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In this article, Isaac argues that since 1948, Israel's control of water resources has been the result of military actions that forced between 700,000 and 800,000 Palestinians into exile and claimed the most fertile part of the disputed territory for the state. It thereby paved the way for subsequent military occupation. Isaac maintains that the Israeli occupation has violated the Palestinian right to the equitable and reasonable utilization of shared water resources. In his view, from the end of the 1967 war, Israel initiated its occupation of the territories of Palestine and quickly imposed military order with a view to achieving full control over land and water resources. To Isaac, these military orders served to dissolve the pre-1967 legal systems and which consisted of Ottoman, British, Jordanian (West Bank) and Egyptian (Gaza Strip) laws. This critical review article concentrates on the concept of justice tourism as a response to these assumed Israeli violations of Palestinian rights to equitable and reasonable utilization of shared water resources. The article sheds light on why and how justice tourism conceivably contributes to the Palestine host communities' transformation and hence to the development of higher level self-consciousness about their rights as "a sovereign nation".
MULTIFILE
The premise for this paper is that tourism scholars researching in Israel and Palestine are, in effect, actors in the geopolitical landscape of the Holy Land. Political tourism is a significant factor in how the Israel–Palestine geopolitical conflict is represented. The current paper provides an analysis of how tourism academics address the situation. A research team of Israeli, Palestinian and a third country origins collaborated to produce a narrative synthesis by systematically reviewing 35 academic papers selected through defined criteria. This approach minimized bias and aimed for analytical robustness and validity. Two main conclusions are derived from the analysis. First, papers tend to focus on the social, touristic and religious aspects of tourism not on the core issues of the geopolitical conflict. Second, the works did not contribute to dialogue between parties but reinforced separateness thus reflecting the political conflict.
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