Waste and the Phantom State: The Emergence of the Environment in Post-Oslo Palestine

In 1995, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established as an interim Palestinian government on shreds of land within the West Bank and Gaza. One of the new authority’s lesser-known administrative mandates is protection of the environment from pollution. Though the PA was to have a semblance of “self-rule,” the Oslo Accords that established the PA also stipulated that the latter seek Israeli approval when building most large-scale infrastructures—including those designed to manage waste. Meanwhile, emergent ideas about the environment defined it as a limitless expanse. The environment projected out from PA enclaves on thirty percent of the land in all directions—including into the air above and into the subterrain below. The Accords projected environmental responsibility into Israel proper as well as into areas it “shares” with Palestinians in the occupied territories. As a consequence, Palestinian waste infrastructures are objects of concern not only to the Palestinian communities they are designed to serve but also to the Israeli state, to Israeli settlements, to regional neighbors and to foreign donors in far-flung offices who are concerned with “environmental security.” This dissertation investigates a series of multimillion dollar PA projects aimed at protecting what came to be called the “shared” environment through management of Palestinian wastes. In doing so it analyzes the tension between the insistence, on the one hand, that the PA govern “its” population within strictly defined borders as part of a hierarchical system of nested sovereignties in which Israel’s is the superior form, and the imperative, on the other hand, that this territorially-defined, officially interim government perform care for the territory’s longterm ecological future. It tends to be taken for granted that Oslo produced a period of separation by enclosing the West Bank and Gaza and cleaving them off from Israel proper. Millions of West Bank Palestinians are no longer permitted to work in, travel through or even visit Jerusalem or Israel. Israel has prohibited Israeli citizens’ entry into PA areas of the West Bank. This allows PA areas to appear relatively autonomous—insofar as they are viewed as separate from Israel. But in a number of significant ways, Israel continues to control and to direct the daily experiences and future possibilities of West Bank Palestinians. Separation and control are thus equally accurate characterizations of Palestinians’ experiences post-Oslo. This dissertation contends that their particular combination in the post-Oslo period has allowed people living in the West Bank to experience PA governance as what, borrowing a term I heard there, I call a phantom state (shibih dowlah). Palestinians see the limits of PA autonomy vis-a-vis Israel and the PA’s many donors. The PA is specter-like: an appearance without stable material follow-through. People nevertheless treat the PA as a matter-of-fact, tangible part of their lives: as an address for appeal, requests and complaints, as a distinct entity upon which responsibility, blame and, very occasionally, even praise is bestowed. Studies of garbage at the turn of the twenty-first century show that modern waste has the capacity to destabilize and to undermine political systems because of the risks it is perceived to pose and because of the difficulty of keeping it stable and contained. Unlike water, oil and electricity, waste is an infrastructural substrate whose flows should move out from inhabited areas rather than into them. As mobile, abject matter that perpetually threatens the environment, it requires constant monitoring. It is managed at regional scales. In the Palestinian context, waste therefore reveals some of the spatial-geographical complexities that render the treatment of separation and control as an either/or dynamic impossible to sustain. It also reveals the ways in which believing both separation and control to be true for the people experiencing them in combination means living, working and planning within a logic of constant contradiction. Waste is not the only infrastructural substrate that reveals the Mobius strip of separation and connectedness of the post-Oslo period. But waste and its infrastructures are uniquely useful for showing the impossibility and the partialness of a politics of separation more broadly in an emergent era of environmental securitization. This dissertation thus analyzes an incommensurable tension in what Achille Mbembe has called a “late-modern colonial occupation” that operates in the style of older forms of indirect colonial rule. That tension renders governance of people and territory both difficult and incoherent. It produces environmental hazards while seeking to eliminate them. And it performs major political displacements among colonized and colonizers alike

Ineffective management practices in Palestinian organizations & its impacts on Developmental aid

