Venturing into a Vanishing Space: Representations of Palestine in Jewish-American and Arab Novels

This study explores the literary representation of Palestine by Jewish American and Arab novelists within the emergent geopolitics of settler colonialism, thus challenging the notion that Palestine presents a unique situation that largely defies comparative approaches. It illustrates how postcolonial theory proves necessary but insufficient to engage the cultural and political specificities of the Palestinian situation, both as fictional representation and as otherwise knowable history. Here, recent developments in theorising settler colonialism provide a useful starting point. Drawing on the work of Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, with its revisionary challenge to postcolonial theory in relation to the need to distinguish between settler colonialism and metropole colonialism, this thesis argues that the case of Palestine problematizes the settler colonial paradigm. Overlaps and entanglements between the supposedly distinct forms of colonialism on the ground complicate the discreteness of the settler model. Hence, the focus on Jewish-American novel serves to suggest that the Zionist settler enterprise is inseparable from American imperialism, and therefore challenges conceptualizations of a purely settler phenomenon in Palestine. The study draws together New Historicism and postcolonialism, suggesting that engagement with the intersection of these two approaches is both valid and timely. The New Historicist return to history proves central to appraisal of the forms of power that continue to condition the authority accorded to a particular version of events, and to the evaluation of the writer’s responsibility to reality as well as the measure of truth embedded even in most fictionalized versions of history. Accordingly, the structure of the thesis identifies key historical moments in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, juxtaposing Jewish-American renditions of the Zionist settler project with Arab counter-narratives. The emphasis in the thesis on historicising rhetorical appropriations and restoring a Palestinian version of events challenges the perception transfer of settler narratives, which, to the privilege of settlers’ self-origination, has long relegated Palestinian people, land, and narratives to the peripheries of history and postcolonial debates. The first three chapters focus on three signal events: the 1948 nakba, the 1967 war, and the 1980s uprising. The first chapter compares and contrasts two versions of the 1948 events as represented in Leon Uris’s The Haj (1984) and Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (1998; trans. 2005). Drawing on the revisionary work of the Israeli new historians, together with Palestinian commentators, the chapter explores the 1948 Palestinian exodus in terms of settlers’ violence and logic of elimination, which Uris’s narrative conceals behind a Western civilizational discourse. Against Uris’s legitimation of the master Zionist narrative, Khoury’s novel suggests an instance of ‘writing back,’ narrating the unspoken and replacing the monologism of the official line with the multiplicity of oral history. The second chapter extends this cross-cultural research to the 1967 war, suggesting the centrality of this event to paradigmatic shifts in Palestinian historical experience and self-representation as well as in the Jewish American writer’s relation to the state of Israel. Literary representations of 1967 Palestine, including Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (2000), Halim Barakat’s Six Days (1961; trans. 1990) and Days of Dust (1969; trans. 1986), Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns (1976; trans. 2003), and Saul Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970) and To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), articulate liminality, ambivalence, and the enabling of new possibilities and fresh perspectives. Each of these writers reveals a shared concern for the politics of the local in order to escape the burdens of diasporic existence, attempting to redefine what seems to be a borderless and geographically vague existence. While post-1967 narratives affirm the rise of a new focus for Palestinian writers, the third chapter shows how the greater visibility of Palestinians in the aftermath of the 1980s uprising finds literary form in US fiction. Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) illustrates the cultural limits that restrict a dialogic engagement with the emerging heteroglossia in US media following the appearance of a Palestinian voice and an anti-Zionist stance. However, this failed dialogism reveals how silence and dissimulation become forms of expression, unveiling the dynamics that manipulate the space permitted for Palestinians in Jewish American fiction. Recovering Palestinian literature from the margins of postcolonial studies, the final chapter charts ways of representing Palestinian (post)coloniality by drawing on the temporal and spatial specifications conceptualised in Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope. Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2008) and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2011) reinvent the traditions of walking and returning, previously manipulated in Zionist settler narratives, in order to articulate a political protest against settler colonialism and assert the legitimacy of the Palestinians’ claim to the land. Although focusing on the Palestinian case, this study seeks to open up the postcolonial to the historical and rhetorical specificities of the literature emerging from contemporary settler colonial situations, and the possible enactment of postcolonial passages in not-yet-postcolonial contexts

