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This thesis is an attempt to find a sustainable solution for the Palestinian refugee problem. It analyzes the Palestinian refugee case and how different actors in the Palestine-Israeli conflict view it. The Palestinian refugees issue is one of the most complicated matters in the peace negotiations between the two parties and without solving it there will be no permanent and sustainable peace in the Middle East region. There is a need for compromise from both the Israelis as well as the Palestinians to find a sustainable solution for the Palestinian refugee problem. The international community in general and those who have the political, military as well as economic power in particular must play an important role in the final settlement of the issue by providing economic incentives to repatriate and compensate the Palestinian refugees. The Right of Return should be respected in any case. While some Palestinian refugees might go back to their historic home land in what nowadays is called Israel, others might have no choice but to be permanently settled in their current host countries provided that they are given full citizenship rights in their host country as well as in the promised Palestinian State.

This thesis is a critical analysis of the theology and ethics of dispensationalist Christian Zionism in America. Chapter One introduces the thesis and its method, which draws constructively from history, sociology, and anthropology while remaining substantively theological. Chapter Two describes dispensationalism's origins in nineteenth-century Britain and its dissemination and development in America. Chapter Three moves from broad, historical description to the contemporary and particular through an introduction to Faith Bible Chapel (FBC), an American Christian Zionist congregation. This description arises from an academic term spent at FBC observing congregational life and conducting extensive interviews, as well as fieldwork undertaken in FBC's "adopted settlement" in the West Bank, including interviews with Israeli settlers about partnerships with American Christians. The remaining chapters move to more explicitly doctrinal analysis. Chapters Four through Six are shaped by William Cavanaugh's concept of 'theopolitics' (Theopolitical Imagination, 2002): a disciplined, community-gathering common imagination of time and space. Through the exploration of a key historical text (The Scofield Reference Bible, 1917) and its continuing legacies in the life and thought of FBC, these chapters examine the theopolitics of dispensationalist Christian Zionism, demonstrating that it is a complex system of convictions and practices in which the disciplines of biblicism and biblical literalism form an eschatology which subordinates ecclesiology and Christology, nurturing an imagination of the roles of Christ and the church in time and space which sever social ethics from necessary Christological and ecclesiological sources. John Howard Yoder's work is used to bring this system into relief, and to establish that eschatology per se is not inimical to Christian social ethics. Chapter Seven concludes the thesis with a summary of its findings, as well as a discussion of the positive functions of apocalyptic in Christian social ethics, pointing toward the possibility of alternative ecclesial enactments of apocalyptic theopolitics.

The study reported here originated in my therapeutic work with children at risk and my search for a therapeutic approach which would help them develop the inner strength to cope with their difficulties. The concept of ‘meaning in life' as a source of strength has been extensively and richly studied among older age groups, both with respect to the different personal meanings which everyone finds in their life and with respect to the effect on one's life of possessing a sense of 'meaning in life', but it has been neglected almost entirely among children. As a result, the aim of this research was to further knowledge about the concept of 'meaning in life' for children. Due to the paucity of research with children regarding this issue, it was needed to first establish that meaning in life was at all a relevant and researchable concept for children. Consequently, the primary research questions were as follows: Does the concept of ‘meaning in life' have relevance for children? Relatedly, what are the (dis)connections between children's understandings of their own lives, and what matters to them, and, the adult concept of ‘meaning in life? To examine these over-arching questions, the following four sub-questions were devised: - What do children think are the most important and meaningful things in their lives? - What do children think is the best way to live life? - What nature of goals and purpose do children have for their lives and do they believe that they have character traits and strengths which would help them to fulfil their goals/purpose? - How do children's individuality and the differences between them show themselves in their perspectives on meaning in life? To what extent is gender associated with variations in response? The research adopted a Constructivist-Phenomenological approach, with the aim of getting as close as possible to the children's own perceptions and experience of their world. Thirty eight-year-old children in their third year at two primary schools in different neighbourhoods of the same central Israeli city were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. This data collection approach was complemented by two creative elements: a short semi-humorous story told at the start to set the tone of the interview, and a picture drawn at the end of the interview by the children to illustrate what was important in their life. Some interviews were carried out individually and some as a group. The data analysis method chosen was Smith's (1996) and Smith and Osborn's (2008) Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). This thesis makes two original contributions to knowledge. The first is the discovery that meaning in life is as pertinent a concept among children as it is among adults. Children may not understand the concept of 'meaning in life' in as full a way as an adult might, but they do have clear and well-shaped opinions about the most important things in their lives (e.g. family and friends) and how they should best live (e.g. by helping others and living in peace). They have goals and plans for the future (e.g. Ambitions to become a pilot or teacher) and they believe that they have traits and strengths that will help them in reaching their goals (e.g. that being wise, kind or curious will help them in life). The second important contribution is methodological: the research technics developed in this study (the semi-structured interview enriched by story-telling and picture-drawing) has provided what appears to be a reliable way of generating valid responses from the participants. It could be used by researchers in the future to further understanding about how children perceive the notion of meaning in life.

