Israeli-Palestinian Context Research Articles

(In)Security in social media: exploring Israeli and Palestinian narratives

ABSTRACT The persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict profoundly influences the perceptions of both Israelis and Palestinians, shaping successive generations and posing a complex challenge for security scholarship. This article examines these contrasting socially constructed realities through the lens of Securitisation Theory, analysing public social media discourses on Facebook between 1 January 2021 and 29 April 2022 in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. By bridging high-level theorising with empirically driven methodology, the study enriches the understanding of securitisation processes using Balzacq’s framework and engaging with perspectives from Cote, Stritzel, and Vuori, including the active role of target audiences and the complexity of securitisation as a speech act. Through this approach, the research not only advances theoretical insights into Securitisation but also demonstrates that leveraging social media analysis provides both a valuable means of theory testing and a more comprehensive understanding of securitisation dynamics in the Israeli-Palestinian context.

Reflexive postliberal peace: a cultural paradigm shift in Israel’s peacebuilding

ABSTRACT To what extent does postliberal peace represent a substantive cultural paradigm shift relative to the liberal peace paradigm? We offer an empirical examination of the question through the Israeli case. An analysis of sixteen peace associations shows that peace activism has changed in the last twenty years in Israel in terms of organization, orientation, and action. Such change is clearly based on reflexivity, i.e. on the attempt by the activists to overcome the weakness of the liberal peace approach that has failed repeatedly in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The Israeli case reveals a cultural change that is creating a new, concrete, micro-level, “bottom-up” model of peacebuilding grounded, first and foremost, in everyday life. It is based on creating bridges on the social and cultural levels through practices, meetings, and networks. Although the peace process is not visible in the near future in Israel, and precisely because of that, the article presents the formation of a new cultural perception, which might be useful, and even necessary in time.

Displaying Dissent: On Faith, Consumerism, and Censorial Discipline in the Israeli Museum

An unusual violent clash between religious, Christian and Muslim demonstrators and the Haifa Museum of Art took place on Thursday, January 9, 2019. The protesters amassed the entrance of the museum to express their distress against the exhibition Shop It! A handheld firebomb thrown towards the museum was but the first round for the violent reactions of the next several days. These included attacking police forces and attempts to break into the museum featuring works of art considered sacrilegious by the demonstrators. The protest developed into a multi-participant debate in the art scene, involving ordinary citizens, artists and art curators, local church leaders, the city mayor, the minister of culture and other politicians, civil rights organizations and the court, as each part sought to exercise civic, moral, ethical or practical authority to censor the position or the work of the other. The article seeks to analyze the different ways in which mechanisms of regularization, supervision and punishment, which have always been part of the world of art, are used not only by those perceived as apparatuses of the state or as ideological mechanisms of abstract political or institutional entity, but as standard practices in the discourse of creating, trading, curating and presenting art – a discourse which, in the Israeli-Palestinian context, is imbued with the notion of national conflict.

Draining International Water Law: Lessons from the Israel–Occupied Palestinian Territory Context

Abstract This article discusses the complexities of International Water Law (IWL) in the Israel Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) context. In the Oslo Accords, Israelis and Palestinians agreed to employ the core principles of IWL in their respective utilisation of shared water resources, in particular, over shared water resources in the West Bank: the principle of equitable and reasonable utilisation of water courses, the principle of no significant harm and the duty of co-operation. This article critically discusses these three principles in the Israel–OPT context and addresses in particular the questions: To what extent these principles are applicable in the Israeli–Palestinian context, and to what extent have they been implemented? The article concludes that there is an evident lack of implementation of such principles which has resulted in adverse effects on Palestinian water rights and have been on the expense of the OPT.