Developing an Embedded Model for Test suite prioritization process to optimize consistency rules for inconsistencies detection and model changes

Software form typically contains a lot of contradiction and uniformity checkers help engineers find them. Even if engineers are willing to tolerate inconsistencies, they are better off knowing about their existence to avoid follow-on errors and unnecessary rework. However, current approaches do not detect or track inconsistencies fast enough. This paper presents an automated approach for detecting and tracking inconsistencies in real time (while the model changes). Engineers only need to define consistency rules-in any language-and our approach automatically identifies how model changes affect these consistency rules. It does this by observing the behavior of consistency rules to understand how they affect the model. The approach is quick, correct, scalable, fully automated, and easy to use as it does not require any special skills from the engineers using it. We use this model to define generic prioritization criteria that are applicable to GUI, Web applications and Embedded Model. We evolve the model and use it to develop a unified theory. Within the context of this model, we develop and empirically evaluate several prioritization criteria and apply them to four stand-alone GUI and three Web-based applications, their existing test suites and mainly embedded systems. In this model we only run our data collection and test suite prioritization process on seven programs and their existing test suites. An experiment that would be more readily generalized would include multiple programs of different sizes and from different domains. We may conduct additional empirical studies with larger EDS to address this threat each test case has a uniform cost of running (processor time) monitoring (human time); these assumptions may not hold in practice. Second, we assume that each fault contributes uniformly to the overall cost, which again may not hold in practice

Multi-tenancy in cloud computing

As Cloud Computing becomes the trend of information technology computational model, the Cloud security is becoming a major issue in adopting the Cloud where security is considered one of the most critical concerns for the large customers of Cloud (i.e. governments and enterprises). Such valid concern is mainly driven by the Multi-Tenancy situation which refers to resource sharing in Cloud Computing and its associated risks where confidentiality and/or integrity could be violated. As a result, security concerns may harness the advancement of Cloud Computing in the market. So, in order to propose effective security solutions and strategies a good knowledge of the current Cloud implementations and practices, especially the public Clouds, must be understood by professionals. Such understanding is needed in order to recognize attack vectors and attack surfaces. In this paper we will propose an attack model based on a threat model designed to take advantage of Multi-Tenancy situation only. Before that, a clear understanding of Multi-Tenancy, its origin and its benefits will be demonstrated. Also, a novel way on how to approach Multi-Tenancy will be illustrated. Finally, we will try to sense any suspicious behavior that may indicate to a possible attack where we will try to recognize the proposed attack model empirically from Google trace logs. Google trace logs are a 29-day worth of data released by Google. The data set was utilized in reliability and power consumption studies, but not been utilized in any security study to the extent of our knowledge

NEW INSIGHT INTO THE MIDDLE EOCENE CALCAREOUS NANNOPLANKTON BIOSTRATIGRAPHY AND PALEOENVIRONMENT FROM FAYOUM AND BENI SUEF AREAS, EGYPT

The present study deals with calcareous nannoplankton paleoenvironmental and biostratigraphic implications as well as the genesis and the stratigraphic significance of an event bed recognized from the middle Eocene Beni Suef Formation in the sections of Gebel Na’alun (Fayoum area) and Gebel Homret Shaibun (Beni Suef area), Egypt. Calcareous nannoplankton biostratigraphy indicates that the Beni Suef Formation in the two areas is synchronous, covering an interval that may be correlated with the calcareous nannoplankton Zone NP17. Paleoenvironmental implications from calcareous nannoplankton suggests deposition of sediments in the Beni Suef Formation under relatively stable, temperate and mesotrophic conditions, with a short interval of eutrophication in the basal part of the Homret Shaibun section

The impact of childhood food allergy on quality of life of the paediatric population in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

