Political culture, alternative politics and foreign policy: The case of Israel

This article analyzes how sociopolitical dynamics within a state can help explaining foreign policy. We show that under certain conditions, the public can be involved in ways that extend beyond expressing opinions that act as constraints on policy makers, and also takes active initiatives that eventually shape foreign policies. The article explains how sociopolitical processes in Israeli society, which transformed the nature of citizen–politician relations from a top-down to a bottom-up orientation, gradually led to shifts in foreign policy regarding the conflict with the Palestinians. The Israeli public has adopted an approach to solving social problems by unilateral initiatives, as part of its attempts to shape foreign policy from the bottom up, due to continuous government failure to provide public services, combined with blocked influence channels. As long as Israeli politicians ignored these changes, they failed to mobilize support for policies imposed from the top down and lost their positions of power.     

Religious and Ideological Dimensions of the Israeli Settlements Issue: Reframing the Narrative?

Whether or not it will be possible to relocate settlers from the "territories" depends not just on the willingness of the relevant Israeli officials to authorize evacuation of some or all of the West Bank and Gaza given the violence it may cause, but especially on the thinking and the changing attitudes of the settlers themselves. Only by understanding the views of the current settlers — their motivations, their beliefs, and the differences among them — will it be possible to formulate a sensible relocation strategy. That was the focus of the conference's first panel.     

Citizens' Learning,Involvement, and Participation in Decision-Making Under the Democratic Ethos: A Theoretical Framework and the Israeli Experience

Public administration literature usually assumes that citizens' participation in administrative decision-making (PDM) processes can improve public sector performance and trust. In this article, we question the universality of this assumption, arguing that PDM processes will have positive results in terms of performance and trust only when there are available channels to influence policy outcomes and democratic participatory behavior. We construct theoretical arguments based on a mechanism of social learning and illustrate them by reference to the case of Israel. The framework highlights the centrality and importance of culture and social characters for the study and planning of public administration reforms.     

Academic interventions for academic procrastination: A review of the literature

ABSTRACT

Procrastination is a widespread phenomenon in academic settings. It has been studied from many different theoretical angles, and a variety of causes and consequences have been suggested. Recent studies support the notion that academic procrastination can be seen from a situational perspective and as a failure in learning self-regulation. It suggests that interventions should address situational as well as deficits in self-regulation to help students overcome their procrastinating tendencies. The present review examined the recent literature on causes and consequences of academic procrastination and the limited number of studies of academic interventions for academic procrastination. Findings of this review strengthen the need to further study the topic of academic interventions for academic procrastination and to develop effective interventions. At the end of this review, several suggestions for the development of academic interventions are outlined.     

Social Agency, Spatial Practices, and Power: The Micro-foundations of Fragmented Sovereignty in the Occupied Territories

The study of the relationships among social agency, spatial practices, and political power opens new directions for empirical inquiry and theorization of current modalities of sovereignty. Yet, recent research has overemphasized external variables, such as globalization and international forces, as conditioners of sovereignty and state power, with diminished attention on national and local realms. In the following article, I investigate state power beyond the limits of its official boundaries, by examining how intruder states produce, manage, and sustain effective authority over occupied territories and populations. I use the example of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank to demonstrate how such cases of political authority are based on fragmented sovereignty: comprised of multiple, localized, and relatively autonomous cores of power, instead of an all-encompassing structural and centralized modality of control. I propose that fragmented sovereignty is shaped and operated through the increasing autonomous power of ground level state agents and in the ways spatial perceptions and practices are interwoven into localized political processes.

Focused training of child and youth-care workers for promoting social and educational inclusion of youth at risk

Engaging marginalized youngsters in the mainstream society poses a great challenge for child and youth-care (CYC) workers. Workers' ability to promote significant inclusion of these adolescents is largely shaped in process of their professional education. Most academic programs for CYC workers define the profession too broadly, and this lack of specification, reflecting the scope and complexity of the field, could have a negative impact on the inclusion-aimed process of professionalization. This opinion note aims at opening a discussion about a new, inclusion-focused perspective on higher professional education of CYC workers. This discussion could suggest a refinement of CYC curricula to reflect specific characteristics of the target populations as well as consider some core concepts of the field of child and youth care.     

The Israeli–Egyptian talks at kilometer 101

This article deals with the Israeli–Egyptian talks after the October 1973 War, which are known as the Kilometer 101 talks since most of them took place at this spot on the Suez–Cairo road. After 17 years of indirect Israeli–Egyptian discussions, representatives from both sides met for direct talks that led to an agreement that allowed solving the exigent problems, like prisoners of war exchange and supplies for the encircled Egyptian Third Army. After about a month the talks ended, allegedly due to disagreement on disengagement and separation of forces.     

Critical coverage: How the media criticize supreme courts—Evidence from Israel

This paper examines media criticism of the Israeli Supreme Court from 2002 to 2011 in two newspapers. We analyze the nature and patterns of press criticism in different contexts by 1) distinguishing between diffuse and specific criticism and 2) by analyzing criticism separately from political framing and the tone of the article. We find that the increase in diffuse criticism and political framing over time was often balanced with counter‐criticism, resulting in a neutral or even positive tone toward the Court. This complex picture enables a more sophisticated understanding of the nature and implications of criticism of supreme courts in the press.