On Collective Self-Determination and a Palestinian State
2 3 Acknowledgments This thesis is the product of the incredible education that I have received during my time at Claremont McKenna College. As a philosophic paper that has practical application to the world in which we live, I feel that it reflects the best of what makes this college so special. Not only did learn how to approach problems of any type or complexity by studying philosophy with under the careful eyes of caring professors, but I was able to go out into the world and learn from the source about issues of collective self-determination generally and the Palestinian case in particular. During my time here, I have received help from so many people in the CMC community, but there are a few people whose help has been invaluable. First, I would like to thank Professor Edward Haley, who has continually played an instrumental role in helping me find the resources to conduct the research that most interested me. His door has always been open and he has always greeting me with a smile and excitement about what I have been doing. Additionally, I would like to thank Professor Paul Hurley, whose guidance was instrumental on this project. He helped me find a topic that I enjoyed writing and gave me the tools to write it. Finally, I would like to thank my family, who I seldom have seen during my time here, but has understood my desire to explore and grow.
THE WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY
Israel enters a new peace process at a time of considerable short4erm safety and Iong4erm uncertainty. The social and demographic consequences of the Gulf War have not fully expressed themselves on the politics of the region, while the military role of Iraq in the future is hard to anticipate. Under such circumstances widely varying interpretations of Israel's security situation have emerged both in the U.S. and Israel,
Defending the Common Life: National-Defence After Rodin
abstract David Rodin has recently put forward a compelling but disturbing argument to the effect that the traditional justification in Just War Theory of a state's right to self-defence (what Rodin calls national-defence), which is derived from the legitimate case of personal self-defence, fails. He concludes that the only way to justify forceful responses to aggression against states by other states or non-state groups is by viewing the right to do so as falling under a form of law-enforcement, which in turn requires the existence of some overarching universal state. In this paper I argue that there exists a possible justification for national-defence that Rodin has overlooked due to an underlying commitment to what Charles Taylor calls ‘the primacy of rights thesis’. My claim is that a particular family of views that see human identity as being crucially bound up with society offers the resources to avoid the pitfalls that Rodin points out befall other attempts to justify national-defence.