This study compiles historical information to highlight the role played by both East and West European countries in the creation of Israel since before World War I. East European countries, especially Russia, Poland, and Romania, were as effective in this regard as the West Europeans. While racial policies were paramount in East Europe, including Germany, religious and strategic policies were as effective in the West, especially in Britain. Two points can be redrawn in this regard: That the question of Palestine was a Western question on both sides of the continent; it had nothing to do with the Eastern question that engulfed the Ottoman Empire before and during World War I. Additionally while World War II did not start the process of creating Israel, it accelerated it since the United States became an active supporter of the Zionist project. The second conclusion explains why all major powers give so much latitude to Israel, regardless of its constant neglect of international law to this very day.

The question of Palestinians’ right for urban planning and development in East Jerusalem is one of many challenges Arab Jerusalemites face over the right to the city. While Palestinians search for the reasons for the impaired urban reality of East Jerusalem, some of the answers lie in the planning systems itself and its allowances. This brief paper describes, analyzes, and critiques urban planning policies that constitute a trap and an indictment mechanism impeding the issuance of a building permit and land titles. The planning trap is part of a sophisticated complex matrix of control systems, with hard and soft, visible and invisible components that are practiced by the Israeli authorities in an effort to bring about the geopolitical, demographic policies, and urban changes desired by the state in Jerusalem.

This article contributes to the critical discourse on security sector reform (SSR) by explicitly acknowledging its political dimensions and implications. Through a consideration of the role of SSR in international processes of securitization and state-building, it highlights the paradoxes implicit in this model, and the subsequent consequences of its implementation on the ground using the case of occupied Palestinian territories where SSR has significantly altered the local security landscape.

This paper examines the emergence and role of research think tanks in Israel, particularly with regard to their influence on policy-making. The establishment of the first think tanks coincided with the founding of the state, with their numbers increasing since the 1990s. This paper attempts to map these Israeli think tanks, which are classified under four categories: government, private or independent think tanks, political party think tanks, and academic think tanks (‘universities without students’). The paper is divided into two themes. The first considers the core issues of their interest against the existence of these think tanks in the Israeli parliamentary political system. The second applies both the quantitative and the qualitative features of these think tanks in an attempt to discover the extent of their influence within the process of decision-making in Israel.

This article examines the indirect negotiations that took place between Syria and Israel in 2008. The five rounds of talks were hosted under the auspices of Turkey, acting as a mediator between the two countries which had not held talks for eight years. The discussions focused on the status of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, as well as issues including borders, water and Syria's alliances with Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and others. Although it seemed as if a peace agreement could be reached with benefits to both Syria and Israel, political obstacles and the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip eventually led to the talks being suspended in December 2008.

Women's participation in the First Intifada allowed for increased gender equality in Palestine. However, the weakness of the Palestinian Authority, established by the Oslo Accords, created space for non-state actors (dominated by the Islamist political organization Hamas) to emerge and gain popularity. Likewise, during the post-Oslo period conservative positions on gender resurged. This paper re-examines the structural factors that facilitated increased gender inequality and argues that the nature of the occupation itself serves as the greatest force for gender inequality in Palestine. To develop and test our theory, we draw on original, large- n survey data and in-depth interviews.

Naseer H. Aruri (7 January 1934–10 February 2015) was an internationally recognized and renowned scholar, activist and expert on Middle East politics, US foreign policy in the Middle East and human rights. He was Chancellor Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science, having served on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts (UMASS) – Dartmouth from 1965 to 1998. In 1993, he received the College of Arts and Sciences ‘Distinguished Research Award'. His papers have been preserved and are on display at the Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections at UMASS-Dartmouth. This text is based on an earlier version of a speech delivered by the author at the Memorial for Naseer Aruri held on 12 April 2015 at UMASS-Dartmouth.

This paper examines the implications of the Arab Spring for the Palestinians. The aim is to point out the basic lessons and implications of the transformations occurring in the Arab world for the Palestinians as an exceptional case, due to their situation under occupation and exile. Cause for optimism is discerned in the anticipated increase in broad and practical Arab support for the Palestinians. However, the contention here is that Palestinians themselves have derived too limited a lesson from the Arab revolutions by focusing only on the call for unity between the competing Palestinian factions. Their reconciliation is only about their self-preservation and that of the system which has served them hitherto. The recommendations posited here are for the Palestinians to embrace the full message of the Arab Spring and make peaceful protest en masse and across the whole Palestinian people their path to liberation.

This research on Hamas's women's movement explains the contemporary political and social involvement of women with a multilayered perspective of different theories based on a textual analysis of the movement's publications (the Hamas Charta 1988 and the Electoral Program 2006, as well as women's testimonies to popular media outlets). Subsequently, it is claimed that only a comprehensive combination of post-colonial studies, gender and nationalism studies can fully grasp women's roles within the Hamas movement. Uniting these three approaches, there are three main hypotheses for women's activism and role within Hamas. First, Hamas propagates gendered worldviews and roles within the nationalist project as well as within the movement. Those outlooks intersect with historized notions of Arab–Muslim identity as well as with notions of liberation against foreign (Western) occupation and colonialism. Second, the ‘women of Hamas’ use such gendered roles in order to pave the way for a pious, yet determined, women's participation within the nationalist venture as well as the movement's overall project of national liberation. Third, the gendered defence calculus springing from those views allows a restructuring of society in general, vis-à-vis the Palestinian population as well as vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Since its inception in 1948, Israel has sought to transform the physical and demographic landscape of Jerusalem to correspond with the Zionist vision of a united and fundamentally Jewish Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. While much of this has been accomplished through the violent expulsion of Arab residents during the wars of 1948 and 1967, the Judaization of Jerusalem has relied equally on measures taken during times of ‘peace’: the strategic extension of Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, bureaucratic and legal restrictions on Palestinian land use, disenfranchisement of Jerusalem residents, the expansion of settlements in ‘Greater Jerusalem’, and the construction of the separation wall.

In the modern history of the Arab East, there has never been a time when wars were waged on three Arab societies at once. Nowadays, Palestine lives in a state of low intensity warfare; Iraq continues to experience a systematic process of devastation that has entered its fifth year; and Lebanon is suffering the repercussions of one of the most unrelenting and intense military campaigns ever mounted on a civil society this century. Is this a chance occurrence or is there a common thread that explains the causes, perpetrators, features and future settlement prospects of the three wars? This article will demonstrate that all three wars, notwithstanding their particularities, are impacted by similar forces. Consequently, an approach that attempts to deal with each conflict separately and without regard to the others will have little prospect of success. More alarming is the fact that there is a chance the region may witness the flare up of new wars if the present situation is left to fester.