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The public policy field generally answers the question as to what a government should or should not do. In the case of Palestine, the Water Reform Process has however been characterized by a gap be...

This paper uses the concept of ‘Slow Violence’ in a Palestinian village to explore the political ecology of the Israeli settlers-colonial paradigm. Slow Violence is violence that manifests graduall...

Many members of minority groups clash violently with state agents. The case of the Israeli West-Bank Settlers’ Right-Wing Activists is particularly paradoxical. Unlike disempowered groups whose abi...

Traditional communities have wide knowledge and experience of wild plants as natural resources that have historically been important for food, medicine, spiritual and hygienic uses. These communiti...

Social work professionals experience job-related stressors often associated with compromised mental health. In low-resource, conflict settings, such as the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), s...

This article aims at challenging the widely accepted argument that Israel has failed to enforce the law on Jewish communities in the West Bank. It argues instead that, since the 2000s, there has be...

The recent ruling of the International Criminal Court (ICC) affirming territorial jurisdiction over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip may at first appear to be a mere proc...

This article examines the relationship between Evangelical Christian Zionists and West Bank Jewish settlers and its implications to the Jewish-Christian boundary. Significant contact with Christian...

This article examined the differences between the political attitudes of two generations of religious Zionists settlers in the West Bank. Theoretical approaches on intergenerational socialization w...

PURPOSE: Cataract surgery, quantity and quality, is an indicator of ophthalmic care. A comprehensive assessment of cataract surgical services has never been carried out in Palestine, including West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The objective of this study was to estimate the cataract surgical rate in 2015 to and to explore the modes of payment and referral systems. METHODS: A cross-sectional study conducted between June and August 2016. Medical Directors from Cataract Surgical Centres in Palestine were interviewed using a structured questionnaire to extract data on cataract output and surgical techniques. Additionally, data were collected on modes of payment for cataract services. The cataract surgical rate was calculated by dividing the total cataract output in 2015 by the estimated population of Palestine in millions. RESULTS: In 2015, 9908 cataract surgeries were carried out in 22 centres. The cataract surgical rate was 2,117 operations per million population. Phacoemulsification was the most common technique (73.4%), however in government centres 67% were performed by extracapsular cataract extraction.In the Gaza Strip, 56.6% of cataract surgeries were operated at government centres, and 42.8% were operated at NGO centres while in West Bank, only 12% of cataract surgeries were operated at government centres, with two-thirds of cataracts diagnosed at governmental centres being referred to private and NGO centres. Seventy eight percent of cataract surgeries were funded by insurance, of which the government insurance scheme contributed 65%. CONCLUSION: The cataract surgical rate in Palestine falls short of the required WHO target. The majority of cataract surgeries are funded by insurance.

This article provides an overview of the internal and external political and economic problems facing the Middle-Eastern Kingdom of Jordan in the light of the so-called ‘attempted coup' of Prince H...

Limited water resources are among the main obstacles to development in Palestine. This research investigates farmers’ perceptions and willingness to use treated wastewater (TWW) for irrigation. Des...

Many members of minority groups clash violently with state agents. The case of West Bank rightwing activists is particularly paradoxical. Unlike disempowered groups whose ability to bring about cha...

Jordan had various expectations when it initially signed the peace treaty with Israel. The Jordanians believed that the peace with Israel, coming after the Oslo Accords, would pave the way for a st...

2019 marked the 25th anniversary of normalizing Jordanian-Israeli relations and the ‘warm’ peace-making between the two countries. Representing key partners and neighbours in the Middle East, Jorda...

This paper argues the built structure of Israeli military occupation in the West Bank is only part of the mechanism that serves to define territorial boundaries and restrict Palestinian movement. A...

The 1906 edition of Baedeker’s Guide to Palestine and Syria contains a perforated slip strategically placed before the title page which reads, ‘The excessive zeal of the Turkish censorship sometime...

Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank is a sobering ethnography about the current and possibly future situation in Palestine or, ...

Israeli-Jordanian disengagement talks saw Israel promote its plan of West Bank ‘Jordanization’, to curtail Palestinian self-determination. This failed. However, it served as the blueprint for futur...

Palestine currently suffers a serious shortage in crucial energy supplies. Nearly 90% of electricity needs come directly from Israel, or through Palestinian electricity distribution companies. This...

