Military Checkpoints Research Articles

SPATIO-TEMPORAL OCCURRENCE, SOURCES, AND HUMAN HEALTH RISK OF 16-POLYCYCLIC AROMATIC HYDROCARBONS IN ANTHROPOGENIC VECTORED SOILS

This study determined the spatiotemporal distribution, sources, and human health hazards of sixteen polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in land-use soils. PAHs were determined by a gas chromatography-mass spectrometer (GC-MS). Total PAHs concentrations ranged from 125.3 to 2587.16 µgkg-1 showing concentrations in the order of topsoil < subsoil and wet season > dry season. PAHs occurrence exceeded the DPR-EGAPSIN target and intervention value in 33.3% and 11% of the samples. This study established variable concentrations of HPAHs relative to LPAHs with a predominance of carcinogenic 5-ring PAHs. The highest concentrations of total PAHs were at Warri military checkpoint. The cancer risk for infants was higher than for adults, and permissible target values, thus signifying human on-spot exposure risk. The results established that the source of PAHs is pyrogenic and petrogenic low-temperature combustion of petroleum fractions and high-temperature combustion of wood, grass, biomass, diesel, and vehicular traffic particulate emissions. The results demonstrated considerable concentration variation and potential for ecological and human health exposure risks. The results show PAHs exposures risk in military checkpoints and related catchments elsewhere.

Conflict and reciprocity: A study with Palestinian youths

This paper studies how reciprocity in the forms of conditional cooperation and vindictive behavior is affected by differential exposure to conflict. We use experimental games to measure preferences of adolescents living in the West Bank, and their obligation to cross military checkpoints to go to school as a proxy for differential exposure to the conflict. We find that adolescents who have an obligation to cross military checkpoints to go to school engage in more reciprocal behavior: they more frequently cooperate in response to cooperative behavior and retaliate against hostile behavior. Part of the effect is explained by changes in the beliefs about their peers’ behavior. A re-analysis of micro-datasets from other conflict contexts provides evidence of the generalizability of our results.

Negotiating Lebanon’s urban boundaries and sectarian space: Syrian refugees in Beirut and Tripoli

ABSTRACT As Syrian refugee numbers in Lebanon have increased, so has the hostility directed towards them, with targeted attacks against informal encampments and public restrictions on Syrian mobility through localized curfews and military checkpoints. The Syrian experience is constrained by both their precarity as refugees and the volatility of Lebanese urban politics. Syrians must navigate the complex terrain of moral and socio-spatial Lebanese boundaries: when to keep silent or remain publicly invisible, how to navigate sectarian street dynamics, and how to respond to heightened public sensibilities. This article, based on six months ethnographic research (2017–2018) among Syrian refugees in Tripoli (Bab al-Tabbaneh) and Beirut (Nab’a) examines how Syrian refugees navigate Lebanese urban spatial realities—adapting and responding to its complex hybrid sovereignties, sectarian atmospheres and everyday security practices. The findings attest to how Syrian refugees seek ‘security within borders’ through practices of rootedness, invisibility and ‘safe space’ boundary marking, while also accepting that crossing boundaries—physical military checkpoints and immaterial social barriers—can result in public confrontations, detention, and violence. Although Syrian refugees attempt to remain apolitical and deliberately disengaged from Lebanese sectarian networks of power, their everyday choices (rent, electricity fees) and physical presence connect them to local political contests and rivalries.

The Unknown Labour Camp in Slivnitsa (August – September 1989)

