The geopolitics of ‘Enclavisation’and the demise of a two-stateSolution to the Israeli – Palestinian conflict

This paper argues that Israel's military strategy since the outbreak of the second Intifada, in September 2000, has been one not merely of ‘security’ or ‘counter-terror’ but part of a longer-term strategy of spatial demolition and strangulation. This strategy seems predicated on two aims: unilateral separation from the Palestinian population, and its concomitant territorial dismemberment. Withdrawal from a totally controlled and isolated Gaza, in effect the latter's enclavisation, is part of this strategy. Such an enclave will in effect be functionally and spatially sundered from another chain of Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank. From an Israeli perspective, driven by its own distinctive territorial imperative, such separation will ensure Israeli control of and sovereignty over the best land and water resources, and control of all borders and border areas. It is further argued that the policy of unilateral separation and strangulation, the destruction and planned enclavisation of Gaza, and covert and overt settlement expansion in the West Bank—its dismemberment through exclavization, has in effect shattered the spatial basis of a two-state solution.     

Measuring Success in Coping with Terrorism: The Israeli Case

This article examines the degree of efficacy of Israel's antiterror policies and ability to cope with terrorism using seven parameters that fall into seven parameters: reduction in civilian casualties among Israelis and Palestinians, Israel's ability to cope economically, Israeli social cohesion, the status of international and domestic support for the Israeli government and the extent of weakening of international and domestic support for the Palestinian leadership. The article concludes that based on most of these parameters, Israel has been successful in coping with terrorism, although greater security must be attained through a change in Palestinian policies.     

Terrorism: Review of 1988 and prospects for 1989

This article is the first to explore the Israel Defense Forces's official statistical data on Palestinian terrorism toward Israeli targets during the al-Aqsa intifada 2000–2004. Focusing the analysis on the logic of terrorist target choice, the article identifies two separate results: First, an unambiguous difference in the form of the attacks contingent on whether they are carried out in the state of Israel or in the Occupied Territories. Second, based on the same distinction, the analysis points out how the attacks are targeted toward distinctively different categories of the Israeli populace. Causes of the results are discussed.     

Support for Palestinians among Jewish Americans: the importance of education and contact

The violent and protracted Israeli–Palestinian conflict continues, and Jewish Americans play a significant role in influencing related US foreign policy as well as in promoting positive interactions with Palestinians globally. Diaspora populations have played an important role in international peace processes and American Jews are actively involved in peace efforts for Palestinian human rights. Previous research indicates a relationship between views about Israel, knowing Palestinian narratives, and promoting peace processes. Thus, the attitudes and experiences that Jewish Americans have are important to understand and predicting their support for Palestinians. An online internet survey distributed to Jewish listservs (n = 173) measured variables of gender, age, political views, Jewish socialization, family and own attitudes about Israel, courses on the conflict, and having been to the West Bank. Results indicated younger, more liberal Jewish Americans who had taken courses and been to the West Bank predicted more support for Palestinians. Implications for future research and education as an important process in moving the peace process forward both through interpersonal relationships and public policy efforts are discussed.     

Minimizing Unintended Deaths Enhanced the Effectiveness of Targeted Killing in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Targeted killing has become a primary counterterrorism measure used by a number of countries in their confrontation with lethal threats. This article focuses on the impact of unintended deaths on the effectiveness of targeted killing. The article evaluates the effectiveness of targeted killings carried out in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict theater that resulted in unintended deaths, compared to the effectiveness of targeted killings where the intended target is the sole person killed. Using multivariate analysis, we demonstrate that targeted killings with unintended deaths were followed by a greater number of suicide bombings and associated casualties compared with targeted killings with no unintended deaths. Based on these findings, nations involved in such conflicts should strive to inflict as few unintended deaths as possible, not only because it is morally right, but also because it is more effective in mitigating terrorism.     

