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Begin New Search Topic Pandemic Political Geography Middle East

31. Lebanon: Managing COVID-19 in the Time of Revolution

Author:
Ishac Diwan and Joelle M. Abi-Rached
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic in Lebanon is a crisis within a crisis. It occurred amidst a broader socio-economic meltdown that has shaken the country in recent months. While Lebanon appears to have responded effectively to the pandemic so far, a number of major challenges await it. With little measures to mitigate the economic impact of the confinement and protesters pushing to return to the streets, the country is entering an extremely volatile period. The only way out will be through measures that address the sanitary as well as underlying socio-economic issues that are threatening the entire country.
Topic:
Governance, Public Health, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East and Lebanon

32. Syria: Sanctions Should Not Be Lifted, but They Must Be Improved

Author:
Genevieve Zingg
Publication Date:
07-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
While not the chief cause of Syria’s economic crisis, sanctions have exacerbated difficulties faced by the Syrian people – in particular as new humanitarian needs arise from the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper argues that sanctions are essential to sustain pressure in the pursuit of justice and accountability and should be maintained but that they must be improved to allow for a more effective use of humanitarian exemptions and to lessen their negative impacts on the Syrian people.
Topic:
Sanctions, Public Health, Humanitarian Crisis, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East and Syria

33. Towards a Zero-COVID Lebanon: A Call for Action

Author:
Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Nahla Issa, Jade Khalife, and Pascale Salameh
Publication Date:
10-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
In its first report, the Independent Lebanese Committee for the Elimination of COVID-19, a group of concerned citizens with various health-related expertise, addresses weaknesses in current government policy and highlights several directions and actions for a more coherent and sustainable national strategy.
Topic:
Security, Governance, Public Health, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East and Lebanon

34. Saving the Suffering Lebanese Healthcare Sector: Immediate Relief while Planning Reforms

Author:
Hussain Isma'eel, Nadim El Jamal, Nuhad Yazbik Dumit, and Elie Al-Chaer
Publication Date:
10-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
Lebanon’s economic downfall had a crippling effect on all healthcare sectors, and COVID-19 has further aggravated the crisis. To save an already ailing health sector, this paper written by medical professionals calls for urgent measures to tackle the immediate crisis. Its focuses on maintaining access to healthcare for all, enhancing primary and urgent care centres, controlling readmission, and introducing telemedicine. It highlights needed measures to reduce the financial strain on hospitals and puts forward recommendations to support healthcare providers as well as the pharmaceutical and medical supplies industry.
Topic:
Health Care Policy, Reform, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East and Lebanon

35. The Deteriorated Educational Reality in Lebanon: Towards “Another” Critical Approach

Author:
Suzanne Abdul-Reda Abourjeili and Seham Harb
Publication Date:
10-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
Education in Lebanon was hit hard by the financial and economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. The sector’s structural weaknesses were brought to the surface by the shift to online and distance teaching. Teachers, parents, and students alike were left on their own to struggle through the school year. This has particularly affected the poorest segments of society, as well as parents and teachers with fewer technical skills to educate children. This paper analyzes the challenges that the educational sector has faced over the last year and presents immediate measures and some future strategic choices as a way forward.
Topic:
Education, Public Health, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East and Lebanon

36. Introduction: Public Health and the Promise of Palestine

Author:
Danya M. Qato
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This introductory essay contextualizes the special collection of papers on the pandemic and seeks to map the terrain of extant public health research on Palestine and the Palestinians. In addition, it is a contribution in Palestine studies to a nascent yet propulsive conversation that has been accelerated by Covid-19 on the erasure of structures of violence, including those of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, within the discipline of epidemiology. Using public health as an analytic, this essay asks us to consider foundational questions that have long been sidelined in the public health discourse on Palestine, including the implications for health and health research of eliding ongoing settler colonialism. Rather than ignoring and reproducing their violence, this essay seeks to tackle these questions head-on in an attempt to imagine a future public health research agenda that centers health, and not simply survivability, for all Palestinians.
Topic:
Health Care Policy, Public Health, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

37. Responding to Precarity: Beddawi Camp in the Era of Covid-19

Author:
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
How are refugees responding to protect themselves and others in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic? How do these responses relate to diverse local, national, and international structures of inequality and marginalization? Drawing on the case of Beddawi camp in North Lebanon, I argue that local responses—such as sharing information via print and social media, raising funds for and preparing iftar baskets during Ramadan, and distributing food and sanitation products to help people practice social distancing—demonstrate how camp residents have worked individually and collectively to find ways to care for Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi, Kurdish, and Lebanese residents alike, thereby transcending a focus on nationality- based identity markers. However, state, municipal, international, and media reports pointing to Syrian refugees as having imported the virus into Beddawi camp place such local modes of solidarity and mutuality at risk. This article thus highlights the importance of considering how refugee-refugee assistance initiatives relate simultaneously to: the politics of the self and the other, politically produced precarity, and multi-scalar systems that undermine the potential for solidarity in times of overlapping precarities.
Topic:
Nationalism, Refugees, Solidarity, Public Health, Humanitarian Crisis, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Iraq, Iran, Middle East, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Kurdistan

38. Covid-19 Fault Lines: Palestinian Physicians in Israel

Author:
Osama Tanous
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This essay explores representations of Palestinian physicians in the Israeli health-care system during the Covid-19 pandemic and the dynamics that have played out in that system during the public health emergency from the perspective of a Palestinian physician. It argues that the health-care system, an essential pillar and infrastructural foundation of the settler-colonial project, is naively imagined as an apolitical, neutral sphere. As the site of a metaphorical battlefield against Covid-19, it has been window-dressed as an arena for brotherhood between Israeli Palestinians and Jews, and fantasized about as a gateway to political gain or equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCIs). Throughout the process, settler militarism, settler symbols, and settler domination have continued to be normalized.
Topic:
Public Health, Pandemic, COVID-19, and Medicine
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

39. Covid-19 and the Necroeconomy of Palestinian Labor in Israel

Author:
Sobhi Samour
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The situation of West Bank Palestinians working in Israel has highlighted a number of parallels with the conditions of global labor employed in essential sectors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Under capitalism, the compulsion to work, ostensibly to cultivate life, comes at the risk of being exposed to death, but is preferred over immiseration caused by unemployment. The pandemic has merely amplified existing structural features of such employment. For Palestinian workers, with the risk of infection in Israel being significantly higher, the perilous conditions experienced by Palestinian labor have turned the preservation of life enabled by such employment more firmly into the production of death. The Palestinian Authority (PA), too, faces a conundrum: to balance the economic benefits it derives from Palestinian disposability in the Israeli labor market with public health considerations limiting such employment. This essay argues that the Covid-19 pandemic lays fully bare the necroeconomy produced by the intersection of settler colonialism and capitalism, which also forms the bedrock of the necropolitical order in the West Bank.
Topic:
Labor Issues, Public Health, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

40. The Virus, the Settler, and the Siege: Gaza in the Age of Corona

Author:
Ghassan Abu-Sittah
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This essay explores the challenges and opportunities that the Covid-19 pandemic has afforded Israel as it broadens its settler-colonial objectives internally, in Gaza, and elsewhere. In particular, it sheds light on the heightened militaristic and economic approaches taken by Israel to further entrench its siege of Palestinians in Gaza and to export increasingly advanced technologies of surveillance and state control long deployed against the Palestinian people. This investigation thus offers an opportunity to probe settler colonialism’s strategic opportunism in the face of the historic pandemic.
Topic:
Public Health, Settlements, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine