Rebuilding Gaza: Putting people before politics PDF Download

Author: Sara Hamood
Publisher: Oxfam
ISBN: 1848145748
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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Author: Aitemad Muhanna
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317183649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Drawing on rich interview material and adopting a life history approach, this book examines the agency of women living in insecure and uncertain conflict situations. It explores the effects of the Israeli policy of closure against Gaza and the resulting humanitarian crisis in relation to gender relations and gender subjectivity. With attention to the changing roles of men in the household and community as a result of the loss of male employment, the author explores the extension of poor women’s mobility, particularly that of young wives with dependent children, for whom the meaning of agency has shifted from being providers in the domestic sphere to becoming publicly dependent on humanitarian aid. Without conflating women’s agency with resistance to patriarchy, Agency and Gender in Gaza extends the concept of agency to include its subjective and intersubjective elements, shedding light on the recent distortion of the traditional gender order and the reasons for which women resist the masculine power that they have acquired as a result. An empirically grounded examination of the attempt to maintain the meaning of social existence through the preservation of socially constructed images of masculinity and femininity, this book will be of interest to social scientists with interests in gender studies, masculinities and the sociology of the family.

Author: Ilana Feldman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822389134
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Marred by political tumult and violent conflict since the early twentieth century, Gaza has been subject to a multiplicity of rulers. Still not part of a sovereign state, it would seem too exceptional to be a revealing site for a study of government. Ilana Feldman proves otherwise. She demonstrates that a focus on the Gaza Strip uncovers a great deal about how government actually works, not only in that small geographical space but more generally. Gaza’s experience shows how important bureaucracy is for the survival of government. Feldman analyzes civil service in Gaza under the British Mandate (1917–48) and the Egyptian Administration (1948–67). In the process, she sheds light on how governing authority is produced and reproduced; how government persists, even under conditions that seem untenable; and how government affects and is affected by the people and places it governs. Drawing on archival research in Gaza, Cairo, Jerusalem, and London, as well as two years of ethnographic research with retired civil servants in Gaza, Feldman identifies two distinct, and in some ways contradictory, governing practices. She illuminates mechanisms of “reiterative authority” derived from the minutiae of daily bureaucratic practice, such as the repetitions of filing procedures, the accumulation of documents, and the habits of civil servants. Looking at the provision of services, she highlights the practice of “tactical government,” a deliberately restricted mode of rule that makes limited claims about governmental capacity, shifting in response to crisis and operating without long-term planning. This practice made it possible for government to proceed without claiming legitimacy: by holding the question of legitimacy in abeyance. Feldman shows that Gaza’s governments were able to manage under, though not to control, the difficult conditions in Gaza by deploying both the regularity of everyday bureaucracy and the exceptionality of tactical practice.

Author: Raphael S. Cohen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780833097873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This report describes how the Israel Defense Force fought an adaptive hybrid adversary in a dense urban setting under intense public scrutiny during its wars in Gaza and draws lessons from the Israeli experience for the U.S. Army and the joint force.

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Author: Raja Shehadeh
Publisher: Steerforth
ISBN: 158642212X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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The Israeli army invaded Ramallah in March 2002. A tank stood at the end of Raja Shehadeh's road; Israeli soldiers patrolled from the roof toops. Four soldiers took over his brother's apartment and then used him as a human shield as they went through the building, while his wife tried to keep her composure for the sake of their frightened childred, ages four and six. This is an account of what it is like to be under seige: the terror, the frustrations, the humiliations, and the rage. How do you pass your time when you are imprisoned in your own home? What do you do when you cannot cross the neighborhood to help your sick mother? Shehadeh's recent memoir, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, was the first book by a Palestinian writer to chronicle a life of displacement on the West Bank from 1967 to the present. It received international acclaim and was a finalist for the 2002 Lionel Gelber Prize. When the Birds Stopped Singing is a book of the moment, a chronicle of life today as lived by ordinary Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza in the grip of the most stringent Israeli security measures in years. And yet it is also an enduring document, at once literary and of great political import, that should serve as a cautionary tale for today's and future generations.

Author: Nathan J. Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801464366
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Throughout the Arab world, Islamist political movements are joining the electoral process. This change alarms some observers and excites other. In recent years, electoral opportunities have opened, and Islamist movements have seized them. But those opportunities, while real, have also been sharply circumscribed. Elections may be freer, but they are not fair. The opposition can run but it generally cannot win. Semiauthoritarian conditions prevail in much of the Arab world, even in the wake of the Arab Spring. How do Islamist movements change when they plunge into freer but unfair elections? How do their organizations (such as the Muslim Brotherhood) and structures evolve? What happens to their core ideological principles? And how might their increased involvement affect the political system? In When Victory Is Not an Option, Nathan J. Brown addresses these questions by focusing on Islamist movements in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Palestine. He shows that uncertain benefits lead to uncertain changes. Islamists do adapt their organizations and their ideologies do bend—some. But leaders almost always preserve a line of retreat in case the political opening fizzles or fails to deliver what they wish. The result is a cat-and-mouse game between dominant regimes and wily movements. There are possibilities for more significant changes, but to date they remain only possibilities.

