The Palestine Question: Themes of Justice and Power. Part I: The Palestinians of the Occupied Territories

Ever since 1948, Palestinian politics have been stymied by two conflicting drives: on the one hand the reality of an overwhelming imbalance of power, which mandates major concessions, and on the other a deep conviction of the unassailable justice of the cause, which refuses to accept the dictates of power. Oscillating between these two poles, Palestinians have been unable to develop a clear and consistent strategy. The first part of this essay, here, explores the ramifications of this dichotomy in the occupied territories, specifically with regard to the development of the Oslo process and the second intifada. A second part will explore how it plays out in the case of the Palestinians of Israel

Palestine, Apartheid, and the Rights Discourse

Since the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the oft-made analogy between the South African and Israeli cases has been extended to suggest the applicability to the Palestinian quest for justice through the rights discourse, arguably the most effective mobilizing tool in the anti-apartheid struggle. This essay explores the suitability of the rights approach by examining the South Africa-Israel analogy itself and the relevance of the anti-apartheid model to the three main components of the Palestinian situation: the refugees, the Palestinians of the occupied territories, and the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It concludes that while the rights discourse has many advantages, it cannot by its very nature -- the focus on law at the expense of historical context -- address the complexity of the Palestinian problem

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Promocionant i conservant la biodiversitat agràri

Subject, Subjugation, and Subjectivity

This paper analyzes the ways in which complicity and dissent feed and subvert one another, or the ways in which the subjugated self becomes a political subject. The formative event of Palestinian collective identity is the loss of home and homeland in the aftermath of the Nakba of 1948. “The Catastrophe” divided the Palestinian community to two: Those who remained within the borders of the Israeli state and became Israeli citizens, and the Palestinian refugees, who came to establish the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and led an armed struggle. While examining the two narratives, I also explore two communal modes of resistance: Palestinians who struggled with a psychology of defeat, and came to challenge the authority of the state; and PLO supporters who began as members of a militant liberation movement, and ended up signing the Oslo Accords and contributing to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA). In short, complicity brought with it resistance, and resistance ended in complicity. If resistance ends in complicity, and complicity could turn into resistance, then the Palestinian is the example for where this interplay—between subjectivity and subjugation—takes place

On the approximation of the δ\delta-shell interaction for the 3-D Dirac operator

We consider the three-dimensional Dirac operator coupled with a combination of electrostatic and Lorentz scalar $\delta$-shell interactions. We approximate this operator with general local interactions $V$. Without any hypotheses of smallness on the potential $V$, converges in the strong resolvent sense to the Dirac Hamiltonian coupled with a $\delta$-shell potential supported on $\S$, a bounded smooth surface. However, the coupling constant depends nonlinearly on the potential $V.

Chinese Presence in the Eastern Mediterranean: Evidence from Syria

Sino-Syrian relations extend back to 1956, making it one of China's earliest and most established diplomatic ties with an Arab country. After the Soviet Union turned down Syria's request for medium-range missile technology in 1980, Beijing declared its willingness to offer Syria the technology. Beijing regards Syria's intellectual, ideological, cultural and social plurality as a model for the region. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first official trip to China in 2004; economic cooperation between China and Syria was the primary emphasis of this visit. There were contracts for oil and energy tankers and manufacturing facilities in Syria. This article deals with the development of SinoSyrian relations and the main stages in the history of the bilateral relationship. An analytical-descriptive approach is used to explain the strategic relationship between the two countries. The article relies on relevant primary and secondary sources to gain a deeper knowledge and understanding of the topic. The study concludes that China aspires to expand and enhance its presence in the eastern Mediterranean due to its strategic geographical importance, the large economic market and the richness of natural resources that China needs. The article notes that Syria is a strategic area for China, which was evident during the Syrian crisis and China's use of its veto in the Security Council in favor of the Syrian regime. The article proposes that Sino-Syrian relations are expected to develop in the foreseeable future due to the strategic political understanding between the two regimes and Syria's active presence on the Belt and Road Initiative, which raises its geographical position in the eastern Mediterranean

