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This article explores the concept of time among combat reservists in the Israel Defense Forces. Most ethnographic studies of temporality tend to focus on how time's passage is measured or 'reckoned' within varying cultural contexts. In contrast, this article looks to the more corporeal and embodied aspects of the human experience of time. It argues that within Israeli military contexts time is experienced as a near material-like substance that imposes itself – in a very physical way – upon the bodies of combat soldiers. In this sense, the 'military timescape' is experienced as a sort of malleable substance that the physical donning of a military uniform can transcend, alter, and refract. A detailed ethnographic exploration of time's corporeal dimensions offers anthropologists a temporal, as opposed to a spatial, paradigm for engaging with some of the unique sociocultural phenomena of militarism and of military reserve service more specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a half century of urban transformation in one relatively minor town in Palestine, situated on a major road, under two regimes: the late Ottoman Empire and British Mandate. The changes in Ludd/Lydda are examined through the planning prism. Given the lack of any systematic, official planning in that town before World War I, an attempt is made to reconstruct such a plan out of available documents. Both the real plan one produced by the British colonial mind and the imagined one—produced so to speak by the Indigenous inhabitants as reconstructed here—serve as case study for tracing how the town's Palestinian inhabitants coped with different regimes until their town was occupied by the Israeli military and they became refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Less armed parties resort to tunnel warfare to reduce military and technological superiority gap with their adversaries. The use of tunnels has prominently emerged since the 1970s by nationalist liberation movements, factions, and other non-governmental forces. Palestinian resistance in Gaza has benefited from this tactic to enhance its military capabilities against Zionist occupation. Over the past two decades, Israel has made destroying Palestinian resistance tunnels a primary objective in its comprehensive wars in the Gaza Strip. This study explores tunnel warfare in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by tracing the historical development of Gaza tunnels, their types, effectiveness, and military operations, and understanding Israeli military strategy towards these tunnels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Since the Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023, the Israeli military has launched an assault in the Gaza Strip, which included over 12,000 targets struck and over 25,000 tons of incendiary munitions used by 2 November 2023. The objectives of this study include: (1) the descriptive and inferential spatial analysis of damage to critical civilian infrastructure (health, education, and water facilities) across the Gaza Strip during the first phase of the military campaign, defined as 7 October to 22 November 2023 and (2) the analysis of damage clustering around critical civilian infrastructure to explore broader questions about Israel's adherence to International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Methods: We applied multi-temporal coherent change detection on Copernicus Sentinel 1-A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery to detect signals indicative of damage to the built environment through 22 November 2023. Specific locations of health, education, and water facilities were delineated using open-source building footprint and cross-checked with geocoded data from OCHA, OpenStreetMap, and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. We then assessed the retrieval of damage at and with close proximity to sites of health, education, and water infrastructure in addition to designated evacuation corridors and civilian protection zones. The Global Moran's I autocorrelation inference statistic was used to determine whether health, education, and water facility infrastructure damage was spatially random or clustered. Results: During the period under investigation, in the entire Gaza Strip, 60.8% (n = 59) of health, 68.2% (n = 324) of education, and 42.1% (n = 64) of water facilities sustained infrastructure damage. Furthermore, 35.1% (n = 34) of health, 40.2% (n = 191) of education, and 36.8% (n = 56) of water facilities were functionally destroyed. Applying the Global Moran's I spatial inference statistic to facilities demonstrated a high degree of damage clustering for all three types of critical civilian infrastructure, with Z-scores indicating < 1% likelihood of cluster damage occurring by random chance. Conclusion: Spatial statistical analysis suggests widespread damage to critical civilian infrastructure that should have been provided protection under IHL. These findings raise serious allegations about the violation of IHL, especially in light of Israeli officials' statements explicitly inciting violence and displacement and multiple widely reported acts of collective punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many conflicts in Western Asia over the past 75 years left devastation and refugees and the last war on the Gaza Strip is a good example. Our interests as environmentalists are the effects of conflict (including active conflict, pre-conflict activities, and post-conflict impact). Here, we review the impacts on the Palestinian environment of activities since 1948 (establishment of the state of Israel): pre-conflict (such as training sites, military bases, military installation), during conflicts (use of different munitions, pollution, altering habitats), and post-conflicts (unexploded munitions, ground water pollution, devastated landscape). The data show significant environmental damage that operates short-term and long-term. More more studies are needed and encouraged, but the data do suggest that environment and human health impacts need to be highlighted in public discourse and remedial actions must be taken in protracted conflict situations like the Palestine/Israel conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevailing notion suggests a universal or human civilization, positing all as subsets of a shared human experience. This article critiques this perspective, arguing that the contemporary concept of human civilization is predominantly synonymous with Western civilization. This article will elucidate its argument by drawing upon the insights of Western