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The suffix "washing" refers to the practice of portraying controversial actions in a positive light by leveraging progressive principles, often used by economic corporations, organizations, political parties, or governments. This paper introduces and develops the term "studentwashing" to define the deliberate effort to present Israeli territorial development as an attractive, youthful, and unique experience. This portrayal aims to engage larger segments of society in the national geopolitical project while normalizing its settler-colonial aspects as a means to ensure its continuation. While the constant development of new territorial settlements is dependent either on the right-wing religious sector or on the "quality-of-life" settlers, studentwashing is reserved for areas that are not ideological enough for the first nor sufficiently attractive to the latter. Analyzing "student villages" in the Negev, this paper depicts a new territorial strategy meant to enhance the state's spatial control over the predominantly Arab periphery inside official Israeli borders. Accordingly, this paper offers a new perspective on Israel's territorial strategies and enhances the general study of geopolitical and geo-economic spatial development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doling (2006, A European Housing Policy? European Journal of Housing Policy, 6(3), 335–349. doi:10.1080/14616710600973169) characterized the intervention of the EU in the field of housing as a 'stealth policy', arguing that while the EU has no formal competence in this policy area, it has de facto conditioned national housing policies. This suggests that housing policy is a particularly interesting case for the study of formal and informal modes of multilevel governance. However, European comparative studies about housing policy have almost exclusively focused either on the national or local characteristics of housing systems. In this paper we explore the connections between the development of Portuguese housing policies in the last four decades, on the one side, and EU programmes and documents on the other. We will show how the dynamics of Portuguese housing policy reflected the fluctuations of EU agenda. In doing so, we aim at (i) exploring the history of EU 'stealth housing policy' in a moment of re-emergence of housing as a defining theme of EU agenda; and (ii) providing a more accurate characterization of domestic recent general trends and processes through a multi-scalar gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The status of Jerusalem is almost universally regarded as the single most divisive issue in Israeli-Palestinian relations; and Israel's settlement policy - and its territorial and demographic implications - is widely considered as the most significant "fact on the ground" established by Israel since 1967. We address these issues by observing how Israel's settlement policy in the area of metropolitan Jerusalem transformed the material, symbolic and political landscape of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Through the case study of the settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, this paper focuses on settlers' place attachment, personal geographies, and the relation between the latter and the production of space. We maintain that the "suburban experience" embodied in the lives of the residents illustrates the action of powerful drivers of the overall process of normalization of Jewish presence in the West Bank; in turn, this rendered the settlement policy relatively uncontroversial for large sectors of Israeli public opinion. Also, we maintain that settlements such as Ma'ale Adumim are also the product of the quest for a suburban "safe space" - i. e. an enclosed space designed to avoid contacts with "unpleasant otherness" that residents of the suburbs all over the world often associate to life in the inner city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of politics on urban planners within framework of the Israeli settlement in Palestine. Topics addressed include the role of planning theorists and practitioners in conflicts and controversies, the social and political dimensions of planning, and the institutionally constraint spaces wherein planners have to work. The differences and similarities among planners in Israel and Palestine are described.

This article explores the role of planning in the deeply divided and politically polarized context of Jerusalem. The overall argument developed throughout the article is that the relation between planning and politics is a non-hierarchical set of interactions, negotiated within specific historical, geographical, legal and cultural contexts-in other words, orders don't come down from the politicians to be slavishly followed by planners. In this respect our findings, based on in-depth interviews with Israeli planners, suggest that the case of Jerusalem represents a particularly dramatic illustration of the fact that the function of planning expertise can only be understood in relation to the surrounding socio-political environment. Furthermore, contrary to conventional wisdom, planners in Jerusalem are not destined to either complicity or irrelevance in the face of political imperatives; planners' agency, however, does not simply reflect their mastery of specific professional knowledge and tools, but also their ability to act strategically in relation to the context in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israel's West Bank settlements are a central point of contention in the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Overall, however, their rapid proliferation has been generally understood through the lens of an ideologically centered approach that highlights, specifically, the centrality of the national religious settlers' movement. Against this background, the article focuses on the overlooked reality of large, state-sponsored suburban settlements – and in particular on the role of the Israeli Ministry of Housing in their establishment between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. Building on contributions in the field of political economy and political geography, we conceive the actions of the Ministry in the occupied West Bank as a result of a broader strategy of spatial restructuring. By considering both economic and political imperatives underlying this strategy, our analysis offers a more comprehensive assessment of the factors behind Israel's settlement policy. Drawing on a broad range of empirical sources, from archival material to in-depth interviews with Israeli planners, we argue that the proliferation of settlements has been largely the outcome of a process of metropolitanization – i.e. of the dynamics of urban development of Israel's main metropolitan centers and the adoption of a new, post-Keynesian policy paradigm based on market-oriented economic development. This process has constituted a major factor for the settlements' growth and, ultimately, in the emergence and naturalization of a new territorial configuration in the area of Israel/Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout history, cities have been the theatre of social and spatial struggles. The issue of urban protests, however, has not yet been investigated in detail in the light of the growing concern of the need to rethink urban studies, from theoretical and epistemic assumptions, to methodological issues. It is argued that the mobilisation of urban dissent in the so-called Arab Spring offers a good opportunity to develop a critical approach based on the observation of the nexus between an event (a punctual expression of dissent) and a site (the urban environment in which the former takes place). The