How has the political visibility of Palestinians within the occupied West Bank and Gaza been constructed and managed by the Israeli occupation? How has the management of the Israeli field of vision and the distribution of Palestinian visibility shaped who can be seen, how and from what position? Focusing on the politics of visibility within Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including Gaza in a post-Second Intifada period (2005-2014), the thesis examines how anti-occupation activists employ visual digital technologies and online communication platforms to make the occupation, and its effect upon Palestinians, more visible to Israelis and international spectators. Concentrating on the collaborative nonviolent action between Palestinians, Israelis and international visual activists, the thesis identifies how antioccupation artists, activists and organizations have worked to creatively challenge the established regimes of visibility within Israel/Palestine. Taking into consideration the potential of new media technologies as a means of producing, enhancing and/or sharing a critically engaged perspective on the occupation, each chapter will highlight different collaborative processes undertaken in an effort to challenge the visual management of the occupation by the Israeli military and government. This study draws upon recent literature that prioritises the relationship between vision, visibility, power and social theory (Brighenti, 2010) and the politics of visibility in Israel/Palestine (Hochburg, 2015; Faulkner, 2014) to present visual activism as meaningful way of widening the space in which politics can be conceived, performed and represented. After situating the thesis in an appropriate context between visual culture and the politics of visibility, the thesis explores how visibility is structured around varying regimes that differ from context to context and are formed around a number of political, military and social mechanisms. Thereafter the four core chapters will examine how visual activism has been employed within the West Bank and Gaza, highlighting a range of geographical, social and political complexities that underpin the specific conditions of each case study. The first case study highlights how social media and various online platforms can be mobilized in an effort to raise awareness of an event to an international audience, namely the Bedouin village of Susiya and their campaign to remain on their lands. In this regard, visual activism is considered as a visibility making tool that is networked and multi platform. Moreover, the case of Susiya outlines the problematic nature of ‘creating the right image’ as well as attesting to how lesser considered images might have the most effect when circulated online. The second case study explores how the Internet was used successfully as a strategic tool to maximize the visibility of nonviolent resistance within the Village of Bil’in for a largely international audience. While the third case study identifies how visual activism and new media technologies can be imbedded within the act of protest as a means of enhancing and defining the visual outcome. Lastly, case study four reflects on the 2014 Israeli military operation in Gaza, commonly referred to as Operation Protective Edge, as a way to delineate the range of conditions related to the military occupation over Palestinian territories and the creative ways visual activism has worked to overcome these conditions in a very specific political space. The thesis examines and applies visual activism as a means of highlighting Palestinian visibility and the Palestinian struggle against the occupation through nonviolent, creative action. Distributed online, these collective efforts have been conceived for an internationally sympathetic audience rather than exclusively for Palestinian or Israeli web-users.

Scholars and journalists have criticised Israel's governmental system as ineffective or unstable, pointing at shortcomings in its policy-making capabilities. However, explanations of what limits its performance have been partial, as they focus on formal attributes of government institutions or the characteristics and interactions of individuals and groups. They have neglected the causal relationship between institutional features, public policy decisions and capabilities. The study seeks to address this gap in academic literature by offering an in-depth view into the system's workings. It investigates the policy implemented by the Labour government in the defence industry, Israel's largest manufacturing sector, when it sought to streamline and reorganise Israel Military Industries (IMI), Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI), and Rafael during their financial crises in the early 1990s. In each case, access to sources and documents enabled the intricate chain of events to be traced and disentangled. The study shows how past policy choices and institutional constraints can influence the government's ability to implement a chosen policy and impose financial losses on organised interests. By identifying how the institutional framework affects the actors involved, the study sheds a light on the constraints that shape policy outcomes. It argues that elected policy-makers preferred to maintain existing institutional arrangements, despite the serious impediments they posed to government, rather than forcing a particular policy on a reluctant constituency. The result was that some government capabilities remained impaired.