scholars in the field of civilizational studies. Subsequently, it will undertake a critical assessment and examination of the Western discourse, evaluating its outcomes as evidenced in contemporary foreign policy shaped by the historical backdrop of colonialism. The article uses direct quotations and historical narratives to not only scrutinize the inclination to depict Western civilization as singular, extraordinary, and unparalleled but also to highlight the persistent tendency to undervalue the importance of other civilizations, often termed as 'the rest.' The notion of Western civilization is depicted as a constructed political construct utilized to perpetuate Western hegemony, engender othering, and perpetuate colonialist agendas. This dynamic persists in the post-Cold War era, and ongoing Western hegemony perpetuates dominance over non-Western powers. Instances reflecting this neo-colonialist paradigm include the US intervention in Iraq, the conflict in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza as of late 2023. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 1951, the Israeli military government of the Negev launched an operation to uproot over five thousand Palestinian Bedouin citizens from the relatively rainy northwest Naqab to its arid eastern side in order to take control of the fertile lands. The campaign formed part of a more comprehensive strategy aimed at inducing the Bedouins to leave the country "voluntarily." While the operation had far-reaching consequences, it achieved only partial success, as the army was faced with resistance from the Bedouins, some of whose leaders still had powerful patrons within the Zionist movement since before the 1948 war. The hitherto unexamined story of the 1951 displacement campaign thus captures a particular historical moment in the aftermath of the war in which Bedouins' patronage links were put to the test in the face of the military's attempts to uproot them. It also demonstrates how the settler-colonial regime sought to take advantage of the contradictions of Indigenous society yet repeatedly found itself unable to fully capitalize on internal divisions among the Bedouins. Lastly, a study of the campaign undermines the prevalent image of a modernizing Israeli state promoting permanent settlement and confronted with obstinate nomadic Bedouins. Like other Palestinians, Bedouins insisted that they were rooted in the local landscape, while the settler--colonial state sought to uproot them, combining violent "nomadization" with forced "sedentarization." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 7 October 2023, Palestinian militants led by Hamas launched a complex coordinated attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, triggering an Israeli ground invasion combined with an aerial bombing campaign. The Hamas fighters killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages, while the death toll from Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip exceeded 31,600 in mid-March 2024. The Hamas attack not only shocked the whole world but also caught most people by surprise. Probably only a few could have imagined that the Palestinian organisation that controls the Gaza Strip could carry out such an attack on Israel. Following 7 October, several questions arose. Why Israeli intelligence could not predict the attack, and why did security and defence forces not react in time? The Israeli Government promised a full investigation once the Gaza ground offensive launched in response to the attack was over. But even without knowing more details of the events, we might still be able to provide a preliminary assessment of the surrounding Israeli intelligence failures based on the reports and accounts made public in the international media. Three months after the attack, the publicly available information showed that the Israel Defense Forces were unprepared and there was no battle plan in place in case Hamas militants broke out of the Gaza Strip with large forces. Clarifying what happened will be crucial not only to learn from the mistakes, but also because other actors or adversaries can learn from Hamas and copy its tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study demonstrates the difference between contemporary Israeli military and national security operations under the 'Campaign between Wars' framework and the way Israel would wage a 'war for existence'. The paper first outlines Israeli military strategy and theory regarding an existential war, while aiming to show how Israel would use its military capabilities. The paper explains the most plausible scenario of a war between Israel and a peer competitor, namely Iran and its proxy network, and the question of using nuclear weapons. Finally, the study presents the potential effects of such war on Israel, its enemies and the region. The paper argues that the most important aspect of Israeli conventional and nuclear warfighting capabilities is that they provide such a robust deterrent that they make war extremely unlikely. However, Israeli deterrence is based on the firm belief that the preparation for the war for existence is the most significant national goal, thereby establishing Israel as a linchpin to the regional balance of power, as a regional great military power itself is incapable of becoming a regional hegemon while assertively balancing against any such contender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To resist the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners are smuggling sperm samples out of Israeli prisons to enable their wives to undergo fertility treatment. Bodies and bodily matter figure as central actors in this practice of resistance. In this article, I draw from fieldwork I conducted with Palestinian women and medical staff in the occupied West Bank to examine the tension between carcerality and matter(ing). I argue that bodies and bodily matter are constitutive of the relationship between oppression and resistance. I analyze how Israeli military authorities assign evidentiary status to Palestinian bodies and illustrate how Palestinian families challenge the Israeli carceral system through new modes of embodied resistance. This article demonstrates how intersecting forms of oppression shape and are being shaped by bodies and their materiality. It also suggests that theorizing the materiality of power from Palestine offers new ways of understanding the political work that bodies do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals who conform strongly to masculine norms tend to have more mental health problems relative to other individuals. However, knowledge about the contribution of