This thesis explores the politics of representing the assemblage of ancient manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls to popular audiences in Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the United States. I demonstrate that these objects of national heritage are circulated along transnational routes to maintain the legitimacy of nationalist discourse abroad. Three sites—the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Qumran National Park in the West Bank, and a travelling exhibit presented at the Boston Museum of Science—are examined for textual narrative, spatial arrangement, and visitor behavior. Analysis of these observations illuminates two recurring motifs common to all three sites: the restoration of an ancient ethno-national landscape (“land of Israel”) in the contemporary landscape of Palestine/Israel and the important legacy of ancient Jewish society in contemporary Israel and “the West.” These motifs and the way they are presented through a framing of cultural heritage can be associated with a larger nationalist discourse maintained by Israeli state authorities and mainstream media that perpetuates a linking of western liberal and Zionist ideologies. I contend that the transnational circulation of this nationalist heritage narrative works to legitimize—at a global scale—an ongoing Israeli program of occupation and settlement in Palestinian territory subsumed under the biblical/Zionist frame of the “land of Israel.” While making preliminary suggestions toward critical interventions, I also suggest that the analysis of transnational encounters with nationalist heritage merits deeper ethnographic investigation towards understanding its impact on individuals’ political (in)action towards the Israel/Palestine conflict.

L'objectif principal de ce travail est d'expliquer et de comprendre les relations existantes entre les territorialités en compétition dans l’espace cisjordanien et les mobilisations de groupes et d’activistes engagés dans la résistance populaire contre l’occupation israélienne entre 2005 et 2016. Les territorialités prises en considération dans ce travail rassemblent celles des acteurs israéliens de l’occupation, des militants palestiniens étudiés dans cette thèse et regroupés autour d’un objet construit que nous avons nommé la « RP » ainsi que celles des multiples agents politiques et sociaux présents dans ce conflit.Pour cela, nous adoptons une approche scientifique interactionniste propre à l’étude des relations de pouvoir, des politiques de conflits et de la sociologie des mobilisations. Nous accordons une place importante à la description de la situation de colonisation de peuplement et au décryptage de la configuration (au sens éliassien du terme) sociopolitique cisjordanienne afin d’analyser les interactions conflictuelles qui engagent les mobilisations de nos enquêtés. De manière générale et en relation avec notre objet d’étude, il apparaît que l’entrée par la notion de territorialité est tout à fait heuristique pour traiter notre problématique. Elle permet aussi d’expliquer et de comprendre les mobilisations de nos acteurs de la RP à partir de l’étude contextualisée de multiples processus politiques. / The main goal of this research is to explain and understand the existing relationships between the territorialities in competition in the West Bank and the mobilizations of groups and individual activists involved in popular resistance against the territorial occupation between 2005 and 2016. The territorialities analysed in this work are threefold: those of the agents of the Israeli occupation; those of the Palestinian activists examined and defined in this thesis under our proposed term “PR” (Popular Resistance); and the territorialities of the various existing political and social entities in this conflict.To pursue this goal, we adopt an interactionist approach well-suited to the study of power relations, contentious politics and social movements. We choose to focus in particular on describing the situation of settler colonization and on the interpretation of the socio-political configuration in the West Bank (based on Norbert Elias’ theories), as these are central in order to analyze the conflictual interactions that motivate our interviewees to take part in the mobilization. In general, and as concerns our subject of study, the notion of territoriality appears to offer a heuristic approach to address our topic. It also enables us to explain and understand the mobilizations of our PR actors on the basis of a contextualized study of multiple political processes.

This study was conducted in order to interpret claims of antisemitism in Malmö, Sweden, depicted as an effect of political events in Palestine/Israel. It is argued that contemporary antisemitism is a new phenomenon, where hostility towards Jewish people is argued to be motivated by hostility towards Israel by perpetrators identified as ”Muslims” and/or people with roots in the Middle East and North Africa. Using previous literature, this view is contrasted with arguments that antisemitism as a phenomenon should not be delimited to such group formations and rather that different arguments are often projected on Palestine/Israel, in relation to antisemitism for political agendas. This paper investigates the meaning making processes of two news reports depicting claims of antisemitism in Malmö, Sweden as an effect of events in Palestine/Israel in May 2021 by using the Discourse Theory of Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe. The analysis investigates the ideas and underlying assumptions found in the material and posits the depictions made, with alternative possible ascriptions of meaning, excluded from the discursive formations made in the material. The conclusion reached is that reproducing many arguments of “new antisemitism” and of Malmö as “antisemitic” may misdirect the “combat” of antisemitism at the disadvantage for pro-Palestinian movements and further strengthen arguments many of which are taken for granted within the empiric material, for the salience of the existence of Israel and Zionism, due to the prevalence of antisemitism. Due to the limited nature of this paper, the author hopes that it can inspire future research within the field, as more extensive research, according to the author, is highly needed.

