The Security Imperative in Counterterror Operations: The Israeli Fight Against Suicidal Terror

ABSTRACT

Israel has had a long tradition of fighting international and Palestinian terror. This article looks at how Israel counterterrorism strategy and tactics have developed since the establishment of the State in 1948. By initially providing a working definition of terrorism, the article then goes to show how Israel has sought to defend itself from different Palestinian terror tactics. This article shows how Israeli security forces have struggled safeguarding, and sometimes disregarded Palestinian human rights. This article concludes by arguing that given the responsibility of democratic governments of defending their citizens from imminent terror attacks, such governments often find themselves paradoxically violating human rights. Despite attempts to reduce such human rights abuses, governments will never do so at the expense of their own security.     

The symbiosis between Palestinian ‘Fayyadism’ and Israeli ‘economic peace’: the political economy of capitalist peace in the context of colonisation

Abstract

Recent years have seen both the Palestinian Authority and Israeli government conveying the supremacy of economic approaches over politics to achieve peace and stability. More specifically, the encounter and symbiosis between Palestinian 'Fayyadism' as a professional application of neo-liberal approaches to state-building and economic development, and the Israeli strategy of 'economic peace' towards the Palestinians have shaped much of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dynamic, with a particularly discernible materialisation in the West Bank. This article critically analyses this dynamic in light of the recently revived theory of 'capitalist peace', which, despite valid criticism, entails considerable similarities with the basic assumptions of 'Fayyadism' and 'economic peace'. While two key dimensions express this symbiosis—security co-ordination and economic normalisation—the article focuses mainly on the economic part, particularly the case of joint industrial zones, which exemplify the most extreme example of this symbiosis.     

“These People Have an Irrevocable Right to Self-Government”: United States Policy and the Palestinian Question, 1977–1979

Upon entering office, Carter Administration officials placed a heavy emphasis on integrating human rights into United States foreign policy. They also sought to contain festering Arab–Israeli tensions in the Middle East. The intersection of these two issues was the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This article examines the Administration's attempts to solve that conflict and to bring peace to the region. It argues that policymakers developed a sincere dedication to safeguarding Palestinian rights, but that their understanding of those rights was limited in scope and defined through the lens of United States security and strategic interests. In spite of a good-faith effort to satisfy Palestinian desires while maintaining a constructive relationship with Israel, the Administration ultimately failed to alter the status quo because of regional developments. As Washington's strategic thinking changed, so did the urgency of Palestinian rights.     

From Hasbara to the Palestine-Israel Sport Conflict

This analysis highlights the role of sport—particularly football—in nation-building. Using netnographic techniques, it focuses on the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and nationhood through the efforts of the Palestinian Football Association [PFA] to challenge Israeli hegemony and function independently of Israeli surveillance in a sovereign Palestinian nation-state. It explains how the PFA has attempted to harness its status, manifested in its Fédération Internationale de Football Association [FIFA] membership, to threaten Israel’s own FIFA membership and its international image. The value of this analysis stems from the way it embeds the empirical narrative within a broader international relations analytical/theoretical framework that problematises the central concept of “soft power” that has predominated the current “sports and international relations” literature.     

The Israeli defense forces and unconventional warfare: The Palestinian factor and Israeli national security doctrine

The basic premises of the Israeli national security doctrine were laid down by the first Prime Minister, David Ben‐Gurion, who emphasized the decisive role of the neighboring sovereign states as the crucial enemy. This view continues to guide the architects of Israeli strategic thought despite the growing importance of a non‐state actor, that is, the Palestinian national liberation movement.     

Atrocities and armed conflict: state consolidation in Israel, 1948–56

This paper contrasts four cases of atrocity in the early years of the Israeli state and contends that, due to ethnic-cleansing incentives, competitive inducements and outbidding, the stated Israeli ideology of self-restraint had little impact on policy. The article further argues that, during the early periods of democratic state consolidation, democratic states act in very similar ways to authoritarian states and that little restraint is exercised in relation to ‘enemy’ civilians located within the territorial boundaries of the new state. In this respect, arguments that democracies are superior to non-democracies with regard to respect for human rights might be called into question during the initial phases of state consolidation. The paper speci?cally questions how con?ict stalemates impact on the use of violence against noncombatants in order to tip the balance of the war and it argues against the assertion that only paramilitaries would ever use terror against unarmed civilians.     

Europe under occupation: the European diplomatic community of practice in the Jerusalem area

ABSTRACT

This article shows how the existence of a community of European practitioners in the Jerusalem area gives substance to the European stance on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The often-stated European Union (EU) support for a two-state solution could appear meaningless in the absence of peace negotiations. However, European diplomats (i.e. diplomats of EU member states and EU officials) in the East Jerusalem–Ramallah area are committed to specific practices of political resistance to Israeli occupation and recognition of Palestinian institutions. These practices have led not only to a specific political geography of diplomacy, but also to a community of practice, composed of European diplomats and based on their daily experience of resisting occupation and bestowing recognition. It is this group of officials who represent and actively “do” Europe’s position and under occupation.     