Exploring a unifying approach to peacebuilding through tourism: Abraham and Israel/Palestine

This work emerges from the encouragement of peace studies scholars to seek out commonalities that can unite rival sides in a conflict. Based on this call, I propose the unifying approach to peacebuilding through tourism as one where tourism initiatives use unifying points (such as figures, sites, stories and symbols) that help conflicting sides see commonalities and thus facilitate cross-cultural understanding. In particular, I look at how the story of Abraham (communal father of Jews, Christians and Muslims) appears to be used as a guiding fiction for the work of two tourism initiatives in Israel and Palestine. Based on mixed qualitative data, I use Creative Analytic Practice to present two semi-fictional stories that explore this use of Abraham, exposing the potential benefits and risks associated with striving for a unifying peace in an arena as charged as the Israeli-Palestinian context. These stories reveal that the unifying approach provides a valuable vocabulary of progress that challenges the dominant sectarian narratives of tourism in the region, yet simultaneously rubs awkwardly against the sharp divisions and imbalances of the Israeli-Palestinian context.

The View from here – The Challenges of Teaching Gender Issues in Drama at An-Najah National University

Abstract Drawing on the challenges I have faced in my feminist analysis of Renaissance drama, this article sheds light on traditional approaches to teaching Othello in Palestine and the responses generated by my counter discussions of this domestic tragedy. My approach aims to reveal the destructive discourse of gossip, the objectification of women, and male refusal to listen to the female voice. While education is a means of emancipation and liberation within the Israeli-Palestinian context, I explore how the traditional way of teaching the play can advertently and inadvertently align with colonial strategies that stifle students’ critical thinking and their potential to emancipate themselves from the network of oppressive traditions and in extension perpetuate the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The Challenge of Empathy: Examining Processes in the Israeli-Palestinian Bi-National School for Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents

ABSTRACT A 30-month-long training program in child and adolescent psychotherapy was established in response to specific Israeli and Palestinian mental health services’ needs. Trainees came from Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. This article addresses the rationale for the program, the opposition it encountered upon its inception, and the empathic processes that arose in the training group through a short vignette from a group supervision hour. It demonstrates the delicate nature of empathy, and its retreat in the face of conflict and aggression. Attention to empathic processes is presented as central both to psychotherapeutic relationships, as well as to the process of learning from group dynamics. The group’s growing capacity for empathy paralleled an increased appreciation for complexity and meeting the unknown personal territory of another. Relating to the Israeli-Palestinian context of the group, enabled an expanded ability to recognize one another’s humanity, while accepting existing political conflicts and experiential differences.

Intimate Others and the Othering of intimates: The gendered psycho-politics of the entangled relational

The article begins with an exploration of the ambivalence experienced by the author when invited to speak at a conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. This followed by introducing two notions, ‘ethical distress’ and ‘entangled relational’, both of which speak to the ambivalence. Next, it is argued that the notion of ‘the relational’ in psychoanalytic literature is largely apolitical, and that it has required women—who speak from the margins—to theorize and incorporate the political into the relational frame. I argue that the ‘entangled relational’ subsumes and politicizes ‘the relational’. The notion of ‘intimate others’ is utilized to think about processes of Othering and the emotional consequences that follow out of it. This is followed by Nancy Chodorow and Lynne Layton’s politicized feminist theorizations. Layton concludes that psycho-developmental processes taking place under conditions of patriarchy necessarily lead to men and women suffering from a form of narcissistic injury. The article then uses all these ideas to think about the psychological consequences of militarization on the male and female citizens of militarized societies, and in particular about the psychological consequences for those living in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The article concludes with some thoughts about the possible function and task of psychotherapy in militarized contexts.

Providing counter-narratives: the positive role of hostels in the Israeli-Palestinian context