conformity to masculine norms to military-related posttraumatic sequelae among women combat veterans is sparse. This study examines the contribution of conformity to masculine norms to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex PTSD symptoms among women veterans as well as the mediating roles of coping strategies in these possible associations. A volunteer, community sample of Israeli women combat veterans (n = 885) and non-combat veterans (n = 728) responded to on-line self-report questionnaires in a cross-sectional study. Combat veterans reported higher levels of conformity to masculine norms and PTSD symptoms, but not complex PTSD symptoms and coping strategies, as compared to non-combat veterans. Moreover, among combat and noncombat veterans, conformity to masculine norms was associated with higher levels of PTSD and complex PTSD symptoms, beyond adverse childhood experiences and combat exposure. Importantly, conformity to masculine norms was indirectly associated with higher levels of PTSD and complex PTSD symptoms through maladaptive coping strategies, for both combat and noncombat veterans. Overall, women combat veterans were more likely to endorse masculine norms that are associated with higher levels of PTSD and complex PTSD symptoms. Moreover, maladaptive coping strategies might serve as mechanisms that link conformity to masculine norms to military-related posttraumatic consequences and warrants further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to food and water are fundamental human rights, even in situations of military occupation, as the occupying power has the responsibility to ensure and respect these rights for the civilian population under its control. Israel has systematically violated the right to water and food of the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank for decades. The persistent violation of these rights has taken on an even more serious dimension in the case of Gaza since the beginning of the Israeli military intervention in the Strip in October 2023. The international community has the obligation to unequivocally position itself to investigate these violations of fundamental rights and put an end to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the College Of Basic Education is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Adab Al-Kufa is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The objective of this study was to characterize driving safety and the factors affecting it among physicians in combat units in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), who have high workloads and substantial sleep deprivation, which could influence driving safety. This cross-sectional study included physicians in combat units who had a personal vehicle equipped with an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS). The study outcomes included events such as drowsy driving or falling asleep while driving, as well as motor vehicle accidents (MVAs), obtained from self-reports from digital questionnaires, and objective ADAS driving safety scores. Sleep hours, burnout scores (Maslach Burnout Inventory), combat activity levels, and demographic characteristics were obtained through digital questionnaires, and their effects on the outcomes were analyzed. Sixty-four military combat unit physicians were included in the study. No differences in drowsy driving, MVAs, or ADAS scores were found between the 2 combat activity level groups. The results showed that 82% of participants reported dozing off while driving, and this was positively correlated with accelerations (β = 0.19; P =.004) and negatively correlated (adjusted R2 = 21%) with hours of sleep (β = −0.28; P =.001). Eleven percent reported experiencing MVAs, none of whom required hospitalization. The mean ADAS safety score was 87.17 ± 7.54, and this was positively correlated with the cynicism score (β = 1.45; P =.04; adjusted R2 = 4.7%). No association between dozing off/falling asleep while driving and the reported MVAs was found (P =.10 and P =.27, respectively). Physicians in combat units have a low incidence of MVAs and high ADAS scores. This may be attributed to the high safety climate enforced in military units. However, the high rate of dozing off while driving highlights the importance of addressing driving safety in this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast with studies examining the incarceration experience in civil prisons, there is a lack of literature and theory focusing on the military prison incarceration experience. The present retrospective qualitative study explored the experience of 27 Ethiopian-Israelis, an overrepresented population in Israeli military prison, incarcerated during their military service due to desertion offenses. Two main themes developed from the interviews: (a) the military prison as a tool to achieve personal goals and (b) Self-perception as victims of the system. Findings suggest that military prison incarceration may be a different experience to that of civilian incarceration, at times lacking the negative psychological described in literature on civil incarceration. On a theoretical level, results suggest that the incarceration experience may not be universal but, rather, dependent on the social and cultural context and meaning of the incarceration for the individual involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis of news coverage of the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza by select British and South African print news outlets. The representation of the actors' legitimacy is the theoretical framework used for the study. Interviews were also conducted with journalists who reported on the war for insights into aspects of news production that impacted their reporting. Textually and visually Israeli military personnel were accorded legitimacy. The Palestinian perspective was marginalised in addition to being de-legitimated. A key facet of the war's coverage is the highly-structured reporting environment in Israel and Gaza. I argue that this continues to exert a significant impact on the work of journalists there. The article enhances current research on the analysis of multimodal texts using qualitative approaches. Important insights are provided about the manner in which textual and visual semiotic resources in news texts function in unison to convey or rescind legitimacy. The second contribution concerns the impact of the news production process in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The media's role in legitimising Israeli violence is particularly pertinent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mistaʿarvim are Jewish undercover agents