The effectiveness of foreign aid should be understood as a discrepancy and complicated relationship between the factors that have a direct influence on aid management effectiveness. Therefore, this study has investigated the efficacy of aid in relation to management systems in Palestinian organizations and investigated how the effectiveness of aid may be improved, as well as explored how the current management system manages available resources- specifically, those that come through aid. The thesis identified specific conditions that influence the ineffectiveness of aid management, by examining and exploring the handling of foreign aid within the current management system in Palestinian organizations. Therefore, this research focused on management policies, organizational structure, procedures, and processes that are followed within the management system. Furthermore, this study has also explored respondents’ beliefs regarding the effectiveness of foreign aid, and the quality of good governance factors in Palestinian organizations. To understand the management of foreign aid as a dynamic and complex process, cross-country data and static econometric models are not the most ideal method of exploration. Therefore, a qualitative methodology has been adopted to explore the experiences, perceptions, and beliefs of people involved in the management of foreign aid. The qualitative approach also enabled the examination of tools adopted by the management system, moreover, several case studies were selected based on projects funded by aid. This study contributes significantly to knowledge in the fields of management best practices and theories. This study deducted many phenomena that contribute to creating the corruption culture, in addition to reasons and tools being used to maintain and reproduce an ineffective management system. In practice, the study's results explored best practices in aid management and laid the groundwork for Palestinian organizations to implement policies, and procedures, that promote good governance and aid effectiveness through the adoption of good practice elements

Police, state and society : the Palestinian police and security forces and the maintenance of public order.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN035544 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Diaspora, state and university: An analysis of internationalisation of higher education in Israel

Internationalisation is increasingly portrayed as a key feature of higher education (HE) systems around the world. It has been portrayed as both a universal and a novel phenomenon linked with the rise of globalisation. The prevalence of internationalisation aligns with analyses which see the world, and education systems specifically, converging on a common set of ideas, values, models and standards. While it is recognised that internationalisation has multiple overlapping political, economic, academic, and sociocultural rationales, historically these are usually depicted as moving from the pursuit in the post-World War II period of peace and mutual understanding; to aid and development in the Cold War period, to the contemporary period dominated by competitive and economic considerations. Despite criticism regarding the ties between internationalisation, neoliberalism, and Western values, internationalisation is usually associated with optimistic and humanistic connotations and tends to be presented as an ideologically neutral, worthwhile and normalised intervention. I problematise these claims and foci of the literature and demonstrate that they do not accurately explain internationalisation in Israel; I also suggest that they do not apply in many other societies. My aim in this thesis is to expand the historical timelines, rationales, forms, strategies, categories and actors so as to enhance understanding of internationalisation. Through an in-depth investigation of Hebrew University (HU), Israel’s first University established before State formation, I trace the formation and development of HU, and in particular its international dimensions of research and teaching, from its origins in the pre-State period until 2018. Employing historical methods and a comparative education perspective, my analysis draws on an extensive corpus of historical documents and interviews, and identifies three distinct periods of internationalisation: 1900s – 1948: Formation and development of the Diaspora University; 1948 – 2000: State formation, stabilisation and the Diaspora; 1990s - 2018: State maturation and steering, the Diaspora and internationalisation. These periods reflect the shifting social, academic, economic, identity/status, security, and political considerations of the State, Diaspora and University. Thus, I argue that internationalisation in Israel can be understood at the nexus of the events, priorities and identities of the Diaspora, State and University. This thesis sheds light on the inner workings of internationalisation in Israel and develops a model which holds considerable explanatory power for understanding its shifting patterns over time. I introduce new rationales; histories; actors; forms; and strategies of internationalisation around the role of Diaspora, opening a new category and lens to understand it. I challenge widespread definitions of internationalisation; its converging nature and reactive role to globalisation. Thus, I provide significant new understanding of internationalisation in Israel and beyond

Information society in Palestine : the human capital dimension

Includes CD-ROM in back pocke

Post-Oslo reconstruction of Palestine 1993-2000 : from rhetoric to reality.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN042028 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The PFLP's changing role in the Middle East

