 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 George W. Bush’s Middle Eastern policies for their strong ideological content. This article agrees with a core premise of these critiques, but it does so for very different reasons from most analyses. Ideological rigidity on some issues, paradoxically, prevented the Bush administration from taking advantage of the full range of ways in which ideologies shape international relations. There were three major opportunities to advance US interests in the Middle East during Bush’s presidency that were created by the effects of ideologies. First, liberalizing parties in otherwise illiberal regimes tended to be significantly more supportive of US interests than other ideological groups in the same country at the same time. Second, major ideological differences among different types of illiberal enemies of the United States enhanced America’s ability to adopt “wedge” strategies toward various hostile coalitions. Finally, the existence of different types of ideological enemies in the Middle East created incentives for some illiberals to align with the United States because of mutual ideological enmity for a third ideological group. The Bush administration, however, failed at key times to take advantage of these openings. If Bush administration officials had been less ideologically dogmatic while, somewhat paradoxically, making better strategic use of ideologies’ major international effects, America’s security would have been significantly advanced in critical cases.