From dialogue to polylogue: Exploring the Israeli and Palestinian past in the present

Resumen Este artículo trata sobre un proyecto centrado en el pasado contencioso en Israel y Palestina. Frente a un escenario de incesantes conflictos, los participantes árabes y los judíos descubrieron sus compromisos mutuos, con distintos puntos de vista, en las comunidades en las que trabajaron. Partiendo de esta base común los participantes exploraron las áreas en las que coinciden o discrepan. No obstante, el espíritu predominante del proyecto era el de la colaboración. Un ejemplo de ese espíritu fue el éxito del esfuerzo de los participantes del proyecto por proteger un antiguo asentamiento que iba a ser destruido por la construcción de un muro de seguridad, a través del West Bank, por Israel.

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Résumé Cet article traite d'un projet au sujet du passé de discorde entre l'lsra?l et la Palestine. Avec pour arrière-plan un conflit incessant, les participants arabes et juifs ont découvert qu'ils étaient mutuellement impliqués dans les communautés dans lesquelles ils travaillaient. Dans le context de ce point commun, les participants on exploré les zones d'accord et de désaccord. La mentalité prédominante dans ce projet a été une de coopération. Le symbole de cet esprit de coopération a été le succès de l'effort des participants du projet pour sauver un ancien établissement menacé de destruction certaine lors de la construction du mur de sécurité par l'lsra?l à travers la West Bank.

     

Questions of deception: contested understandings of the polls on WMD,political leaders and governments in Australia,Britain and the United States

The weapons of mass destruction (WMD) Saddam Hussein was said to possess were central to the justification the Australian Prime Minister gave for Australia's decision to go to war in Iraq. When no WMD materialised, poll data suggested that the public felt misled. But the same data suggested that support for both the government and the Prime Minister was unaffected. Among critics of the war, this generated a moral panic about Australian democracy and the Australian public—its commitment to the end justifying the means, its failure to receive a lead from the Labor Party, its widespread apathy. It also led to an intense debate about why the charge of not telling the truth had weakened public support for Blair and Bush but not for Howard. This article explores the concerns expressed by critics of the war in the face of polling that suggested that Australians were prepared to support a government and its leader that had misled them—deliberately or otherwise. It raises questions about the contrasts drawn between polled opinion in Australia, Britain and the United States. And it argues that the differences in the pattern of opinion across the three countries were not marked and that what had cost governments support were views about how the war was going, not the failure to find WMD.     

The contested rescaling of economic governance in East Asia: a special issue

The special issue this article opens engages with an apparent conundrum that has often puzzled observers of East Asian politics—why, despite the region's considerable economic integration, multilateral economic governance institutions remain largely underdeveloped. The authors argue that this ‘regionalism problématique’ has led to the neglect of prior and more important questions pertaining to how patterns of economic governance, beyond the national scale, are emerging in East Asia and why. In this special issue, the contributors shift analytic focus onto social and political struggles over the scale and instruments of economic governance in East Asia. The contributions identify and explain the emergence of a wide variety of regional modes of economic governance often neglected by the scholarship or erroneously viewed as stepping stones towards ‘deeper’ multilateralism.     

Killing with kindness: funding the demise of a Palestinian state

This article sets out to show the widening gulf that has emerged between the international community's professed diplomatic endgame to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following a two-state paradigm, the aid strategy it has put forward since 1993 in support of this political goal, and the developments on the ground in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Within the context of a volatile Oslo peace process and the intifada, aid to the Palestinians has mainly been used as a substitute for international political will and to compensate for the lack of genuine bilateral negotiations between the parties. Aid, however, cannot buy peace. Not only has the international community's 'aid for peace' strategy failed to attain its stated political and socio-economic objectives, but it is also the central contention of this article that such international intervention has actually been harmful. Donors have ended up financing Israel's continued occupation of the Palestinian territories and its expansionist agenda at the expense of international law, the well-being of the Palestinian population, their right to self-determination, and the international community's own developmental and political goals. Looking ahead, despite the widespread current optimism generated by Gaza disengagement, this does not bode well for the emergence of a viable Palestinian state or the individual and collective security of the Israeli and Palestinian people.     

Teens and territory in contested spaces: Negotiating sectarian interfaces in Northern Ireland

The purpose of this article is to examine children's experiences of territory in one location in Northern Ireland. The research draws on stories, maps and focus group interviews with 80 children aged between 14–15 years of age, living in one of the most contested interface areas in Northern Ireland. Interface areas are locations where Catholics and Protestants live side by side in segregated communities divided by peace walls and other symbolic boundaries. Within these spaces, children made distinctions between place and territory. Place was referred to in relation to physical features of the surrounding landscape but more importantly as spaces where family and friendship ties were paramount. Territory on the other hand was referred to in terms of Protestant and Catholic identity.     

