New Article: Bishara, Geopolitics of Press Freedoms in the Israeli-Palestinian Context

Bishara, Amahl. “The Geopolitics of Press Freedoms in the Israeli-Palestinian Context.” In The Media and Political Contestation in the Contemporary Arab World: A Decade of Change (ed. Lena Jayyusi and Anne Sofie Roald; Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 161-86.

 

 

Extract

Surely, a desire to restrict coverage was part of the Israeli authorities’ intentions in limiting journalists’ access to Gaza. However, it is also possible that Israel restricted foreign journalists’ presence not only in order to constrain coverage, but also in order to make it easier for the Israeli military to carry out operations without killing non-Palestinian civilians and thereby provoking international outcry.

 

 

 

New Book: Voltolini, Lobbying in EU Foreign Policy-Making: The Case of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Voltolini, Benedetta. Lobbying in EU Foreign Policy-Making: The Case of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Routledge/UACES Contemporary European Studies. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016.

 

 

This book examines lobbying in EU foreign policy-making and the activities of non-state actors (NSAs), focusing on EU foreign policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It sheds light on the interactions between the EU and NSAs as well as the ways in which NSAs attempt to shape EU foreign policies. By analysing issues that have not yet received systematic attention in the literature, this book offers new insights into lobbying in EU foreign policy, EU relations surrounding the conflict and the EU’s broader role in the peace process.

The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political science, international relations, EU politics, EU foreign policy-making, Middle East studies and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 

Table of Contents

• Introduction: ‘Embedded’ lobbying in EU foreign policy
• 1 Exploring lobbying in EU foreign policy-making
• 2 The EU and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: An overview of declarations, policies and actors
• 3: Who’s who? Mapping non-state actors in EU policies towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• 4: Trade relations between the EU and Israel: Lobbying on the territorial scope of the EU–Israel Association Agreement
• 5 The Goldstone Report: To endorse or not to endorse it?
• 6 Framing the EU–Israel Agreement on pharmaceutical products: Cheaper medicines, territorial scope or policy coherence?
• 7 Using the national level to lobby the EU
• 8 Conclusions

 

Benedetta Voltolini is Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Political Science, Maastricht University, the Netherlands.

 

 

ToC: Theory and Event 18.1 (2015); special issue: The Israeli War on Gaza 2014

Theory and Event, 18.1, supplement, January 2015

Introduction: The Israeli War on Gaza 2014
Jon Simons

The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza
Amir Nizar Zuabi

Deconstructing the Israeli Socio-political Apartheid System
Adel Manna

Gaza 2014: The Collapse of a Control Model
Lev Grinberg

Five Lessons Learned from the Israeli Attack on Gaza
Muhammad Ali Khalidi

“Meeting with a Dietician”: Israel’s Institutionalised Impoverishment of Gaza
Trude Strand

Inhabiting the Split: Dissident Aspirations in Times of War
Louise Bethlehem

Divine Violence, Divine Peace: Gaza 2014
Jon Simons

The War with Gaza Did Not Take Place
Ofer Cassif

Biographies

 

New Article: Bowman | Encystation: Containment and Control in Israeli Ideology and Practice

Bowman, Glenn. “Encystation: Containment and Control in Israeli Ideology and Practice.” Journal of Palestine Studies 44.3 (2015): 6-16.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jps.2015.44.3.6

 

Abstract

The radical closure of Gaza serves here as an extreme example of a process of isolation and immiseration of national enemies that is deeply rooted in Israeli ideology and practices of state formation. I use encystation to reveal the dual meaning of the term—that of radical isolation of diseased elements and that of protecting a fetus within a womb—and to show how the two meanings connect with respective Israeli policies toward Palestinians and Jews. I suggest in closing that the Oslo Accords have put in place mechanisms for the future imposition on West Bank Palestinians of the same containment currently afflicting Gaza.*

New Article: Solomon, From the Barrier to Refugee Law

Solomon, Solon. “From the Barrier to Refugee Law: National Security’s Transformation from a Balancing Right to a Background Element in the Realms of Israeli Constitutionalism.” International Journal of Human Rights 19.4 (2015): 447-64.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2015.1027063

 

Abstract

Mapping cardinal cases of the Israeli Supreme Court, the article will demonstrate how, in the Israeli constitutional experience, the concept of national security came to be transformed from a balancing right to a background element. Along these lines, the article will argue that while Israeli constitutionalism indeed awarded national security parameters a decisive role in the realms of the human rights balance judicial discourse, it equally embarked on a procedure of delineating the existence of national security as an autonomous consideration, in cases where national security exigencies ceased to be obvious in the Israeli reality. Compelling the examination of a national security debate under the human rights lens, the Israeli Supreme Court aligned its jurisprudence with that of other supreme courts as well as with the international thematic constitutionalism model, aspiring to interpret the different fields of laws and various provisions under the concept of the right to dignity.