The violence of culture: the legitimation of the Israeli occupation of Palestine

This paper considers the ramifications of the fact that a majority of (Jewish) Israeli citizens no longer considers the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territory of the West Bank to be an ‘occupation’. Informed by qualitative research conducted in Israel and the occupied territory of the West Bank, the paper argues the case for understanding of this process of social legitimation as being rooted in complex structures of cultural processes and practices grounded in ideological and religious beliefs. Identifying Zionism as an ethno-national ideology, located within the wider ethno-national impulse of nineteenth century Europe, the paper further investigates a number of cultural processes that have led to the domestic justification and rationalisation of occupation in the Israeli public consciousness and consequently, the legitimisation of continued occupation. These cultural practices are inherently highly political, constituting a long-term strategy aimed at maintaining the occupation. The paper argues that this strategy is articulated not only by cultural practices of ethnonationalism and identity politics, but ultimately by various acts and facets of violence.     

Israeli State Violence during the Second Intifada: Combining New Institutionalist and Rational Choice Approaches

In attempting to explain Israel's retaliatory policies toward Palestinian violence, new institutionalist and rational choice theories vie for dominance. This article argues that both approaches can contribute to understanding the severity of Israel's response if they are viewed as nested explanations appropriate to different threat levels. The article makes its case using data from 74 interviews with senior Israeli counterterrorist experts (2006–07), counts of Israeli and Palestinian fatalities due to state and collective violence (1987–2007), and a database of collective violence events during the Second Intifada (2000–05). Institutional effects are evident at low threat levels, as new institutionalists predict, but these effects are overwhelmed at high threat levels, as rational choice theorists assert.     

Settling on Violence: Expansion of Israeli Outposts in the West Bank in Response to Terrorism

How does terrorism affect land control in intrastate conflicts? This article explores this question in the case of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict during the Second Intifada (2000–2005), and shows that Palestinian attacks led to an expansion of Israeli outposts in the disputed territories of the West Bank. Following suicide attacks, there is an increase in outposts in home districts of the perpetrators. The number of outposts also increases following deadly attacks against Israelis in West Bank districts where these attacks take place. These results suggest that Israeli settlers use outpost expansion as retaliation against Palestinian communities they perceive to be involved in violence, and this shifts territorial control against Palestinians.     

Crony capitalism in the Palestinian Authority: a deal among friends

Abstract

This article interrogates the multifaceted political–economic networks entrenched within the multiple structures of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA). The main argument of this article is that crony capitalism is a defining feature of the PA’s relations with a handful of capitalists and business groups. The demonstration of this argument is exhibited through the large-scale public and private monopolistic practices in strategic sectors of the Palestinian economy, which function within the framework of Israel’s settler-colonial reality and the persistent patterns of international aid to the occupied West Bank. While acknowledging the existence of cronyism as a feature of the capitalist system in its diverse typologies, crony capitalism may be more pronounced in situations characterised by political uncertainty, whereby political–business collusion strategizes the expansion of neo-patrimonial networks and rent-seeking opportunities as a meta-mechanism for social control and political stabilisation. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, crony capitalism was developed as part of the political allegiances and economic alliances that underpin the structures created by the Oslo process, which are fostered by Israeli policies and the international donor community to maintain the cohesiveness of the PA regime.     

Planning and Strategy in Reforming Romania's SRI

Counting the wars

Count Alexandre de Marenches and David A. Andelman: The Fourth World War: Diplomacy and Espionage in the Age of Terrorism William Morrow, New York, 1992, 281 p., $23.00.

The Israeli nuclear minimax

Seymour M. Hersh: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy Random House, New York, 1991, 356 p., $23.00.

Weighing evidence for the intelligence analyst

David A. Schum: Evidence and Inference for the Intelligence Analyst 2 Vols./ University Press of America, 1987, Vol. 1—486 p., $125.00; Vol.2—359 p., $85.00.

Yankee secrets

Edmund R. Thompson, ed.: Spies of the American Revolution David Atlee Phillips New England Chapter, Association of Former Intelligence Officers, Kennebunk, Maine, 1991, 234 p., $12.95.

Enquiring minds want to know…

Peter Gudgin: Military Intelligence: The British Story Arms and Armour Press, London, 1989, 156 p., $21.95.     

