The example of the PLO’s terrorist campaign against Israel demonstrates that terrorism is unlikely to be an effective tool to achieve political goals.
Hamas, ‘Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya’ (The Islamic Resistance Movement), has evolved over time from its humble beginnings as a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, to an arguably legitimate political body, controlling much of the occupied Palestinian territories. This paper will reflect on the key factors in its development and features of the movement, and will conclude with a discussion of Hamas’ future as both an agent of armed struggle and a legitimate political body.
Reproduced violence in videos and images registers an order of grievability that fails to recognise the value of lives in the Middle East as lives.
The dominant Western rhetoric enforces the portrayal of Hamas as a static organisation, its violent and ‘fanatical’ behaviour rendering it as innately characteristic while contradictory evidence is marginalised as irrelevant. This myopic approach has failed to understand Hamas, and for peace ever to be achieved this paradigm must be broken.
Predictions of “water wars” have become an important and even customary part of global diplomatic discourse. In 1995, the World Bank’s vice president for environmentally sustainable development famously asserted “if the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water”. What is the truth about transboundary water and the potential for war?
Israel’s pursuit of economic peace is, in reality, a policy of economic pacification. There is a real danger that Economic Peace can be used to frame peace-building away from political diplomacy. Neglecting the political aspects of peace building and favouring economic pacification will only lead to a resurgence of violence in the future.
Hamas’ takeover of Gaza marked a shift in the complex process of preparation for national sovereignty, especially for the Palestinian women’s movement.
Water has always been a very important factor in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Given the importance of agriculture for both economies, whoever had access to water would obtain access to land once they managed to cultivate it. The Jews used this as a strategy for land appropriation before the official creation of Israel, but after 1948, water politics transformed to attain other national goals.
Israeli Occupation through its Zionist strategies, manifestations of terror, curfews, surveillance, and violence restricts Palestinian women’s reproductive choices.
Fragmentation during the Intifada demonstrates that while fragmentation is not inherently a positive attribute in civil war, it can be applied in future conflicts.
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