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The ongoing crisis in the Middle East can be understood as the intersection of three developments. The first is Iran's strategy of forward defense, a style of warfighting that effectively combines material, psychological, and physical elements and has been enabled by regional political developments. The second is Israel's ongoing political crisis—long in the making—which handicapped Israel's ability to maintain credibility in the face of the growing threats on all its borders. The third is the uncertainty of US strategy in the Middle East, which has been unable to find a formula for even its medium-term engagement with the region. This article uses these three trends to create a frame of reference for the current crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research examines joint collective action between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, from the perspective of the latter. We hypothesize that joint action poses a dilemma which lies in the tension between perceived instrumentality of joint action (i.e., ability to promote the disadvantaged's goals) and perceived normalization (i.e., its tendency to blur power relations). We test this idea across three studies in the United States and Israel/Palestine. In Study 1 (n = 361) we manipulated perceptions of joint action from the perspective of a hypothetical character, and in Study 2 (n = 378) we presented participants with an article highlighting the risk and benefit of joint activism. Results showed that perceived instrumentality increases, whereas perceived normalization decreases joint action tendencies. In Study 3 (n = 240), we described a joint action event that taps into some of the themes that induce concerns about normalization. We found that normalization perceptions feed into perceptions of instrumentality, and this occurred mainly among high identifiers, for whom the dilemma is most salient. The implications of these findings for understanding the complexity of joint collective action from the perspective of the disadvantaged are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, written by a Zionist Israeli historian, provides a critical perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the challenges faced by Zionism. The author argues that the tendency to compare the recent Hamas attack to the Holocaust is misguided and prevents a thorough self-examination of Israel's role in the conflict. The article highlights two paradoxes inherent in Zionist ideology and suggests that Israel's strategy of avoidance and complacency has led to the deterioration of Israeli democracy and the emergence of Palestinian terrorism. The author calls for a rethinking of Israel's future path towards normalcy, peace, and democracy. [Extracted from the article]

The diagnosis of autism is often delivered solely to the parents, a practice that forces them to confront the dilemma of whether, when and how they should disclose it to the child. The present study seeks to probe deeper into the phenomenon of diagnosis disclosure and lead to a clearer understanding of the dilemmas parents? face. This article presents an analysis of a focus group and an online survey conducted with parents. The analysis produced a model that maps parents' dilemmas regarding diagnosis disclosure to their child. The dilemmas, found to be complex and interconnected, concern the invisible nature of autism, the word autism and stigma, time motif, child's environment, the act of disclosure itself, and the child's personal narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic evolved through five phases, beginning with 'the great threat', then moving through 'the emergence of variants', 'vaccines euphoria', and 'the disillusionment', and culminating in 'a disease we can live with'. Each phase required a different governance response. With the progress of the pandemic, data were collected, evidence was created, and health technology was developed and disseminated. Policymaking shifted from protecting the population by limiting infections with non-pharmaceutical interventions to controlling the pandemic by prevention of severe disease with vaccines and drugs for those infected. Once the vaccine became available, the state started devolving the responsibility for the individual's health and behavior. Main body: Each phase of the pandemic posed new and unique dilemmas for policymakers, which resulted in unprecedented decision-making. Restrictions to individual's rights such as a lockdown or the 'Green Pass policy' were unimaginable before the pandemic. One of the most striking decisions that the Ministry of Health made was approving the third (booster) vaccine dose in Israel, before it was approved by the FDA or any other country. It was possible to make an informed, evidence-based decision due to the availability of reliable and timely data. Transparent communication with the public probably promoted adherence to the booster dose recommendation. The boosters made an important contribution to public health, even though their uptake was less than the uptake for the initial doses. The decision to approve the booster illustrates seven key lessons from the pandemic: health technology is key; leadership is crucial (both political and professional); a single body should coordinate the actions of all stakeholders involved in the response, and these should collaborate closely; policymakers need to engage the public and win their trust and compliance; data are essential to build a suitable response; and nations and international organizations should collaborate in preparing for and responding to pandemics, because viruses travel without borders. Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic posed many dilemmas for policymakers. The lessons learned from the actions taken to deal with them should be incorporated into preparedness for future challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The present paper demonstrates a combined method of statistics and algebra for computing the base rates of deceptive vs. truthful examinees that take polygraph tests in defined populations, based on the proportions of the deceptive and truthful test results. It also evaluates the degree to which a specific test outcome of the polygraph comparison question test (CQT) examination can be trusted to be correct. A concrete example was taken from the Israel Police. It shows that the confidence with which a deceptive outcome (DI) can be trusted to be correct is only about 0.65. In contrast, the posterior probability of a truthful outcome (NDI) to be correct is 0.98. The method is generalized to a wide range of hypothetical proportions of outcomes. The significance of the finding is discussed concerning the dilemma of using polygraph results as evidence in court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organ trafficking is