Un modèle de sous-graphes aléatoires pour l'analyse de la dynamique d'un réseau historique

National audienceCes dernières années, de nombreux modèles de graphes aléatoires ont été proposé pour extraire des informations à partir de réseaux. Le principe consiste à chercher des groupes de sommets ayant des profils de connexions homogènes. La plupart de ces modèles sont adaptés pour les réseaux statiques, c'est-à-dire ne prenant pas en compte la dimension temporelle, mais pouvant gérer différents types d'arêtes, qu'elles soient binaires ou discrètes. Les modèles existant doivent donc être adaptés pour être capables de gérer l'aspect temporel. Nous nous intéressons ici au modèle de sous-graphes aléatoires proposé par [1]. Ce modèle permet de modéliser les sous-graphes connus d'un réseau à l'aide de structures latentes cachées. Nous proposons d'intégrer un processus à espace d'états à ce modèle afin d'autoriser les classes, ainsi que la topologie du réseau, à évaluer au cours du temps. L'inférence est réalisée par l'intermédiaire d'un algorithme Bayes variationnel. Un critère de sélection de modèles est également dérivé. Nous appliquons cette méthodologie à un réseau décrivant les relations entre évêques en Gaule Mérovingienne. Mots-clés. Réseau, sous-graphe, classification, algorithme VBEM. 1 Contexte de notre étude Ce travail a été motivé par la nécessité d'analyser un réseau historique évoluant dans le temps, pour lequel une partition des sommets est donnée et dont les arêtes sont de type catégorielle. L'analyse porte sur les relations interindividuelles tissées dans le cadre des conciles réunis en Gaule au VIe siècle. Le concile est une assemblée d'ecclésiastiques réunie sous l'autorité d'un évêque pour débattre des affaires ecclésiastiques. Pour le VIe siècle, 46 conciles furent réunis en Gaule, qui est alors, au gré des partages successoraux, divisée entre plusieurs royaumes : Neustrie, Austrasie et Bourgogne, la Bourgogne et l'Aquitaine changeant plusieurs fois de mains au cours du VIe siècle. La base de données regroupe 1331 personnages ayant occupé une ou plusieurs fonctions en Gaule entre 480 et 614 et les individus pour lesquels nous savons qu'ils ont eu des liens relationnels avec d'autres que ce soient des liens de parenté ou de connaissance. D'un point de vue historique, l'analyse et la comparaison de la structure organisationnelle de chacun des royaumes ou provinces pourrait fournir des éléments clés de compréhension de cette période

Atrophy of the Tongue as the Presenting Feature of Metastatic Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is the most frequently diagnosed solid organ cancer in men and is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men in the United Kingdom. Commonly, it metastasizes to bones and lymph nodes, however, in advanced hormonerefractory disease it may involve the skull base leading to associated cranial nerve palsies. Cranial nerve palsy as the presenting feature of advanced hormone-sensitive prostate cancer is extremely rare. To the best of our knowledge, we report the first case of solitary hypoglossal nerve palsy as the presenting feature of advanced prostate cancer. Neurologists, neurosurgeons and otolaryngologists may be the first clinicians to see such a patient; therefore, prostate cancer should be amongst the differential diagnoses considered in middle-aged and elderly men presenting with a cranial neuropathy and evidence of skull metastasis

On the self-adjointness of two-dimensional relativistic shell interactions

We study the self-adjointness of the two-dimensional Dirac operator coupled with electrostatic and Lorentz scalar shell interactions of constant strength $\varepsilon$ and $\mu$ supported on a closed Lipschitz curve. Namely, we present several new explicit ranges of $\varepsilon$ and $\mu$ for which there is a unique self-adjoint realization with domain included into $H^{\frac{1}{2}}$. A more precise analysis is carried out for curvilinear polygons, which allows one to take the corner openings into account. Compared to the preceding works on this topic, two new technical ingredients are employed: the explicit use of the Cauchy transform on non-smooth curves and the explicit characterization of the Fredholmness for singular integral operators.Comment: Comments are welcom