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Many in the United States and Israel believe that Hamas is nothing but a terrorist organization, and that its social sector serves merely to recruit new supporters for its violent agenda. Based on Sara Roy's extensive fieldwork in the Gaza Strip and West Bank during the critical period of the Oslo peace process, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza shows how the social service activities sponsored by the Islamist group emphasized not political violence but rather community development and civic restoration.

Collective singing has been viewed as an important sociological component in the literature written about social movements. However, it has seldom been the explicit focus of examination. This study analyses the use of collective singing during the intense moments of the Yesha movement protest against Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Content analysis of interviews with 14 protesters and 14 security force members (SFMs) shows that protesters used collective singing to evoke emotions that would help them raise morale, vent negative emotions, strengthen solidarity, experience spiritual transcendence, foster hope, empower themselves, mourn and achieve closeness to the SFMs. The results are discussed in the light of sociological theories.

The legal status of the Gaza Strip following the 2005 Israeli ‘Disengagement’, as well as the applicability of the laws of belligerent occupation with regard to this territory, have sparked, and continue to generate, a lively academic debate, involving states, organisations and legal scholars. Nevertheless, this debate has seldom included an examination of the de facto policy exercised by Israel vis-à-vis Gaza residents themselves. This article seeks to fill the gap by providing a thorough examination of Israel's legal position towards the residents of Gaza, and a critical analysis of its policy and practice with regard to their movement as well as the movement of goods. This review, based on dozens of policy papers, regulations and procedures, as well as numerous judgments handed down by Israeli courts, reveals that Israel maintains a deliberately deficient and ambiguous legal position with regard to the status of Gaza residents. Under this position, the residents are merely ‘foreign residents’ who have no particular rights in relation to Israel. I argue that this position establishes a major legal vacuum in the protection afforded to Gaza residents and is therefore incompatible with both the reality of Israel's continuous control over Gaza as well as the objects and norms of international humanitarian law.

Chronically described as poor, overcrowded, and dangerous, the Gaza Strip exemplifies the longstanding Zionist \"dilemma\" of how to deal with dense concentrations of Palestinians who must not be granted equality but who cannot be removed or exterminated en masse. This article analyzes key Israeli policies toward the Gaza Strip---specifically, the use of closure, buffer zones, and air power---in the context of the Zionist movement's broader geographic and demographic goals. It argues that the Gaza Strip can be usefully seen as a \"laboratory\" in which Israel fine-tunes a dubious balance of maximum control and minimum responsibility, refining techniques that are also suggestive of possible futures for the West Bank. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Jonathan Rynhold and Dov Waxman posit that ideological change within the right-wing Likud party generated support for the partition of Israel that was a vital prerequisite to the Sharon government's adoption of the Gaza disengagement plan in 2005. Although international and domestic pressures were important in determining certain elements of the withdrawal, they did not dictate the policy of disengagement. Adapted from the source document.

This article traces a critical change in the professional implementation of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): the broadening of its use from an apolitical sign of psychopathology, to an interpretative framework in which clinical questions of diagnosis and treatment intersect with political questions of ethno-national power relations. The aid discourse of a new NGO—the “Israeli Trauma Coalition” (ITC)—serves as my case study. I analyze how the experts negotiated similar clinical questions, associated with a single biomedical idiom, PTSD, but in relation to two different matrices of political relations: the “Disengagement Plan” (August 2005), which led to the evacuation of National-Orthodox Jews who had settled in the Occupied Territories, and the Second Lebanon War (July 2006), which led to the exposure of Palestinian citizens of Israel to missile attacks. In particular, I shed light on the ITC’s decision-making processes regarding the organizational representation of suffering and its empirical validation. I found that the distress of both groups has been left dangling between the processes of medicalization and de-medicalization, while a context-related transition from one meaning of trauma to another has taken place. Finally, I discuss how this implementation of PTSD compares with other national sites of its growing globalization.

