Israeli legislation on aggressive tax planning

Israel's new law requiring taxpayers to report aggressive taxplanning arrangements to the Israeli Tax Authority requiresprofessionals to consider the reporting implications and therisks when advising clients.     

Rights-Based Judicial Review: A Democratic Justification

Law and Philosophy -     

Large‐Scale Social Protest: A Business Risk and a Bureaucratic Opportunity

The public versus private nature of organizations influences their goals, processes, and employee values. However, existing studies have not analyzed whether and how the public nature of organizations shapes their responses to concrete social pressures. This article takes a first step toward addressing this gap by comparing the communication strategies of public organizations and businesses in response to large‐scale social protests. Specifically, we conceptualize, theorize, and empirically analyze the communication strategies of 100 organizations in response to large‐scale social protests that took place in Israel during 2011. We find that in response to these protests, public organizations tended to employ a “positive‐visibility” strategy, whereas businesses were inclined to keep a “low public profile.” We associate these different communication strategies with the relatively benign consequences of large‐scale social protests for public organizations compared with their high costs for businesses.     

Coerce,Consent, and Coax: A Review of U.S. Congressional Efforts to Improve Federal Counterterrorism Information Sharing

Government Accountability Office reports and secondary sources reveal that the U.S. Congress has employed three distinct legislative approaches to address the federal counterterrorism information-sharing impasse: coerce, consent, and coax. One main example illustrates each approach: the Homeland Security Information Network project exemplifies the coerce approach; Intellipedia illustrates the consent approach; the office of the Program Manager of the Information Sharing Environment exemplifies the coax approach. Secondary examples are utilized including those of regional Fusion Centers, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center. The merits and challenges of the three approaches are discussed and compared. The conclusion proposes ideas for using the approach most appropriate to specific counterterrorism challenges.     

The Well of Forgetfulness and Remembrance: milieu de mémoire and lieu de mémoire in a Palestinian Arab Town in Israel

This article explores the history of an ancient well that had been a vivid milieu de mémoire, in Pierre Nora's term, for hundreds of years. In the 1950s water pipelines were connected to many houses in the town of Baqa al-Gharbiyya, where the well was situated, and within a few years the well was deserted. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century the well had been forgotten as waste piled up where once an ancient source of life had flourished. This article focuses on the circumstances of a recent conservation project intended to rescue the well from a careless municipal ‘development’ plan, and to preserve the site for the benefit of the local population. The new lieu de mémoire of the well deserves scholarly attention because it was built ‘from the grass roots,’ by ordinary men and women who conceive of their cultural heritage as an important part of their identity and oppose the ‘acceleration of history,’ as Nora put it. The interpretation of the memorial site is carried out in a contextual symbolic analysis of its spatial and artistic characteristics, alongside written evidence concerning the initiative, as well as oral testimonies relating the history of the well since the 1930s. This multilayered interpretation revolves around the gap between memories and relics of an essentially rural culture, and complex urban, social, and political realities.