who masquerade as Arabs in order to infiltrate Palestinian and other Arab societies in the service of the Israeli military. The first Mistaʿarvim unit, which served in the pre-1948 Palmach Zionist militia, was based on Jews of Arab origin. Arabs in appearance and in speech, these undercover Jewish agents masqueraded as Arabs to blend into Arab communities without raising suspicion. They successfully executed their operations only by transforming their Arab selves into a performative imitation of 'Arabs' as Others. Complying with the Zionist binary separation between 'Arabs' and 'Jews' as two different identities, they broke their originally hyphenated Jewish-Arab identity, and in return they gained heroic acceptance into the exclusively Jewish nation in Israel. In this article, we examine how the military-oriented tactic of histaʿarvut (the infinitive form of acting as Mistaʿarvim) sheds light on performative acts in the field of popular music, whereby a Jewish Israeli identity is asserted through a 'masked' performance of Arabs. As an act of self-imitation, 'cultural histaʿarvut' includes symbolic borrowing of visual, linguistic, or musical elements from Arab and Palestinian cultures in order to stage a masked performance that 'crosses' the cultural lines to ridicule or demean Arabs and their culture, as a means of Jewish Israeli entertainment. Drawing on this, we introduce the term 'sonic masquerading' to elaborate on the specific performative uses of the Arabic accent and musical features as an example of cultural histaʿarvut in the work of the Israeli musicians Shefita, Daniel Saʿadon, and Tuna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay puts into conversation two texts that negotiate the fantasy of space, flight, and Arab identity, specifically focused on the Lebanese diaspora: A. Naji Bakhti's debut novel Between Beirut and the Moon (2020) and superhero comics about the Lebanese American Green Lantern Simon Baz (2012–2021). Drawing on a history of how aerial surveys and perspectives inflicted the modernizing logic of empires in Lebanon, this essay argues that the visual modalities of empire are reinscribed in these texts' fantasies of flight. In Between Beirut and the Moon , Adam dreams of becoming an astronaut and flying to the moon, a fantasy itself deeply entrenched and complicated by the logics of empire. In Green Lantern (2011–2016) and Green Lanterns (2016–2018), Simon Baz offers a complicated fulfillment of Adam's childhood fantasy as the "first Arab astronaut." Ultimately, while Simon's superpowers suggest the limitless, liberatory possibility of flight in the Lebanese imagination, in practice they reinforce many of the same restrictions that limit Adam's dream and necessitate his departure to England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term "Military Ethical Washing"1 is used to describe ways in which military ethics clears military organizations from moral responsibility for their actions in a post-national liberal militarism era. Film and television, now even more than in the past, serve as agents of ethics in general, and of military ethics in particular. Using the terms of the "Just War Theory," the study shows how through processes of De-Politicization and Dis-militarization enhanced by fictional audio-visual narrative representations, narrative films and television dramas express the ethical-liberal turning point of our times, while at the same time using it to ratify national militarism. The process of "Military Ethical Washing" is illustrated in the paper in the Israeli context through cinematic and televised representations of internal targeted assassinations that took place during the constitutive national period of the struggle for Israel's independence – a case study having critical potential for discussing current military practices and ethical issues being dealt with by the Israeli military, but also relevant to other cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note contributes to the growing body of knowledge on foreign fighters in international affairs. While most scholars in the field derive their understanding of the phenomenon from highly publicized cases of Western Muslims fighting alongside Jihadi groups in the Middle East, this article brings a new case study into the arena: Jewish foreign nationals who voluntarily enlist in the Israeli military, also known as lone soldiers. After a presentation of this to date unexplored case (i.a. through nineteen semi-structured interviews), the article delves into the conceptual realm, discussing whether Israel's lone soldiers can be analyzed within the foreign-fighter framework in the first place. Based on the empirical findings and an interdisciplinary literature review on foreign fighters the article argues that lone soldiers do constitute a relevant case study. This research note further suggests that much of the controversy on conceptual matters could be avoided by understanding the phenomenon as an action (i.e., foreign fighting) rather than an actor (i.e., foreign fighter). Further research is warranted to support these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has enormous negative effects on people’s lives. People with disabilities (PWDs) who have been made vulnerable and who tend to face significant barriers in accessing public services are likely to be affected even more. This study aims to shed light on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on PWDs with special attention to their ability to access public services in the West Bank region of the occupied Palestinian territory. Methods: This qualitative study was conducted between March 2021 and October 2021. The study was divided into two phases. The first phase consisted of interviews with people with different disabilities, while the second phase targeted policymakers and stakeholders in discussion of the results of the first phase. A total of 16 interviews with people with different types of disabilities (7 males, 9 females) were conducted via telephone. For the second phase, a total of 6 interviews were conducted with stakeholders most responsible for addressing the issue of disability and the needs of PWDs in the West Bank. Analytical memos were prepared for all interviews. Main themes and subthemes were identified by reading and re-reading memos and transcripts until themes and subthemes emerged. Results: All participants agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic had affected all aspects of life for all groups of people, including PWDs. The effects of the pandemic exacerbated the overall living conditions and access to basic services for PWDs. The results show that