Third Year Winner: ‘A land without people for a people without land’: Colonialist discourse in the framing of Israel’s formation among selected North American Newspapers, 1945-1949

HIST 3844, Liberation, Violence, and Reconstruction: A History of the Second World War and its Aftermath, 1944-1949. CD: Deb Neill.

Abstract

The essay offers a more-than-fitting response to a complex and challenging research project, that of employing contemporary newspapers as the primary source for an analysis of the prevailing range of attitudes to a specific historical event. In this case the author treats North American views of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 via the coverage in such newspapers at the Globe & Mail, the Toronto Daily Star, and the New York Times. It views these views through a critical anti-colonial lens. The essay is admirably clear about its theoretical and methodological bases and makes its case tellingly. It is particularly effective in highlighting the various shadings of opinion within the ideological field it discerns and accounts as shared amongst the sources cited. In foregrounding such variations the essay both strengthens its case and permits a particular past to speak