The labour camp in the military unit in the town of Slivnitsa as a place of state repression in the campaign for forced name change has not been the subject of special scientific research. In early 1985, hundreds of Turks from North-Eastern Bulgaria were summoned to the military checkpoints and as "mobilized" were sent to the unit, part of which was turned into a special labour camp. In Slivnitsa and other labour camps, the mobilized were subjected to heavy physical labour and psychological harassment. In the archive of the State Security documents are kept with some of the statistics on this form of violent dealing with the most active Turks – potential opponents of the forced name change and organizers of mass protests in North - Eastern Bulgaria. The repression in the labour camp in Slivnitsa from August-September 1989, happened during a period of the hardest field work for the tobacco producers. As "reserve troops" some of the most prominent Pomaks in Southern Bulgaria, including also some Turks from the Pazardzhik and Gotzedelchevski villages, were isolated. Subjected to humiliation, harassment and ideological manipulation, more than 100 people in a month were held halfhungry and forced to engage in heavy physical labour. This state violence scared the population and interrupted all possibilities for general opposition against the communist regime. This study aims to present this form of mass repression, carried out secretly and thoroughly concealed by the communist totalitarian regime in Bulgaria and plunged into oblivion. It is based on archival documents, memories, unknown to science notes and a list of the names of those brought in in 1989 in the labour camp in Slivnitsa.

Israel/Palestine: Border Representations in Literature and Film

Israel/Palestine: Border Representations in Literature and Film

Challenges of Human Resource Management in Palestine

The study investigated the challenges faced by the Palestinian Authority Institutions (PNA) in their practice of Human Resource Management. It adopted a qualitative approach based on a review of relevant literature to find out the major challenges handicapping the efforts to improve HRM in the West Bank in Palestine. The study reflected that with a specific focus on Palestine, the daily practice of HRM is a real challenge especially under the Israeli occupation and the different strategies Israel employs to destroy any improvement plans. The study showed that in the era of global technology, the Palestinian National Authority and its organisations in the West Bank are facing both internal and external challenges, namely the low organisational position of the management of human resources and its confinement to basic functions. In addition, the Procedural aspects, lack of planning and developmental aspects, and limitation of their practice in routine matters related to employment, calculation of salaries and dues, as well as follow-up and permits which constitute a significant challenge. Moreover, the external challenges include the Israeli occupation, which has a major role in these challenges as the occupation prevents public employees of different positions and deputies from reaching their workplaces by dividing the cities of Palestine, military checkpoints, and frequent arrests of ministers and legislators.

Urban Squares in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: a Street View on Ancient Near Eastern Governance

Urban Squares in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: a Street View on Ancient Near Eastern Governance

‘Your daily reality is rubbish’: Waste as a means of urban exclusion in the suspended spaces of East Jerusalem

Drawing on ethnographic and visual research, this article examines the role of waste in two areas of occupied East Jerusalem cut off from the city by the Separation Wall and military checkpoints, Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Refugee Camp as well as their immediate surroundings. In asking how urban exclusion operates on the margins of the city, we argue that rubbish can disclose broader socio-spatial relations at work in Jerusalem from the ground up. We find that waste serves to reduce the ambiguity at work in these interstitial zones by furthering exclusion – it operates through the urban everyday where the legal and political situations are in suspension. Conceptually, we contribute to the discussion on spatial stigma associated with infrastructural violence by arguing for a multi-layered understanding of the way waste ‘works’ in urban exclusion. Three registers mutually constitute each other in this process: the materiality of waste with its embodied and affective interactions, the symbolic and discursive violence associated with waste, as well as spatialised stigma and bordering processes.

The effect of Israeli checkpoints on Palestinian students’ psychology: An-Najah National University’s students as a case study

This paper documents several key contributions made to the field of psychology and education. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the psychological pressures resulting from the Israeli military checkpoints on Palestinian university students who are passing through Azzun area to their university. The study focused on the negative impact of Israeli checkpoints on their daily life routine at the university such as their academic plans, intended goals, and time organizations. The researchers adopt the qualitative approach for this study. The sample of the study included (5) students of both genders who were randomly selected for this study. For data collection, the researchers used semi-structured interviews to identify the opinion of the study sample regarding the questions of the study. The researchers developed four main questions to collect data comprehensively. The results of the study show that Israeli checkpoints are considered their main concern every single day they come to university. The stay sample agreed among themselves on the fact that checkpoints cause headache, tension, low-academic achievements, and frustration. The study recommended An-Najah National University to facilitate their needs in case they miss an exam or arrive late at the university. Furthermore, the study recommended using technology to support and assist those who face psychological pressure through online platforms.