access to public transportation, public services, and to health services was all interrupted during the pandemic. This was compounded by deterioration of the financial situation for PWDs which further worsened their access. The stakeholders’ interviews confirmed and explained the findings as mainly due to lack of prioritization of PWD’s rights and needs. Conclusion: The study emphasized that most of the reported barriers to accessing essential services were intensified during the pandemic.Furthermore, the results show that PWDs and their needs are not considered a priority by the Palestinian Authority, exacerbated by the Israeli occupation. Our findings underline the importance of including PWDs in any future crisis planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French priest Paul Gauthier (1914–2002) was a former theology professor who, after a short period as a prêtre-ouvrier (worker-priest) in Marseille, decided in 1956 to settle in Nazareth and practice his working apostolate there. For the next eleven years, and until his abrupt departure shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel became Gauthier's home. Some years after his arrival, Gauthier was invited to the Second Vatican Council by the archbishop of Galilee. There, Gauthier led the group the "Church of the Poor," which aimed to bring the issue of poverty and pastoral service to the forefront of Council discussions. Gauthier spent his years in Israel between two physically close but culturally and politically distant worlds. On the one hand, he lived and worked with the vulnerable Arab population of Nazareth. On the other, he was in close contact with Israel's new Jewish society, which greatly aroused his curiosity. In addition to his friendly contact with the Israeli civilian and military authorities, who would help him foster his cooperative for Arab housing, he was attracted by the kibbutz lifestyle and was especially moved by the philosophy of the Zionist thinker and pioneer Aaron David Gordon. Gauthier believed that his experience in Nazareth and Israel, where he saw an interchange of many worlds, could shed light on the worker-priest apostolate and provide a model for priestly spirituality in a working-class environment, in its various aspects. This article analyzes the influence of the "Israel experience" on Paul Gauthier's thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Al-Bahith Journal is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Tensions between Egypt and Israel have escalated over control of the Rafah border crossing. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry accused Israel of distorting facts and being responsible for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Israel, on the other hand, blamed Egypt for preventing aid delivery through the crossing. The International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt military operations in Rafah and keep the Rafah crossing open. Egypt condemned Israeli airstrikes on a camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah and called for an immediate cessation of military operations. [Extracted from the article]

This study investigates how second‐generation Israeli Americans explain their voluntary enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). By using 63 interviews, I compare enlistment motivation narratives of three groups: IDF enlistees with a background in Tzofim, an Israeli‐Zionist youth movement in the U.S.; same movement participants who did not enlist; and IDF enlistees with no movement background. The findings illustrate the importance that life circumstances, instrumental considerations, and a search for belonging have for enlistment. Respondents whose future life course was clear were more likely to opt for college, while those without a clear life course joined the IDF in a quest for belonging and future opportunities. Ideological motives were mostly subsidiary, and enlistees without a movement background were even less likely to express them. The study brings together the scholarship on migration and nationalism with the sociological theory of high‐risk participation. It thus investigates the largely uncharted territory of homeland military service among diaspora members, an underexplored yet highly relevant topic in the current era of mass migration. The study also offers a novel contribution to high‐risk collective action theory as it brings attention to two largely overlooked groups: non‐participants and participants who have not undergone movement socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Liminal Church by Maria Chiara Rioli brings significant new historical information to the history of contemporary Palestine. Her central themes are the disruptions suffered by the Latin patriarchal diocese in Jerusalem following the war of 1948-49 and the efforts to reorganize this Church in Israel and Jordan. The chapters dedicated to the period 1946-1949 deal with the position of the Christian churches on partitioning Palestine, Catholic fears about the establishment of the State of Israel, the Arab reaction, Israel's occupation of Catholic properties, and accusations of Israeli desecration of Christian symbols. Of particular interest is the examination of the internal upheaval within the Latin patriarchal diocese of Jerusalem following the exodus of Palestine's Arab population as a result of Israeli military operations and forced expulsion. From 1950 to 1956, the Palestinian Latin Church faced a number of Israeli and Jordanian laws limiting the activities of the Christian communities. The author focuses as well on the symbolic phenomenon of a number of Jews married to Christians that began the controversial process of conversion to Christianity. The book also addresses Catholic anticommunism in Israel and Jordan and the attempts of the Latin and Greek Melkite churches to fight it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at investigating how Arab American writer Randa Jarrar’s short story “The Story of My Building” (2016) appropriates events, themes, tropes and motifs employed by Russian writer Isaac Babel in his short story “The Story of My Dovecote” (1925) to portray the hard conditions and circumstances that Palestinians endure due to recurrent Israeli military attacks on the Gaza Strip. Jarrar’s story alludes to anti-Semitic violence, known as pogroms, that marred the lives of Jews in Russia in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Through strategic employment of intertextuality, Jarrar’s story vividly portrays how a child’s dream of building a dovecote has turned into a nightmare due to the demolition of his house by Israeli tanks. Borrowing