Previous research suggests that tourism has a role to play in challenging the destructive dominant narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian context – discourses that traditionally have, and still do, revolve around sectarianism, Othering and violence. Our case study focuses on a hostel in the Palestinian city of Ramallah that boldly attempts to challenge the way tourists view the Israeli-Palestinian context and Palestine as a tourism destination. We examine how the hostel attempts to achieve this and the ways in which being a hostel (as opposed to a hotel) helps its guests with this reframing through in-depth qualitative interviews conducted on-site with members of the hostel management and staff, and through participant observation conducted by the researchers in Ramallah. Findings shed light on the hostel’s ability to enable Israelis and Palestinians to cooperate within tourism, and how Palestine has much more to offer tourists than conflict-related tourism, thus challenging the master narratives of the region which have suggested quite the contrary. A key finding is the hostel's on-going attempt to remove ignorance about the situation in the region and promote fact-based learning. The results also suggest that the very characteristics of a hostel assist in achieving this mission through the intimate interactions that are inherent in a hostel setting. Hostels can, therefore, be part of a wider approach to ensuring tourism is used to promote alternative, positive narratives of contested space, as opposed to promoting division and externalising the conflict, as is so often the case. 摘要之前的研究表明, 旅游业在挑战以色列-巴勒斯坦背景下的破坏性主导叙事方面可以发挥作用——这些话语传统上想来围绕宗派主义、异己和暴力展开, 现在依然如此。我们的案例研究集中在巴勒斯坦城市拉马拉的一家青年旅社, 它大胆地尝试挑战游客看待巴以关系和巴勒斯坦作为旅游目的地的方式。我们通过在现场深入访谈青年旅社管理人员与员工,以及通过由拉马拉研究人员的参与观察, 研究了该旅社试图实现这一目标的方式, 以及在这一新框架下该旅社是如何帮助客人的。调查结果有助于了解该青年旅社有能力使以色列和巴勒斯坦人在旅游业内进行合作, 以及巴勒斯坦向游客提供的服务如何远远超过与冲突有关的旅游, 从而挑战了该地区的主流叙述, 而这些叙述的观点恰恰与实际相反。一个关键的发现是, 青年旅社正在努力消除对该地区情况的无知, 并促进基于事实的学习。研究结果亦显示, 青年旅舍的特色有助于透过旅舍环境所固有的亲密互动来达成这一使命。因此, 青年旅舍可以成为一种更广泛的方法的一部分, 以确保旅游业被用来促进对有争议的空间的替代的、积极的叙述, 而不是像通常情况那样促进分裂和将冲突外部化。

The philosophical challenges of critical peace education in the Palestinian-Israeli context

ABSTRACT This article presents and analyzes two examples of peace education practices in the Israeli-Palestinian context. Zochrot is an organization dedicated to raising public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel. The School for Peace is a Jewish-Arab organization that conducts encounter activities with the goal of encouraging participants to become active in relation to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Both practices are grounded in critical pedagogy and postcolonial literature, and their aim is to change existing power structures. Current political realities, however, which include oppression, occupation, and injustice, exacerbate the challenge of this goal. We identify three challenges that demand attention if these practices are to realize their transformative potential: essentialism, responsibility of the victim, and singular utopia. Finally, we highlight the importance of hybrid identity as an educational approach that is a promising path for realizing the transformative potential of critical PE.

Political ‘apptivism’ in the Middle East: The case of iNakba

The use of social media in the Arab world has drawn an increasing amount of scholarly attention. Research addressing ‘Arab Spring’ upheavals and Islamic military movements has demonstrated grassroots level and often spontaneous uses of social media platforms. However, little attention has been paid to political apps as an emergent means of communication. Specifically, this study asks how users and developers view the use of political apps within the Israeli–Palestinian context by focusing on iNakba – an app that enables users to navigate Palestinian villages that were destroyed during the 1948 war and its aftermath. Ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative analysis of interviews with iNakba users and developers uncover three key facets of the app: (1) crowd mobilization, (2) educational tool that reanimates the invisible landscape of pre-1948 Palestine, and (3) promoting the Palestinian narrative. The study illuminates the role of political apps as agents of change for identity building and shaping users’ political consciousness.

The Politics of Decolonisation and Bi-Nationalism in Israel/Palestine

Recent years have seen a revitalisation of decolonisation as a framework of analysis in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This article maps changes in the meanings attached to decolonisation in the Israeli Israeli–Palestinian context, paying particular attention to the one-state paradigm. One-state proposals highlight bi-national realities in historic Palestine in order to lay out a decolonising vision grounded in equal civic rights. Many one-state advocates, however, are suspicious of a prescriptive bi-national paradigm that would afford the two national groups equal collective rights, primarily because its recognition of Jewish national self-determination is seen as entrenching, rather than decolonising, colonial relations of power. We argue that a prescriptive bi-nationalism in fact offers rich resources for a decolonising project in Israel/Palestine that seeks to establish a polity based on the principles of justice and equality – come to terms with historical injustice and imagine alternative pasts, presents and futures based on Arab–Jewish relationships.

