Israeli-Arab Relations

"The presence of Israeli settlements in the West Bank represents one of the main issues concerning Israeli-Palestinian relations. Still, perhaps because of their exposure, academic and media discourse on settlements is rather one-dimensional in its focus on their role as “obstacles to peace.”

Indeed, Israeli settlements repeatedly prove to be an intractable problem for international diplomacy. However, a more nuanced understanding of Israel’s settlement policy is needed to acknowledge the “banality of colonization” as a fundamental driver in the dynamics of settlement expansion and in the transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

"By James M. Dorsey

Beitar Jerusalem, the bad boy of Israeli soccer, has appealed an Israeli Football Association (IFA) decision to dock it two points after fans shouted racist slurs against a Nigerian-born international striker Toto Tamez during a match against Hapoel Tel Aviv.

Beitar is likely in its appeal to argue that it is seeking to rein in its Sephardic Middle Eastern and North African Jewish fans, known for their dislike of Arabs Ashkenazi Jews of East European origin. The club is looking to hire a private security company to restrain its rowdy supporters.

The IFA's decision to activate a suspended two-point punishment of Beitar meted out last year because of its fan behaviour could prove disastrous as the club seeks to evade relegation because of poor performance.

Beitar this weekend scored much needed points with its defeat of Maccabi Netanya in a home match in Jerusalem's Teddy Kollek Stadium which it had earlier been ordered by the IFA to play behind closed doors because of racist chanting by its fans.

Israeli news reports quoted Beitar coach Yuval Naim as saying the IFA ruling was a disgrace. "They're killing us and demoting us a league. It's a death sentence for Beitar," Mr.Naim reportedly shouted.

Beitar was Israel's richest club until its owner, Russian-born billionaire Arkady Gaydamak, cut funding and failed to sell the club to two American Jewish investors who are widely viewed as critical of Israeli policies and doves when it comes to achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace

The IFA said it was to penalising the club because "the Beitar management had not made an honest effort to combat the fans' chants."

That judgement was reinforced when Maccabi Haifa striker Mohammed Ghadir recently put Beitar on the spot by insisting that he wanted to join the club, which prides itself to be the only Israeli Premier League to have never hired a Palestinian player in a country whose population is for 20 per cent Palestinian and in which Palestinians play important roles in most other top league teams.

"Our team and our fans are still not ready for an Arab soccer player," Israel's liberal daily, Ha’aretz, recently quoted Beitar’s management as saying in response to Mr. Ghadir’s challenge.

Beitar's notorious racism prompted the IFA to become the only Middle Eastern soccer body to launch a campaign against.

Established in 1936 and supported by Israeli right wing leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Beitar traces its roots to a revanchist Zionist youth movement. Its founding players actively resisted the pre-state British mandate authorities. Its fans shocked Israelis when they refused to observe a national moment of silence for assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who initiated the first peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Beitar has the worst disciplinary record in Israel’s top league. Since 2005 it has faced more than 20 hearings and has received various punishments, including points deductions, fines and matches behind closed doors because of its fans’ racist behaviour. The IFA recently ordered Beitar to play two home games behind closed doors and pay a $16,000 fine for fan rioting during a match against Bnei Yehuda.

Beitar’s matches often resemble a Middle Eastern battlefield. It’s fans revel in their status as the bad boys of Israeli soccer. Their dislike of Ashkenazi Jews rivals their disdain for Palestinians.

Despite the IFA's efforts, militant soccer fan racism is encouraged by far-right wing politicians such as National Union deputy Michael Ben-Ari, a proponent of expelling all Palestinians from Israel, who last year proposed legislation that would require members of Israeli national sport teams to sing the national anthem and recognise Israel as a Jewish state. The latter demand is rooted in an Israeli desire backed by Mr. Netanyahu to impose recognition of the Jews’ historic right to settle Palestine and block recognition of Palestinian rights to return to lands within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

Similarly, Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat, who cultivates an image as a tolerant, modern public servant, has largely remained silent about the racism of home soccer team. Ha'aretz recntly pointed out that approximately one third of Mr. Barkat's constituents are Jerusalem's 280,000 tax-paying Palestinians.

The importance of Palestinian players to Israeli soccer was driven home to Israelis in 2005 when Abbas Suan, a devout Muslim who refused to sing the Hatikva before a game, achieved for a brief moment what politicians in more than a half-century had not: he united Israeli Jews and Arabs by securing with a last minute equalizer against Ireland Israel’s first chance in 35 years to qualify for a world cup. The game earned him the nickname The Equalizer and made him an Israeli hero; his cheery face and toothy smile featured in ads for the state lottery.