Policing divided cities: stabilization and law enforcement in Palestinian East Jerusalem

The study of conflict in cities has emerged as a significant subfield in a number of disciplines. For policy‐makers and analysts concerned with humanitarian interventions in cities emerging from conflict, the city as a form of human organization and its impact upon the establishment of security is of particular importance. Less academic attention has been given to divided cities where the legitimacy of the state authority controlling the city is, itself, in question and where stabilization and the establishment of security is protracted. The adoption of integrative and inclusive approaches to policing becomes a key component in security regimes in divided cities. In these cases, however, to what extent should the stabilization phase be recast? Is the law enforcement phase subsumed and over‐ridden by national security concerns? This article examines these questions by suggesting a number of security models which have been used in a range of divided cities. It focuses in more detail on a study of Israeli policing in the Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem occupied by Israel after 1967 to draw some broader conclusions about the nature of the security regime in Jerusalem and other divided cities inside contested states.     

Archaeology Programs at the Palestinian Universities: Reality and Challenges

Over the past three centuries, Palestine, a country rich in historic and archaeological sites, has drawn many archaeologists, historians, scholars, clergymen, adventurers and treasure seekers, all wishing to study or, at times, to exploit the cultural heritage of the land. Historically, these Westerners have enjoyed the intellectual and financial fruits of their explorations, while the native population was traditionally relegated to the role of simple laborers in the field-work. Until 1977, when the President of Birzeit University, with the support of the Director of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, founded the archaeology program at Birzeit University, there was no indigenous institution dedicated to the preservation, protection and study of Palestine’s cultural heritage. Since then, four additional Palestinian universities—al-Quds University, an-Najah National University, Hebron University and the Islamic University of Gaza—have developed archaeological programs designed to train qualified professionals committed to the management, preservation, restoration and conservation of cultural resources throughout Palestine. Yet, despite the tireless efforts of countless dedicated men and women at these institutions, there exist numerous political, economic, social and bureaucratic obstacles that greatly diminish the operational effectiveness of these programs and, as a consequence, further jeopardize the future of Palestinian cultural heritage resources. The purpose of this analysis is to diagnose the actual efficacy of these programs so that Palestinian stakeholders and policymakers may develop legislative and bureaucratic remedies which will ensure the continued protection and preservation of the Palestinian cultural heritage.     

Between religion and nationalism in the Palestinian diaspora

This article examines Palestinian refugee articulations of the Palestinian homeland and struggle in relation to religion and nationalism. My contention is that the impact of Hamas's electoral victory in Palestine is visible within the discourse of Palestinians in Jordan. This discourse suggests a transformation of the meaning of Palestinian nationalism in which religion is taking an important albeit complex role in nationalism. Using the concept of intertwining, this article considers how Islam has been intertwined with Palestinian nationalism in ways that have privileged particular ideas about the national homeland and fight for liberation. While many suggest that Islamist politics is incompatible with nationalism, this article takes the local discourse of refugees and argues that Hamas and its supporters have yet to abandon the framework of nationalism, although certain tensions exist.     

Strategic spatial planning and contested ruralities: Insights from the republic of Ireland

Since the publication of the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), a growing body of literature has emerged related to European spatial planning. Much of this literature is focused on the influence of the ESDP on city regions and urban policy in individual member states. Much less attention has been paid thus far to the influence of the ESDP on the formulation of spatial strategies and plans for rural areas. Within this context, this paper aims to explore the formulation of a national framework for spatial development in the Republic of Ireland, and in particular to examine the expression given to rural development and planning issues. This paper reviews the extent that the Irish National Spatial Strategy can provide a basis for a spatially defined (rather than sectoral based) rural policy by examining the policy construction of rurality and how this will impact on three aspects of rural planning policy: the conceptualization of the urban–rural relationship; managing rural settlements; and rural development. The paper concludes by developing wider lessons from the Irish example in the application of the European Union discourse of spatial planning to rural regions, and the difficulties associated with developing and implementing spatial policies in a deeply contested rural arena.     

Children's perception of their city centre: a qualitative GIS methodological investigation in a Dutch city

Children represent a population group that is much neglected in the city planning process. Their perceptions, which are different from those of adults, are usually not incorporated in the design of cities. The aim of this paper is to present a qualitative GIS approach to capture children's perceptions of the urban environment. It gives a detailed insight into why certain perceptions occur and what the associated physical and social qualities are. The approach considers children as active participants and combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Twenty-eight children aged 10–17 were involved in examining the city-centre area of Enschede, the Netherlands. The results show both similarity and heterogeneity in perception (e.g. based on gender and age group) and the emergence of new location-specific qualities (e.g. natural elements, smart technologies, economic functions). It concludes with a discussion on the potential of incorporating this approach in urban planning processes.     

Turkey and the Palestinian Question: The Shift of Roles in Foreign Policy

For Turkey, which was seeking a leading role in the Middle East, the Palestinian Question became a priority in its foreign policy during the late 1990s. In this article, it is argued that the role Turkey primarily espoused in the resolution of the Palestinian Question in the period 2000–2009 has mainly been that of a communicator. Nonetheless, in times of crises between Palestine and Israel, Ankara lost its neutrality and credibility to some extent, as it shifted to the role of guardian of Palestinians and proponent of Palestine, thereby undermining its communicator role. Finally, this dilemma in Turkish foreign policy in the Palestinian Question was the fundamental impediment to Turkey's sustainable and constructive contribution to the settlement of the problem in the examined period.