BackgroundFood allergy is an allergic reaction to any type of food that differs in its severity and impact on the patient's life as well as on caregivers. AimsTo measure the quality of life in the paediatric population with food allergy at National Gourd Health Affairs Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.Methods The food allergy quality of life-parent form was used in this study. The sample size is 75 participants. An Arabic translated and validated version of both questionnaires, with minor modifications were used. Demographic profile, allergy profile, and symptoms profiles were described as frequencies. Cronbach’s alpha was calculated for each food allergy quality of life domain. Food allergy quality of life domains were described using the average scores of the summed corresponding variables. A two-way MANOVA was carried out.Results The total score for patients aged 0–3, 4–6, and 7–12 are 2.01, 2.56, 2.33, respectively. There was no significant interaction between the independent variables (p=0.123). Age group and gender had no effect on the combined score measuring the quality of life (p=0.061, and 0.465, respectively). The total score for parental concern about food safety is 3.56±1.15 (SD) and the total score for child's concern about food safety is 2.81±1.45 (SD). Total score for these domains general health perceptions, parental emotional impact, general mental health, and family and child's activities are 1.6±0.79, 2.84±1.36, 3.09±1.28, 2.39±1.27, respectively.ConclusionThere were no significant differences between age groups or gender in the overall score. Only minimal differences were observed in (emotional, social and dietary limitation). We highly recommend further studies in the same field to be able to generalize the results in the Saudi paediatric population

A record of spontaneous subduction initiation in the Izu–Bonin–Mariana arc

The initiation of tectonic plate subduction into the mantle is poorly understood. If subduction is induced by the push of a distant mid-ocean ridge or subducted slab pull, we expect compression and uplift of the overriding plate. In contrast, spontaneous subduction initiation, driven by subsidence of dense lithosphere along faults adjacent to buoyant lithosphere, would result in extension and magmatism. The rock record of subduction initiation is typically obscured by younger deposits, so evaluating these possibilities has proved elusive. Here we analyse the geochemical characteristics of igneous basement rocks and overlying sediments, sampled from the Amami Sankaku Basin in the northwest Philippine Sea. The uppermost basement rocks are areally widespread and supplied via dykes. They are similar in composition and age—as constrained by the biostratigraphy of the overlying sediments—to the 52–48-million-year-old basalts in the adjacent Izu–Bonin–Mariana fore-arc. The geochemical characteristics of the basement lavas indicate that a component of subducted lithosphere was involved in their genesis, and the lavas were derived from mantle source rocks that were more melt-depleted than those tapped at mid-ocean ridges. We propose that the basement lavas formed during the inception of Izu–Bonin–Mariana subduction in a mode consistent with the spontaneous initiation of subduction

Improving Multi-Tenancy Security by Controlling Resource Allocation in IaaS Public Clouds

In a world where the requirements of computing systems are rapidly changing, the need for a dynamic, yet a cost-effective system becomes urgent. Besides, the need of dynamically scale-up and scale-down, mobility, and reduce both individuals and enterprises share costs and expenses. Thus, such needs and more are fulfilled by Cloud Computing. Mostly, Cloud Computing is promoted as a new paradigm which offers a set of benefits for both providers and consumers. For service providers, it gives an ease of management, reduced maintenance and operational costs, better utilisation of resources, and extra profit. For customers, it offers on demand resources, mobility and effective scale-up, and scale-down. Despite the benefits provided by Cloud Computing, some challenges are seen. For instance, security is a major challenge. Indeed, security is an obstacle to promoting public Clouds for large consumers (i.e. governments and enterprises). Therefore, more research on safety issues in Cloud Computing is required. For instance, the issues of access control could be found in traditional systems; however, Multi-Tenancy could be considered a unique issue related to Cloud Computing. Nonetheless, the research shows for the first time the size of Multi-Tenancy as a security concern. Specifically, Multi-Tenancy could increase the probability of being under attack by 100%. Moreover, to enhance the safety of Multi-Tenancy, availability could compromise as well the Cloud provider’s ‎profit.‎ Although Multi-Tenancy is a complex issue due to its benefits to Cloud Computing, we develop a scheme to enhance the security of Multi-Tenancy while preserving its benefits

The affect of familiarity on the usability of recognition-based graphical password

Recognition-based graphical password have been proposed as an alternative to overcome the drawbacks of the alphanumeric password in user authentication. A web-based study was performed to determine the cultural impact on the usability of recognition-based graphical password. A number of participants (Saudi and British) selected their graphical passwords from a set of pictures representing different cultures. After three months, they were asked to login using their graphical passwords