certain episodes from Babel’s story, Jarrar sets up a link between her story and Babel’s, creating a parallelism between Palestinian people’s aches and anguishes at the hands of Israeli military forces at the start of the twenty-first century and Russian Jews’ sufferings and torments at the hands of pogromists almost a century ago. The connection between the stories is made even stronger as each story is narrated by a smart ten-year-old boy who is traumatized by the pillage and carnage he witnesses and experiences. In Jarrar’s story, Israeli tanks destroy the protagonist’s house and kill civilians; similarly, pogromists loot the protagonist’s house and murder his grandfather. Eventually, the two boys are reunited with their families who have taken refuge at a friend’s house. Yet, while Babel’s protagonist does not lose his house, in Jarrar’s story the protagonist’s family along with several other Palestinian families become homeless and displaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Top-leaders continuously struggle to cultivate their image and duly face a challenge in fulfilling their role: establishing authority among their senior followers, while maintaining productive social distance to enhance charismatic appeal. Considering this challenge, rather than focusing on leader–follower relationship, this study critically spotlights the workings of top-leader assistants, referred to as squires (Weber & Moore, 2014). Accordingly, we inquire how squires construct the charisma of top-leaders within a bureaucratic setting. Through an extensive ethnographic study in Israeli military headquarters, alongside 28 semi-structured interviews with Generals, staff officers, and personal assistants of Generals, we identified two primary strategies by which squires enhance their top-leader's charismatic appeal: daily aggrandizing rituals and wrapping. Daily rituals that occur in meetings and visitations enhance the leader's aura as the embodiment of authority. Wrapping is diverse acts in which squires broker the leaders' environment and access to subalterns, thus allowing leaders to focus on their primary agenda, while elevating their perceived status. These strategies allow dyadic performance of top-leaders and squires. They intricately utilize formal and informal interactions to sustain effective distance from followers, to foster disciplined selves among senior followers. Implications of the findings regarding the role of squires as power brokers and their equivalent roles in contemporary organizations are discussed, alongside implications regarding leadership and bureaucracy research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is frequently invoked, the archipelago is such a vague concept that its deployment in fields such as island studies is only productive when the contingency of its use is specified. In this article, we examine the concept itself and then consider the use of the archipelago as a metaphor and/or model for a future Palestinian state. The creation of the modern nation-state of Israel in Palestine in 1948, various Israeli military actions, and (often related) public and private developments of former Palestinian lands has resulted in a substantial proportion of Palestinians fleeing to neighbouring countries (chiefly Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria). Those Palestinians who have remained have largely been confined to territorial isolates within the Jewish state. These isolates have frequently been understood and analogised as 'islands' within Israel, and the aggregation of these isolates has been variously referred to and/or represented as an archipelago. This article examines the development of this metaphoric interpretation of the Palestinian community within Israel in Anglophone, Arabic, and Francophone discourse, and characterises the contortions necessary to imagine Palestinian territories as archipelagic. The conclusion returns to consideration of the notion of the archipelago itself and of its usefulness in island studies and other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Established in 2008, the Council of Europe's Intercultural Cities Network "supports cities in reviewing their policies -- and developing comprehensive intercultural strategies to help them manage diversity positively and realize the diversity advantage" (ICC, 2018). According to their website, the ICC approach "helps build trust between members of the community through policies which encourage mixing, interaction and participation" (ibid). More than a hundred cities are now members of the ICC network, but their discourse -- based on dialogue and trust -- is challenged by another apparently contradictory discourse. According to Asa and Yaari (2014), two Israeli military experts, the era of wars between nationstates has passed, but has not brought about a kind of 'world peace' as expected. What has emerged are the 'new wars' -- which are conducted within a civilian environment, between the authorities and enemies who are citizens of the state or its residents. Unlike the 'enemy of the past', who could be identified by means of his uniform, language, appearance or simply being a foreigner, the new enemies are hard to recognize, as, in the age of globalization, the cosmopolitan city is full of aliens -- most of whom, of-course, are not enemies at all. (Asa and Yaari, 2014). According to Arjun Appadurai (2006) the globalization process makes it very difficult to define who 'we' are and who 'they' are, thus creating feelings of constant uncertainty. This is the discourse of mistrust and suspicion, which challenges the ICC's discourse of trust and dialogue. The current paper is part of a PhD research done in the years 2015-2018 for the Haifa University Anthropology Department, supervised by Prof. Amalia Sa'ar. It was based on about 20 interviews with integration officers in European cities which are members of the ICC network, as well as observations in different conferences and trainings held by the organization. The paper examines the complex and fascinating ways these two discourses challenge each other, contradict, react or get entangled with one another in trying to deal with the reality of these years of terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article focuses on the personal stories of Muhammad Naji and resides in the village of Abu Gosh, west of Jerusalem. Topics include Muhammad Naji's life events and memories extend throughout the most salient stages of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the Nakba and the Naksa, and the Israeli occupation and the reality of everyday life of the Palestinians under Israeli control.

