Eleanor Roosevelt: supporting Zion, denying Palestine

dc.check.date10000-01-01
dc.check.embargoformatBoth hard copy thesis and e-thesisen
dc.check.entireThesisEntire Thesis Restricted
dc.check.infoIndefiniteen
dc.check.opt-outYesen
dc.check.reasonThis thesis is due for publication or the author is actively seeking to publish this materialen
dc.contributor.advisorRyan, Daviden
dc.contributor.authorKidd, Geraldine M.
dc.date.accessioned2015-11-27T10:15:05Z
dc.date.issued2015
dc.date.submitted2015
dc.description.abstractEleanor Roosevelt, as a renowned humanitarian, portrayed an inconsistency by supporting Zionist ambitions for a national homeland in Palestine while simultaneously ignoring the rights of the indigenous Palestinians. Because of this dichotomy, this dissertation explores her attitudes, her disposition and her position in light of the conflict in the region. It conveys how her particular character traits interplayed with the cultural influences prevalent in mid-century America and encouraged her empathy with the plight of European Jews after the Holocaust. As she evolved politically, initially under the tutelage of Franklin Roosevelt and latterly as a UN delegate, she outgrew the anti-Semitism of the period to become a committed Zionist. Judging the Palestinians as ‘primitives’ incapable of self-government and heartened by Jewish development, she supported the partition of Palestine in November 1947. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war the 800,000 Palestinian refugees encamped in neighbouring Arab states threatened to destabilise the region. Her solution was to discourage repatriation and to re-settle them in Iraq – a plan that directly contravened the principles of the December 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the UN committee she had chaired. No detailed work has been conducted on these aspects of Eleanor Roosevelt’s life; this dissertation reveals a complex person rather than a model of ‘humanitarianism’, and one whose activities cannot be so simply categorised. In the eight chapters that follow, her own thoughts are disclosed through her ‘My Day’ newspaper column, through letters to friends and to members of the public that petitioned her, through a scrutiny of her articles, books and autobiography. This information was attained as a result of archival research in the US and in The Netherlands and was considered against an extensive range of secondary literature. During the Cold War, to offset Soviet incursion, Eleanor Roosevelt promoted Jewish usurpation of Palestinian lands with equanimity in order that an industrious Western-style democracy would bring stability to the region. These events facilitated the exposure of a latent Orientalism and an imperialistic lien that fostered paternalism in a woman new to the nuances of international diplomacy.en
dc.description.statusNot peer revieweden
dc.description.versionAccepted Version
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationKidd, G. M. 2015. Eleanor Roosevelt: supporting Zion, denying Palestine. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/2110
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherUniversity College Corken
dc.rights© 2015, Geraldine M. Kidd.en
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/en
dc.subjectRoosevelten
dc.subjectUS foreign policyen
dc.subjectPalestineen
dc.subjectMiddle Easten
dc.subjectHuman rightsen
dc.subjectZionismen
dc.subjectOrientalismen
dc.thesis.opt-outtrue
dc.titleEleanor Roosevelt: supporting Zion, denying Palestineen
dc.typeDoctoral thesisen
dc.type.qualificationlevelDoctoralen
dc.type.qualificationnamePhD (Arts)en
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