From terror to public diplomacy: Jibril Rajoub and the Palestinian Authorities’ uses of sport in fragmentary Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Focusing on sport as an arena of struggle in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the current study traces, conceptually and historically, the way in which the Palestinian Authority in general, and Jibril Rajoub in particular, have shifted efforts toward the sporting arena in order to promote global awareness of the Palestinian case. In the current case study, the Palestinians were not successful at drawing attention to their political goals or in suspending Israel from Fédération Internationale de Football Association. However, their attempt emphasizes the ways in which conflicts had changed and the importance of images in the information age we live in. Conflicts today are very much battles of ideas and the information designed by the media. Alongside the military confrontations, an Image War is taking part in which each side tries to justifies its ideas, beliefs and actions.     

Libya's Qadhafi and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, 1969–2002

CROSS ROADS TO ISRAEL by Christopher Sykes, 479 pp., maps, illustrations, index. Collins. 42s.

EDWIN MONTAGU by S. D. Waley, 333 pp., index, Asia Publishing House, 45s.     

The road to the Israeli – Polish rapprochement

Between 1906 and 1949, more than 950 slaves reported at the British agencies in Bahrain, Kuwait, Muscat, and Sharjah and asked for manumission. Their written statements prove that slavery was an important part of the local socio-economic system and that many slaves had for generations been bound with the same families of owners. The manumission movement was caused mainly by the collapse of the pearl industry in the Gulf in the 1920s and 1930s, but it was the psychological factor rather than the economic one which played the decisive role in slaves coming to a decision to run away from their master.     

The Arab‐Israeli peace process: A house built on sand?

While the Declaration of Principles agreed between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in September 1993 was widely welcomed as the major breakthrough in the seemingly intractable Arab‐Israeli conflict, progress proved to be difficult, uncertain and, at times, bloody. This article places the agreement in the context of previous peace endeavours in an attempt to explain why the apparent early promise proved so difficult to sustain.     

The EU against the New Normal: Avoiding the Banalization of the Israeli‒Palestinian Dispute

This article assesses the European Union (EU)’s engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and highlights the unintended consequences of the policies pursued by Brussels on this matter. While stressing that Palestinians and Israelis interested in peace face the danger of the banalization of the conflict, the article argues that the current status quo is unacceptable and unstainable in the long run, and this demands new policies from the actors involved with the conflict or its resolution. The EU policies’ overall rationale must be to treat the Israeli?Palestinian dispute as a normal, non-exceptional conflict, in which economic and legal tools can be employed to create new legal facts on the ground. An alternative EU approach to the conflict must recognize the insufficiency of recent initiatives and should be built upon two pillars: the legalization of the main contending issues and the empowerment of the civil society actors and initiatives that foster dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis.     

Ideo‐theology and the Jewish state: from conflict to conciliation?

The assassination of Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin provided the most vivid demonstration to date of religious‐nationalist opposition inside Israel to the principle of exchanging land for peace. This article sets out to explore this world view and its intellectual origins, exploring in the process how the use of sacred Judaic texts have become both the monopoly of religious‐nationalism and the template for politically inspired violence against those in Israel suspected of condoning territorial compromise. This article concludes that if the ideo‐the‐ology of religious‐nationalists is to be assuaged, a religious discourse supporting territorial retrenchment has to become part of the political fabric of the centre‐left in Israel.     

Unlikely relations: Israel,Romania and the Egyptian–Israeli peace accord

The history of Israel's turbulent relations with the Eastern bloc nations during the Cold War has one exception, Romania. Unlike other Warsaw Pact members, Romania did not sever relations with Israel following the 1967 war. Central to these relations was Romanian Communist leader Nicolai Ceausescu, who managed to establish himself as an important figure among both Arabs and Israelis. This article will examine Romanian–Israeli relations during the 1970s and especially Ceausescu's role in the Egyptian–Israeli peace negotiations. Recent Israeli and some Romanian documents released from the Israeli State Archive and the Begin Centre reveal much about Israel's attitude towards Romania and Ceausescu's involvement in the Middle East, and serve to shed light on a heretofore neglected aspect of Israeli foreign policy. Some of the main issues to be addressed are Ceausescu's influence on Egyptian and Israeli decision makers, Israel's prime motives in maintaining a close relationship with Romania, the importance of Romanian Jewry's position to Israel's policy vis-à-vis Romania and the extent to which these relations represented a back channel that facilitated some contact with the Kremlin. All these will be examined against the larger backdrop of the Cold War and the Arab–Israeli conflict.     

Guinea‐Bissau's rocky path to peace and democracy

Nepad has helped to world to focus on Africa's challenges and potential successes rather than the negatives.     