That sense of unity was short-lived. When Suan set foot on the pitch in Israel a week later as captain of Bnei Sakhnin, an Israeli Palestinian team, Jewish fans of Beitar Jerusalem, Israel’s most nationalistic club, booed him every time he touched the ball. “Suan, You Don’t Represent US,” blared a giant banner in the stadium. Fans shouted, “We hate all Arabs.”

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

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At a time when momentous changes are taking place in the Middle East, this volume provides a timely and critical assessment of the European Union (EU) foreign policy towards the region. The book collects revised and updated versions of the papers presented at the third Academic Forum on European Security, which took place at the Institute for European Studies (IHEE) in Strasbourg on March 30-31, 2010. The subtitle «the hour of the EU» was chosen to emphasize the moment of opportunity for the EU to actively influence a peaceful resolution of the major crises affecting the Middle East. Accordingly, contributions to this volume show the potential and the limits of the EU's normative and soft-power-based diplomatic toolbox in trasforming its neighbourhood, focusing on four macro-areas: the Arab-Israeli conflict, the rise of Iran as a regional (and perhaps nuclear) power, the EU's engagement in democracy promotion and EU-Turkey relations. Overall, this book aims at providing the reader willing to learn more about EU foreign policy's achievements and weaknesses with a close-up on those four critical areas.

The present study examines parental attitudes towards bilingual and peace-promoting education at a school in Israel, and how these affect the behaviours and perceptions of their children studying there. The questions of interest were: (a) what are the parents’ perceptions of and attitudes towards the bilingual and peace-promoting education? (b) Are these attitudes in line with the school’s ideological framework? and (c) How might parental perceptions and attitudes affect the success of the educational endeavour and the children’s experiences at this school? Twenty-one Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli parents of children attending a bilingual school in Israel partook in this study. A semi-structured interview was used to investigate the perceptions and attitudes of the parents, and the data were analysed using Thematic Analysis. The findings indicate that the majority of the parents sent their children to the school for reasons other than the peace-promoting and ideological framework it offers. Essentially, parents were looking to provide their children with a better education than the one available in their immediate residential area. Concurrently, it was found that the parental attitudes appeared to influence children’s behaviour negatively. The implications of these attitudes and the impact of the school towards peace-promotion are discussed.

With the rise of anti-Israel sentiments in the post-Mubarak era, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, led by Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and Prime Minister Essam Sharaf appears caught in a complex web of satisfying popular aspirations, which oppose or have reservations about the peace treaty with Israel, while not abandoning the strategic dividends the treaty has produced.

This study conducts a posteriori versus a priori deconstruction of events that foreshadowed the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 using Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) intelligence analysis technique. The events in question date from the end of the Six Day War in June 1967, through the War of Attrition between 1967 and 1970 to events occurring hours and minutes prior to the initiation of 1973 Yom Kippur hostilities. This study demonstrates that sufficient evidence existed for the Israeli government and military to question the closely-held ‘Concept’ that framed their understanding of Egyptian intentions unto the start of Yom Kippur hostilities. This study concludes that the Yom Kippur War forced Israeli reexamination of assumptions regarding Egyptian leadership that resulted in the Camp David Peace Accords of 1979 normalizing relations between Egypt and Israel.

International Communications has been largely concerned with investigating the fields of propaganda, advertising, and political campaigning. The Israeli-Lebanese conflict of 2006 is used, as a case study, in support of the current research... Finally, the process of propaganda as a form of public diplomacy, mass communication and political manipulation is examined as a platform of instrumentality and social identity projection. 

""The economic offshoot of the Oslo Accords governing Israeli Palestinian economic cooperation failed in 2000. The Paris Protocol, as it was known, has become increasingly irrelevant due to the Israeli closures policy, disengagement, and economic policies aimed at maintaining the status quo, asymmetry, and dependence in Israel-Palestine economic relations. This article argues that not only is a new version of the Protocol urgently required, but that it should facilitate cooperation on some final status issues, including the future of Palestinian refugees and
the economic status of Jerusalem. The greatest threat to a new protocol is a lack of trust and security that stems from political issues, ongoing disputes over settlements, and the non-resolution of final status issues. For international donors such as the US, the price of peace stacked against tackling the accumulating economic cost of related conflicts, terrorism and regional insecurity will make even long term and sustained investment look favorable."