Avraham Sela

Sela completed his doctoral dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in July 1986.[3] Titled The Question of Palestine in the Inter-Arab System, from the Foundation of the Arab League until the Invasion of Palestine by the Arab Armies 1945–1948, it examined Arab diplomacy and inter-Arab politics during the period surrounding Israel's establishment.[3]

In September 2019, Sela presented research on the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — in Israeli-Jordanian relations from 1967 to 1988. The conference program listed the paper as The Option that Wasn't: Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank, 1967–1988.[1] On March 14, 2019, he also participated in a conference organized by INSS, Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, the Menahem Begin Heritage Center, and Israel's Foreign Ministry to mark forty years since the Israel-Egypt peace agreement, joining a session on Israel-Egypt relations from 1948 to 1973.[4]

The Decline of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Middle East Politics and the Quest for Regional Order was published by the State University of New York Press in 1998.[3] The work has been cited in support of the argument that Arab governments' increasing focus on national and regime interests reduced the Palestinian issue's centrality and made settlement and relations with Israel possible for some states.[2]

Sela co-authored The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence with Shaul Mishal, published by Columbia University Press in 2000.[5] A 2023 Combating Terrorism Center article cites Mishal and Sela's analysis that adjustment became a main feature of Hamas's political conduct.[6] The two scholars also co-authored the Hebrew-language book The Hamas Wind: Violence and Coexistence, published in 1999 by Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books.[7] They are additionally identified as the co-authors of Zman Hamas (Hamas Time), published by Yedioth Ahronoth, although the cited report does not give its publication date.[8]

In 1997, Sela co-edited The PLO and Israel: From Armed Conflict to Political Solution, 1964–1994 with Moshe Ma'oz, published by St. Martin's Press.[9] He also wrote the second-edition Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on the Palestine Liberation Organization, describing the PLO's foundation as the product of "two separate processes: an authentic rise of self-assertion and revolutionary trends among young Palestinian refugees, and inter-Arab circumstances."[10]

Sela co-edited The War of 1948: Representations of Israeli and Palestinian Memories and Narratives with Alon Kadish, published by Indiana University Press in 2016.[11] The volume examines Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian memories and narratives through subjects including television, museums, urban memory, literature, visual art, and Palestinian collective memory, highlighting disputes over identity, legitimacy, justice, and representations of self and other.[11] A Jerusalem Post opinion article identifies Sela, Kadish, and Arnon Golan as the scholars behind The Occupation of Lod, July 1948 and says the book reconstructs events from IDF telegrams and reports, Lydda Military Command documents, and personal accounts by Jewish and Arab participants.[12]

Sela was among the contributors to Nonstate Actors in Intrastate Conflicts (2013), edited by Dan Miodownik and Oren Barak. The volume examines the roles external nonstate actors play in internal conflicts through case studies including Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Turkey.[13] He also contributed a chapter titled "Israeli historiography of the 1948 War" to Shared Histories: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue, edited by Paul Scham, Walid Salem, and Benjamin Pogrund and published by Left Coast Press in 2005.[14]

A sustained thread running through Sela's career is the historical study of Israel's War of Independence from the perspectives of multiple participants. His essay on Arab governments' diplomacy and policy toward Palestine, covering the period from the end of World War II through the war, observes that earlier literature on Israel's establishment concentrated mainly on diplomatic and military dimensions and "hardly addresses Arab diplomacy and responses to the emerging new world order led by the United States and the Soviet Union."[3]

Sela's survey of Arab historiography examines, country by country, Arab authors who wrote about the Arab loss of Palestine. The Center for Israel Education states that the survey was reprinted with his permission.[15]

Beyond his work on the War of Independence, Sela has been cited among scholars who assign considerable weight to the first intifada and the transformations it produced within Palestinian society and the Palestinian national movement.[16]

Sela's article "Politics, Identity and Peacemaking: The Arab Discourse on Peace with Israel in the 1990s" appeared in Israel Studies, volume 10, issue 2 (2005), pages 15–71. It was assigned in a university syllabus under a class section on the peace process and the Oslo era.[17]

He published the 2019 Hebrew-language piece "The crisis in the Palestinian national movement, and the day after" in Hazman Hazeh, a journal of the Van Leer Institute. The article has been cited in later analysis of Palestinian political dynamics and the effects of the first intifada.[16]