e’s Intelligence
One of the prominent religious parties in Israel, intimately involved in political decision-making, has been the Shas party, led by the late Rabbi ‘Ovadia Yosef. This article examines four components of Rabbi Yosef’s political stance: (1) his view of Jewish religious law as a factor that moderates the force of changes of seemingly historical and revolutionary significance; (2) his opposition to radical messianism; (3) his desire to adopt independent positions; and (4) his role in the development of a Mizrahi, ultra-Orthodox stream of Zionism.
This article analyses the enabling and restraining conditions of local peace organisations in Israel and Palestine. It utilises the analytical notion of peace gaps to accentuate the interplay between local and elite levels. It also highlights the discrepancies when it comes to expectations of peace, the ability to communicate peace discourses and the power to influence and build wider domestic peace constituencies. The empirical findings reveal how current vertical and horizontal peace gaps result in the disempowerment and marginalisation of local peace NGOs on both sides. Such a precarious situation hinders broader peace mobilisation and is further exacerbated by widespread political apathy and peace fatigue among Israeli and Palestinian publics. By way of conclusion, the article argues for the need to re-politicise and re-negotiate space for a more agonistic peacebuilding, which allows for differences to co-exist.
This article explores the practices, discourses and dilemmas of the Israeli human rights NGOs that are working to protect and promote the human rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. This case can shed light on the complex process of “triangular translation” of human rights, which is distinct from other forms of human rights localization studied thus far. In this process, human rights NGOs translate international human rights norms on the one hand, and the suffering of the victims on the other, into the conceptions and legal language commonly employed by the state that violates these rights. We analyze the dialectics of change and reproduction embedded in the efforts of Israeli activists to defend Palestinian human rights while at the same time depoliticizing their work and adopting discriminatory premises and conceptions hegemonic in Israeli society. The recent and alarming legislative proposals in Israel aimed at curtailing the work of human rights NGOs reinforce the need to reconsider the role of human rights NGOs in society, including their depoliticized strategies, their use of legal language and their relations with the diminishing peace movement.
The Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, otherwise known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), have been a test case for international aid policies and practices for many years, especially since the Oslo agreement between the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Israeli government in 1993. Yet in many ways, the OPT are unique since they are not a state, not even a fragile state, therefore rendering the applicability of aid principles, as captured by the Paris Declaration, somehow problematic. Despite substantial aid flows over the last years, the problem of the absence of statehood is a fundamental block to development. Moreover, many aid programmes have been, partially at least, instrumentalised to stabilise the occupation. In the meantime, social and economic conditions have deteriorated. Although there are many reasons for that deterioration, we argue that the perpetuation of the Israeli occupation is the most important factor since it reproduces the social, political and economic dislocation of the OPT. This persisting occupation of the OPT, and the consequent external control over land, security, borders and so many other key elements of governance and sovereignty, explain the fact that the many attempts to make aid more ‘effective’, in the spirit of the aid effectiveness principles of the OECD, have failed.
Numerous analysts have criticized Geor