This research assessed the effect of untreated wastewater discharged to Sarida Wadi within the Sarida Catchment in the Central West Bank. Spring water from seven springs within the catchment were tested for physical, hydrochemical, and microbiological characteristics in wet and dry seasons. Hydrochemical results of wastewater samples showed that Total Suspended Solids (TSS) and Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD5) exceeded the standards in 93 percent of the samples, and an increase of COD value was recorded in the catchment downstream in the dry season. The springs’ hydrochemical data showed that Ca2+ plays a dominant role, and samples from the dry season exceeded the limits for HCO3-. One spring showed high nitrate values, exceeding the 45 mg/L limit. The springs’ microbial results provided overwhelming proof of wastewater contamination and an increasing trend over time of Fecal Coliforms (FC). The analyzed trace elements did not exceed World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines for drinking water with the exception of one spring with an abnormal value for Boron.

Fatah leaders routinely accuse Hamas of plotting to establish an “emirate” in the Gaza Strip. Gaza is in fact turning into a statelet separate from the West Bank, but it is Israeli policies that ar...

The situation of West Bank Palestinians working in Israel has highlighted a number of parallels with the conditions of global labor employed in essential sectors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Under...

In this article, I will highlight and discuss the following issues: How do players experience football as a way of normalising crisis during occupation? How do players experience the sense of honou...

This paper studies the gender wage differential in the Palestinian labor market of the West Bank before, during, and in the aftermath of the second Intifada. We combine data on the Palestinian labo...

This article examines a double discourse by the Palestinian leadership, one in English and one in Arabic, which plays a central role in their negotiating strategy with Israel since the onset of the...

The West Bank wall is a contemporary manifestation of the protracted violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet, the Israeli state-promoted discourse has detached the wall’s construction from t...

This article considers the cultural meaning of religious and community boundaries when attempting to mediate the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Here we compare two sites, one religious, the other sec...

Cyber technology gradually is becoming an important dimension of globalisation involving state and non-state actors. The diffusion of cyber technology has occurred in tandem with political...

Andrew Ross's Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel is a significant contribution to an emerging literature on Palestinian labor. Through an examination of various facets of the stone indust...

This paper discusses a collaborative research project that aimed to explore approaches to creative practices and pedagogies by teacher education communities in the West Bank, Palestine, and North W...

When Menachem Begin, Israeli prime minister and founder of the Likud party, formulated Israel’s claim to the West Bank, he did not utilise the classic terra nullius settler argument. Instead, his i...

Masar Ibrahim al-Khalil is a trail 330kms long in the Palestinian West Bank. The object of this research is the social ‘nonmovement’, to borrow a term from Asef Bayat, of walkers from the U...

Background Testing by pharmacogenomics (PGx) aims to reduce the side-effects of medicines and to optimize therapy. Aim To ascertain the knowledge and attitudes towards PGx among pharmacy students in Jordan and West Bank of Palestine (WBP). Methods This cross-sectional study focused on pharmacy students from five universities in Jordan and WBP. Students were asked to answer an online survey comprising 30-closed ended questions measuring the knowledge and attitudes towards PGx. Results The total number of respondents to the questionnaire was 466. Most (96.1%) respondents knew that genetic variations can affect the drug response. Most students stated that the total number of lectures mentioning PGx was fewer than three. Most (>80%) respondents answered that they knew that human genetics can affect the response, inter-individual variation, and ethnic variations in the drug response. However, their knowledge about US Food and Drug Administration recommendations regarding PGx testing of commonly used drugs was weak. Also, 60.3% of respondents stated that the information they received about PGx was insufficient. Most (>92.7%) students wished to know more about PGx and believed that PGx is helpful in choosing the appropriate drug. Conclusion Pharmacy students had fair knowledge and good attitudes towards PGx. These factors could aid application of PGx in clinical practice in Jordan and WBP.

Gabriel Varghese’s Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank: Our Human Faces joins a growing number of works that focus on the role of culture in depicting and engaging with the conflict in Israel/Pale...

In The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank: The Theatrics of Woeful Statecraft, authors Michelle Pace and Somdeep Sen explore the motivations of various stakeholders in engaging with Palestinian...

