Human rights discourse is central for the work of international social movements. Viewing human rights as a context-dependent and socially constructed discourse, this article investigates how it is used by a specific social movement – Israel-critical diaspora Jewish activists – and argues that it can simultaneously challenge and reproduce existing practices of domination. The article applies co...

How do we write about Palestinian village life in the first half of the 20th century? The absence of peasants and other nonelites from the social and cultural history of this period contrasts with the prominent role they play in contemporary scholarship regarding the political history of this period. In similar situations in other parts of the world, historians are left with only official recor...

In March 1998, the political leadership of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel was looking for ways to commemorate al-Nakba (“The Disaster,” in Arabic), referring to the war of 1948, during which about 700,000 Palestinians were uprooted and hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed. This leadership, organized in the Follow-Up Committee (FUC), nominated a Nakba and Steadfastness Commit...

We examined posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression symptom trajectories during ongoing exposure to political violence, seeking to identify psychologically resilient individuals and the factors that predict resilience. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with a random sample of 1196 Palestinian adult residents of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem across three occasions, six...

Perception of charisma, the ability to influence others by virtue of one’s personal qualities, appears to be influenced to some extent by cultural factors. We compare results of five studies of charisma speech in which American, Palestinian, and Swedish subjects rated Standard American English political speech and Americans and Palestinians rated Palestinian Arabic speech. We identify acoustic-...

THE FORMER RAND AFRIKAANS UNIVERSITY, now University of Johannesburg, has acted against its own and the South African national interest by terminating the 25-year-old collaboration with the Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Around the World item “End to partnership with Israeli university,” News of the Week, 1 April, p. 19). Boycotts of Israeli scientists, science institutions, and worse, res...

The desire for justice can escalate or facilitate resolution of intergroup conflicts. Two studies investigated retributive and restorative notions of justice as the mediating factor of the effect of perceived outgroup sentience—an aspect of (mechanistic) dehumanization referring to the emotional depth attributed to others—on intergroup conflict resolution. Study 1 showed that for Palestinians, ...

after islamic revolution of 1979, the left wing had a new sphere to act in political eras, and overcastted on the other groups, but as soon as possible, the unreligious left leaved the political scene of iran after revolution. it seems the religious groups –as the only legal political actors- are integrated under “islamic republic party” but so soon, we saw the distinction between them all. jus...