Segmentation Approach for a Noisy Iris Images Based on Hybrid Techniques

Iris recognition indicates the procedure of recognizing humans based on their both left and right iris patterns. Nowadays there is rapid progress in realizing an old dream of developing a user-friendly recognition system. Most of the new projects became a nightmare of security of the system. The prosperity of iris recognition aside from its attractive physical characteristics is led to developing an efficient feature extractor to attain the required objective of recognition. Fingerprint, facial, and iris biometric techniques are developed widely for identifying processing most boarded management points, access control, and military checkpoints. Hybridization between Daugman’s Integro Differential Operator (IDO) with edge base methods was realized through taking the advantages of the good qualities of both methods so as to enhance the precision and reduce the required time. The proposed hybrid recognition system is very reliable and accurate. UBIRIS version 1 dataset was utilized in the conducted simulation which indicates the distinctions of the hybrid method in providing good performance and accuracy with reducing the time consuming of iris localization by approximately 99% compared with IDO and edge based methods.

Rambo in the dead lands: on cinema, war and climate

In war-weary Israel, where military checkpoints dot the country and gun-toting soldiers are everywhere, visitors cannot help but be apprehensive. The soaring temperatures and isolation of the country’s rugged landscape fit the mood of lonely, dispirited Vietnam vet John Rambo.1 This extract from a 1987 Los Angeles Times article implies that war and climate in Israel combine to create a perfect film set for Rambo III (Peter MacDonald, 1988). Produced by TriStar on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Rambo III delivered an action-packed Cold War story about US military aid being provided to the Afghan mujahideen by the CIA. Israel was perceived to be a suitable stand-in for Afghanistan, where John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) fought alongside local guerrillas against Soviet troops. ‘Israel’, Stallone explained to a local reporter, ‘is a perfect replacement for Afghanistan. Not only is it bone-dry, but it’s also in war.’2 Rambo III is a by-product of the deepening relations between Hollywood and Israel during the 1980s, and just one of a handful of Hollywood films that were produced in the deserts of Israel at the time. With a third of its territory consisting of arid or semi-arid terrain, Israel’s climate could conveniently simulate the orientalized war zone,3 but the country held another advantage that made it a ‘natural’ substitute. Dozens of declassified documents found in the IDF (Israeli Military) Archive in Israel reveal lengthy bureaucratic exchanges between Hollywood executives and military officers, containing snappy pitches, character descriptions, artistic statements and, most importantly, evaluations of long lists of weapons and military facilities to be used as props in the manufacturing of cinematic spectacle. These include guns, tanks, jeeps, built structures, soldiers, aeroplanes, helicopters and, above all, swathes of desert land, regularly deployed by the IDF for training purposes, that were to be re-appropriated as lucrative film locations. With the Nevada and Mojave deserts becoming increasingly costly as locations, the documents show Hollywood entrepreneurs venturing further to identify suitable replacements for the numerous film productions that dramatized the US intervention into Middle Eastern territories.4 Titles such as Delta Force (Mehamen Golan, 1986), Riding the Edge (James Fargo, 1989), Iron Eagle (Sidney J. Furie, 1986), Sahara (Andrew McLaglen, 1983) and Rambo III all feature combat scenarios, with the desert often standing in for enemy terrain. The documents reveal how the Israeli military was a particularly valuable co-producer of cinema, and attest to the material basis that enabled such collaborations to prosper. Expansive territories in the Negev held by the IDF facilitated the most desirable of commodities: the desert itself.

The borderization of waiting: Negotiating borders and migration in the 2011 Syrian civil conflict

The past several decades have witnessed diverse techniques of border control and migrant experiences and negotiations of border controls. This article focusses on the spatio-temporal dimensions of border control that underscore the deceleration of migration movements and stimulate certain kinds of agency, processes that bring attention to what is referred to as the borderization of waiting. Drawing on and contributing to critical migration and border studies, the analysis first draws attention to city street protests in Syria that demanded political change, which in turn created powerful responses including the expansion of protests against the state, the circulation of fear by the state, and the movements of people out of Syria. It then demonstrates how the borderization of waiting during the 2011 Syrian civil conflict occurs at many different points along migrant journeys and encompasses not only precarity but also fear, insecurity, invisibility, and presence. This form of waiting encourages ‘agency-in-displacement,’ which involves strategizing journeys and negotiating inter-state military checkpoints, state territorial borders, and holding zones in order for people on the move to access safety and protection. The analysis draws on policy, program, and scholarly documents, and on a selection of fifty-five in-depth, interviews with Syrians, now resettled in Canada, about their experiences and negotiations of border controls during their departures from the civil conflict.