goal is to avoid theoretical rigidities inherent to the assumptions about the intrinsic qualities of cities or social movements. The paper also aims at connecting different academic and disciplinary traditions across linguistic divides—and especially the Anglophone urban studies with the Francophone stream of city-focused political science and political sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank represents a crucial issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through the examination of a single case study--the planning history of the Jewish settlement of Ma'ale Adummim, located in the eastern periphery of the city--the paper addresses the complex nexus between planning and state-building practices; building on Henri Lefebvre's theory of space, he offers an account of the role of Israel's settlement policy in the transformation of the material, symbolic, and political landscape of the metropolitan area of Jerusalem. My main argument is that the observation of the development of large suburban communities in the metropolitan area--a blind spot both in media and in academic discourse--is crucial for our understanding of the settlement policy as a whole, and its impact on Israeli-Palestinian relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at providing a review of various streams of literature dealing with the spatial fragmentation of cities. In the last two decades many different contributions emphasized the growing fragmentation of the urban environment; the idea of 'divided city' covers a multiplicity of approaches, methodologies and field of research. Still, the 'divided city' literature tends to elevate a small number of cities to paradigmatic examples and to focus on abstract categories based on single factor explanations of urban fragmentation. The article, while accepting the hypothesis that the urban context is increasingly fragmented, argues that systems of coordinates - more than a taxonomy or a hierarchy - is needed to make sense of this phenomenon and draw significan comparison between cities. The article also maintains that a significant angle to look at urban polarization relates to the configuration of urban governance and political power. The article therefore considers three main areas connected to the distinction between polity, politics, and policy - and the three corresponding ideal-types of partitioned, contested and discrete city - where the conflict focuses respectively on the jurisdictional shape of governance, the degrees and venues of access to decision-making, and frame and contents of public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate around the viability of the so-called 'Two-State Solution' and the perspective of an alternative 'One-State Solution' began to attract renewed the attention after the collapse of the Oslo process. We suggest that instead of debating the viability of rival constitutional schemes, a more fruitful approach to the issue of peace making in Israel/Palestine should focus on the structural elements of the picture more than on future possible outcomes of the diplomatic process. This article focuses on the role of the two leaderships by analysing their historical background, discourses and policies in order to understand to what extent the debate on the TSS/OSS dichotomy reveals the hidden logic of the alternatives. Our aim is to describe the 'primordial soup' that enables discussion and decisions with respect to the different scenarios addressed by the debate. We conclude that the TSS/OSS alternative hardly identifies meaningful coalitions for peace making and the attainment of either of the two solutions seems to be unlikely without a dramatic change the very identity of Palestinian and Israeli leadership; the rhetoric about the 'missed opportunities' of negotiation contributes instead to obscure the resilience of the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through an approach based on citizenship. The article considers the whole historical Palestine (Israel and the so-called Occupied Territories) as a unique unit of analysis, and suggests that the dynamics of citizenship in this area should be analysed through the exam of two fundamental dimensions, relating to membership and territory. In general, the example of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict offers the chance to address the conventional meaning of concepts such as 'state', 'democracy' and 'citizenship', underlying the complex dynamics of inclusion/exclusion of individuals and groups within a collective decision-making process. As far as Palestine is concerned, the centre of gravity and the horizons of the conflict are described through the notion of 'ruptured demos', suggesting new directions for comparative research and drawing the attention to the progressive demise of the so-called 'two-state' solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terroir describes a set of special characteristics of a given place—geography, geology, climate, and human agricultural traditions—that incarnates in the unique taste of its products, usually wine. In contrast to modern perceptions of territory as an abstract legal–political entity, terroir invokes images of organic relations between people and a specific land with a unique ‘character’. The paper will analyze the evolving discourse in the West Bank settlements in recent years, which shifts the emphasis from biblical history, ideology, and security—to tourism, vineries, and terroir. The argument will be that the usage of sophisticated wine language enables normalization of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank in a paradoxical way that is emphasizing their location and blurring it at the same time. While the concept of normalization is usually applied to the ‘quality-oflife’ urban settlements, our paper concentrates on the small and ‘ideological’ settlements, which are located in the densest Palestinian regions. By that, we wish to contribute to the growing research body on the West Bank settlements, as well as to the fields of geopolitics, colonial and postcolonial studies, and cultural geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It seems that during SARS-CoV-2 infection, total cholesterol, LDL-C, and HDL-C values decrease and lipids could play a fundamental role in viral replication. Moreover, it has been shown that SARS-CoV-2 infection could influence thyroid function. We performed a retrospective analysis of 118 hospitalized patients with COVID-19, comparing pre-infection lipid profile (53 patients) and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) values (45 patients) to those measured on admission. Our aim was to evaluate whether SARS-CoV-2 infection could be involved in thyroid and lipid profile alterations and study possible correlations with disease severity and clinical outcome. Median baseline values at the admission time were: total cholesterol at 136.89 ± 42.73 mg/dL, LDL-C 81.53 ± 30.35 mg/dL, and HDL-C 32.36 ± 15.13 mg/dL; and triglycerides at 115.00 ± 40.45 mg/dL, non-HDL-C 104.53 ± 32.63 md/dL, and TSH 1.15 ± 1.08 μUI/mL. Median values of pre-infection total cholesterol, HDL-C, and TSH were significantly higher than those measured at the admission time (p value < 0.05). The C-reactive protein (CRP) negatively correlated with LDL-C (p = 0.013) and HDL-C (p = 0.05). Our data underline a possible impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection on thyroid function. Moreover it suggests a possible relation between COVID-19 and the lipid profile with a negative correlation between CRP, LDL-C, and HDL-C values, proposing the hypothesis that lipid lowering could follow the rising of the COVID-19 inflammatory state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]