<p dir="ltr">Violent death that violates the ontological dignity of the body and the disappeared corpse often results in a crisis of mourning for those left behind, with the matter made all the more complicated when it comes to instances of politically motivated violence in the context of war. What follows such death/disappearance are issues of identification, collection of remains and, ultimately, an inability to enact necessary death rituals such as washing, shrouding and burial, leading to a separation between the dislocated soul and the corporeal form on part of the dead and the issue of incomplete mourning on part of the bereaved. Both the living and the dead, thus, come to occupy a liminal space (<i>barzakh</i>) where the boundaries between past/present, human/non-human, and dead/alive fall away. This paper argues that this in-between state helps the mourner gain access to a radical state of bearing witness outside of the oppressive binaries of the modern world. This work makes use of Middle Eastern (Iraq, Palestine, Egypt) and South Asian (Kashmir) literatures dealing with dehumanization and violent death in the context of what Achille Mbembe refers to as “death-worlds,” inhabitants of which are deemed “living-dead.”</p>

以、巴問題是國際上長期難以解決的問題，最原本的根源是猶太人與巴勒斯坦人在巴勒斯坦土地上相互爭取建國的權利而引起的。在以色列建國後，以、巴問題開始牽涉到難民、國家安全、宗教、水資源、被佔領領土與恐怖主義等諸多因素，使得以、巴問題日益複雜，迄今仍無法解決。 　　雖然國際間曾多次嘗試解決以、巴問題，並舉辦過多次和會，也提出過多次和平計畫，但是歷來國際間的努力都成效有限。本論文認為，這是因為歷來的和會與和平計畫不但沒有全面顧及到當事者的立場，也沒有全面考慮到以、巴問題的所有癥結。以、巴問題不只是個政治問題，然而國際間卻欲以政治方法解決之，因而成效不彰。 　　本論文認為，一旦整合有所成果，參與整合的國家間便會因為關係更加密切，進而使發生戰爭的機會大為降低。因此要解決以、巴衝突，必須由促進以、巴間的整合開始。並且考慮到以、巴問題的諸多癥結，因此整合不能僅限於政治層面，而是必須由政治與經濟方面同時進行。本論文認為，在以、巴政治整合方面，應採用安全社區理論；而經濟整合方面應採用共同市場理論。 　　在建構以、巴的和平上，安全社區與共同市場是相輔相成的。安全社區可以幫助共同市場建立良善的市場秩序，共同市場可以幫助安全社區成員達成更深的相互依賴，而唯有在以、巴間的安全社區與共同市場成立後，以、巴間長久且穩固的和平才有可能被真正的建構。 / The conflict between Israel and Palestine is a long-lasting international problem whose origin is that both Jews and Arabs claim their right to found their own nation on Palestinian land. After the founding of Israel, the problem between Israel and Palestine began to involve refugees, national security, religion, water resource, the occupied territories, terrorism, and many other factors. These factors make this problem increasingly complex and still unsolved to this day. Although international community has repeatedly tried to solve the problem between Israel and Palestine, held a number of peace conferences, and also proposed several peace plans, the effect has always been little. I believe that this is because peace plans neither totally took into account the positions of Israel and Palestine nor comprehensively considered all the cruxes of the problem between each party. The problem is not just a political issue, but the international community always wants to solve it through political ways. Once the integration of states works, the participating states will be closer to each other – and set up “interdependence” – and the possibility of war between them will be greatly reduced. Therefore, to solve the problem, we can encourage Israel and Palestine to begin the integration. Taking all cruxes of the problem into consideration, the integration cannot be limited to political level, but both political and economic levels at the same time. I believe that, in the process of integration, “security community theory” must be followed on political level and “common market theory” on the economic level. To make peace between Israel and Palestine, “security community” and “common market” are complementary to each other. “Security community” can help the “common market” establish good market order, and “common market” can help members of the “security community” achieve deeper interdependence. Only after the establishment of the “security community” and the “common market” could the enduring peace between Israel and Palestine be real possible.