Law Trumps Hate? Enforcing Legal Constraints on Use of Force in Armed Conflict in the Face of Literal, Interpretive and Implicatory Denial

The rise to power of champions of post-truth politics attests to a social climate in which facts are devalued while sentiment is given great currency. In this environment, there is cause for concern that both facts and norms will be set aside when yielding unpopular outcomes. Such concerns are especially warranted when it comes to holding state servicemen accountable for alleged violations towards persons affiliated with the adverse party to an armed conflict. Promoting accountability in such cases has always posed a challenge and will likely prove all the more difficult in a state of widespread indifference to the truth. With this threat to the rule of law looming in the background, the article looks to experiences from the Israeli-Palestinian context to draw cautionary lessons and raise a call for vigilance. Through analysis of case studies in which Israeli troops allegedly applied unlawful force against Palestinians, it traces a corrosive process whereby regular recourse to ill-founded and unwarranted denial has undermined the enforcement of international humanitarian law and related rules in the occupied territory. Noting that denial persists even in the wake of seemingly compelling evidence furnished by advancing technologies, the article contends that it has fostered a culture of impunity that in turn threatens to bred widespread disrespect, indifference and alienation towards the law and towards its underlying values. The article ultimately advocates for steps to be taken to offset this dangerous outcome.

‘BDS – it’s complicated’: Israeli, Jewish, and others’ views on the boycott of Israel

ABSTRACTThis study explored attitudes of 501 Israelis – Jews and non-Jews – and Jews and others from western countries concerning Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which aim to change Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. We studied the relationships between views on BDS/PACBI, understandings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and anti-Semitism, in the different groups. Our internet questionnaire led to snowball sampling, resulting in a highly-educated sample. Israeli-Jews were more inclined to participate than others. Few Palestinians from the Occupied Territories responded; hence we could not compare this group to the others. Overall, more respondents opposed the boycott than those who favoured it. Jewish-Israelis showed the lowest agreement with BDS while non-Jews from western countries exhibited the highest. Jewish-Israeli responses were similar to responses from western Jews and non-Jewish Israelis tended to respond like western non-Jews. Jewish respondents saw BDS as less non-violent than the other groups, while non-Jews disagreed more with the statement that BDS is anti-Semitic than the Jewish respondents. In conclusion, since views towards the boycott were found to be nuanced, researchers and activists need to be aware of these complexities when engaging in human rights work in the Israeli-Palestinian context.

Cultural factors in peace-making: the Israeli-Palestinian context

The importance of culture, while recognized, has received proportionately less attention than political and economic issues and objective interests in settling political disputes. Traditional ways of understanding conflict and approaches to reconciliation nevertheless appear to play a major role in the frequent breakdown of peace agreements, as parties’ underlying needs and expectations are not met. A review of data on peace agreements in the Middle East as compared to the rest of the world shows that power imbalance, perceptions of injustice and the authority of potential mediators play especially important roles in success. In cases of inter-Arab and Arab–Israeli conflict, reconciliation requires power rebalance, demonstrated mutual respect and security guarantees.

Legal Entitlements, Changing Circumstances and Intertemporality: A Comment on the Creation of Israel and the Status of Palestine

The events surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the ensuing Palestiniannaqba(disaster) have generated an abundance of legal literature. It is beyond the ambitions of this article to revisit all or most of the existing literature, or to strive and comprehensively discuss the various legal propositions they consider. Instead, it offers a critical assessment of some of the legal conclusions offered by one of the most influential experts in the field – Professor James Crawford – who, in the second edition of his seminal treatiseThe Creation of States in International Law,discusses at some length the events surrounding the creation of Israel and the status of Palestine. Section 2 of the article offers some general observations on the continued relevance of the events surrounding the creation of Israel. In particular, it raises the question of the relationship between the principles ofex injuria non oritur jusandex factis oritur jusin the Israeli–Palestinian context. Section 3 examines the legal significance of the 1922 League of Nations Mandate and Crawford's position concerning its validity. Sections 4 and 5 adopt a similar examination with regard to two other historic events of potential legal significance, namely the 1947 UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (the Partition Resolution) and Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence. Section 5 also briefly examines Crawford's conclusions relating to the status of Palestine, and Section 6 concludes.

