Qatar’s humanitarian aid to Palestine

The purpose of this paper is to document Qatar’s recent contribution of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. We consider Qatar as an example of a mini state that relies on its wealth and soft power to further its interests in the Middle East and support a beleaguered Arab-Muslim state. The paper carries out analysis of Arabic newspapers and other documentary evidence to contextualise and estimate Qatar’s financial contribution 2010–2016. Contextualising Qatar’s aid necessitates considering Israel’s military control of the Palestinian Territories, and its ability through hard power to regulate the inflow of aid to Palestine. The paper concludes by calling for adopting the political economy perspective in dealing with humanitarian aid.     

Old (Molotov) cocktails in new bottles? “Price-tag” and settler violence in Israel and the West Bank

In the early morning of July 31, 2015, masked attackers threw firebombs into two Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Duma, south of Nablus, killing three Palestinian civilians. Contrary to claims by Israeli and Palestinian politicians, this attack was neither an isolated anomaly nor just another incident of settler violence. Instead, it was the latest attack in an important but largely unknown phenomenon called “price-tag,” in which a loosely connected group of young Israelis called “hilltop youth” burn Palestinian mosques and destroy property in hundreds of attacks accompanied by threatening graffiti that references Israeli settlers, outposts, and anti-Arab slogans. Using an original dataset of price-tag incidents and interviews with key actors, we demonstrate that the perpetrators, targets, and strategies of price-tag are different than previous patterns of settler violence. Whereas previous settlers saw the Israeli state as legitimate and largely decided to cooperate with it, the hilltop youth have decided to confront it by using price-tag attacks to deter settlement withdrawals and chain-gang the state into a conflict with the Palestinians. This analysis of the strategic logic of price-tag reveals its potential to shift the political landscape within and between Israelis and Palestinians.     

Israel's Counter-Terrorism Policy: How Effective?

The percentage of Israelis killed by terrorism is higher than in any other democracy. The article analyzes the threats Israel has faced, the impact terrorism has had on Israel, and the counter-terrorism policies Israel has adopted. Terrorism has had a decisive effect on Israeli elections and national security decisions, but not the economy. Israeli counter-terrorism has often been conducted without a coherent overall policy, has failed to reflect and conflicted with broader objectives, and has greatly undermined Israel's international standing. Conversely, it has enabled Israel to live in relative security and thrive, and provided its leaders with the latitude to pursue various policies, including peace, should they wish to do so.     

以色列反恐政策演变及其评价

以色列建国后，其面临的恐怖主义威胁先后经历了三个不同阶段，与此相适应的以色列反恐政策也先后进行了多次调整。以色列反恐政策体系来自其长期的反恐作战实践，并深受其历史文化经历的影响，具有较强的适应性、综合性以及崇尚“先发制人”等特征。虽然以色列的反恐政策成功地维持了其社会的正常运转，但由于其反恐斗争仅是巴以冲突的一个重要组成部分，故而在巴以冲突得不到解决的情况下，它不仅无法走出诸多反恐“困境”，也难以获得反恐战争的最后胜利。     

Identity beyond borders: national identity and the post-colonial alternative

The study examines national identity in school curricula against the backdrop of globalization and its forces to create a universal global identity beyond particular affiliations. To that end, the study examines the problematic nature of Western notion of identity formation, and simultaneously asks whether political socialization in the nation-state school system is conducive of the development of cosmopolitan identity, an identity beyond national borders. Jordan, Israel, and Palestine are the three-case studies discussed in this article. Theoretically, the study contributes to the ongoing scholarly debate concerning the question of identity, political socialization, globalization, and nationalism. I make use of postcolonial theories to demonstrate the shortcomings of the logocentric way of theorizing identity as a binary twin, rooted in the relational formation between Self and Other, and search for alternative strategies to identity formation.     

Insurgent informality: the struggle over space production between the Israeli state and its Palestinian Bedouin communities

This article addresses the political and spatial agenda of the people of informalities. It conceptualizes insurgent informality as a discursive social reality, which is based on the struggle between the state hegemonic discourse regarding informal spaces and modes of space production and the countering-hegemonic discourse of communities. Based on empirical case, this paper interrogates the discourses of Israel and the its Arab communities regarding informal spaces. The analysis suggests that the state hegemonic discourse is articulated through three interrelated logics of difference, threat and spatiality. The countering discourse challenges the hegemonic discourse through its logic of justice, recognition, and protest.     

Fundamentalism's encounters with citizenship: the Haredim in Israel

This paper centers on the challenge that fundamentalist groups – such as the Israeli ultra-Orthodox community (the Haredim) – pose for citizenship. It focuses on two issues: challenges centering on contribution to and sacrifice for the Israeli nation-state; and alternatives that fundamentalism poses to definitions of citizenship. Empirically, it is based on research in three arenas: service in the Israeli military; a voluntary organization aiding state agencies after terror attacks (ZAKA), and a charitable association offering help in health and social welfare (Yad Sarah). Two trends – challenges to concepts of security and the state, and the weakening of the state in the economic sphere and social services – have opened up spaces for fundamentalist groups to operate in civil society and complement the state. The Haredi community has gradually developed a new concept of inclusion that both fits the state-centred view of citizenship and their own fundamentalist perspective.     

The 1996 Split of the Islamic Movement in Israel: Between the Holy Text and Israeli-Palestinian Context

This article aims to explain the causes and meaning of the formal split of the Islamic Movement in Israel into two factions—following the decision to participate in the elections to the fourteenth Knesset (Israeli parliament) on May 29, 1996—while locating these in a larger theoretical framework. This split resulted from a delicate combination of doctrinal-ideological controversies relating to secular electoral competition and historical-political-tactical controversies that are rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian context. Specifically, the split of the Islamic Movement in Israel derived from two interpretations of the Islamic belief: a more literal or concrete interpretation and a more abstract one.     

Within and beyond citizenship: alternative educational initiatives in the Arab society in Israel

In recent years, Arab-Palestinian citizens in Israel are in search of ‘a new vocabulary of citizenship’, among other ways, by resorting to ‘alternative educational initiatives’. We investigate and compare three alternative schools, each challenging the contested conception of Israeli citizenship. Our findings reveal different educational strategies to become ‘claimants of rights’, yet all initiatives demonstrate the constraints Arab citizens face while trying to become ‘activist citizens’ (E.F. Isin, 2009. Citizenship in flux: the figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity, 29 (1), 367–388.).     

Opaque transparency: an analysis of the Israeli lobbying regulatory regime of 2008

After some failed attempts to regulate the lobbying, the Israeli Parliament—the Knesset—passed the Lobbyist Law on April 2nd 2008. Although lobbying is a common and legitimate part of the democratic process, it raises issues of trust, equality of access, and transparency. What motivated the MKs to regulate lobbying—public interest, private interest, or symbolic politics? The MKs claimed that the law was needed for improving transparency whereas MK Yechimovich declared that it balances the strength of the rich, represented by lobbyists and the wide public. Assessing the achieved transparency in the comparative framework of other lobbying regulatory regimes, we see that the law confers tangible benefits on powerful interest groups, while providing only symbolic gestures to the public. Lack of information available for MKs creates a need for lobbyists for political intelligence and MKs need to identify the interests in play to guarantee for themselves the necessary legislative subsidy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.