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16821. The Urban Battleground: Explaining Conflict in Global Cities

Author:
Samantha Hammer
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Affairs
Institution:
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Abstract:
When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, people across the Arab world identified with him, a person trying to make a decent life for himself but hobbled by a repressive government. As Tunisia erupted into a successful revolution, citizens throughout the Middle East and North Africa were inspired to follow. Over the course of the uprisings, images of protesters fiercely battling government forces in reclaimed city squares exemplified the importance of urban spaces as arenas for power struggles that can redefine national sovereignty.
Political Geography:
Middle East, North Africa, and Tunisia

16822. From the Editor

Author:
Rashid Khalidi
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
As A wAve of revolution, unrest and upheaval sweeps slowly across the Arab world, one question has arisen repeatedly. This is the place of the question of Palestine in these ongoing tectonic shifts in the political map of the region. It has long been an article of faith for partisans of the status quo from which Israel benefits that this is an unimportant question, artificially sustained by corrupt unpopular regimes in order to distract their oppressed citizens. In her article on the place of the Palestine question in Egypt's revolutionary upheaval, Reem Abou-El-Fadl shows that in the case of Egypt the political forces that made the revolution (and those that have emerged in its aftermath) have long been deeply involved with the cause of solidarity with the Palestinians and opposition to the regime's policy of normalization with Israel. This important article highlights how central the question of Palestine and Israel is in Egypt, in spite of the overwhelming emphasis on domestic factors since the January 2011 revolution.
Political Geography:
Israel, Arabia, and Egypt

16823. The Road to Jerusalem through Tahrir Square: Anti-Zionism and Palestine in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

Author:
Reem Abou-El-Fadl
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article addresses an aspect of Egypt's 2011 revolution almost entirely ignored in most Western media accounts: Israel and Palestine as prominent themes of protest. In reviewing Egyptian mobilization opposing normalization and in support of the Palestinian cause starting from Sadat's peace initiative of the mid-1970s, the author shows how the anti-Mubarak movement that took off as of the mid- 2000s built on the Palestine activism and networks already in place. While the trigger of the revolution and the focus of its first eighteen days was domestic change, the article shows how domestic and foreign policy issues (especially Israel and Palestine) were inextricably intertwined, with the leadership bodies of the revolution involved in both.
Political Geography:
Israel, Palestine, and Egypt

16824. Digital Occupation: Gaza's High-Tech Enclosure

Author:
Helga Tawil-Souri
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
In disengaging from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel did not end the occupation but technologized it through purportedly “frictionless” high- technology mechanisms. The telecommunications sector was turned over to the Palestinian Authority under Oslo II and subcontracted to Palestine Telecommunications Company (PALTEL), furthering a neoliberal economic agenda that privately “enclosed” digital space. Coming on top of Israel's ongoing limitations on Palestinian land-lines, cellular, and Internet infrastructures, the result is a “digital occupation” of Gaza characterized by increasing privatization, surveillance, and control. While deepening Palestinian economic reliance on Israel and making Palestinian high-tech firms into dependent agents, digital occupation also enhances Israel's territorial containment of the Strip.
Political Geography:
Israel and Palestine

16825. The "Urban Redesign" of Jenin Refugee Camp: Humanitarian Intervention and Rational Violence

Author:
Linda Tabar
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
UNRWA's reconstruction of Jenin refugee camp following the massive destruction by Israel in April 2002 was the largest humanitarian intervention during the second intifada. This article uses the Jenin project as a lens through which to critically examine the minimalist humanitarian paradigm underwriting the agency's relief-centered mandate. Reviewing the negotiations between UNRWA planners and local refugee committees, the author highlights the tension between the agency's politically “neutral” technical vision and the refugees' needs and wishes. While recognizing UNRWA's crucial role, the author regrets that in expanding its operations beyond relief provision, the agency opted for a more traditional (liberal) community- based development framework rather than a rights-based approach, resulting in a depoliticization that undermines the community's struggle for its rights.
Political Geography:
Israel

16826. The Right of Return Movement in Syria: Building a Culture of Return, Mobilizing Memories for the Return Anaheed Al-Hardan

Author:
Anaheed Al-Hardan
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The Palestinian Right of Return Movement (RoRM) emerged among diaspora refugee communities following the Oslo accords and the perceived threat to the right of return. This article focuses on the RoRM in Syria in the context of the community's history and unique civil rights there. Based on extensive interviews in the Damascus area, it provides an overview of the heterogeneous movement, which, while requiring state approval, operates in an autonomous civil society sphere. RoRM activists translate visions of the return formulated in the Palestinian national arena into local community practices that mobilize memories of Palestine as resources (through oral history, village commemorations, etc.) with the aim of ensuring a future return by the new generation of refugees.
Political Geography:
Palestine and Syria

16827. The Iron Wall Revisited

Author:
Avi Shlaim
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
More than a decade after the publication of his acclaimed The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, Avi Shlaim returns to Ze'ev Jabotinsky's theory as a framework for understanding Israel's Arab policies, this time focusing on the post-1967 period. The author revisits the theory's formulation by the leader of Revisionist Zionism in 1923 and its near total convergence with the (unacknowledged) strategy followed by Labor Zionism. Examining each Israeli government since 1967, he shows that all zealously followed stage one of Jabotinsky's strategy (constructing an “iron wall” of unassailable military strength) but that the lesser known stage two (serious negotiations with the Palestinians after being compelled by stage one to abandon all hope of prevailing over Zionism) has been completely ignored except by Yitzhak Rabin. Indeed, the recent periods have witnessed a full-blown return to the iron wall at its starkest, with increasing resort to violence and unilateralism.
Political Geography:
Israel, Palestine, and Arabia

16828. Fieldnotes from Jerusalem and Gaza, 2009 – 2011

Author:
Elena Hogan
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Written by a humanitarian aid worker moving back and forth between the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem over a two-year period (May 2009– June 2011), the observations in these “fieldnotes” highlight the two areas as opposite sides of the same coin. Israel “withdrew” from Gaza and annexed East Jerusalem, but both are subject to the same degree of domination and control: by overt violence in Gaza, mainly by regulation in East Jerusalem.
Political Geography:
Israel

16829. Mapping the Nakba

Author:
Ilan Pappé
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
In its first edition published in 2004, The Atlas of Palestine was already an essential item in the library of anyone seriously interested in the history of Palestine. At nearly 700 pages (almost 300 more than the earlier edition), the 2010 edition contains valuable information available nowhere else on 1,600 towns and villages, 16,000 landmarks, 30,000 place names, and much more. If I emphasize the richness of this car tographic representation of Palestine's modern history, it is because this Atlas is the strongest rebuttal yet of the Zionist cartographic representation of the country's history, exemplified in publications such as Martin Gilbert's Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Oxford University Press, 1993) and the various other atlases produced by Israeli geographers over the years. It challenges those projects both as a meta-narrative of Palestine's history and as a detailed project that rescues the native population from the invisibility to which they are condemned by Gilbert and others. In other words, this huge volume is a detailed refutation of the attempt to erase the Palestinians from the history of Palestine.
Political Geography:
Palestine

16830. Staying Human Amidst Inhumanity

Author:
Edda Manga
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Vittorio Arrigoni (1975–2011) was an Italian journalist and peace activist who lived and reported from Gaza for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto from 2008 until his death in April 2011. His book contains a day-by-day inside account of Operation Cast Lead, Israel's three-week military assault on the besieged and densely populated Strip
Political Geography:
Italy