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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]