Author: Izzeldin Abuelaish
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802779484
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER Search for Common Ground Award Middle East Institute Award Finalist, Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought Stavros Niarchos Prize for Survivorship Nobel Peace Prize nominee "A necessary lesson against hatred and revenge" -Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate "In this book, Doctor Abuelaish has expressed a remarkable commitment to forgiveness and reconciliation that describes the foundation for a permanent peace in the Holy Land." -President Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Prize laureate By turns inspiring and heart-breaking, hopeful and horrifying, I Shall Not Hate is Izzeldin Abuelaish's account of an extraordinary life. A Harvard-trained Palestinian doctor who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and "who has devoted his life to medicine and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians" (New York Times), Abuelaish has been crossing the lines in the sand that divide Israelis and Palestinians for most of his life - as a physician who treats patients on both sides of the line, as a humanitarian who sees the need for improved health and education for women as the way forward in the Middle East. And, most recently, as the father whose daughters were killed by Israeli soldiers on January 16, 2009, during Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip. His response to this tragedy made news and won him humanitarian awards around the world. Instead of seeking revenge or sinking into hatred, Abuelaish called for the people in the region to start talking to each other. His deepest hope is that his daughters will be "the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis."

Author: Khaled Elgindy
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815731566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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A critical examination of the history of US-Palestinian relations The United States has invested billions of dollars and countless diplomatic hours in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a two-state solution. Yet American attempts to broker an end to the conflict have repeatedly come up short. At the center of these failures lay two critical factors: Israeli power and Palestinian politics. While both Israelis and Palestinians undoubtedly share much of the blame, one also cannot escape the role of the United States, as the sole mediator in the process, in these repeated failures. American peacemaking efforts ultimately ran aground as a result of Washington’s unwillingness to confront Israel’s ever-deepening occupation or to come to grips with the realities of internal Palestinian politics. In particular, the book looks at the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics—namely, how a badly flawed peace process helped to weaken Palestinian leaders and institutions and how an increasingly dysfunctional Palestinian leadership, in turn, hindered prospects for a diplomatic resolution. Thus, while the peace process was not necessarily doomed to fail, Washington’s management of the process, with its built-in blind spot to Israeli power and Palestinian politics, made failure far more likely than a negotiated breakthrough. Shaped by the pressures of American domestic politics and the special relationship with Israel, Washington’s distinctive “blind spot” to Israeli power and Palestinian politics has deep historical roots, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. The size of the blind spot has varied over the years and from one administration to another, but it is always present.

Author: Didier Ndongala Mumbata
Publisher: Paragon Publishing
ISBN: 1782225927
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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The aim of this book is to bring into focus the most exciting and complicated presidential campaign which revealed, for the first time to the world, Barack Obama as an extraordinary politician. It is not a biography of the man who became the 44th president of the United States of America. On the contrary, the book is the absolutely true story of the most remarkable leader during the campaign; a man whose, intellectual and political gifts prevailed and set him apart as a political genius. Barack Obama won the presidency even if unfavourable circumstances made him less likely to be the president of the United States of America: being an African-American, son of a non-American from Kenya; having a strange name for an American; married to a woman who is a descendant of slaves; being only four years as Senator. Just imagine that, before his 2004 convention speech, more than half of the American people did not know or had heard about him. This book explains explicitly how this African-American survived and convinced all the peoples of the world that he was the one they had been waiting for, and why the American people chose him as president of the United States of America in a crucial moment of financial crisis despite all the disadvantages on his side. Barack Obama really shook the world. With this achievement, he has definitely proved that anyone, not only rich boys from the upper classes, can grow up to be president. Besides, the book, The Political Phenomenon, is the most nuanced account of the most exciting presidential campaign in American history, including not only the high points, but the way the campaign actually became dramatic, with all the problems, conflicts and achievements. Usually, the rest of the world doesn’t pay too much attention about the primaries until the two main candidates have emerged. But this time, it was different. From Paris to Kinshasa, Copenhagen to Melbourne, people were staying up until late – already in the beginning of 2008 – to wait for the results of the U.S. presidential primary season. And finally, this book captures the essence of one of the most extraordinary leaders of our time and the process by which he became, without any doubt, a political phenomenon.