Variations in Height, Weight and Body Mass Index According to Generation, Place of Residence and Region in Palestinian Territories

Introduction: The relationship between second intifada and risk factors of chronic diseases was not studied before in PalestineAims: The aims of this study is to describe differences in height , weight and BMI between different generations of Palestinians who were born at different times in the armed conflict. Also we wanted to know whether weight and height in West Bank follow any social pattern.Methods: This study was retrospective analysis of pooled data from many previous studies where participants reported their weight, height, place of residence, region in west bank and income.Results: Almost 61% of our study were females. Among female 12.8% were born before first intifada, 6.4% around first Intifada and 80.8% were born around second intifada. For males; 12.2% before first intifada, 5.7% around first intifada and 82.9% around second intifada. The generation born around second intifada had 12 cm higher height relative to generation before first intifada, 5 cm more height relative to first intifada generation (p=0.001), whereas females born before intifada had 20 Kg more weight than the generation of second intifada (p< 0.0001). In multiple regression model done for the second intifada generation weight and height were related to place of residence and income and age significantly.Conclusion: Political conflict have detrimental consequence on Palestinians wellbeing

Rethinking Moving beyond Deterrence: A Partial Replication Study

We assess Dugan and Chenoweth’s Rational Choice-based argument regarding moderating effects of indiscriminate conciliatory state actions on levels of terrorist attacks in Israel-Palestine, utilizing data drawn primarily from declassified security records on Israeli state actions during the First Intifada (1987–1992). This type of data source, we argue, contains a more accurate ratio of conciliatory to repressive actions than Dugan and Chenoweth’s media-based data, given state authorities’ attempts at concealing repressive actions while publicizing conciliatory actions during times of intense conflict. We discuss differences in results—including, most centrally, no support for the hypothesized effect of conciliatory state actions—highlighting the theoretical payoffs of examining the Political Process–related factor of varying levels of state control over the political environment.

Enduring Palestine

This chapter considers the ways in which Adania Shibli’s Touch, an imagistic novella, offers a haptic understanding of the Palestinian experience of violence. Whereas much of the recent literature emerging about Palestine/Israel takes a contextually direct approach, setting their stories amid concurrent events, Touch broaches Palestinian subjectivity in a more unorthodox fashion, breaking new ground in the Palestinian literary canon. Rather than foregrounding the bloody violence endemic to the First Intifada milieu, Shibli’s novella gives an intimate portrayal of childhood and adolescence as discreetly violent. This focus on the private allows the reader to discover how the violence of living under occupation is present in seemingly innocuous, yet irreparably damaging ways.

Emotionalising the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: on the civil society engagements of Israeli mental health professionals in response to the Palestinian uprisings

This article explores how Israeli mental health practitioners emotionalised the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by intervening in the public sphere. Based on a close reading of texts produced by two Israeli civil society associations of psy-professionals – Imut and Natal – we analyse and compare two languages of emotion that they developed in response to two Palestinian uprisings, the First Intifada of 1987–93 and the Al Aqsa Intifada of 2000–05. This allows us to point to differences and similarities in the ways these two associations articulated, conceptualised and represented emotions that they attributed to the Israeli-Jewish collective. Imut voiced a critical and openly political response to the outbreak of the First Intifada, while Natal adopted an ostensibly apolitical position that affirmed mainstream Israeli politics in response to the Al Aqsa Intifada. Though they differed in their politics, both Imut and Natal emotionalised the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a dual fashion. They depicted emotions as forces (a) whose dynamics have to be understood in order to grapple with the conflict, and (b) whose detrimental effects have to be controlled through proper management. Thus, both associations portrayed emotions as an instrument for understanding the political situation and as a powerful tool to achieve social and political aims. Though both Imut and Natal emotionalised the conflict in their civil society interventions, neither of them depoliticised it. Rather, they transposed the psychological from the individual to the social level, thus embedding it in a dialectic in which the politicisation of the psychological leads to a non-reductionist emotionalisation of the political.

Cultural resistance in occupied Palestine and the use of creative international solidarity through song1

Protest song has been an important component of grassroots political struggles, and the Palestinian resistance to Zionist settler-colonization is no exception. This article draws on original research with activists in the Palestinian popular resistance on the impact of song during the first intifada (1987 to 1993) and more recently in the opposition to the segregation wall and accelerated colonization of the West Bank. The significance of international solidarity to the Palestinian struggle is noted, and the role of protest song in international solidarity is explored. The activities of Edinburgh-based community choir San Ghanny in using song as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian popular anti-colonial struggle is analysed. Protest song is a globally recognizable form, which can help to build connections with social movements in different parts of the world and in different periods of history, which is both rooted in individual places and struggles, and also transcends these at the level of global solidarity.

Violence and the New Internationalism, 1988–2003

This chapter looks at the first intifada—a grassroots resistance movement that emerged in the West Bank and Gaza in late 1987 and showed considerable promise before being crushed by Israeli military might. Its collapse also coincided with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, marking the beginning of a new American tactic of supposed humanitarian concern for ethnically or communally defined victims of a regime as a pretext for military action intended to ensure resource access, especially to oil. These arguments for and practices of occupation not only invigorated and intensified internal ethnic and communal tensions within the Iraqi state, but also fueled new forms of Islamist opposition that had never before flourished in the Mashriq.

Palestinian leadership and the contemporary significance of the First Intifada

On the eve of the highly controversial 2020 plan for Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, the author examines the nature of the Palestinian condition and the many challenges Palestinians confront, including the absence of an effective leadership. In registering this, the article proposes a reassessment of the First Intifada that places it in a contemporary perspective and seeks to ‘excavate’ modes of resistance. It engages with the problematic of leadership and highlights how existing challenges might be addressed. Taking into account the Oslo Accords and subsequent attempts towards neoliberal state-building, it draws on theories of settler colonialism and stresses the neo-colonial continuum in Palestine. Finally, the author interviews key activists from the First Intifada to (respectively) provide insight into the nature of the contemporary situation and suggest an alternative model of leadership and struggle.

The Palestinian Resistance: Nonviolent Praxis in a Gramscian Paradigm

This article analyses the praxis of nonviolent resistance in Palestine through the lens of Gramsci. First, it begins with a historical inquiry into the major phenomena of the Palestinian resistance tradition. Its nonviolent expressions are highlighted in order to prove their continuity as well as their effectiveness, focusing on three uprisings of the national movement where this form of resistance was deployed: the Arab revolt, the First Intifada, and the Al Aqsa Intifada. Then, it presents the framework of the theoretical tradition of nonviolent struggle in order to interpret Palestinian popular resistance actions and strategies. Finally, these forms of resistance are embedded, and subsumed, in a Gramscian alternative hegemonic paradigm, so as to enhance the discussion around an organic nonviolent strategy of political resistance.

A Village Rises in the First Intifada

Determined to have the name of Deir Dibwan broadcast on the pirated Intifada radio station in 1988, four high school students and one university student decided to organize the first protest in the village to mark International Women’s Day. Manal A. Jamal describes how the event that was supposed to be a modest women’s march turned into a protest of over five hundred people. Since the start of the Arab Spring, much of the discussion on the circumstances of Arab women has been ahistorical. It is vital to draw on past experiences of women during different periods of upheaval to ensure that these issues are presented with the multilayered complexities they embody. Unlike much of the discussion on the plight of Arab women today, the scholarship on Palestinian women during the first Intifada is significant in the extent to which it captures women’s nuanced experiences—as agents of change confronting the multiple complexities of gender relations in their society.