זה יותר מעשור, מאז ההתנתקות הישראלית מעזה בשנת 2005 ותפיסת השלטון בידי חמאס, מתנהל עימות צבאי מתמשך בין ישראל לישות מאורגנת – שלטון חמאס בעזה, שמעמדו המשפטי אינו ברור: מחד גיסא הוא תואם לקריטריונים הקבועים בדין הבין־לאומי של מדינה ריבונית, ואף נחשב שלטון מרכזי המספק שירותים לתושבי העיר, ומאידך גיסא הוא אינו מזדהה כמדינה ואינו נוטל לעצמו את המעמד ואת האחריות המשפטית הנובעים מסטטוס זה. מצב זה מעורר שאלות חסרות תקדים במשפט הבין־לאומי: האם קיימת זכות לאי־הגדרה עצמית? ואם כן – האם יש הצדקה להכיר בזכות זו? בעיה משפטית תיאורטית זו ניצבת בלב המאמר הנוכחי ונבחנת בו משלוש נקודות מבט שונות: האפשרות לגזור מן הזכות המוכרת להגדרה עצמית את היפוכה; האפשרות המשפטית להכיר בזכות לאי־הגדרה עצמית בסדר העולמי הנוכחי; והיחס בין הזכות לאי־הגדרה עצמית ובין זכויות של מדינות אחרות וזכויות האדם של חברי הישות הבלתי־מוגדרת. מסקנת המאמר היא, שאין הצדקה להכיר בזכות לאי־הגדרה עצמית במשפט הבין־לאומי, ושגם אם היא תוכר – יש לסייגה מפני זכויות מתחרות. ההשלכה של מסקנה זו על שלטון חמאס בעזה היא שניתן ומוצדק, מבחינה משפטית, לייחס לו מעמד וחובות משפטיות של מדינה ריבונית.

While nearly half of the Israeli public opposed the idea of withdrawal from Gaza and parts of Northern Samaria, the implementation of the disengagement plan met with a minimum of resistance. The reasons for the above may be found by examining the ideological background of two schools of modern Zionist thought: the imperative of clinging to the land, that is, the Land of Israel, versus the acceptance of geographically unspecific territorialist ideas. Despite the fact that clinging to the Land of Israel has deep roots in the country's national ethos, many Zionist thinkers espoused the principles of territorialism, which ultimately prevailed among the decision-makers who planned and carried out the disengagement.

Brig.-Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser served as the head of the Research Division for Military Intelligence of the Israel Defense Forces in 2005 at the time of the disengagement from Gaza and parts of Northern Samaria. Because of his special vantage point, he is able to bring a new insight to the subject. Intelligence professionals were not consulted in the decision-making process. While the Prime Minister and his confidants hoped that this initiative would result in a political advantage for Israel and strengthen its security, it is clear that they did not take possible Arab and Palestinian reactions into account, particularly those of Hamas. In this article Brig.-Gen. Kuperwasser presents the issue of disengagement from a fresh perspective and describes its unintended consequences, which could have been foreseen.

The disengagement and its disappointments have been part of public discourse in Israel for the past decade. Among the topics are: \"Hamastan\"; the nine thousand uprooted settlers; the 11,600 rockets fired at Israel and the eight military operations which followed. Nevertheless, an essential question remains unanswered: did Prime Minister Ariel Sharon implement this plan because he genuinely believed in it or were his motives based upon self-interest? Was his real aim to extricate himself from the criminal investigations against him? There are several schools of thought which have attempted to explain what ultimately led the prime minister to make this crucial decision. On the one hand, some, such as Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, believe that Sharon was motivated by \"external considerations and personal distress,\" and former Member of Knesset Zvi Hendel still contends that it was the investigations that led to the evacuation of the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, Dov Weisglass [occasionally spelled \"Weissglass\"], director of Sharon's office, and Eyal Arad, Sharon's strategic adviser, argue that such allegations are baseless and false. The purpose of this article is to present and review the opposing perspectives regarding the motivation for Sharon's decision. Based on the available evidence, the author concludes that it is not possible to offer a definitive and unequivocal answer. However, it is important to present the differing views as they help us appreciate the diversity of vantage points involved both in making the decision and in the subsequent analysis of the disengagement.