PREFACE On November 29, 2012, exactly sixty-five years after passing the Partition Plan for Palestine, the UN General Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority to recognize the State of Palestine within the 1967 borders as a non-member state with observer status.1 In his speech before the UN General Assembly, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas declared: “The moment has arrived for the world to say clearly: Enough of aggression, settlements and occupation.” That this bid for statehood comes on the heels of rising Israeli political and military intransigence and instability in the region served as a significant drive behind its adoption. I first traveled to Israel-Palestine near the end of the second Intifada. Looking only at the period since the start of my independent research on Palestinian citizens in this country, the military establishment of the State of Israel has initiated wars with intense bombardment of neighbouring populations, violated a range of prohibitions contained in international law including multiple ceasefires, and reinforced an illegal and debilitating land, air and sea blockade of the Palestinians in Gaza. This does not include the daily violations of Palestinian human rights, particularly in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, in the form of checkpoints, roadblocks, military raids and shootings, home demolitions, arrests, settlement building, collective punishment, population transfer and more. Throughout this aggression we have also seen the rise of a disturbing and increasingly normalized discourse in Israeli society depicting these offences as a dress rehearsal for a future war with Iran. Perhaps most troubling is that these devastating military initiatives were conducted without any significant public political uproar from global actors – not to mention from Jewish-Israeli society. Evidently, the world has not yet had enough. Today most observers appear more sympathetic 1 The bid for statehood at the United Nations was submitted by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to the organization in September 2011. Though the Palestinian political group Hamas initially rejected the initiative, it later voiced support for the statehood bid, arguing that it backs any political gain Abbas can achieve at the UN that does not cause “harm to the national Palestinian rights.” See Reuters, “Hamas lends support to Abbas’s UN statehood bid,” The Jerusalem Post, November 26, 2012, http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article .aspx?id=293489.