widely recognised as a human rights concern. Medical professionals play a decisive role in bringing international norms regarding organ trafficking into the local context as translators and localisers. In Israel, this localisation reflects the tensions and gaps between global and local values, moralities and beliefs. Based on in-depth interviews with 92 stakeholders, this article examines the Israeli medical professionals' approach toward organ trafficking, the moral conflicts, challenges and dilemmas they faced given these tensions and gaps, and their attempts to address them in practice. The findings reveal that many Israeli healthcare professionals subscribed to an ambivalent stance on organ trafficking and a non-judgmental approach towards patients who engage in organ trafficking, preferring to turn a blind eye to this phenomenon. They internalised key aspects of the deeply rooted local ethical perceptions regarding organ trafficking. This internalisation points to the limitations of translators' freedom of operation between transnational and domestic languages. Localisation is not merely a result of pragmatic compromises but stems from the localisers' identification with local moralities. This study contributes to understanding the role of professionals in processes of societal change and the complex ramifications of this role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Camping is a recreational activity that links people with their physical surroundings and the environment. Hence, efforts in promoting camping activities may help promote sustainable and accessible recreation and tourism. This research focuses on preferences and barriers for camping in Israel as perceived by frequent, occasional, and noncampers. The findings of an online study with 665 respondents show that focusing only on current campers may create self-selection bias and overlook the barriers that prevent people from camping. While noncampers shared some barriers with campers, they also experienced more barriers regarding information gaps (location of campsites) and camping equipment. All participants had a similar preference for solitude and lack of crowding. These findings create a dilemma for camping managers and marketing campaigns: to reduce the barriers that prevent low frequency campers and noncampers from camping or to keep the situation as is and minimize overcrowding in campsites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Hospital professionals are "dual agents" who may face dilemmas between their commitment to patients' clinical needs and hospitals' financial sustainability. This study examines whether and how hospital professionals balance or reconcile clinical and economic considerations in their decision-making in two countries with activity-based payment systems. Methods: We conducted 46 semi-structured interviews with hospital managers, chief physicians and practicing physicians in five German and five Israeli hospitals in 2018/2019. We used thematic analysis to identify common topics and patterns of meaning. Results: Hospital professionals report many situations in which activity-based payment incentivizes proper treatment, and clinical and economic considerations are aligned. This is the case when efficiency can be improved, eg, by curbing unnecessary expenditures or specializing in certain procedures. When considerations are misaligned, hospital professionals have developed a range of strategies that may contribute to balancing competing considerations. These include 'reshaping management,' such as better planning of the entire course of treatment and improvement of the coding; and 'reframing decision-making,' which involves working with averages and developing tool-kits for decision-making. Conclusion: Misalignment of economic and clinical considerations does not necessarily have negative implications, if professionals manage to balance and reconcile them. Context is important in determining if considerations can be reconciled or not. Reconciling strategies are fragile and can be easily disrupted depending on context. Creating tool-kits for better decision-making, planning the treatment course in advance, working with averages, and having interdisciplinary teams to think together about ways to improve efficiency can help mitigate dilemmas of hospital professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine how the Israeli legal system grapples with cases involving the spiritual world. Many Israelis do not separate the natural from the supernatural in their understanding of causation or in their attribution of responsibility and culpability, and as a result, they expect the legal system to regulate social life in the spiritual world as well as the natural one. This article examines the ways in which the Israeli legal system confronts three cases culled from the lives of religious Israeli Jews: claims of domestic abuse; ceremonial curses conducted in public; and political parties' appeals to voters with promises of religious salvation and/or threats of damnation. This article raises significant questions regarding legal equality for those citizens whose understandings of justice extend into the spiritual world, when the law fails to follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Paul's use of Scripture in Romans 9:26-29 in dealing with exclusionary and inclusionary tendencies in view of the Jews-Gentiles dilemma. In his use of Scripture, Paul uses the concept of 'seed' as a link through which he draws various texts in developing his argument as to who is included or excluded within Israel. While it is crucial to observe how Paul utilises Scripture and exegetical traditions in developing his argument, it is argued that the Jews-Gentiles dilemma cannot be solved simply by paying attention to the biblical texts as the voices of the Gentile others also need to be considered. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article is an intersection of Second Temple interpretation and contextual reading of texts, thereby pointing to the importance of readers' social location in reading of the biblical texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the political narratives produced in English-language Israeli cookbooks. We examine an understudied, yet central component of everyday international relations, everyday nationalism, and identity contestations as practiced through gastronomy, and highlight the dilemma between the different political uses of popular culture in the context of conflict resolution and resistance. Our argument identifies different narratives represented in what we term Culinary Zionism. One narrative is explicitly political, discusses Israeli cuisine as a foodway, and contributes to creating a space of, and a path for, coexistence and recognition of the Other. A second narrative is found in tourist-orientated cookbooks that offer a supposedly apolitical story of culinary tours in Israel. We problematize the political and normative implications of these narratives by exploring the potential role of these books to open space for dialogue and to increase the familiarity and interest of foreign audiences of Israel and the conflict. We contrast this possibility with their potential to what we term foodwashing, namely the process of using food to symbolically wash over violence and injustices (the violence of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in this case). