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This article ponders Israeli-Druze relations during Lebanon's 1983 War of the Mountain in light of derestricted sources pertaining to the Robert C. McFarlane mission in Lebanon. After the assassination of the Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel in September 1982 and the rise to the presidency of his brother Amine, Israel's relations with Lebanon's Christians soured. By contrast, Israel's connections with the Lebanese Druze intensified, and the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin threatened to establish a "Druze Canton/Israeli Protectorate" in the Shuf-Aley region. Ostensibly, Walid Jumblatt, the leader of the Druze community, allied himself during the Lebanese Civil War with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Syria. Untapped diplomatic documents show, however, that Jumblatt also courted Israel and developed ties with the Menachem Begin administration. Uri Lubrani, an Israeli official who recruited members of Israel's Druze community to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the 1950s, played an important role in developing Israel's ties with Jumblatt. In this paper, I flesh out the dynamics of Israel's discrete relations with Lebanon's Druze community and their implications on the trajectory of the Lebanese conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that after the failed Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the United States government has adopted a counterinsurgency model that promotes intra-Muslim civil wars, especially in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. It is obvious that the US is here recycling its experience of fighting wars by proxy in Latin America. In fighting communism, though, the US had the added advantage of dealing with a Western ideology. Islamic political ideology is a product of the global south and is still largely incomprehensible to US political and military leaders. If the US is using Islamist groups to fight other Islamist groups, then we are looking at a type of warfare that is more similar to the Algerian civil war than to Latin American wars. Of course Algeria of the 1990s is not the Middle East of the 21st century. This paper simply argues that the strategy that Algerian generals devised and implemented in the 1990s - namely the creation of Islamist groups to fight Islamist opposition - is now being adopted by the US administration to prosecute its wars in the Middle East. Washington has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight terrorism (US Undersecretary of State William Burns, cited in James 2002). This is a prescription for intra-Muslim civil war throughout the Middle East. Those involved would be seen as proxies tearing the Muslim world on behalf of Israel and the US (El Alaoui 2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Druze historiography in modern Lebanon has developed in leaps and bounds since the early 1980s and has burst the confines of the written text to resonate in poetic and popular literature. One of the best examples of the latter iszajal, specifically the work of Ḥamdān, considered the greatest of contemporary Lebanese Druze popular poets. This study is based on still un-consulted oral poetry, principally in the form of cassette recordings of Ḥamdān's poetry to be found in Druze villages in Israel and Lebanon. The diffusion of Druze narrative intozajalpoetry may be interpreted in two different ways: as a unique phenomenon of intertextuality between written texts and oral tradition, or as a manifestation of oral tradition. The present paper focuses on the correspondence between the contents of the written historiography and the ideological and historical meanings contained in Ḥamdān's poetry. Furthermore, it demonstrates how Ḥamdān employs his poetic talents to present the Druze narrative while simultaneously conducting a polemic against the Maronite establishment, historiography, and politics. The similarity in content between the written texts and the oral poetry assumes the existence of a dialog between the historiographical texts and the ongoing cultural and social process on the one hand and between the oral poetry and the written text on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the history of the relations between the Shi'ite and Druze communities in independent Lebanon. Suggesting that these have turned on the issue of secularism, it argues that the attitude towards the state and its political structure has always taken front stage. Three stages in the relationship can be discerned: mobilization, cooperation, and political dissension. The defeat of the Left and the failure of the secular project constituted a historical watershed in the political behavior of both communities, leading to a regression to primordial loyalties and exclusivism. While this development reflects structural weakness and vulnerability amongst the Druze, amongst the Shi'ites it is indicative of increasing communal consciousness, growing empowerment, and the adoption of new strategies in the attempt to change Lebanese political reality. At the same time, the historical circumstances the two communities have experienced within independent Lebanon demonstrates that the confessional system continues to serve as an obstacle to the creation of a coherent and crystallized political community in Lebanon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the global and structural forces facilitating the movement of female migrant domestic workers (FMDWs) from developing regions to southern Europe and the Levant. At the intersection of welfare state, childcare, gender and migration regimes, we can identify a cross-Mediterranean domestic worker model. It has important implications for the magnitude, composition (in terms of national background and live-in vs. live-out work), legal status and mobilization of the region's FMDWs. Their roles in global migration flows and national labour markets, as explained in the existing literature, are examined, followed by case comparison of Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon and Jordan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the relationship between memory, trauma and ethics in the Israeli war film Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008). I argue that Waltz with Bashir highlights a traumatic rupture between history and memory, and points to the decline of national collective memory in Israel. In the film, the war is represented as the private memory of a distinct social group-soldiers who fought in the First Lebanon War-and is no longer a collective memory, a lived and practised tradition that conditions Israeli society. The film is constructed as a kind of lieu de memoire that houses repressed traumatic events that have been denied entry into the nation's historical narrative, and which the protagonists feel duty bound to remember. This detachment from the national collective memory draws the film into a timeless world of dreams, hallucinations and fantasies. The film does not aspire to reveal the true details of the war. Rather, it is concerned with memory and the very process of remembering, as well as with the ethical questions that they pose to both the film's protagonists and its viewers. These questions are reflected both in the film's narrative and in its unique aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2006 Israel resumed military operations in the Gaza Strip and conducted a war in Lebanon following attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah, respectively. Due to the elections that had recently taken place in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, these events seem to support the argument that democratizing nations are particularly war-prone. Yet the dynamics this perspective identifies as dangerous were largely absent. To address this puzzle, this paper offers three arguments. First, democratization enhanced the power of groups openly hostile to Israel, increasing Israel's perception of threat. Second, democratization was threatening because it occurred within highly divided societies governed by weak state institutions that allowed radical groups to attain political power. Finally, Israel's response to the increased threat posed by these groups was ultimately counterproductive because it further eroded the capacity of the Palestinian and Lebanese governments, heightened polarization within both societies, and therefore exacerbated the same conditions that made democratization threatening to begin with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the months before the "Second Lebanon War" of 2006, Israeli policy did not prevent Hizbullah from taking actions that Israel considered highly unacceptable and ultimately resulted in the Israeli decision to conduct military operations against Hizbullah's power base in Lebanon. However, this does not vindicate the conventional wisdom that Israeli deterrence of Hizbullah failed in a simple, unambiguous fashion. Rather, Israeli deterrence signals were not clear and Hizbullah did not understand that it was crossing "red lines" that would result in Israel undertaking high-intensity military operations in Lebanon. This paper explores the deterrence relationship between Israel and Hizbullah, with particular reference to the 2006 conflict and its impact on that relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]