Summary
Author of Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy (University of California Press, 1999), which argues that U.S. policy on Palestine has been made within an Israel-centered Frame of reference in which Palestinians are politically invisible and their 1948 dispossession is an unrecognizable episode (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 145-167).
Details
- The book grew out of Philip Mattar’s suggestion for an article on the mind-set, or “frame of reference”, from which policymakers approach the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; in the Acknowledgments Christison records that investigating the Bush-era mind-set led her back first to the Truman administration and then to still earlier periods in search of the frame’s origins (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 130-141).
- Her stated method is to analyse, for each U.S. administration since Woodrow Wilson’s, the president’s and key policymakers’ knowledge and preconceptions, the state of public knowledge and prevailing perceptions, and the ways policy was influenced by the conventional wisdom (lines 263-269).