The “Double-Battle”: women combatants and their embodied experiences in war zones

Our study contributes to the ongoing debate about women in combat by exploring women combatants’ experiences of war through interviews with women soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces who served as combatants or in combat-support roles in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. We proffer that the bodily experiences of women combatants disturb conventional international relations and hegemonic masculine war metanarratives that either abstract or glorify combat. These otherwise silenced narratives reveal juxtapositions of feelings of competence and vulnerability and shed light on the women’s struggle for gender integration in the military. We conclude the article with a reflection on the challenges facing researchers investigating war and terrorism.     

The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel's Control over Palestinian Archives

The essay discusses one characteristic of colonial archives – how the ruling state plunders/loots the colonized’ archives and treasures and controls them in its colonial archives - erasing them from the public sphere by repressive means, censors and restricts their exposure and use, alters their original identity, regulates their contents and subjugates them to colonizer’s laws, rules and terminology. It focuses on two archives plundered by Israel in Beirut in 1980s: the Palestine Research Center and archive of Palestinian films. The essay continues my earlier research on Palestinian visual (and other) archives taken as booty or looted by pre-state Jewish military organizations and soldiers or civilians in the first half of the twentieth century, especially during the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe, 1948), and later by Israel’s military bodies. It analyzes the plunder itself while focusing on the power relations reflected toward the hybrid gazes of the colonizer and the colonized and discusses colonial features of military archives holding and controlling seized materials. While colonial museums have been largely discussed, and also archives holding colonial history, this is one of the first essays to discuss features of colonial archives holding plundered archives/material.     

The Role of Societal Benefits and Fairness Concerns Among Decision Makers and Decision Recipients

Four experiments examined the role of costs and benefits versus procedural and distributive justice for procedural fairness and procedural evaluations among decision makers and decision recipients. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the responses of actual judges in a 2 (high versus low benefit) x 2 (search procedure conducted respectfully versus disrespectfully) randomized factorial. In both studies judges evaluated procedures differently than is typical among samples of decision recipients: outcome concerns strongly influenced both procedural evaluations and procedural fairness while procedural concerns such as voice and respect were minimally influential. Whereas fairness concerns continued to be important among these decision makers, outcome fairness was more influential than procedural fairness. Studies 3 and 4 varied role (authority versus subordinate), procedural respect, and societal benefits. Both experiments supported our predictions that procedural criteria would dominate the procedural evaluations of subordinates whereas outcome concerns such as societal benefits would dominate the procedural evaluations of authorities.     

The Importance of Male Batters’ Attributions in Understanding and Preventing Domestic Violence

The present article reviews the literature regarding the importance of taking into account male batters’ attributions in order to understand and to curtail their violence. Many treatment programs have been devised to stop domestic violence (DV); however, little comparative research exists. Therefore, we are unable to determine which techniques are effective and which are not. We contend that uncovering battering men’s attributions is important in understanding DV, and specifically, that these attributions are the key to curtailing DV. We present a typology of battering men’s attributions. What is common to these attribution styles is the evasion of responsibility for commission of, and for the need to take affirmative action to stop, the violence. These attribution styles have been found to increase battering men’s hostility and stress, their risk for engaging in violent behavior, as well as enabling battering men to continue their violence unchecked. Therefore, attributions are a crucial ingredient in DV and must be addressed directly and intensely in DV treatment programs in order to increase their (as yet limited) effectiveness.     

Judicial Procedural Involvement (JPI): A Metric for Judges’ Role in Civil Litigation,Settlement, and Access to Justice

We examine judges’ role in civil litigation by studying empirically the relationship between judicial procedural involvement (JPI) and lawsuits’ mode of disposition (MoD). Furthermore, we propose JPI as a metric for the allocation of judicial attention to litigants. Applying the framework to Israeli trial court data, we find that 60 per cent of cases included JPI (through hearings and rulings on motions) whereas 40 per cent involved only the court's institutional function. By juxtaposing JPI and MoD data, we shed light on the scope of judicial involvement in settlements, the ratio between judges’ normative public-life function and their problem-solving function, and other pertinent questions. Since nowadays lawsuits are rarely adjudicated, trial rates are low, and litigants in person (pro se litigants) are common, we argue that access to justice should also be construed in terms of access to judicial attention throughout the proceeding, which is readily measurable through JPI.