This thesis identifies the managerial challenges facing Catholic school leaders in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and isolates those that have a relation to and influence on school Catholicity. Data were collected from 14 schools using a non-experimental, descriptive design that involved interviews with school leaders as well as conversations with staff members or teachers. To nuance all discussions and to provide concrete examples, observations of school operations and evaluation of institutional documents occurred. Analysis of the data revealed 10 functions, tasks, and behaviours (collectively called managerial challenges) that Catholic school leaders regularly carry out. Once these were identified, they were compared to the elements of school Catholicity described by Thomas Groome. A discussion about the managerial challenges facing administrators revealed that Catholic schools of East Jerusalem and the West Bank reflect one area of excellence, four areas of growth, and three areas of concern. This seven-chapter thesis was undertaken to show the collective challenges facing Catholic school leaders in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and to provide insight into how these might affect local Catholic education in the future.

This thesis identifies the managerial challenges facing Catholic school leaders in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and isolates those that have a relation to and influence on school Catholicity. Data were collected from 14 schools using a non-experimental, descriptive design that involved interviews with school leaders as well as conversations with staff members or teachers. To nuance all discussions and to provide concrete examples, observations of school operations and evaluation of institutional documents occurred. Analysis of the data revealed 10 functions, tasks, and behaviours (collectively called managerial challenges) that Catholic school leaders regularly carry out. Once these were identified, they were compared to the elements of school Catholicity described by Thomas Groome. A discussion about the managerial challenges facing administrators revealed that Catholic schools of East Jerusalem and the West Bank reflect one area of excellence, four areas of growth, and three areas of concern. This seven-chapter thesis was undertaken to show the collective challenges facing Catholic school leaders in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and to provide insight into how these might affect local Catholic education in the future.

This thesis adopts a bottom-up, qualitative approach to Palestinian identity construction in East Jerusalem and asks how the new politics and altered geography of the city since Oslo are recreating Palestinian subjectivities and redefining Palestinian struggle. I make the case that East Jerusalemites are doubly marginalised, first as Palestinians spatially and politically dislocated from the West Bank, then as residents of Israel, inside the politics and economy of the state but permanently excluded from the national project. Distanced from both state projects and from the discursive structures through which Palestinian identity was constructed after 1967, East Jerusalem residents are redefining from below what it means to be Palestinian in ways that are unfamiliar to Palestinians elsewhere in the occupied territories. Drawing on the vocabulary and theoretical contours of discourse theory, I problematise the top-down optic favoured by mainstream academic approaches which essentialises identities and privileges an occupation/resistance binary. I suggest that a ground-level approach to everyday practices in East Jerusalem sheds light on the extent to which existing nationalist and resistance discourses have either lost or changed meaning for Palestinian residents and makes evident the complexities of domination which are not visible from an elevated perspective. I suggest that the view from the ground in East Jerusalem is significantly underexplored and that from this position, the assumptions underlying existing analytic approaches to Palestinian identity and struggle are called into question.

This paper defends Israel's expropriation of property under the Absentee Property Law within the state’s pre-1967 borders on constitutional grounds, but holds that the Law’s increased use in the region of East Jerusalem is invalid under Israel's constitutional scheme. This distinction turns upon the state’s application of the Law for necessary purposes. I hold that Israel’s justification for breaching human rights explicitly protected must be based on the state’s need to preserve its foundational ideology and national purpose in times of extra-normal circumstances. Israel may act undemocratically only to the extent imperative to preserve the Jewish nation and the existence of the Jewish state for generations to come.