Shared History Project: A PRIME Example of Peace-Building Under Fire

Minimal peace building during a violent conflict is suggested as a strategy for future post-conflict peace processes. This paper describes a process of five workshops in which Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli teachers developed a joint school textbook of two narratives (an Israeli and a Palestinian) in regard to three dates in their mutual conflict: the Balfour Declaration, the 1948 war and the 1987 Intifada. The teachers developed these two narratives to be taught in their classrooms. All these activities took place under severe conditions of asymmetry of power relations of occupation (of the Palestinians) and of suicide bombers (against Israelis) throughout the project. The Two-State solution requires in our view textbooks of two narratives, so students learn to respect the narrative of the Other.     

Speechlessness: In Search of Language to Resist the Israeli “Thing Without a Name”

This paper criticizes the words used to critique Israeli repression of Palestinians as ineffective for political struggle and not critical enough. It argues that there is no single word able to comprehend the phenomenon of constant dispossession, violent repression, and righteous blaming of Palestinian resistance as terror. Unable to suggest one comprehensive concept that can at once describe, analyze, and criticize the phenomenon, scholars use inappropriate existing terms—like occupation, Apartheid, colonialism, and Zionism—or invent new words like ethnocracy, politiciside, Bantustine, spaciocide, sociocide, or symbolic genocide. All the concepts are discussed in the paper; it is argued that they are partially correct, but not totally comprehensive. The paper aims to uncover the sophisticated regime that can co-opt every critical word, and present always Israel as a democratic and enlightened regime, a victim of Palestinian violence. It claims that the incapacity to create a critical language is one of the obstacles to develop effective resistance to the regime.

YES PM: Years of Experience in Strategies for Peace Making

From the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in September 2000 to the eruption of Al Aqsa intifada in September 2000, the international community allocated an estimated $20–25 million for people-to-people (P2P) projects. Since September 2000, almost all P2P projects came to a halt. Many people have asked why this had to happen? Why did the P2P projects cease to work when they were needed the most? Why did the P2P projects fail to produce the desired goals? How could P2P projects have greater impact? Why are some activities continuing, while others have ceased? This article will attempt to deal with these questions. It is based on a research project that involved Israeli and Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Civil Society institutions; Israeli, Palestinian, and international academics; and other expert conflict resolution and conflict prevention practitioners. A joint team of Israeli and Palestinian researchers was appointed to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the P2P process; two workshops were held to conduct subjective analyses of the P2P process from its start until today. An interactive web site was also produced, and some 40 interviews were conducted with initiators and implementers of P2P projects. We present here the findings of this study.     

Fighting Networked Terrorist Groups: Lessons from Israel

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States faced “networked” adversaries: insurgent groups that communicated and coordinated their political and military campaigns without a central command. The rise of networked groups is a direct result of the preponderance of U.S. military power. Consequently, this article asks: What strategies have been most effective in defeating networked groups? To answer this question, the article examines Israeli operations against Palestinian groups during Operation Defense Shield in 2002. It argues that the most effective strategy to defeat networked adversaries is to use networked strategies. In Israel, this meant establishing multiple units to penetrate Palestinian urban areas, swarm together from several directions, and kill or capture militants.     

Transformation of the Official Memory of Conflict: A Tentative Model and the Israeli Memory of the 1948 Palestinian Exodus

Collective memory of an intractable conflict is an important determinant of the psychological and the behavioral dynamics of the parties involved. Typically biased, it de-legitimizes the rival and glorifies the in-group, thereby inhibiting peaceful resolution of the conflict and reconciliation of the parties. Therefore, the transformation of this memory into a less biased one is of great importance in advancing peace and reconciliation. This article introduces for the first time a tentative model of that transformation, describing the seven phases of the transformation process and the five categories of factors that influence it. Methodologically, this is done using a case study approach, based on the empirical findings regarding the Israeli official memory from 1949 to 2004 surrounding the causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus. This memory is represented by all of the publications produced during the 56-year research period of the Israeli army (IDF), the National Information Center, and the Ministry of Education. While until 1999 this inclusive memory was largely Zionist (i.e., all the Palestinian refugees left willingly in 1948), since 2000, it has become partially critical because the Ministry of Education has begun adopting the critical narrative (i.e., some left willingly while others were expelled).     