This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue 'Palestinian Futures Anticipation, Imagination, Embodiments', edited by Mikko Joronen, Helga Tawil-Souri, Merav Amir & Mark Griffiths. The almost 100 Israeli checkpoints that are located inside the West Bank and on its 'border' with Israel play a particularly important role in the architecture of occupation. They represent key political technologies that are used to monitor, discipline and/or selectively limit the mobility of Palestinians. In this paper, I analyse the ways in which the design of the newly relaunched Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem represents a certain specific 'checkpoint future', materialized in the continued 'evolution' of Checkpoint 300, its machines and 'façade of legitimacy': a future in which the Israeli military regime controlling the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) is kept in place and the checkpoints and their inherent violence are increasingly normalized. Furthermore, I argue that this 'checkpoint future' does not lead to a less violent or arbitrary checkpoint regime. This remaining presence of violence should not be framed as a failure, instead, the continued presence of violence, analysed here as experienced and expressed in the arbitrary functioning of the checkpoint machines, as well as the 'legitimised façade' of Checkpoint 300 are intrinsically bound and an expression of the same violent future: a future with an enduring Israeli military regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

([10]) I The Present i lumps the checkpoint soldiers together, with clear shots of Yousef's face dominating the frame as he addresses the soldiers who are mostly shot from the back. But a plethora of testimonies from Israeli soldiers on I Breaking the Silence i uncover a transgressive regime of: truth other than the ones that permeate many Palestinian films; the conflicted Israeli soldier. The Present (2020), a Palestinian film co-written and directed by Farah Nabulsi, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. Palestinian director Elia Suleiman's film "It must be Heaven" has a scene where a French director turns down the opportunity to produce a Palestinian film because "it was not Palestinian enough" since "the events could be anywhere in the world". [Extracted from the article]

Research regarding the ability to convert military resources into valuable social resources (convertibility) focused on the macro‐level. These researches examined the influence of various mechanisms on the ability to convert military service into objective rewards in the civilian sphere and labor market. The aim of this research is to focus on a neglected part in the research of convertibility: the micro‐level analysis that emphasizes the subjective dimension. We argue that soldiers are motivated by, evaluate and perceive their military service through the capitals they acquire during military service which they expect, or not, to convert into the civilian sphere and labor market. The article presents a comparative analysis of veterans from the Israeli and British militaries, based on interviews with soldiers who served in both combat and non‐combat roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Rachel's Tomb area and nearby checkpoint 300 in the north of Bethlehem have become an arena of cultural opposition to an Israeli geography of oppression that excludes, fragments, shrinks, and closes off Palestinian space. The article describes how a spatial-narrative politics - articulating counter-narratives through the strategic use of space - has helped to rewrite the Israeli military geography of power and control. Over the last fifteen years both locals and foreigners in the area have inscribed narrative discourses of home, freedom, and welcoming into this geography in rhetorical contrast to the discourse of military power. While opposition to the Wall is important in all these practices, Van Teeffelen considers the Wall as part of a broader military geography rather than standing by itself. Oppositional politics is illustrated by analyses of statements of daily life sumud or steadfastness, examples of Palestinian Christian religious practices, the Palestine marathon in Bethlehem, and the iconic graffiti of British artist Banksy. The author reflects upon the potential of a spatial-narrative politics consisting of three stages: affirmation of rootedness, creative opposition, and border-crossing. The arts, religion, sports and political struggle, while fundamentally different human experiences, have in principle a potential to transcend borders toward a more hopeful horizon while connecting local and global narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims about Soviet policy at the end of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war played a key role in discrediting détente in the mid- and late 1970s. This analysis considers the part that Henry Kissinger played in triggering the Soviet actions at the end of the war to which the critics of détente pointed. Contrary to what Kissinger claimed, he essentially reneged on the agreement he had reached with the Soviet leadership to end the war and instead directly encouraged the Israelis to continue military operations well after the ceasefire was supposed to take effect. That, in turn, led to a crisis that had a profound effect on Soviet-American relations for years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her paper 'Your house does not look like you anymore: On repair, restoration and destruction in Gaza', Mona Kriegler uses stories of damage and transformation in the Gaza Strip to explore how the act of repair should be considered as culturally significant and valid as restoration. Referencing Sartre's belief that destruction to a valued object impacted one's psyche, she demonstrates how the act of repair can acknowledge - and begin to resolve - the trauma of breaking by highlighting - rather than redacting - the experience of the damage. Kriegler does this through telling the stories of how artists and craftsmen in Gaza are repairing objects broken by time and conflict while leaving