Current Security Situation in the Near East Palestinian State： Yes or No？

The article analyses the political situation in the Near East in trial to find the formula of peace. It would guarantee a peaceful coexistence for Palestinians and Israelites. The conflict of Israel and Palestine lasts for already over 100 years and becomes a global conflict among Islam believers and Jewish-Christians. Trying to have peace Israel left the occupied Sinai Peninsula of Egypt and made considerable concessions for Palestinians as well： It agreed on Palestine self-governing rights or autonomy in 1994. The problem is that Arabs cannot accept the fact of Israel state in their psychology. Nobody can guarantee their national security when Jews retracted to the borders which existed till 1967, the Sixth Day War. What does the total retraction from Gaza Strip from where the rockets are constantly sent to the territory of Israel on the heads of civil people？ Would the most real and secure way of all the solutions be a Federation of Palestinian Territories or Confederation with the Kingdom of Jordan （or with the state of Egypt）？ The peace problem of Near East is global and even connected with the intentions of Iran to make an atomic bomb. International community should be more sensitive not only to the tired nation of Palestine but also the Kurds who try to establish their state in Kurdistan. People of Azerbaijan should be helped in uniting into one state in the frames of Azerbaijan. The author tried to prove the article by the facts and the regulations of international law as much as possible.     

Rebel-to-political and back? Hamas as a security provider in Gaza between rebellion,politics and governance

ABSTRACT

After winning the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections and subsequently taking control of the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007, the Palestinian Hamas – a hybrid political, social and military actor – undertook a complex process to ascertain authority and control over Gaza. The article focuses on understanding Hamas’s performance as a political party and a “rebel government” as well as the impact of this newly acquired role on the group’s strategy. Relying on primary sources, field-work and interviews with members of the Hamas government and its security sector, the study looks at Hamas’s role as a security provider and analyses the complex relationship between the institutionalized security sector and the group’s insurgent armed wing. Examining Hamas’s logic as a security provider and exploring the inherent tensions between political and insurgent logics allows for a better understanding of both the rebel group’s role as a political actor and the broader challenges behind the successful rebel-to-political transformations of non-state armed organizations. In doing so it contributes to the emerging literature on non-state actors’ shifts between ballots and bullets and on their potential role as alternative governance providers.     

Is Unilateralism Always Bad? Negotiation Lessons from Israel's “Unilateral” Gaza Withdrawal

Using the 2005 unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as a case study, this article exposes an apparent paradox: circumstances may exist in which an outcome that serves the interests of parties to a conflict cannot be achieved through bilateral negotiation but can be achieved by unilateral action. Although the withdrawal was seen at the time as serving the interests of both the Israeli government and the Palestinians, we argue that the same result could not have been achieved through bilateral negotiations. “Behind‐the‐table” internal conflicts on each side would have made it impossible for the leaders to agree on the scope of these negotiations. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's success in implementing his Gaza withdrawal was attributable in significant measure to his ability to maintain ambiguity about his long‐run plans for the West Bank. Only by focusing attention on Gaza was he able to build the necessary coalition to implement the controversial move. The Palestinian leaders, on the other hand, could never have agreed to come to the table to negotiate about Gaza alone — they would have insisted that the scope of any negotiations address a broad range of final status issues. In this article, we identify some of the lessons that the Gaza example teaches regarding the utility and limits of unilateralism as well as the benefits and potential costs of employing ambiguity as a strategy to help accomplish a controversial move. Finally, we also explore the aftermath of the withdrawal and its many missed opportunities for improving the outcome. We suggest that, even when acting unilaterally, leaders should carefully consider the probable impact of their actions on the internal conflicts of their adversaries.     

Squaring the Palestinian triangle

Abstract

The 10 options offered so far to resolve the Palestinian conundrum have proved vain. New thinking that combines Palestinian self‐determination rights with Israel's security needs is necessary. The proposed solution rests on the following: (1) mutal acceptance of self‐determination for the Palestinians and the Jewish people, (2) mutual recognition of PLO and Zionism, (3) partition of Greater Palestine between Israelis and Palestinians, and (4) separation between sovereignty over territory and personal status of inhabitants.     

