Historians of Judaism often call the first Islamic centuries the “gaonic period.” The term alludes to the gaonic yeshivot – scholastic academies in Abbasid and Buyid Baghdad, as well as in Palestine, whose leaders helped to canonize the Babylonian Talmud. However, this essay argues that these yeshivot were not commensurate across regions. I revisit the early history of the Palestinian yeshiva and conclude that it developed long after its Iraqi counterparts, likely sometime in the tenth century. The essay closes by considering briefly how this thesis might help us begin to better understand the Palestinian rabbinic culture that preceded the yeshiva–a distinct form of rabbinic Judaism that thrived in Byzantine and Umayyad Palestine during the fifth to eighth centuries, before giving way to a new brand of gaonic rabbinism imported from the Abbasid heartlands.

As 2001 began, Australia’s relationship with West Asia could be characterised as one between perfect strangers. Despite regular military forays into the region, largely in support of the USA, and a burgeoning commercial relationship, the region had never been considered part of Australia’s primary area of strategic interest nor had political relations between the Australian Government and its regional counterparts ever really moved beyond occasional visits and diplomatic courtesies. Meanwhile, to the extent that Australia entered the consciousness of regional elites and the broader population, it was mainly as a supplier of primary products, such as sheep and wheat, and as a steadfast, if somewhat lower-profile, ally of the USA. In effect, there was a degree of mutual, if largely happy, ambivalence between Australia and the region.

This chapter investigates ‘forbidden’ knowledge, examining the structures and processes that impede the production of knowledge, and how such knowledge can threaten powerful interests mediated through institutions and sociopolitical and religious cultures. This can entail both formal and informal processes including self-censorship, peer review, internal university restrictions, and external sociopolitical restrictions. The chapter considers the construct of ‘forbidden’ knowledge, recognising it as more than gaps in knowledge, and also in terms of structural and sociopolitical processes, consolidating this knowledge as too dangerous or ‘taboo’ to produce. Drawing on empirical accounts of the daily lived experiences of academics operating within this terrain, four areas of forbidden knowledge – ‘bioethics, psychology, and genetics’; ‘Palestine’; ‘gender and sexuality; and ‘race, religion, security, and extremism’ are explored. In addition, questions of power, agency, positionality, and sociopolitical and historical contexts are critically elucidated.

The preface opens the book with a commentary on the organic relationship shared between the United Nations Organization and the question of Palestine. It does so through a brief discussion of the 1948 Reparations Case, in which the International Court of Justice affirmed the international legal personality of the United Nations arising from the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Mediator for Palestine

The introduction provides the book’s framework. The UN is regarded as the guardian of the rules-based international legal order, but it is often not faithful in discharging this role. Building on the Third World Approaches to International Law school of thought, the chapter argues the existence of ‘international legal subalternity’ – a condition that marks the relationship of the global south with international law from its modern European origins to the present day. This condition is marked by the UN’s repeated representation of international law as a means through for historically disenfranchised peoples to achieve justice, but which is perpetually kept out of reach. International legal subalternity is the result of the creation and use of international law as a tool by hegemonic power, the manifestation of which is the production and reproduction of global subaltern underclasses who have little or no say in the substantive formation or application of the law that purports to govern them. The UN’s management of the question of Palestine most aptly illustrates this, as a critical examination of key moments from 1947 to the present will demonstrate.

This chapter concludes this book by summarizing its principal findings and situating them in the larger context of the questions posed at the outset. Rather than the international rule of law ordering principle, it is the international rule by law principle that finds express and sustained illustration in the UN’s management of the question of Palestine. This phenomenon is rooted in the clash between hegemonic and subaltern interests that produce and reproduce situations in which the promise of international law is repeatedly presented as the basis of international legitimacy and peaceful coexistence among a citizenry of formally equal nation-states, but which relegates non-self-governing peoples and other subaltern societies to partial and qualified access in the system. The result is the presence of international legal subalternity as a long-range condition, a fixed feature of the international order with wider relevance for a variety of other subaltern actors and regions.

This last chapter presents Baeck’s imperial imagination in the postwar era. Baeck developed a bifocal view of Jewish history in this period, describing it as an ellipse circling around two poles. Whereas earlier these were, for example, the Northern and Southern kingdoms or Sepharad and Ashkenaz, in the postwar era Baeck locates the two centers in the United States and Palestine, and later the young state of Israel. In this new constellation, both needed each other. American Jews needed the State of Israel in order to be reminded of their particularity; the State of Israel needed American Jews to serve as a guard against nationalism and deification of the state. The Cold War brought with it new geopolitical constellations. Baeck imagined the United States as Atlas carrying the world. It played an important role not only in fostering Jewish life, but in serving as a bulwark against communism, and leading the United Nations in a more religious direction.

Edward Said was known not only for his literary studies, his strong support for Palestinian identity, and his influential political commentary but for his criticism of Orientalist scholarship and its impact on the image of Muslims maintain by many Westerners. But for all his criticism of those scholars, it may be argued, however, that Said missed much about their work that should have been addressed. In this chapter, we consider the Orientalist romanticization of the Arabic language, their dismissal of actual Islamic law court decisions, and their emphasis on Arab stasis rather than their social fluidity and creativeness. If we paint a fuller picture of the Orientalists’ scholarship, we can understand both the strengths and weakness not only of their approach to the cultures of the region but where Said himself was able or unable to fulfill his own professed goals.

The second chapter provides a brief description of the Sunni political Islam as an ideology with a focus on its historical provenances of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its diffusion to the broader MENA region. This chapter gives an overview of the psycho-biographies of individual Muslim Brotherhood leaders: Mohamed Morsi, Rashid Ghannouchi, and Khaled Mashal. The authors discuss the operational code analysis results and deliberate on what kind of generic foreign policy behavior and strategies we should expect from the Sunni political Islamist leaders. The chapter also sheds light on what these results and strategies mean for MENA politics. The chapter concludes that despite the conventional portrayal of Muslim Brotherhood leadership, these leaders resort to negotiation and cooperation to settle their differences, hence the best way to approach them is to engage in a Rousseauvian assurance game that emphasizes international social cooperation.

In the first half of the thirteenth century, Mongol forces launched raids into areas that are now parts of Iraq and Syria. Raids turned into conquest with Hülegü’s movement into the region in the mid-1250s. Baghdad was taken in 1258, and by spring 1260, much of Syria was overrun by Mongol forces. A small Mongol army, however, was defeated by the Mamluks from Egypt in northern Palestine later that year. After a clear border was established along the Euphrates, for sixty years the Mamluks and Ilkhanids struggled for regional supremacy in major battles, frontier warfare, and diplomatic démarches. Around 1320, this conflict ended after negotiations, with peace agreements in place until the breakup of the Ilkhanate after 1335. Although ultimately unsuccessful in conquering lands beyond Iraq, the impact of the Mongols on greater Syria, Egypt, and Arabia was significant, not only militarily, but in the realm of demography, culture, and economy.

This chapter approaches the historical entanglement of Jewish and Palestinian diasporas as one structured by incommensurability and inextricability. It takes up the writings of Stuart Hall on the diaspora concept to consider the limits and possibilities of framing this entanglement relationally. In his own method of argumentation, Hall repeatedly held his notion of diaspora at arm’s length from a set of historical, political, and cultural concerns regarding Palestine and Israel. The chapter argues that Hall’s pattern of relational refusal precludes a more fulsome engagement with diasporic relationality, and seeks to stretch Hall’s own insights beyond their own self-imposed limitations.