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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]

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]

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]

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]

A travelogue of an Israeli musicologist, descendant of German Jewish émigrés, her real and imaginary sonic journey roams between ruins and rubble in Germany and Israel/Palestine. She takes ruins as iconic, allegoric, and reverberating; partially resisting the ravages of time, enshrining sounds and memory. She deems rubble as formless, plain, and voiceless, devoid of identity, transient, and forgetful. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce by the Romans is her starting point, and the currently occupied East Jerusalem by Israeli armed forces is where she ends. The imaginary soundscapes she unfolds resonates forlorn heavenly voices, Nazi youth's ditties, Israeli pop songs, operatic voices, and redemptive and subversive German and Israeli oratorios. [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]

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]

This essay examines the difficulties for children and youth in attaining an education while living under Israeli military occupation. It focuses on three Palestinian students in the West Bank who shared their experiences with the author about their trials of getting to and staying in school, their limited opportunities for gaining higher education, and their sense of well-being, to demonstrate the impact of military occupation on their daily student life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protests in response to Israeli military action in the Occupied Territories have a long history in Israel. While such opposition movements in many countries are comprised of civil society activists, the dynamics of protest differ in Israel because of the country's mandatory military service. From the 1980s to present day, former and current Israeli soldiers have used a wide range of methods, tactics, and strategies to challenge Israeli military actions. Using insights from nonviolent resistance theories, we examine how the approaches and goals of military opposition groups in Israel have changed over the past decades. Specifically, we develop a typology to explain why different types of protest arise from within the Israeli Defense Force that garner strong reactions – whether laudatory or derogatory – from the Israeli government and general public. The paper concludes with lessons learned for military opposition movements in the context of nonviolent resistance theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the court case state of Palestine v. United States of America examined by International Court of Justice. Topics discussed include Court to resolve the dispute in accordance with its Statute and jurisprudence, based on the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR) read in appropriate context; and the dispute being the relocation of the United States Embassy in Israel to the Holy City of Jerusalem, it is essential to explain the factual and legal context.

In 2002, the Israeli military performed one of its most extensive operations on occupied Palestine. One outcome of this war was the enforcement of an Israeli Segregation Wall that severs the sensitive Palestinian urban fabric and secludes Palestinians in isolated enclaves. Consequentially, the eight-meter-high wall stands as a physical reminder of the spatial violence behind its existence, which targets the normality of Palestinian everyday life by restricting mobility and confirming invisibility. The imposed hegemonic wall became part of the public realm, converting the latter into a traumascape where memories of war are continuously emitted to the public. Since then, eager international and Palestinian artists have been utilizing the concrete panels as a medium for art expression. On the Segregation Wall, graffiti expresses the historic and ongoing struggle that embodies Palestinians' collective memory and national identity. Through graffiti, Palestinians find moments to grieve losses and cognitively imagine a liberated future for their cities. This paper offers an in-depth reflection on the Palestinian graffiti on the Segregation Wall. Through ethnographic research, the study explores the role of Palestinian graffiti in transforming the Israeli-imposed traumascape into what we term a resistancescape. By provoking urban dialogues around trauma sites, Palestinian graffiti offers an example of creative everyday resistance, empowering Palestinians to claim their right to the city. Challenging the oppressor's hegemony by spreading graffiti on the imposed Segregation Wall helps Palestinians negotiate everyday life, keep their Sumud , and demand spatial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw on interviews conducted with former Israeli military lawyers about their role in lethal targeting operations. I argue that military lawyers and the practice of operational law help to legitimize and extend violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. To make the case I focus on Israel's ‘targeted killing policy’ (2000–present) and on the involvement of military lawyers in the planning and execution stages of targeting operations. I offer two contributions to the literature on war and law; first, I extend Derek Gregory's analysis of the ‘kill chain’ by arguing that targeting is increasingly made possible by a ‘technolegal’ process. Second, I add nuance to Eyal Weizman's account of how law extends violence in what he calls the ‘humanitarian present’. I argue that we must attend not only to international humanitarian law and different scales of law but to the simultaneously plural and overlapping legal regimes that govern late modern war. I conclude with a reflection on Judith Butler's Frames of War to think through the ways in which ‘frames of law’ have come to structure our apprehension of targeting and war today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short comment on Loïc Wacquant's ‘Marginality, Ethnicity, and Penality’ begins by highlighting three of Wacquant's most important interventions. It then extends the analysis by drawing on research about urban marginality in South Africa and Palestine/Israel. Whereas Wacquant focuses on the state response to urban marginality, I suggest that it is important to look beyond the state to consider how other actors have responded to the growth of precarious populations. Specifically, I point out that private security companies and residents' associations are at the forefront of efforts to police poor black South Africans, while an imperial network of security forces polices the Palestinian precariat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the Israeli and Palestinian people who have been engaged in deadly conflict known as the Second Intifada. The three main Palestinian factions involved in violence against Israeli citizens are Fatah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Data and descriptive statistics in the article include the web site for B'tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, and the database on incidents and casualties prepared by the Institute for Counter Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel. The article also focuses on reaction functions to estimate Israel's reaction to Palestinian violence.

The article discusses a report that claims the armed forces of Israel committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 2009 Gaza conflict. It references a report released by the United Nations (UN), which disclosed the deliberate attacks on hospitals and other medical facilities. The report also contends that the indiscriminate rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian armed groups into southern Israel would also be considered war crimes and may result in crimes against humanity. Recommendations to both Israeli and Palestinian authorities are cited.