‘A source of considerable annoyance’: an Israeli–Palestinian backchannel in the efforts to release the blocked Palestinian bank accounts

In addition to the great emotional toll that the Nakba inflicted on the Palestinian people, the 1948 exodus occasioned substantial material losses for the refugees as well. As the 1948 War ground to a halt, the international community had to decide how to deal with all of this, and in the early 1950s the matter of the so-called ‘blocked’—or frozen—Palestinian bank accounts became one of the main issues on the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission’s agenda. Initially, its effort included the government of Israel and the British-owned Barclays Bank. As things progressed, however, Israeli diplomats also engaged a group of Palestinian refugees in an informal backchannel. This article sheds light on this largely overlooked episode and shows how the channel was established, and how the Palestinian group faced nothing but strong international opposition, most notably from the British Foreign Office. Protecting the interests of its regional ally Jordan, as well as those of Barclays Bank, the Foreign Office did what it could in order to make sure that this particular Israeli–Palestinian backchannel was promptly closed.     

The British army in the east and India to‐day

The Soviet Union and The Pacific By Gerald Segal. London. Unwin Hyman. 1990. Pp. 236. Notes. Bibliog. Index. £30.00 Hb £10.95 Pb

The Red Star and The Lotus. The Political Dynamics of Indo‐Soviet Relations. By S. S. Rai. London. Sangam Books. 1990. Pp. 347. Index. £17.95

India and the Soviet Union. Trade and Technology Transfer. By Santosh Mehrotra. Cambridge University Press. 1991. Pp. 242. Notes. Bibliog. Index. £30.00     

‘The state starts from the family’: peace and harmony in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs

Based on anthropological fieldwork between 2008 and 2011, this article focuses on how people in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs conceptualize well-being through the establishment of peace and harmony. An exploration of the interactional use of the terms ‘peace’ and ‘harmony’ in Kyrgyz and Tajik (tynchtyk, yntymak, tinji, and vahdat) makes manifest that the meanings of these terms are connected to the fields of ‘family’, ‘leadership’, and ‘state’. Basing their reasoning on the officially promoted analogy between family and state, people in the eastern Pamirs distinguish between social spaces that are related to well-being and those that are not. As a factor of distinction, and crucial to the establishment of peace and harmony, the moral quality of leadership plays an important role. Positive experiences of such leadership as balanced and morally pure are mainly identified and witnessed within families and neighbourhoods and only occasionally in state institutions. This discrepancy raises the question of where to locate boundaries between good and bad, moral and immoral, harmonious and conflictual. Thus, this article contributes not only to the study of local concepts of well-being in Central Asia but also to the study of local concepts of ‘ill-being’ which challenge them.     

The British Mandate and the crisis of Palestinian landlessness, 1929–1936

This article examines landlessness among Palestinians as a facet of colonial policy in Mandate Palestine before the 1936 revolt. The growth of what was sometimes called a ‘landless class’ came into official view after the violence of 1929. Subsequent investigations indicated that landlessness was a significant problem and that it threatened to destabilize the Mandate. The effort to ameliorate the crisis of landlessness, however, clashed with the dominant colonial conception of settler developmentalism, the notion that Jews, not Arabs, were the agents of modern economic development in Palestine. The first part of this examination revisits the contest over the 1930 White Paper, focusing on its relationship to the advent of mass landlessness. The rapid defeat of the new policy via the MacDonald letter left the landlessness problem to fester while simultaneously obscuring it. As the situation in the Arab countryside continued to deteriorate, the onset of the fifth aliya temporarily reinforced erroneous assumptions about the potential to rectify the problem through the yishuv's development. By the time mass landlessness was ‘rediscovered’ and new land controls designed to protect Arab smallholders were on their way to promulgation in 1935–1936, the Palestinian countryside was just months away from determined revolt.     

A Paradise Lost? The Rise and Fall of the Palestinian Community in Kuwait

The article discusses the evolution of the Palestinian community in Kuwait in the wake of the 1948 War. The demand for skilled labour facilitated the gradual integration of the Palestinians into Kuwaiti society, especially in the education system and state institutions. In this regard the article examines the role of education and students in creating personal and political socio-economic networks. The relatively liberal political atmosphere in Kuwait during its years of development transformed it into a hotbed for Palestinian political activism. This trend continued up to the 1991 Gulf War, when Yasir Arafat's support of Saddam Husayn in that wa, caused the fall from grace of the Palestinians in Kuwait. This ended the central role that the Palestinians played in the historical process of Kuwait state building. Following the death of Arafat the PLO began to seek reconciliation with Kuwait. At this timely moment in the history of relations between these two communities, the article sheds light on these efforts.     

Who represented the Israeli middle class? The crystallization of the General Zionists from 1948 to 1949

The establishment of the State of Israel was a watershed moment in the history of the General Zionists movement. The ending of the British Mandate – characterized by its responsiveness to private enterprise – symbolized the denouement of a regulatory strategy era as an exclusive modus operandi for the general organizations. The transfer of power to a participatory Jewish democracy, whereby independent institutions drew on electoral support, required that bourgeois and petit-bourgeois leaders relinquish their reservations about the political-partisan game. For the first time, they sought to gain ascendancy over a political party in the hope that it would stand up for the rights and interests of the middle class. This article will analyze the formation process of the center party and its attempt to become a significant factor in Israeli society.