Destabilizing Mastery and the Machine

Military checkpoints are inherently unstable technologies of rule due to their contradictory functions of blocking as well as sorting bodies. This paper examines the dynamics of gender, corporealit...

Marriage and Fertility under Military Occupation: A Study of the West Bank of Palestine

We investigate effects of the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank on rate of marriage and fertility in Palestine using three alternate theories: (1) higher fertility is a political response to existential threat associated with expansion of settler communities (minority status hypothesis), (2) larger numbers of checkpoints in a place isolate it from neighboring places, and narrows accessible marriage market possibly increasing age at marriage (marriage market hypothesis) and (3) for families under stress, responses to both checkpoints and larger settlement populations will be to ‘double down’ on family - an earlier age at marriage and higher fertility within marriage despite fracturing of the marriage market (family security hypothesis). We use data from Palestinian Censuses of 1997 and 2007 and divide the 11 West Bank governorates into 31 distinct geographic areas, distinguishing urban, rural, and refugee camps. We test the hypotheses for women age 10 to 49 years in 2007, controlling for place of residence characteristics in 1997, community marriage and fertility rates in 1997, and change in community level of development from 1997 to 2007. Military checkpoints and settler population penetration in each governorate measure the intensity of the Israeli Occupation. We find evidence consistent with family security hypothesis.

Voices against Erasure, Loss, and Dehumanization: The Year in Palestine

Voices against Erasure, Loss, and DehumanizationThe Year in Palestine Adam Yaghi (bio) Rooted in the land just like other Indigenous populations who have endured settler colonialism, Palestinians use different venues to humanize their struggle for freedom and equal rights. From popular resistance and international solidarity activism to textual and visual productions, they share their voices and hopes with the world. More specifically, in life narratives published between 2017 and 2018, Palestinians speak with urgency. The individuals who populate the life narratives I survey in this essay remember the physical loss of historical Palestine and draw attention to numerous barriers that stand between them and their right to return to and inhabit the land. Their voices attest to their ongoing collective displacement since 1948, wrestle with thorny political questions, unveil the multifaceted damage settler colonialism has brought upon their communities, and genuinely yearn for a normal future. Their texts have one eye on the past—as the past is never past—with the other fixed on the present to report the horrors of decades of ongoing dispossession. The following discussion samples a few of these publications and does not promise in any way to be comprehensive. The works covered here include Where the Line Is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine by Raja Shehadeh, Young Palestinians Speak: Living under Occupation by Anthony Robinson and Annemarie Young, The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story by Ramzy Baroud, and Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre by Samia Halaby. A Palestinian author, lawyer, and human rights activist, Shehadeh speaks directly to Western misrepresentations of Palestine. His narrative unveils injustices rarely addressed in Western discourses. Shehadeh was born in the city of Ramallah shortly after his family was forced out of Jaffa to make room for Israeli Jewish settlers. In his 2008 book entitled Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, not only does Shehadeh mourn a disappearing Indigenous landscape and show [End Page 103] irreversible forms of environmental injustice, but he also sounds the alarm when he draws attention to the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank where he lives: on our land, we are "unwanted strangers, constantly harassed, never feeling safe. We had become temporary residents of Greater Israel, living on Israel's sufferance, subject to the most abusive treatment" (180). Shehadeh does not stop here: "But worse than all this was that nagging feeling that our days in Palestine were numbered and one day we were going to be victims of another mass expulsion" (180). Palestinians in Shehadeh's West Bank endure harsh, inescapable realities under Israeli settler colonialism. They witness their neighborhoods rapidly shrink, and in their cities they live under permanent siege. Israeli military checkpoints cripple their movement, settler-only roads cut through their backyards, and Jewish settlements eat up every inch of their arable land. What remains is a disfigured landscape and captive Indigenous population with restricted access to water and essential natural resources. Their livelihood is on the line. Yet they endure. The West Bank recurs in Where the Line Is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine. Life for Palestinians there has become more and more difficult. Indeed, this 2017 life narrative describes some of the hardships Palestinians endure in the West Bank, but in it, Shehadeh, more importantly, offers a comprehensive personal and collective Palestinian history through recalling numerous crossings he had into Israel/Palestine from 1959 to 2013. He uses these crossings to comment on the Nakba and the course of the history of Palestinian struggle. In some of them, he reflects on his complicated friendship with an Israeli named Henry Abramovitch and shows the absurdity of the so-called peace process. Shehadeh's Israeli-sanctioned movement between the West Bank and cities like Tel Aviv, Jaffa, or Jerusalem and the political debates he participates in with a few Jewish Israelis depict a beautiful but scarred land with an unpredictable future. Almost in each crossing, Shehadeh incrementally introduces different human rights violations Palestinians have endured under Israeli settler colonialism. For example, his narrative re-inscribes the Nakba. In so doing, Shehadeh demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of loss and challenges a hegemonic Zionist myth. According to this myth, Palestine was an empty land, but like countless...

