Stranger in a Strange Land: Thucydides' Stasis and the Arab Spring

The article reviews the Arab Spring, projecting an alternative point of view. Although it lies in the spectrum of international politics analysis, still it maintains an internal approach regarding the Arab troubles. I support the idea that the Arab Spring can be examined as a Stasis phenomenon, deriving from the Thucydidian analysis. Nevertheless, while it is a phenomenon that affects the evolution of the Islamic nucleus, it is also an international event that may turn into a large‐scale crisis for neighboring subsystems accordingly.     

The Basis of China's Pro‐Palestine Stance and the Current Status of its Implementation

This article is built upon the author's previous attempt to review Sino–Israel relations from the Chinese perspective, where it is argued that the relationship is at a crossroads because China is increasingly more proactively involved in the international arena, which will inevitably lead to a more assertive role in trying to facilitate a solution to the Israel–Palestinian conflicts. The author also affirmed that China is more supportive of the Palestinians. In this article, the author will further analyze China's pro‐Palestine stance, give empirical evidence of this preference by Chinese intelligentsia, and provide insight into the decision‐making mechanisms of the Chinese government in terms of its diplomatic policies. The author also wants to demonstrate that, despite the evident pro‐Palestine tendency of Chinese scholars and consequently the government, little has been done to implement this preference. The Israelis still have a sizable time window to achieve a fair and just peace agreement with the Palestinians. In the long run, China's pro‐Palestine inclination will work more and more against Israel, in contrast to the strong pro‐Israel inclination of the United States.     

Gender Segregation,Effacement, and Suppression: Trends in the Status of Women in Israel

The aim of this article is to analyze the phenomenon of the exclusion of women from the public sphere in Israel. The article describes some of the causes of this phenomenon, its impact on Israeli society, and the difficulty in confronting it. Israeli women have made impressive gains on many fronts, but the exclusion of women from the public sphere as a result of the influence of the growing Ultra‐Orthodox minority, which imposes its norms on the general public, raises serious concerns. The exclusion of women manifests itself in several forms: gender segregation in public spaces, the effacement of women's images from the public sphere, and the suppression of women's voice. The infiltration of Orthodox Jewish fundamentalism into Israeli society may cause the regression of advancements previously made in women's rights in Israel. The article points to the limitations of the treatment of this phenomenon within a theory of multiculturalism, and suggests an alternative framework of discourse, which relies on concepts that are drawn from the literature on environmental ethics, public rights, and public ownership of space and resources.     

ICT,Social Media,and the Arab Transition to Democracy: From Venting to Acting

There is widespread use of information and communications technology (ICT) in the Middle East and North African countries. Blogging and social media have played an important role in the recent calls for reform and change. Using these new communication systems and devices, citizens have been venting their anger and frustration with their autocratic governments and rulers. Most recently, the venting has turned into action, as shown by the eradication of the old regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, as well as the ongoing struggle in Syria. The most notable issues include lack of individual freedoms, deteriorating economic conditions, high unemployment, increased corruption, and violent treatment of citizens at the hands of security forces. The Arab Spring, or Awakening, and the events that have since followed have, in part, been promoted by ICT and other means of modern communications. Along with the popular Arab traditions of oral communication as well as Friday and Sunday sermons at mosques and churches, social media were used by organizers of the Arab Spring to call for and coordinate demonstrations against the regimes. Access to this newer media has circumvented the established and government‐controlled media such as printed press, radio, and television—outlets bent on appeasing the rulers and misinforming the masses. Arab authoritarian systems have discovered that they cannot simply flip a big red switch to stop the flow of information that they would rather keep hidden from the masses. Further discussed are digital democracies that are currently emerging because of the growing population of netizens, bloggers, and social media political activists throughout the Arab world and the many attempts to silence them.     

Images of Muslims in Western Scholarship and Media after 9/11

This article endeavors to trace changes in the images of the Muslim of the Orient, a product of Orientalism, to contemporary images of the Muslim post 9/11, marking a transition from classical Orientalism to a new Orientalism or Islamism. The study demonstrates how most Western scholarship and media, through the construction of so‐called Islamophobia, have portrayed Muslims in terms of global terrorism, Islamic jihadism, fanatic Islamism, fundamentalism, fascism, and Islamic authoritarianism. Much of the scholarship and media dealing with Islam and Muslims require critical assessment and revision. The article also addresses ways through which Muslims in academia and the media have opposed negative images of Muslims. For instance, in response to the irrational acts of extremists that have fostered negative stereotypes of Islam, public lectures, sermons, conferences, and media programs have recently and abundantly been made by Muslim scholars and media activists to present Muslims positively at both the national and global levels.     

The Muslim Settlement of Late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine: Comparison with Jewish Settlement Patterns

In the late Ottoman and Mandatory periods, Palestine's rural landscape underwent a great transformation. This study examines how the Muslim population expanded beyond its traditional inhabitation in the highlands and settled the fluid inventory of marginal lands in the coastal plains and unpopulated valleys of Palestine. In settling these marginal landscapes their settlement dovetailed with Jewish settlement patterns. While most studies have emphasized the competitive aspect of this process, examining Zionist and Arab national claims, this research points to a different aspect of this new settlement—mainly how much the Jewish and Muslim settlement patterns mirrored one another and how they were part of similar physical processes and complemented one another. Relying on censuses, aerial photographs, and period maps, as well as other archival sources, this is the first systematic research to examine the full extent of new Muslim settlements in Palestine in the late Ottoman and Mandatory periods, and to draw parallels between this phenomenon and the settlement endeavors of the Zionists.