Companions in Conflict: Animals in Occupied Palestine , by Penny Johnson. New York: Melville House, 2019. 256 pages. $26.99 cloth, $12.99 e-book. “I explore the histories and intertwined fates of some of the large mammals that live in this fractured land” (p. ix), author Penny Johnson tells us in the second paragraph of Companions in Conflict , and in eight chapters she takes the reader on her excursions through the West Bank in search of indigenous familiar (donkeys, goats, sheep, cows, boars) and endangered (hyenas, jackals, ibexes, wolves) mammals to understand what human engagement with them tells Palestinians and Israelis about themselves and their future in this common land. She describes the changes in the environment over the years and the people she encounters along her walks, digressing to recount stories told to her and to relay interesting facts gleaned from wide-ranging reading, the nagging question never far from her mind: what conditions are needed for humans and animals to flourish? The threats to both are varied, as each chapter makes painfully clear. Chapter 1 begins with the story of Kojak the …

This paper explores how processes of visuality produce geopolitical imaginaries of the West Bank in the everyday register. Drawing on the visual geopolitics literature, I turn to a grounded approac...

This article employs the monstrous body of Frankenstein to examine political factionalism in the Palestinian Occupied Territories; the West Bank and Gaza. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its Ira...

International audience; This article explores how Palestinian led, donor supported water projects have transformed societal interactions concerning water since 1994. It distinguishes spatial, institutional and sectoral trajectories of water and explores the impacts on each type of trajectory. It demonstrates that the overall impact of these projects is more than the sum total of the individual projects. All together, they entail territorial change. Wastewater and reuse projects transform the largest flows and have the greatest impact on water trajectories. Overall, the recharge of the upper unconfined aquifer is compromised, with the effect that grass-root farmer institutions managing it are negatively affected.

In late 2008, as negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians faltered, the US directed the Jenin Initiative on the ground in the West Bank. Designed to inspire confidence in Washington’s...

In this article, we draw attention to trends in land transformation in the West Bank since the Second Intifada, after which a surge of investment from Gulf countries entered Palestine, almost exclu...

University students are at higher risk of using psychoactive substances (PS). The aim of this study was to provide insight into the extent and the pattern of PS use among students in four m...

This paper considers the ramifications of the fact that a majority of (Jewish) Israeli citizens no longer considers the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territory of the West Bank to ...

In the West Bank, hundreds of non-Palestinian women who are married to Palestinian men have recently been issued shortened visas with tightened restrictions. This means they are often prevented from working, their mobilities are severely reduced and they are placed in extremely precarious bureaucratic and procedural positions. The research in this article draws from fieldwork interviews with women affected by such restrictions to show how politically induced precarities produce gendered effects towards specific ends of the occupation of Palestine. We thus frame a discussion of the women’s experiences of visa regulations through precarity before giving an account of the profound effects on women’s roles in family and political life. We then broaden the focus to consider Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the demographic implications of the gendered effects of visa precarity. In doing so we make the argument that Israel’s spousal visa regulations contribute to the (re)production of uneven gender relations and the demographic objective of emptying out the West Bank.

This exploratory study introduces a human security framework to examine the challenges that journalists face from daily professional and societal constraints and pressures when attempting to fulfill their role to inform the public in areas of conflict. The research focuses on the influences on Palestinian journalists in one of the most challenging regions in the world for independently reporting the news. Our framework includes seven dimensions of human security: personal, organizational, community/societal, economic, political, geographic, and infrastructural. Our study found that the Palestinian media are military targets, and journalists face direct and indirect censorship by the Israeli government as well as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Although we have adapted this framework for the Palestinian case in particular, the spheres of these influences on human security would likely pertain to other insecure situations for journalists. Applying this framework to journalism studies could open new avenues of academic discovery to analyze human security beyond violence, safety, and risk. Our main contribution, we suggest, is building out a human security framework for academic journalism studies in contested, conflict-prone, and post-conflict areas around the world.

Colonial regimes used urban planning regulations as a tool to control and dominate other people and natural resources. Since the beginning of the past century, Palestine represented a good example ...

Research has shown that rai-fed (Baʿlī) cultivation provides a resilient agroecological structure. Recent work in agroecology has refined our understanding of agroecosystem resilience, but both tem...

The tomb of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt, one of the major attractions of the World Heritage Site of Ancient Thebes and its Necropolis on the West Bank of modern day Luxor, is toda...