre Dame. Before that, he was for 12 years on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, during which time he also served as Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations and Chairman of the Department of International Relations. Professor Dowty is a graduate of Shimer College and the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1963. He has published widely on U.S. foreign policy, weapons of mass destruction, international freedom of movement, and international enforcement; most of his recent work is on the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli politics. Among his books are The Limits of American Isolation (New York University Press, 1971), Middle East Crisis (University of California Press, 1984), which won the Quincy Wright Award of the International Studies Association, Closed Borders: The Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement (Yale University Press, 1987), which was written as a Twentieth Century Fund Report, and The Jewish State: A Century Later (University of California Press, 1998, 2001), described by the Times Literary Supplement as "a careful, balanced, and often highly insightful analysis of the making and workings of Israeli democracy." An edited volume, Critical Problems in Israeli Society, will be published by Praeger in early 2004. He has published over 130 scholarly and popular articles and reviews, and has delivered over 500 public lectures in 17 countries. Currently he is working on two books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, one of them a basic classroom text on the conflict.

Downloads

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 4 (2004): Summer 2004

Section

Articles