The PFLP represents a violent Marxist trend among Palestinian political organizations. It is uncompromisingly hostile toward Israel, the industrialized West and the West's regional allies, and rejects any settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict which does not entail both Israel's elimination and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on all land it claims as Palestine. Until this occurs, the PFLP remains committed to armed conflict with its enemies. This study attempts to explain the PFLP's lagging position within the Palestinian national movement by comparing its policies with Fatah's. Unlike the PFLP, Fatah's overriding concern was to establish a Palestinian authority on any portion of 'liberated land' and consider the question of Israel's existence later. Fatah's selection of supporters was never conditioned upon ideological compatibility. It formed coalitions with all interested parties and accepted assistance from all willing providers. Most importantly, Fatah - as the PLO's dominant faction - transformed itself from an underground group to a quasi-government with diplomatic status and later, to leadership of the PNA in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Fatah's flexibility enabled it to survive regional and global changes. In the unipolar international order which followed the Soviet bloc's collapse in 1991, the PLO courted the United States and its allies, participated in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and was rewarded with authority over part of the Palestinian 'homeland'. The PFLP, spurning change, refused to act likewise. From its Damascus headquarters, it can currently do nothing without the Syrian government's approval and Syria, on the verge of a peace agreement with Israel, is unlikely to allow its protege to do more than issue statements. Only an imaginative and bold move by the PFLP, at this point, can restore the organization's prestige among its constituents and notoriety among its enemies

Dyskurs konfliktu jako gatunek polityczny

This dissertation approaches the discourse of conflict as a cluster of conventionalized goal-oriented discursive forms, which inherently links it theoretically with the linguistic scholarship on genres in communication and, in particular, with the most recent theoretical developments in this domain that advocate the need to seek perspectives capable of grasping novel and/or constantly evolving structures of political communication (cf. Cap and Okulska 2013). For these purposes, in this research I list and analyze specific and (more or less) stable structural, content-related and functional characteristics of the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s speeches discourse about – and in the context of – the Middle East conflict as typical for political genres and, thus, as features that enable to classify, analyze and interpret this discourse as a (potentially new) genre in political communication. Also, this entails that in my study I take these regularities as constitutive of a potentially new generic category in political communication, which is oriented at achieving specific goals in the context of this conflict. In consequence, this research project has strong foundations in Critical Discourse Studies, linguistic pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, and entails a critical perspective on the ‘micro’ considerations of the cognitive-pragmatic properties of the (Israeli political) discourse of conflict, and the ‘macro’ considerations of the larger social motivations and consequences (cf. Fairclough 1995; van Dijk 2001; Wodak and Chilton 2005; Wodak and Meyer 2009) behind producing and negotiating specific conflict-related meanings in various settings.Rozprawa doktorska napisana w ramach projektu "Międzywydziałowe Interdyscyplinarne Humanistyczne Studia Doktoranckie – Kształcenie kadr dla potrzeb rynku flexicurity i gospodarki opartej na wiedzy - Oferta kierunków nauk humanistyczno-społecznych UŁ". Projekt współfinansowany ze środków Unii Europejskiej w ramach Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego

Evaluation of the impact of international standards set by “the basle committee on banking supervision” on Jordanian law

Formulating international standards on banking supervision is one of the most important topics of international financial law. The recent international financial crisis is another striking example on the significance and relevance of this subject. This thesis attempts to evaluate the impact of international standards of banking supervision aimed at the creation of a "safe and sound" banking system on Jordanian legislation at two levels: to what extent international standards set out by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision ("BCBS") have influenced Jordanian law; and how these standards can assist in improving the Jordanian law as well as direct new policy reforms. The first finding of the thesis is that Jordanian law is significantly compliant with international standards. The second main finding is that soft law, as opposed to hard law, is the optimal form of setting international banking supervisory standards. The thesis also finds that the BCBS standards do not provide adequate guidance on the structure of the banking supervisory authority. The thesis concludes with recommendations on how to enhance international banking supervisory standards as well as the structure and substantive law of banking supervision in Jordan in light of international standards and with occasional reference to the UK Law