Ingredients of a Successful Track Two Negotiation

During three days in 2003, an Israeli–Palestinian group met in London to negotiate the draft of the “Geneva Initiative,” which offered a potential final status agreement between Israel and Palestine. In this article, I analyze the video recording of these unofficial negotiations and examine how the framing and conduct of the talks enabled significant progress toward reaching an agreement. I describe six main framing techniques used by the mediators: calling the meetings an “exercise,” which reduced restraints on the participants and enhanced their flexibility, avoiding deep historical issues to focus solely on future‐oriented pragmatic solutions, allowing the participants to discuss any topic they chose while deliberately avoiding crucial narrative issues, convincing the participants that this track two negotiation was crucial for the future of official Israeli–Palestinian relations, accentuating the parties' understandings and agreements with each other, and building a sense of superordinate group identity among the participants, to encourage cooperation. These components were the key “ingredients” for the first — and still the only — (unofficial) detailed proposal for an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. They provide lessons that could improve the success of other track two negotiations.     

Canada,the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the flexibility of terror identities

ABSTRACT

Security governance practices are contingent on the imagination of future threats. The “war on terror” has produced a very narrow imagination of threats, almost singularly focused on suspect communities that are Arab, Muslim, or perceived to be Middle Eastern. Discussing how immigration practices in Canada have been influenced by counter-terrorism trends, we argue that “terror identities” are mutable and highly racialised imaginaries that cast indelible marks of suspicion on subjects who are deemed as security threats. Examining the case of a journalist deemed inadmissible to Canada because of her “membership” in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), we argue that terror identities impose authoritative control over the status and lived experiences of individuals who are cast through these racialised labelling practices. Focussing on the shifting characterisation of the PLO by Canadian officials as both political interlocutor and terrorist organisation, our purpose is to highlight how racialised imaginations of terror identities enact punitive and discriminatory practices.     

Two Complementary Settings of Peace-making Diplomacy: Political-Elite Diplomacy and Public Diplomacy

In terms of the question, “how to create an effective peace-making process in the Israeli–Palestinian case,” this article argues that the answer is a multidimensional approach to peace-making diplomacy that contains two main settings: political-elite diplomacy and public diplomacy. Political-elite diplomacy suggests various modes of peace-making interactions between political-elites. Public diplomacy provides instruments to involve the people in the peace-making struggle, prepares them for a change, and presses the leadership to reach agreements. The analysis suggests establishing an institution for the operation of public diplomacy—a major Israeli-Palestinian public negotiating congress. The congress is a democratic peace-making institution that invites representatives of the opposing societies to discuss, debate, and negotiate solutions to their struggle. The article also presents the concepts of political-elite diplomacy and public diplomacy as competitive settings that should be regarded as complementary. It includes lessons from the “Minds of Peace Experiment”—a small-scale Israeli–Palestinian public negotiating congress—which has been conducted in different places around the world.     

Analogies to Terror: The Construction of Social Problems in Israel During the Intifada Al Aqsa

Studies of the construction of social problems suggest that claims makers only relate to the issue that they are trying to place on the national agenda. However, an analysis of the Israeli public discourse about a number of social problems during the Intifada Al Aqsa indicates that this is not the case. The external threat served as an inferential structure for understanding and explaining the country's internal ones. Because of the centrality of the Intifada in the public imagination, claimants made a wide variety of analogies to the problem of Palestinian terror. All four areas of the discourse—about the severity of the problems, their causes, the rationales given for taking preventive and/or ameliorative action, and the solutions offered—were replete with references and analogies to the uprising. Clearly, the claimants believed that this was a particularly effective way of competing in the social problems marketplace, but the analogies may, in fact, have reinforced the existing hierarchy of priorities rather than lead to a significant shift in the public agenda.     

International relations scholarship,academic institutions and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

This paper explores the role of academic scholarship and practice in constituting, aggravating, and resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The first section of the paper examines how scholarly discourse and methods of analysis contribute to shaping (mis)understandings of on-the-ground conflict dynamics. To demonstrate this point, the paper first overviews conventional social science methods used in mainstream international relations (IR) scholarship that tend to reify, freeze and homogenize ‘the conflict’ as well as conflict parties and then uses a different scholarly approach—namely a processual, peace-studies-oriented methodology—that provides a very different ‘picture’ of the conflict, its parties and appropriate strategies of engagement in the pursuit of peace. The second section of the paper uses three brief case studies to demonstrate how Israeli and Palestinian academics help constitute ‘the conflict’ and its parties not only through their scholarship but also through their ‘practice’. These examples also show the importance of re-evaluating analytical models to include contextual dynamics such as time, place and sources of available power as well as to recognize the diversity of Palestinian and Israeli views regarding the sources of—and best approaches for addressing—‘the conflict’.     