visible the historical, cultural and psychological legacy of the damage. Two of the case studies show that, while the repairs (to fractured antiques and a deteriorated mansion) share the same ethos of the South Asian repair technique kintsugi, those doing the repairs have indigenized the process due to the reality and needs of those living in the beleaguered, besieged Gaza Strip. When repairs are made with the limited materials available or through Linebaugh's social 'commoning' process, the transformation of the object (from broken to repaired) symbolizes the ongoing breaking and recovery of those living in the Gaza Strip. The third case study (on a cultural centre bombed by the Israeli military) reflects on whether repair can still happen in the face of total destruction. She concludes that an object can still live on, even in its absence, if those that value it (in this case, the Gazan cultural community) use their collective memory and imagination to reconstitute what is lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article titled "EDITORS' NOTE" in the Arab Studies Journal explores the relationship between heritage and technology. It features an examination of how Egyptian effendiyya framed Egyptian music as a national heritage, as well as an ethnographic encounter with Hijazi technologists seeking to use smart technologies for pilgrim management in Mecca. The article also includes reviews of multidisciplinary works on revolution, energy, and the city. The editors acknowledge the ongoing Israeli military actions against Palestinians in Gaza and express their emotional toll and solidarity with those affected. They highlight the importance of learning from Palestinian resistance and emphasize that Gaza's history of revolution will continue to resonate. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores how Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies obscure the traditional boundaries associated with the military realm. As the first examination of the conditions underlying the assimilation of 4IR technologies in Israel's armed forces, this paper makes several contributions. It expands the knowledge on the military assimilation of 4IR technologies and describes the interaction between military doctrine and technology using current evidence. It also enriches the evolving discussion on the strategic effect of emerging technologies. Finally, it demonstrates how emerging technologies involve neither straightforward spinoff or spin-on processes but a reciprocal transfer of know-how between the military and civilian sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how processes of visuality produce geopolitical imaginaries of the West Bank in the everyday register. Drawing on the visual geopolitics literature, I turn to a grounded approach of ethnographic observation to consider how the West Bank is framed for international tourists. I trace two guided tours of the West Bank with attention to the differences in the visual, discursive, and embodied practices that constitute their scopic regimes. By analysing the sights tourists are allowed to see or made to see, I illuminate the geopolitical implications of how the West Bank is framed: the scopic regime of mainstream tourism normalises the Israeli military occupation by obscuring its violence, while the critical gaze of alternative tourism seeks to challenge it by foregrounding its violence. The juxtaposition ultimately reveals the complicity of both types in sustaining the asymmetrical logics of occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deployment of special forces in hostile or politically volatile environments in search of strategic/operational intelligence, though not a 21st century novelty, appeared as a distinct military activity in literature only in the early 2000s under the label 'Special Reconnaissance' (SR). This article argues that the concept of SR (a) originated in the biblical Israelite military tradition and is depicted in the Bible as the lapis angularis of military strategy and a practice capable of dictating military and political norms; (b) has been used as a key element of the Israel Defence Forces' (IDF) modus operandi since 1948 thenceforth functioning in an analogous manner. To support these arguments, the theoretical and practical characteristics of Moses' intelligence mission to Canaan as well as the IDF's proclivity to SR are scrutinised under the general theoretical framework of political realism that assumes rational and pro-state interest course of actions. Accordingly, SR emerges as a distinctive common instrument of biblical and contemporary Israeli strategy, a fact that underlines the uninterrupted socio-political and cultural links between the past and the present of the Israeli ontology, this time via the wider concept of the Israeli military ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an analysis of the last 2021, 11-day War that Israel launched on Gaza, and an investigation of the transformation of the international opinion on the diplomatic track towards understanding the Palestinians and exerting pressure on Israeli leadership. This transformation is regarding the Europeans and with less grade the Americans. The Israeli military actions put European policy-makers on the spot, who pleaded with both sides – Hamas and Israel – to desist from military targeting of each other cities. The reactions of European politicians were also pressured by the widespread protests on the streets in London, Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, Madrid, and Vienna. Israel became worried about the extent of adverse reactions to its actions from the top of the US political echelons – President Joe Biden, Congress, Senators – down to nationwide America, which is a reaction that Israel had not witnessed before from the US. The White House team opened up a ‘massive line of communication’ with the Israeli government, including six direct phone calls between Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the conflict, and called on Egypt, Jordan, and Qatar to encourage Hamas to stop from its side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]