Barriers to Health Care Services Among Palestinian Women Denied Family Unification in Israel.

Family unification received public and political attention following recent global immigration crises, though less within health research. In Israel, under the Family Reunification Order, about 20,000 Palestinian women from the Occupied Palestinian Territories are denied residency and the right to universal health care services (HSC) after marrying Palestinian citizens and moving to Israel. To better understand the relationship between lacking residency and barriers to accessing HCS, we conducted in-depth interviews with 21 Palestinian women (ages 22-59) denied family unification. Our findings revealed that in addition to hindering access to HCS, lacking residency intersects with other political, social, and economic determinants of these women's health and disrupts normal family life. Lacking residency intensifies poverty (via private health insurance and legal fees, permit extensions) and leads to family separations and risky crossings at military checkpoints into the West Bank for medical treatment. Restrictions on freedom of movement engender fear of deportation and precarity. Denial of residency also exacerbates gender inequality (increased dependence on husbands) and can endanger child custody when mothers' lack of residency passes to children, violating children's basic rights. Allowing family unification to Palestinian women would remove barriers to HCS access, allow normal family life, and permit social integration.

The Generals in Their Labyrinth

The Generals in Their Labyrinth

Falling Apart Together

I could not hear weeping as the screen fell dark. But the glistening cheeks and too-bright eyes spoke loudly enough when the lights rose. We had confronted together a loss of revolutionary possibility, and a refusal of that same loss, that touched nearly every body in the theater. To view Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Ali Atassi’s Our Terrible Country (2014) in Beirut, scarcely seventy-five miles from a Damascus whose dying and lost flowed continuously into Lebanon even as we watched for Syrian hope on the screen, was to be swept up in the civil war’s terrible pull of collective suffering and loss. Swept up, for many in the salle, perhaps all, all the more than each was already. Less than a decade earlier, Syrian military checkpoints had controlled movement throughout Lebanon entire. Lebanon had been the fractured vassal state, Syria its wise but firm tutor. In the “now” of 2014, however, there was no longer a Syria but only an increasingly dim possibility that one might come someday again to be. Syrian refugees swelled Lebanon’s population, crowded Beirut and Tripoli and the mountain towns and the verdant Bekaa Valley. And many sitting silent and wet-eyed through the film’s still-terrible credits had friends and loved ones not only from but still in the terrible, devastated spaces we had together watched passing across the screen—spaces still falling apart in 2014 as we watched, scarcely two hours away, scarcely further than the length of the film itself, falling apart before our eyes in the 2013 of the film’s shooting as they had been falling apart for two years already before that. As they are falling apart still, now in 2018, with only proper names exchanged: Ghouta, Raqqa, Homs, Aleppo, today Ghouta again. Tomorrow? Their terrible country, indeed.