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What should a powerful patron do when a weaker protégé plans to launch a counter-proliferation strike against the nuclear facilities of a target country? This paper identifies three possible strategies available to the patron when handling a 'trigger happy' protégé. These strategies range from lending 'tacit support' to the protégé' on the one end, to 'intervention by exposure', on the other end, where the raid is effectively sabotaged. Occupying the middle ground is a strategy termed 'status quo adherence', in which the patron attempts to warn the protégé against launching the raid, while simultaneously bidding to mitigate the protégé's concerns by other diplomatic measures. By accessing previously untapped documents from several archives, the study uses the Carter administration's approach to Israel's growing agitation with the Iraqi nuclear programme to explore the strategy of 'status quo adherence' and its lessons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the unprecedented decision taken by the Israeli state in 2005 to legalize the status of non-Jewish undocumented migrants' children. In explaining how the plight of culturally assimilated non-Jewish children succeeded in penetrating the hermetic ethno-religious definition of citizenship in Israel, the article focuses on the subtle yet critical influence of kinship on modern state-making and the affective fashioning of national belonging. By insisting on treating culturally assimilated non-Jewish children as Others, Israel increasingly ran the risk of unveiling the feeble construction of the Jewish nation in terms of kinship as 'one big family'. The Israeli media increasingly began to question the refusal of the state to recognize children who were evidently 'Israelis in every way'. Such a development, as some Israeli politicians undoubtedly realized, could have potentially been more detrimental to the mythological foundations of the Jewish state than the 'adoption' of a few hundred non-Jewish children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the practice of Jewish rabbinic law within the combat ranks of the Israel Defense Forces can be used as an ethnographic medium through which anthropologists may better contextualize the social and political tensions that characterize Jewish religious nationalism in Israel. We argue that national religious combat soldiers rarely turn to rabbinic legal tracts, or to the overlapping levels of military and civilian rabbinic leadership in their immediate efforts to resolve the everyday ritual dilemmas of their service. Rather, these dilemmas are primarily addressed and (always imperfectly) resolved on the small-scale intra-unit level. Through this ethnographic window into the religious and ritual aspects of military life, this article ultimately argues that the experience of political piety in Israel (and perhaps the wider Middle East) hinges not so much upon the power play between opposing religious and secular institutions but rather in the daily ambivalences and ambiguities experienced by individual adherents as they go about their daily lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In professional therapeutic settings, care-providers are required to work through dilemmas in light of a professional ethics that demands the suppression of other aspects that may inform their moral experiences. Drawing upon in-depth conversations with Jewish-Israeli female social workers who talked about dilemmas at work, we analyse how they carry out such deliberations. When recounting their dilemmas, social workers relied on shared professional principles for justifying their decisions, but upon closer examination, differences were apparent in their decisions. Whereas religious (observant) social workers tended to follow professional regulations, seculars (non-observant) favoured clients' interests and took some liberty in bending rules. Accordingly, we argue that while care-providers follow shared professional ethics, they still implicitly adhere to the local moral worlds that inform their moral experiences. We analyse this discrepancy in relation to the interface between a modernist professional ethos and acknowledged and unacknowledged motives that pragmatically participate in professionals' deliberations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israeli religious settlers live in contested territory that they claim is promised to them by God. The settlers are at the center of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute and are the recipients of international condemnation for their illegal behavior. Because the territories are neither sovereign nor legally recognized by Israel, their definition is open to construction. Religious settlers make arguments to satisfy three discursive dilemmas that must be solved in order to normalize their lives. They must 1) construct their own authenticity, 2) marginalize the native others, and 3) establish cultural authority. These dilemmas are explicated in this essay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At their final training session, soldiers at the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) close-combat instructors’ course are faced with an extreme situation. Clad in full protection gear, they must face consecutive opponent and fight until they can fight no more. The training setting presents to the soldiers a dilemma epitomized in the instructor’s question ‘‘Do you want to quit?’’ The author argues that the question, as well as, the situation as a whole presents the trainees with a paradox that seems at first to be a moral dilemma. However, since the training setting simulates real battle, the question which also has an existential facet, is in fact a pseudo moral dilemma, reversing the order of self-interest and self-regard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a study which aims to examine the contribution of the simple decision process (SDP) to the invariability in intuitive educational decisions in Israel. The study allows 40 teachers to solve complex educational dilemma three times using their intuition with the same data presented in different order, another 246 teachers underwent the same activity but with the use of SDP. The study found out that the principle of invariance, a prerequisite in analyzing rational choices, is maintained.