The Evolutionary Path of Hamas: Examining the Role of Political Pragmatism in State Building and Activism

Of the two major Palestinian factions, Hamas has demonstrated that it is more radical and willing to use acts of terrorism than Fatah. While some arguments have made the case that Hamas has become more moderate in light of efforts to develop stable institutions of government and societal organizations, there has not been conclusive evidence of this ideological shift. In fact, the continued adherence to the Muqawama (resistance) Doctrine represents a decisive facet of the movement's enduring pledge to nullify the state of Israel through a prolonged war of attrition. This article examines the role of political pragmatism in the evolution of Hamas. First, it discusses why the moderation argument alone does not provide an adequate understanding of the movement's evolution, especially since it continues to embrace the use of terrorism and violence as facets of Islamism and as an extension of the Muqawama Doctrine. Second, rather than solely using the moderation argument, this article offers an alternative approach which considers how the combination of strategic policy approaches implemented by Hamas has reflected the role of pragmatism in pursuing its domestic and foreign policy agendas, which are intertwined with the values of the Muqawama Doctrine.     

Death is in the eye of the beholder: a study of casualty count framing in the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict

The 2014 Israel–Gaza war was the third of a string of conflicts to erupt between the State of Israel and Hamas in neighbouring Gaza and quickly became the deadliest for both sides. Even with the extensive media attention this crisis received, calls for more objective reporting were widespread, as locating sources that were not clearly influenced or reflective of political biases seemed near impossible. This paper seeks to explore the role “cultural proximity” plays in informing casualty count reporting in times of conflict. Qualitative content analysis is conducted on news coverage of the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict in the American daily newspaper, The New York Times, and the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, to assess whether significant differences exist in the way casualty figures are addressed across varying degrees of political and cultural involvement. This research reveals that variations in casualty count reporting do indeed exist across cultural and national contexts, and deems this subject worthy of further research.     

The Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism: Old Wine in New Bottlenecks

This article examines the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM) – the main institutional mechanism regulating the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip since the 2014 war. Proponents of the GRM hold that it is a crucial lifeline enabling the entry of humanitarian and reconstruction goods into Gaza while assuaging Israel’s security concerns. In contrast, this article argues that the GRM has introduced a bureaucratic and cumbersome mechanism that has created new bottlenecks that are impeding effective reconstruction and have institutionalized and depoliticized the siege of the Gaza Strip by passing the responsibility for its maintenance on to the international community.     

Waiting for Palestine: refracted citizenship and latent sovereignty in Gaza

This article explores the dynamics of citizenship under conditions of statelessness and in territories with uncertain sovereignty. The Gaza Strip under Egyptian Administration (1948–1967) – a nearly indefinable entity that was under Egyptian authority but no one's sovereignty – offers an especially good site for this exploration. In this period, both the government and the population were invested in some notion of Palestinian citizenship, but there was no Palestinian state to codify that concept. The Palestinian loss of formal citizenship with the end of the British Mandate in 1948, and the continued absence of this legal category, has shaped Palestinian life and political identification in profound ways. Even under these conditions, though, both conceptions about, and the social practice of, citizenship have also been crucially important for Palestinian community. Conditions in Gaza under Egyptian Administration illuminate a ‘refracted citizenship’ that articulated a relationship to both a future state and an existing government. Considering both the earlier dynamics of citizenship and sovereignty under the contested circumstances of the Mandate and the details of Egyptian governing practices in Gaza, the article argues that refracted citizenship provided a mechanism for people to make claims of the existing government and offered a means for that government to better manage the place and people of Gaza. Refracted citizenship also enabled people to build new community relations within Gaza – to develop a sense of specifically Gazan community – without feeling that they were jeopardizing their claims to Palestinian citizenship.     

The impact of the conflict in Gaza on antisemitism in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Taking Belgium as a case study, this article aims to assess the impact of a foreign conflict (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Gaza Strip) on intergroup relations in Europe. It asks whether intensification of the conflict in Gaza increases the number of antisemitic incidents in Belgium, and makes use of a database of complaints to the Centrum voor gelijkheid van kansen en voor racismebestrijding (Center of Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism), a federal anti-racism agency, and of an analysis of political claims-making in the written press. It is often stated that the conflict between Palestine and Israel leads to increased levels of antisemitism in Europe but rarely is this based on statistical analysis. The authors of this article undertook such an analysis and concluded that complaints about antisemitism in Belgium indeed showed a statistically significant increase during the Israeli military operation Cast Lead (December 2008–January 2009). Time series and intervention analysis on data spanning a period of one-and-a-half years, however, showed that this effect was not lasting and wore off after a couple of weeks. Apart from the temporary effect of the Gaza war on domestic intergroup relations, there seemed to be no systematic and continuous link between events in the Middle East and acts of antisemitism in Belgium.