This thesis is the history of an intense period of Israeli attempts to address the issue of how the state should communicate its national image, particularly on the international stage. Between 1966 and 1975, the Eshkol, Meir and Rabin governments invested far more time and energy in the management of Israel’s international image than the governments before or after. Those responsible for this policy were informed by a developing Israeli national political culture that bore the strong influence of pre-independence Jewish history and which reinforced the simple and pervasive concept of hasbara (literally ‘explaining’) as Israel’s communications strategy. At the same time external factors, particularly the wars of 1967 and 1973, made government information efforts and Israel’s international image far more politically important. Yet, by the end of the period, nothing much had changed. This thesis examines why that should be the case. Using newly-released archive material, personal interviews and existing research, this thesis presents a new assessment of the domestic determinants that shaped the formulation, institutionalization, and execution of Israeli policy in the period under review. Three themes emerge from examining the domestic sources of Israeli government communications strategy in the period under question. Together, they explain why such an intense period of activity should produce such limited results. Firstly, the political culture of hasbara, an instinctively defensive, tactical, persuasive and Jewishly-rooted approach to generation and maintenance of international support for Israeli foreign policy aims, itself a residue of the pre-state period, proved an imperfect lens through which to view the world, and was an obstacle to cogent policy-making. Secondly, structural features of Israeli politics contributed to the lack of substantive progress in addressing the perceived failures of hasbara. The ruling Mapai party was split between the dominant ‘activist’ camp, which broadly dismissed the pursuit of international legitimacy in favour of the ‘practical Zionism’ of David Ben-Gurion, and the ‘diplomats’ who attached a much greater value to it. However, whilst the Mapai ‘diplomats’ were sometimes strong enough to limit ‘activist’ policy, they lacked the power to articulate or pursue a real alternative. Given Mapai’s unchallenged leadership at a national level, the sporadic bursts of opposition – in parliamentary or public debate - on this issue in the period under review produced very little real change. In addition, the environment in which these issues were discussed accentuated the role of personality in foreign policy decision-making. Finally, in the absence of clear political leadership, policy was often decided by bureaucratic ‘muddling through’, a model that describes incremental change from a limited set of options, an already-familiar feature of Israeli political culture.

This thesis is an ethnography of Palestinian political factions in Lebanon through an immersion in the daily life of homes. It explores the nature of factions and faction membership from the vantage point of those who form their very basis. It asks how did Palestinian political factions, which are clearly made of people, come to be seen as autonomous bodies that are studied as a whole and spoken of in the singular (‘Fatah did this’ and ‘Hamas declared that’). Through a detailed account of the everyday practices of Palestinian refugees I problematise the underlying conceptualization of factions in the academic literature as bounded structures defined by their respective ideologies. I explore how factions appear in the daily life of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; how Palestinians join factions; how their relationship evolves over time; how they demand, and at times obtain, aid; how and whether they participate in events organized by factions; and how factionalism affects their understandings of what factions are. This ethnographic approach reveals that what binds Palestinian refugees to factions is not the ideology or regional or international alliances of the factions. For example, young Palestinians do not join a faction based on whether it is Islamic, Marxist, or nationalist; rather they do so based on where they have friends or family, and sometimes depending on which faction has the closest youth centre to their home. In fact, it is those personal relationships, including those developed with other faction members that keep Palestinians affiliated to factions. Factions appear as a loose network of people held together by different degrees of trust and cohesion. Yet my work does not dismiss the fact that factions also appear as structures, as coherent entities. On the contrary, in the second part of this thesis, I trace another set of practices, that of aid distribution, criticism, physical representation, and factionalism, to show how factions metamorphose from loose networks based on interpersonal relations into impersonal structures defined by ideology. An examination of the everyday practices and representations of Palestinian political factions reveals how those structures come into being, how that operation creates and maintains a certain configuration of power in Palestinian society, and how factions remain the center of political life in the face of widespread condemnation.