Coexistence: Two Brothers, Two Groups, Two Peoples

This article explores group and intergroup relations in the Israeli-Palestinian context in Israel through the lens of sibling relationships. The authors analyze the emerging intragroup and intergroup dynamics through a one-directional prism, while unfolding a multitude of identities and resonances within these relations. The article describes two groups that were facilitated side by side: a dynamic group and an observation group, which switched roles after 10 sessions. This exchange allowed members to reenact primary phenomena from sibling life, such as the mother's second pregnancy and the birth of the second child, relationships between siblings, and sibling play-space. In addition, the fact that half of the group members were Jewish and half were Arab enabled the examination of the cultural aspect through terms such as the favorite child, the rejected child, exclusion, and dialogue.

A model for partnering with the informal e-waste industry: Rationale, principles and a case study

Various forms of informal activity have long played an under-recognized yet substantial role in solid waste management, especially in developing countries. In particular, informal activity is prominent in the electronic waste (e-waste) sector, whose volume and impacts have grown rapidly over recent decades. While the worrying aspects of informal e-waste recycling have been widely discussed, less attention has been given to its positive potential and to its relation to formal e-waste actors and policies. These topics have direct implication for pathways for transitioning from informality, and, in particular, ways in which informal recyclers can build on their strengths while beginning to operate in cleaner ways that retain livelihoods while reducing ill effects.In this paper, we draw upon extensive field work as well as secondary literatures to offer a taxonomy of management stances towards informal e-waste practices. These range from hostility through disconnection to interaction and, finally, synergy. Our recommendation is for the latter since the informal sector has important strengths and merits, as well as its harmful aspects, while formal approaches that ignore or attempt to squelch the informal sector do not yield constructive outcomes. Specifically, we suggest an incremental ratcheting synergistic model that draws on the respective strengths of both sectors to forge a genuine partnership between them. We describe six key elements of this model, and illustrate it through application to the Israeli–Palestinian context we have studied in depth. In particular, we show how the treatment of copper cables, now one of this industry's largest and most harmful segments, can be improved through an incremental series of synergetic solutions that preserve or even improve livelihoods of informal recyclers while greatly reducing their health and environmental impacts.

Assessing the effects of reported torture in the Israeli-Palestinian context: A struggle for psycho-political thirdness

A group of Israeli and Palestinian physicians and mental health professionals was trained to assess the physical and psychological evidence of torture according to the Istanbul Protocol. This paper describes the effects of one such assessment on the author, an Israeli-Jewish psychologist. It explores the phenomenon of politically-related dissociations, and the individual and group efforts to overcome them.

Social Dominance Orientation

Social dominance orientation (SDO) is one of the most powerful predictors of intergroup attitudes and behavior. Although SDO works well as a unitary construct, some analyses suggest it might consist of two complementary dimensions--SDO-Dominance (SDO-D), or the preference for some groups to dominate others, and SDO-Egalitarianism (SDO-E), a preference for nonegalitarian intergroup relations. Using seven samples from the United States and Israel, the authors confirm factor-analytic evidence and show predictive validity for both dimensions. In the United States, SDO-D was theorized and found to be more related to old-fashioned racism, zero-sum competition, and aggressive intergroup phenomena than SDO-E; SDO-E better predicted more subtle legitimizing ideologies, conservatism, and opposition to redistributive social policies. In a contentious hierarchical intergroup context (the Israeli-Palestinian context), SDO-D better predicted both conservatism and aggressive intergroup attitudes. Fundamentally, these analyses begin to establish the existence of complementary psychological orientations underlying the preference for group-based dominance and inequality.