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Among the consequences of the consolidation of the Israeli closure regime have been the contraction of Palestinians' social worlds and the emergence of new forms of localism. Unlike the more parochial West Bank towns of Nablus, Hebron, and Jenin, Ramallah/al-Bireh has taken on many of the cosmopolitan aspects of larger metropoles—Beirut, Cairo, Tunis—because of a combination of historical influences, present-day migration patterns, and political realities. The result is a paradoxical “enclave city” whose sights are oftentimes more fixed on the global rather than the national level.

This groundbreaking volume takes an in-depth look at how individuals, families, and entire households \"cope,\" negotiate their lives, and achieve personal and collective goals in Occupied Palestine. Contributors raise critical questions about tradition vs. modernity and the sociocultural consequences of emigration. Living Palestine establishes that household dynamics (i.e., kin-based marriage, fertility decisions, children's education, and living arrangements) cannot be fully grasped unless linked to the traumas of the past and worries of the present. Likewise, family strategies for survival and social mobility under occupation are swept up in the tide of history that engulfs the world in which Palestinians live and struggle. Living Palestine is drawn from an expansive research project of the Institute for Women's Studies at Birzeit University which sought to examine the Palestinian household from multiple perspectives through a survey of two thousand households in nineteen communities.

Discusses how the Internet has changed the way researchers study the Middle East.

The most obvious answer to this question would be to underline the huge impact of the Internet on research on the Middle East: the speed with which material is circulated among colleagues, reviewers, and editors; the increasing availability of documents and materials; the ease of access to scholarly work through online databases; the availability of scholarly forums (such as H-Net) for exchanging information and views; and a long list of other benefits. My own correspondence with a publisher and some journal editors in the past few months is a case in point: a seven-month strike declared by postal and other public-sector workers to protest the Palestinian Authority's nonpayment of salaries stopped all mail services to and from the occupied territories. Without the Internet (and private mail carriers) I certainly could not have published what I did manage to publish in these turbulent times. There are more substantive implications of Internet developments for scholars of the Middle East, and I would like to focus on two of them in the short space allowed here.

During the past decade, the issue of gender relations and women's conduct and dress has been occupying an increasingly prominent place in the discourse of Islamist movements. This article attempts to situate Arab Islamists' preoccupation with women within the legacy of colonialism and social transformations relating to gender and class. With regard to Jordan, the author links the urgency of the issue with social transformations at the level of gender and class during recent decades, and points out that the key to understanding the prominence of the 'woman question' in Islamist thinking is the fact that the social groups which comprise the traditional constituency of the Islamists are finally experiencing for themselves the socially disruptive implications of new patterns in women's work, education and visibility. In short, the issue of women's modesty and conduct, which was more abstract as recent as one generation ago (when only upper middle and upper class women were visible in the public domain), acquires concreteness and urgency in the rapidly changing social environment. The article also tries to show how the Islamists' framing of the issue in cultural terms has a primal appeal, especially to those social groups most alienated from the insular world of the westernized elite and in search of 'authentic' ways of living in the modern world.