The physical and social image of the scientist among school children, student teachers, and teachers over the last 50 years was investigated. Interest has also been shown in the perception of the personality behind the physical stereotype. Nevertheless, the value judgments of science and scientists and the positive and negative mind–sets attaching to these judgments in our society were less investigated, either in Israel or abroad. In this investigation models given to science and scientists in the classical literature and by some popular science writers were investigated, together with contemporary learners’ views. The populations consist of 125 high school students from Israel. Several tools were used during this investigation to decipher the images of science: Closed questionnaire, writing an essay, and semistructured collective interviews. Classical authors have pessimistic views about science and the scientists. Most models are unfavorable, and criticize the scientists: The mad and monstrous scientist ( Frankenstein), the scientist who is alienated from human life ( The Physicists), the scientist who is cut off from reality, the “geek” ( Gulliver’s Travels), the scientist whose irresponsible research is harmful to the environment ( Jurassic Park), the scientist who hungers for knowledge at any cost ( Faust). The positive images found especially in the popular science literature: the scientist who cures diseases ( Microbe Hunters), the scientist who has professional integrity ( Galaxies), the scientist who keeps to the rules of the scientific method to obtain objective results ( Wrinkles in Time). We found that some expressions relating to fear of science which have appeared in the classics since the beginning of the 18th century were found in a similar way with students of the 21st century, while others expressed that same fear in different ways. There was also an identification with Swift’s “unsociable and unemotional” scientists. Alongside the existence of expressions of fear of science, and mainly ambivalent opinions of students toward science, the dominant picture that stands out in this study is that our contemporary students are pro science, and regard science as a useful area of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on educational work, particularly among youth, that is taking place in Israel. The youth in Israel is a kind of "wasted" commodity, trained to produce the destructive results that the previous generation created. Despite being educated to be unquestionably patriotic, there are a steadily growing number of young people who are questioning the truths manufactured for them by army generals and the corporate elite. The article concern educational challenges that are directly bound up in the actual, visceral experience of war. It also suggests that the stakes for understanding the warfare that engages this community of learners and teachers are extremely high, involving nothing less than national and even personal survival. The article includes an anecdote that also brings up and ultimately leaves unresolved this dilemma of educating for peace. It is a dilemma that supports curricular emphasis on transforming the ways one frames its understanding of war and its resolution. It recognizes also the significant role families and communities have in creating a climate for an education that can lead to political change. The fact that the author is able to consider education for peace at all reflects the luxury that Israelis enjoy because of their power and relative sense of security.

The article reports how Israeli social workers perceive and deal with confidentiality in their day-to-day lives. Confidentiality continues to be a concern of the social work profession. Social workers surveyed reported that confidentiality was the most frequently encountered ethical dilemma for them. Many of the Israeli social workers' dilemmas with informed confidentiality and informed consent are created by government mandates imposed by the army, the police, the ministry of social welfare and the social security system. Israeli social workers are instructed to honor the privacy of their clients, but in the actual social work setting there is an internal tension between social workers' obligations to individuals and their obligations to the larger social systems in which they work. Social workers who work with children are sometimes confronted with the needs to disclose information to parents. The process of informing could be problematic as social workers may not want to overburden clients with too much information and yet they want to provide sufficient information.

Focuses on the essay involving the social condition of Israel in the first century. Historical perspectives on the master-schema as security-relevant employed in the country; Scrutiny on the loss management and distress of the society; Overview of the interrelations between the societal dilemma and war-caused bereavement.