Lessons

Lesson 1: State-Building—Confronting Ideology and the Challenge of Modernization. Introduces the concepts of political development and modernization, and the challenges they pose to state-building in the contemporary Middle East.
Lesson 2: The Development and Impact of Patrimonial Patterns in Middle Eastern Society. Discusses the development of patrimonialism and its impact on political and social development in Islamic society.
Lesson 3: The Impact of Contemporary Patrimonial Leadership in the Middle East. Discusses the impact on regional development of several influential twentieth-century Middle Eastern leaders. Also examines governmental institutions that exert major influences on the pace of modernization.
Lesson 4: The History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Examines Israeli and Palestinian state formation through discussion of the influence of Zionism and the consequent rise of Islamism, the impact of the United States and the international community on these processes, and the progress of peace talks.
Lesson 5: From Politics to War—The Growing Influence of the Gulf States. Discusses the vital role of the oil-producing states in regional political and economic development. Examines the causes of the Iran-Iraq war and the first Persian Gulf War, as well as the devastating impact of these conflicts on the socioeconomic fabric of the protagonists’ societies.
Midterm Exam (covers Lessons 1–5)
Lesson 6: An Historical Overview of the Middle East. Provides a broad sweep of regional history from biblical times to the origins and development of the Zionist movement and its impact on early twentieth-century Palestine.
Lesson 7: The British Mandate and the Decline of Palestine. Discusses the political jockeying of the main protagonists both before and during the British mandate, as the Ottomans, Zionists, Arabs, and British vied for control of Palestine.
Lesson 8: The Creation of the State of Israel and the Arab-Israeli Wars. Explores the growing influence and organizational capabilities of the Zionist movement at the expense of Palestinian Arab interests, culminating in the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Also examines the two major Arab-Israeli conflicts of the late 1940s and early 1950s: the first Arab-Israeli war and the Suez crisis.
Lesson 9: The Growth of Arab Nationalism and Its Impact on Israeli State-Building. Discusses the spread of Nasserism and its impact on the growth of Arab and Palestinian nationalism in the face of Israeli expansionism in the 1960s and 1970s. Examines the increasing interest of such outside actors as the United States in the search for peace among the protagonists.
Lesson 10: From Lebanon to Camp David and Back Again: The Peace Accords and Israeli Interventionism. Examines the impact of the Lebanese civil war on Lebanese-Palestinian relations, along with the PLO movement's continued quest for a state and its effect on the Camp David peace process. It also discusses the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the changing U.S. policy toward the PLO. The lesson concludes with a discussion of the first and second intifadas and the first Persian Gulf War.
Lesson 11: The Oslo Accords and Beyond: Arab-Israeli Negotiations. Discusses various attempts at negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace, from Oslo to the Wye River Memorandum. It also examines the impact of recent Israeli administrations on the peace talks, as well as the impact of the Iraq War on such efforts.
Final Exam (covers Lessons 6–11)

Center for Distance and Independent Study Political Science 2520: Middle Eastern Politics

Lessons

Center for Distance and Independent Study
Political Science 2520: Middle Eastern Politics