Reproductive health and rights in East Jerusalem: the effects of militarisation and biopolitics on the experiences of pregnancy and birth of Palestinians living in the Kufr ‘Aqab neighbourhood

Research with marginalised communities points to the need to understand political determinants of reproductive health. For residents of Kufr ‘Aqab neighbourhood, Israeli biopolitics in East Jerusalem can be barriers to access to maternal health. This is manifested in women having to cross military checkpoints to give birth in hospitals located in Jerusalem to make their children eligible for “permanent residency”, a document required for Palestinians to live in Jerusalem. A basic qualitative design is utilised, and semi-structured in-depth interviews with 27 women and 20 men were conducted and thematic analysis was used to extract themes and subthemes. Women reported exposure to risky conditions during pregnancy and worries of giving birth at checkpoints. Social support was restricted for some women due to inability of the husband/family to reach the hospital at the time of birth. Men reported distress related to inability to attend birth. Giving birth in a Jerusalem hospital, as part of passing residency to children, was perceived as reaffirming Palestinian presence in the City and transforming sites of suffering to sites of resistance. Israeli residency policies and segregation of Jerusalem affect Kufr ‘Aqab residents’ pregnancy and birth on physical, social and psychological levels. Results indicate the importance of incorporating political determinants of access to maternal care and safe pregnancy in the conceptualisation of reproductive rights.

Quality of life for families living in East Jerusalem's Kafr ‘Aqab urban sprawl: a qualitative study

BackgroundSince 1967, about 14 000 Palestinians have had their Jerusalem residency rights revoked by Israel, and thousands more struggle to maintain their permanent residency. As stipulated by the “centre of life” policy, Jerusalem residents must provide regular proof of residence within Israeli-defined municipal boundaries. In 2003, an amendment to the Israeli Nationality Law prohibited Jerusalem residents who were married to Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territories to apply for residency rights to live in Jerusalem. The location of Jerusalem's Kafr ‘Aqab neighbourhood was physically separated from the city by the Separation Wall and Israeli military checkpoint, but was included within Israeli-defined administrative Jerusalem municipal boundaries. This inclusion allowed families who held different legal status to live together and maintain their Jerusalem residency. We aimed to investigate the effect of disrupted family life and insecurity on health and wellbeing of Palestinians living in this area. MethodsIn-depth qualitative interviews with 25 women were done with a locally-developed semistructured interview schedule that explored living conditions and quality of life. We selected participants through purposeful-convenience sampling methods to include Palestinians with Jerusalem residency who were married to residents of the occupied Palestinian territory, and vice versa. The Institute of Community and Public Health (ICPH) Research Ethics Committee granted ethical approval. Data were analysed by reading and rereading transcripts for recurring themes and subthemes. FindingsResidents of Kafr ‘Aqab were exposed to various life stressors, including anxiety resulting from legal and administrative battles to maintain residency, increased financial strains, economic exploitation, and the distress of relocating to areas with poor living-conditions to maintain Jerusalem residency, and at the same time living with spouses who are residents of the occupied Palestinian territory. Most women expressed strong feelings of insecurity for the future of their families' residency, given Kafr ‘Aqab's situation outside the Separation Wall. Heightened by fear of local Palestinian investigators working with the National Insurance Institute and perceived increase in crime, some women noted that they increasingly mistrusted newcomers and did not feel part of a community or integrated social fabric. Physical barriers (ie, the Qalandia-checkpoint and Separation Wall) restrict access to families and social support, and pose obstacles to access health-care services in Jerusalem. Most women reported harmful environmental conditions (including filth, sewage, and water concerns) because of increased urban sprawl and inadequate access to municipality services, despite taxation. InterpretationThe Kafr ‘Aqab predicament attests to poor conditions to live in for a vulnerable group, ruled with ambiguity and uncertainty, existing within an already volatile context. As a result, this raises concerns of the effects on health and wellbeing of families living in these conditions. FundingReproductive Health Working Group, Arab World and Turkey.