This paper focuses on the relation between Judaization policies and Palestinian resistance in the city of Hebron/al-Khalīl, sacred to both the Jewish and Islamic faiths, particularly after 1990’s onwards. The Israelis’ movement to Judaize sacred places has a two-layered structure: one layer is an effort to control the areas on the ground; and the other is the use of propaganda involving representations or discourses to justify their position. The Palestinian resistance is also taking place in two layers, and the conflicting parties are clashing at each layer. While the two-layered structure is not unique to the conflict over the sacred sites, there are some peculiarities. The religiously inspired narrative used to justify control of sacred areas in Hebron/ al-Khalīl will bring about the exclusion of the other conflicting party, which is particularly apparent in Judaization. As for the Palestinian resistance, their main target is revival of the old city as one unit, including the Islamic religious heritage and social life there. This paper examines the conflict over Hebron/ al-Khalīl in the context of the Hebron Agreement (1997) and concludes that the competition in that city will remain fixed because the spatial partition and separation between peoples, decided in that agreement, decrease the opportunities leading to peaceful coexistence.

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This article analyzes the process of the alliance between the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Jordan from 1982 to 1987, and its effect on the occupied Palestinian territories (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). PLO leaders, like Khaled al-Hassan, sought to become allied with Jordan for two reasons: to balance the power against opponent groups that had ties to Syria, and to prepare for possible peace negotiations hosted by the U.S. However, their alliance only lasted for a few years, until 1987. The PLO leadership realized the alliance with Jordan could not achieve political status for the PLO and even caused more severe inter-factional disputes among Palestinian groups. PLO leaders sought reconciliation among factions, but then decided to cancel the Amman Agreement. Even with the Amman Agreement’s retraction, the short alliance between the PLO and Jordan introduced a direct connection between the PLO and the Occupied Territories. The PLO’s leadership, especially Abu-Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir), played an important role in establishing PLO-affiliated organizations inside the territories. These circumstances led to pro-PLO political activities in the territories, and led the way to the first Intifada in 1987.

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Despite Israel’s adoption of universal conscription, one third of Israeli citizens avoid military service. We utilize the deviance from conscription to investigate the function of military service as a process of political socialization. This article provides an empirical examination of the effect of service in the Israeli Defense Forces on political attitudes. We test a hypothesis derived from the theory of national integration of the armed forces. That is, military experience raises consciousness of national security and produces an uncompromising defensive attitude toward the occupied territories. Data are from the Democracy Survey conducted in February 2007 among a representative sample of the Jewish population. The research design of our study applies propensity score analysis to produce as-if randomized treatment and a control group, almost the same as groups without military experience, and to control confounding variables. We demonstrate that conscripted Jewish citizens hold a similar distribution to non-drafted Jewish citizens in the categories of satisfaction with democracy, Zionist identity, opinions about leadership, and national pride. However, our analysis shows a counterintuitive result, that the experience of military service prompts opposition to Arab emigration and support for territorial concessions in the West Bank for the conflict resolution. The result is implicated in a reexamination of the theory of national integration of the military service.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine an Egyptian writer’s, namely ‘Abdullāh al-Nadīm’s (1843-96) contributions to the analysis of the “despotism of riches”. Through social activism for the poor or orphans as well as writing original fictional works such as plays or short skits, al-Nadīm defends the equality of opportunity for a free education for everyone, especially for the marginalized classes. He also urged the Egyptian ruling class to recognize the social impediments before the majority of people who had no chance of escaping their stagnant social situation. Therefore he preferred to use the art of “dialogue’ or “metaphor”, in order to help peasants recognize the meaning of free elections or the invisible ideological order encompassing them. Moreover, al-Nadīm focused on the question of Arabic diglossia. Despite his understanding of the importance of literal Arabic, he opposed to a unilateral enforcement of national education to the students by using only literal Arabic, which was ignoring the importance of colloquial culture in the Egyptian society. He was well aware of the fact that it would not be possible to realize a real national unity to resist against the colonial power and the indigenous despotic régime, without respecting the spontaneous desire to learn of the people.

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In this article, the author studies the arming of the Ottoman-Iranian Borderland after the Russo-Ottoman War (1877-78), as an attempt to clarify the significance of the “modern age” in the history of firearms. The Russo-Ottoman War gave rise to the diffusion of Martini-Peabody rifle in the Borderland, the impact of which can be discerned from Sheikh ‘Obeyd allāh’s revolt in 1880 and the destabilization of the regional security in the 1880s and 1890s. On the other hand, the Qajar irregular forces armed with those rifles displayed their own importance, and the Qajar dynasty attempted to utilize “modern” arms spread in the region by mobilizing these irregulars. This attitude seems to have been related to the general military policy of the Qajar dynasty in the age. Reacting to the arming of the Borderland, indigenous gunsmiths attempted to produce the imitations or to reuse metal cartridges locally, showing the indigenous technological level of arms production. Finally, the author suggests that these developments prepared the ground for the later historical developments including the Constitutional Revolution and the conflicts between various ethnic groups in the region in the WWI period.

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