Concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the Netherlands still counts as one of the most pro-Israeli countries in Europe. The Dutch government recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination. But is spite of the fact that the government claims to be conducting a policy of 'evenhandedness' since the first half of the 1970s, practice shows that the Israeli right to self-determination is still being regarded as more important than that of the Palestinians. The Netherlands’ pro-Israeli Middle East-policy is often explained by referring tot WWII and continuing guilt feelings about the Holocaust. The question is whether feelings or remorse concerning the fact that there was no other Western-European country from which comparatively speaking so many Jews were transported to the Nazi extermination camps in the east offers an all-encompassing explanation, especially for the Dutch position nowadays as the distance towards the war past already counts seven decades.    

This research project for the first time aims to deliver an integral history about the Dutch position toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict starting with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and ending exactly one century later.  On the basis of archival and media research and interviews with concerned diplomats and politicians the project will not only deal with the question how the positions of both the government, parliament and society developed but will also explain which internal and external factors were responsible for that.   

Since the 1990s a rising number of academic accounts on remedies for serious and grave injustices have been published. Each year numerous new books and articles on tribunals, financial compensation, apologies and truth commissions find their way to academics from a broad range of disciplines that each from their own perspective deal with the question how to repair grave injustices from the past as effectively as possible. A serious problem however continues to be that broad interdisciplinary accounts that not only focus on either retributive measures (punishing the perpetrator) or restorative measures (restoring the victim) so far are not available or are completely outdated. 

The objective of this project is to develop a new extensive text book that critically assesses all available remedies for serious and grave injustices, ranging from criminal tribunals to financial compensation and commemorations. 
Differently than many other accounts in this field this book can be regarded as truly interdisciplinary in the sense that it puts the increasing use of instruments of transitional justice and their functioning in their proper legal, socio-political and historical contexts. Furthermore, the book not only wants to describe, but also wants to raise questions by alternating short historical overviews with in-depth articles on topical issues. The first part of the book examines specific difficulties and challenges that all available remedies are confronted with. (When do historical injustices become genocide? What to do with bystanders and victims that also have become perpetrators?) The second and third part of the book pay attention to both positive as well as well as negative aspects and characteristics of available instruments. (Politicization of tribunals; Balancing the rights of perpetrator and victim; Inevitability of apologies; Educational powers of statues and monuments from the ‘dark past’.) 
The book ends with four still pending cases and issues ranging from the effectiveness of the ICC to the continuing debate on the legacy of colonialism/slavery, the Armenian ‘genocide’ and the drama of Srebrenica. These case studies can be used as stepping stones for further discussion on the functioning of specific instruments and the opportunities to deal with delicate issues that either have reference to a distant or more recent past. 
Because of its all-encompassing and interdisciplinary character, its clear structure and its question raising approach this text book may be regarded as a perfect introduction to the topic of transitional justice for students from different academic domains. 

• dr. Lauren Gould