The Middle East conflicts between Palestine and Israel are long-term, ongoing and wide-ranging. Kicking All Odds is an observational documentary that explores women football players from Palestine – both Christian and Muslim girls – who play together and forge a team despite all the hardships they face.

This thesis is an analysis of the Jordanian economic developmental process which demonstrates that it expanded rapidly between 1948 and 1970. During the period under study, Jordan had to face two wars, in 1948 and 1967, which had inverse effects on the economy. After each war, the economy experienced a period of recovery due primarily to government efforts to promote investment; the existence of a more educated people represented by the refugees; and the role of foreign aid. Chapter I is a brief introduction to the Jordanian economy. Chapter II is a discussion of some theories of economic development. Chapters III and IV provide us with a more detailed description of the economic situation before and after the 1967 war. However, the purpose of Chapter V is to incorporate the theory that appears to handle the processes discussed in both Chapters III and IV.

The Gaza Strip may be the world’s most relentless conflict zone. After decades of destruction and resistance, it is hard to imagine a different reality. But before the Gaza Strip, there was Gaza—a gateway city within an eponymous region with a much-neglected history. Stripped is an exploration of the Gaza borderland that aims to salvage Gaza’s past from the conceptual and historiographic shackles imposed by the current reality of the Gaza Strip, as well as to render imaginable a horizon for Gaza beyond this reality. The work is the first to methodologically depart from the common understanding of the Gaza Strip as purely a consequence of the 1948 war. Instead, Stripped situates Gaza within a century-long history of the Eastern Mediterranean’s integration into the global market economy, the Ottoman-British quest for imperial sovereignty over the Sinai-Palestine-Hijaz desert corridor, and the Palestinian struggle to overcome the urban and environmental destruction of World War I in the face of British and Zionist colonialism. Relying on little-studied sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Hebrew, English, and French, the dissertation explores how the Gaza region adapted to Ottoman agrarian reforms and gravitated into British economic orbit in the Mediterranean. As a result of these processes, Gaza of the late nineteenth century reoriented its economy from land to sea and turned to fully rely on exporting its locally cultivated barley to the British beer-brewing industry overseas. While generating promising growth for some two decades, global demand for grains diversified widely in the early twentieth century, leading to an abrupt collapse of Gaza’s new financial base. Concurrently, the very trade Gaza relied upon sliced this historic borderland into separate zones of imperial domination, turning it into a frontier between the Ottomans and the British. Gaza thus became one of the Middle East’s most devastating battlefronts during the First World War. When Palestine was made a formal political unit under the British Mandate, Gaza was both financially and physically in ruins, forced into a slower, more convoluted historical trajectory than other parts of the country. Ruins and their meanings, therefore, are central to the dissertation’s inquiry, as they turned in the interwar period into a contested ground in the struggle for Gaza’s recovery. Dwelling among the physical debris of their former city, Gazans had to marshal waqf regulations and Ottoman land legislation to restore their urban and agricultural environments against British antiquities preservation and land development schemes. Navigating often contradictory reconstruction initiatives, the people of Gaza toiled to carve themselves a space within the emerging Palestinian national collective as well. However, after a century-long “stripping” of its previous economic, social, and political centrality, Gaza could only remain peripheral to the political upheavals of the Mandate period and finally even remote from the battlefields of the 1948 war. It thus almost naturally emerged as a safe temporary shelter for wartime Palestinian refugees, around which the Israeli and Egyptian armies demarcated the Gaza Strip.

This study is a Comparative Foreign Policy (CFP) analysis of the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) foreign policy behavior from 1964 through 1981. This study develops and tests a role modification model that accounts for evolutionary changes in foreign policy behavior. One of the major premises of this research is that what often appears as dramatic restructuring in foreign policy is actually the culmination of a series of modifications that transpired over an extended period of time. The model relies on a total of six independent variables as determinants of PLO foreign policy output representing multiple levels of analysis. There are a total of 12 dependent variables expressed as either foreign policy tactical roles or strategic goals. Relying on content analysis of relevant PLO documents, the role modification model demonstrates that the foreign policy output of the PLO experienced a gradual, over time change in both the means and ends of its foreign policy. The model also identifies the conditions under which any one of the independent variables is able to exclusively determine foreign policy output and which roles one can reasonably expect the PLO to exercise under a given circumstance.

Henry Kissinger is considered to be one of the most influential diplomats of U.S. history. During the decade he spent directing the U.S. foreign affairs from one of the top level positions, he achieved many important successes. His power extended far beyond the normal competence of the secretary of state. His personal skills, which were an important asset in obtaining such an influential position, combined with the complicated internal political situation in the United States. At the time Kissinger entered the Middle East conflict as an important actor, the Nixon Administration fought against charges connected with the Watergate affair and the president consequently had little time and energz to devote to the foreign policy. Henry Kissinger could thus became the creator of American diplomacy and its main representative. The documents about the Yom Kippur War and the U.S. engagement in the region, which were declassified much later and which this thesis make use of, show that the real power of Henry Kissinger was much broader than widely believed.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

In 1969, Richard M. Nixon became the thirty-seventh President of the United States. He brought with him an aggressive foreign policy aimed at retarding the escalating Cold War and ending America's war with Vietnam. In his inaugural address, he exclaimed that under his leadership the United States was going to enter an era of negotiation, leaving the age of confrontation behind. Determined to create a structure of peace around the world, Nixon and his administration fashioned a policy to reflect their goals. This study seeks to understand why the Nixon administration allowed the Middle East to fall into the peripheries of their foreign policy. A conflict as devastating as the October War was certainly the kind of incident Nixon and his advisors wished to avoid. Between the years of 1969 and 1973, they worked tirelessly in the Middle East and around the globe to secure a more hospitable international climate; so why, despite their efforts, did the Arab-Israeli conflict spiral so devastatingly out of control?

The Arab-Israeli conflict is examined from its religious aspect, presenting people's experience of religion without passing judgement. Selected concepts are compared and contrasted and interpreted hermeneutically. The roots of the antagonism are traced back historically, showing that it comprises more than a claim to the same geographical territory. Each religion's notion of statehood is described. Internally Jewish-Zionist friction over the ceding of territory arises through divergent interpretations of the same texts; Islam, Nationalism and religious rivalry, being at variance, have engendered Arab tensions. Their respective doctrines on war and peace suggest, broadly speaking, a Jewish-Zionist leaning to shalom, and Islam-Arab Nationalism to jihad (struggle). While the religious perspective does leave an opening for a solution to the conflict, pragmatism may lead to compromise. Finally the suggestion is made that the religious dimension is necessary for a holistic understanding of political issues / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Religious Studies)