Peaceful and Violent Separatism in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, 1861–1993

This chapter begins with looking at the Israeli–Palestinian conflict since the 1980s. It discusses Israel's coercive response to Palestinians' secessionist moment, the first intifada. The chapter then investigates how security fears sprung from its rough neighborhood, featuring a history of warfare with its neighbors, and its essentializing of Palestinian nationalism, subsuming it under an “Arab” identity. This chapter also reviews two of the handful of completely peaceful major secessions to occur in the twentieth century: one in 1993 that dissolved Czechoslovakia into its constituent units, and the other in 1905 that separated Norway and Sweden. It illustrates how the muted external security implications of Norwegian and Slovak separatism facilitated their respective host states peacefully negotiating their exit from the polity. The chapter next examines the American Civil War, even though it neither took place in the twentieth century, nor was it, strictly speaking, ethnic in nature.