The demise of Oslo and Hamas’s political engagement

Abstract

This article explores the consequences of the Oslo Accords on the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas. It shows how the movement positioned itself from the onset in opposition to the treaty and ensuing peace negotiations, rejecting the changes which took place within the Palestinian political establishment; namely, the creation of the interim self-governing Palestinian Authority. It demonstrates how Hamas’s refusal to grant the Oslo Accords any legitimacy was a primary factor in its decision to boycott the first Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections in 1996. With the failure of the peace negotiations and the subsequent eruption of the Second Palestinian Intifada, the framework for the implementation of the Oslo Accords was seen to have effectively collapsed. This article argues that it is this perceived ‘demise’ of the peace process which—to a large extent—underpinned Hamas’s decision to participate in the PLC elections a decade later, in 2006. In mapping this transition, the article explores the factors motivating Hamas’s subsequent entry into the Palestinian political establishment.     

A critical analysis of the NBC news special “six days plus twenty years: A dream is dying”

The July 1, 1987 NBC News documentary on Israel's occupation of the West Bank neglected the context of the occupation, failing to give any historical perspective on the Israeli‐Palestinian dispute. The nature of the Palestinian opposition— characterized by intransigence and violence—was virtually ignored by NBC. The unbalanced coverage of the conflict served only to confuse the viewer and distort the salient issues involved.     

Human (in)security: Palestinian perceptions of security in and around the refugee camps in Lebanon

Based upon over 20 hours of focus groups and in-depth interviews with diverse representation from three Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the authors analyse Palestinian perceptions of both Lebanese and Palestinian security institutions, detailing the ways in which conventional, state-centric approaches to security by both parties have been insufficient. Special attention is paid to the new security regime in the Nahr al-Bared camp, which was destroyed in 2007 during a protracted battle between the Lebanese army and the militant Islamist group Fatah al-Islam. This is because the Government of Lebanon has made clear its intention that this regime serve as a model for the country's other 11 camps. Ultimately, the authors argue, Palestinian human security is inextricably linked to Lebanese sovereignty and national security, and the improvement of Palestinian human security will yield tangible security benefits for Lebanese and Palestinians alike. Rather than presume to speak on behalf of all Palestinians in Lebanon, the authors have instead opted to present detailed—and sometimes contradictory—quotations from Palestinians interviewed on such subjects as arms, violent extremism, Lebanese–Palestinian relations and the protection of human rights.     

Disregard for Security: The Human Rights Movement and 9/11

ABSTRACT

International human rights NGOs have warned that human rights have been threatened since September 11. However, the matter is complicated since what is involved is in reality a relationship between two concepts: human rights and security against terrorism. This article demonstrates that there is a tendency for international human rights NGOs to brush aside questions on security against terrorism. NGOs have stipulated that human rights values should be superior, or they have maintained, but failed to show, that there is no goal conflict between security and human rights—even that human rights fulfil a considerable instrumental function with respect to freedom from terrorism.     

Democracy,human rights,and U.S.‐Africa trade

The nexus of economic and political relations is a central issue in international relations, and the influence of political liberalization upon trade ties lies at the center of much liberal theory. However, many facets of the empirical linkage between political liberalization—including democratization and the respect for human rights—and trade remain uninvestigated. Examining the case of U.S.‐Africa trade, this study considers two unexplored facets of these political determinants of trade: (1) the role of human rights conditions, and (2) the robustness of the relationship between democracy, human rights, and trade across a subset of vertical dyads. Using a gravity model to assess trade patterns, we find that neither democracy nor human rights conditions has a significant impact upon U.S. trade to Africa.     

Parting the Black Sea (Region): Geopolitics,Institutionalisation and the Reconfiguration of European Security

Abstract

This article examines critically one of the most active regional dynamics of European security, centred on the Black Sea. Recently, the Black Sea region has received increased attention from a variety of political actors, who seek to increase the profile of the region in order to develop a common regional identity and an integrated approach to the security problems of the Black Sea region. This resurgence of the Black Sea region can be understood as the combined product of local interests, European integration and the ‘global war on terror’. The main argument of the article is that Black Sea security integration is characterised by a fundamental contradiction between two different logics of security—geopolitical and institutional. Three other problems—transposition, fragmentation, and duplication—are also discussed. In the conclusion, the article examines the significance of the efforts to build the Black Sea region for the future of regional integration in European security.     

Middle East conflicts

Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab‐Israeli Conflict, third edition. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Pp.xx + 358, maps, index, chronology, biblio, notes. £14.99 (paper). ISBN 0–312–12817–7 (cloth); ‐09649–6 (paper).

Edgar O'Ballance, The Palestinian Intifada. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Pp.xxii + 252, maps, index, chronology, biblio. £42.50. ISBN 0–312–21172–4.

Edgar O'Ballance, Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorism 1979–95. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Pp.xx + 228, index, chronology, biblio. £42.50. ISBN 0–333–65472–2.