Do Targeted Assassinations Work? A Multivariate Analysis of Israel's Controversial Tactic during Al-Aqsa Uprising 1

We assess the impact of Israel's targeted assassinations policy on rates of Palestinian violence from September 2000, the beginning of Al-Aqsa uprising, through June 2004. Literature concerning the relationship between repression and rebellion suggests four plausible effects of targeted assassinations on insurgents: deterrence, backlash, disruption, and incapacitation. Using differenced and lagged time-series analysis, this article utilizes multiple and logistic regression to evaluate the effect of targeted assassinations on Palestinian violence. It is concluded that targeted assassinations have no significant impact on rates of Palestinian attacks. Targeted assassinations do not decrease rates of Palestinian violence, nor do they increase them, whether in the short or long run. Targeted assassinations may be useful as a political tool to signal a state's determination to punish terrorists and placate an angry public, but there is little evidence that they actually impact the course of an insurgency.     

Choice as Everyday Politics: Female Palestinian Citizens of Israel in Mixed Cities

The paper analyzes everyday life as an arena of politics and choice as a form of everyday power. The paper discusses the theoretical debate on choice and everyday life as depoliticization mechanisms and claims, as opposed to the prevailing theory, that choices made in everyday life form politics of small things. In the various choices that women make and the way they conduct their everyday lives, they offer an alternative sociopolitical order based on a conscious, intentional choice. The experience of Palestinian woman citizens of Israel living in cities of mixed Jewish and Palestinian populations serves as the field of study. I argue that the choice to live in a mixed city and everyday life in this city constitutes an alternative life space for Arab–Palestinian women that allows them to express their opposition to both their own society and the larger Jewish society and, at the same time, serves as a setting for social change. Arab–Palestinian women utilize the space of the mixed city to forge new ways for themselves and their families to structure gender relations, feminine identity, class identity, and Palestinian national identity in a largely ethnonational and gendered unequal society.

‘For you were strangers’: Jewish ritual,black musics,and commemorative politics in Tel Aviv’s Refugee Seder

ABSTRACT

Each Passover since 2009, hundreds of East African asylum seekers and Israeli activists have gathered for ‘Refugee Seder’, a public event to support Sudanese and Eritrean communities in Israel. Featuring a ceremonial seder meal, storytelling, speeches, and a dance party, Refugee Seder draws on age-old Jewish rituals and contemporary global black pop musics to symbolize Africans as members of the Israeli national collective. This article explores Refugee Seder’s modified commemorative practices, which engage dual narratives of Jewish nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. I show how seder rituals enable African participants to temporarily embody a Jewish spiritual identity, and how black pop musics help publicly reframe Africans’ ‘blackness’ as a cultural asset instead of a political liability. Ultimately, I argue that Refugee Seder distills larger ideologies of identity and belonging that are deeply rooted in Israeli collective consciousness, and which shape the trajectories of ‘refugee issue’ politics and policy-making.     

Norms,persuasion and practice: landmine monitor and civil society

This paper describes a key aspect of the Israeli seizure and incorporation of Palestinian Arab lands that has been little examined to date, namely the dynamics of the Judaisation of Palestinian land as a result of circumstances of war, peace and conjunct agreements. I argue that this process has capitalised on a dynamics of disorder concomitant with armed hostilities. And, during peace negotiations, a policy of land takeover was pursued grounded in the power disparity between the two partners. I further emphasise that this policy has been in keeping with an ethnocratic state ideology and the perceived need to control ever more area within the Land of Israel for settlement and absorption of immigrants. The Israeli political class has repeatedly expropriated borderland space when such a window of opportunity for implementing its ethnocratic territorial imperative has arisen. This ideological imperative predated the formation of the state and has been central to the broader political enterprise of which the Israeli state was and remains the expression. The paper examines cases of land ‘expropriation’ in the early years of the state and specifically after the immediate termination of military hostilities, focusing on case studies in the northern demilitarised area, the Latrun area and in East Jerusalem. This fundamental state policy continues down into the present, evident in the land being seized from Palestinian territory for the building of the Separation Wall, an instrument of a significant new ‘grab’ of land.