2006年1月25日巴勒斯坦舉行立法議會(PLC)選舉，哈馬斯(Hamas)出乎意料贏得議會過半席次，擊敗執政黨法塔(Fateh)，並依法律組成新政府。 以美國為首的西方國家對哈馬斯勝選感到十分震驚，因為西方國家迄今仍將哈馬斯列入恐怖組織名單。美國表示除非哈馬斯宣布永久放棄暴力及承認以色列生存權，否則拒絕與哈馬斯接觸。 哈馬斯勝選將衝擊以巴和平進程(peace process)的發展。1991年馬德里和會（Madrid Conference）後，以巴之間開啟談判大門，並於1993年雙方簽訂奧斯路協議(Oslo Accord)。然而，哈馬斯不但堅決反對奧斯路協議，更多次在以色列境內發動自殺炸彈攻擊，導致以巴之間衝突不斷，而哈馬斯則被國際社會認為是以巴和平進程的障礙。 事實上，哈馬斯並不完全是西方媒體所描述的恐怖組織。哈馬斯以伊斯蘭作為其政治理念，在各地設立醫院、學校與活動中心等社會福利設施，並強調結束以色列佔領的重要性，獲得多數巴勒斯坦人民認同與支持，以及受到阿拉伯國家與伊斯蘭世界的援助。 本文將先探討哈馬斯成立背景、組織結構、理念與發展經過，再深入分析哈馬斯對以巴和平進程的認知與策略。 本文認為，未來以巴和平進程必須將哈馬斯納入其中。若國際社會一味的排斥與孤立哈馬斯政府，不僅不能促進以巴和平進程，反而使巴勒斯坦社會更趨於孤立與激進，造成以巴局勢動盪不安，進而影響中東區域安全與穩定。 / On January 25, 2006, Palestine held a legislative election; unexpectedly, Hamas won more than half of the seats in the council and defeated the Fateh which dominated the Palestinian Council in the last decade. As s result, a new government was formed by Hamas. Western countries, especially the United States, were astonished at Hamas’s victory. Since the United States still lists Hamas as a terrorist group, Washington insists that Hamas must denounce violence and recognize the Israel’s right to exist, otherwise the U.S. would refuse to deal with Hamas. Hamas’s victory seems to undermine the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. After the Madrid Conference in 1991, Israel and Palestine signed the Oslo Accord in 1993. However, Hamas strongly opposed the Oslo Accord, and launched many suicide attacks within Israel that resulted in the bloody confrontations. In fact, Hamas is not a terrorist group. Hamas uses Islam as the political value to establish hospitals, schools and centers for activities in the occupied Palestinian territory and emphasize the importance of ending Israel’s occupation. Hamas is supported by the most Palestinian as well as by the Arab countries and the Islamic World. This paper first examines Hamas’s background, organizational structure, and its development. Then Hamas’s position toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and its peace strategy will be analyzed. This paper argues that if the international community deliberately excludes the Hamas government from the peace process, it will neither promote the peace process nor result in peace.

Le conflit israélo-palestinien continue de faire couler beaucoup d'encre dans la discipline des relations internationales et beaucoup de sang au Proche-Orient. Dans le monde arabo-musulman, il est le prétexte de tous les radicalismes, de tous les extrémismes. Nous avons choisi d'aborder ce sujet sous l'angle d'un acteur particulier, le Mouvement de la Résistance Islamique, mieux connu sous le sigle de Hamas, dans un cadre bien précis, le processus de paix israélo-palestinien sous l'égide des États-Unis d'Amérique. Ce mouvement islamiste palestinien, mis en orbite par les Frères musulmans à partir de 1987, s'est vite fait de se tailler une place de choix sur la scène politique palestinienne, jusqu'à en devenir l'acteur le plus important. Dès sa création, il revendique un radicalisme sans concessions à l'endroit de l'État d'Israël dont il conteste la réalité, jurant de chasser les juifs hors du territoire de la Palestine, la terre sacrée de l'islam et de ses fils. Les accords de paix israélo-palestiniens négociés secrètement à Oslo et signés en grande pompe à Washington le 13 septembre 1993 par les leaders palestinien Yasser Arafat, chef de l'OLP et israélien Itzhak Rabin, Premier ministre en présence du président américain William Jefferson Clinton, avaient justement pour objectif de mettre un terme à des décennies de lutte existentielle entre les deux peuples, en favorisant selon un calendrier précis l'émergence d'un État palestinien, tout en régularisant la situation sécuritaire d'Israël. Le Hamas a rejeté de façon catégorique le protocole d'Oslo, taxé de reddition de la part des négociateurs palestiniens, déclarant continuer le combat nationaliste jusqu'à la destruction totale de l'État juif. En choisissant la dialectique des armes comme mode d'expression politique, le mouvement islamiste s'inscrit dans une logique de défi vis-à-vis du parrain américain et de la communauté internationale dont il conteste la médiation. Le radicalisme des islamistes, l'intransigeance de l'État d'Israël, une gestion de crise bien particulière des États-Unis d'Amérique auront sérieusement perturbé l'instrumentalisation des accords de paix. Les islamistes, contre toute attente, ont décidé au début des années 2000 de rejoindre l'Autorité palestinienne, structure qu'ils avaient régulièrement combattue pour être un produit des accords d'Oslo. Une première victoire aux élections municipales en 2004, un raz-de-marée électoral aux législatives deux ans plus tard, les propulsant à la tête de l'Autorité palestinienne, ont considérablement modifié leur position envers le processus de paix et Israël. Le mouvement islamiste a largement revu sa stratégie d'origine, adoptant une nouvelle posture moins radicale, plus réaliste, ouvrant une fenêtre d'opportunité pour la résolution du conflit israélo-palestinien par des moyens pacifiques, sur la base de la légalité internationale. L'acteur américain, à tort ou à raison, a choisi d'ignorer l'ouverture, conditionnant une éventuelle collaboration à l'observance stricte de ses diktats, notamment l'abandon total de la violence et la reconnaissance explicite de l'État d'Israël. Aujourd'hui, les territoires palestiniens sont divisés, le conflit israélo-palestinien étant très loin d'être résolu. Au cours de cette étude, nous mettrons en exergue les radicalismes, les intransigeances, les blocages qui ont laminé les fondements du processus de paix, sans omettre les préjugés, stéréotypes et jeux politiques qui l'ont complètement décrédibilisé, ce qui a empêché l'avènement d'une ère de paix entre Palestiniens et Israéliens. Le dossier israélo-palestinien connaîtra-t-il de solution définitive sans une évolution des mentalités? ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : autorité palestinienne islamisme, radicalisme, islamo-nationalisme, conflit israélo-palestinien, processus de paix, Hamas, Israël, Palestine, politique américaine au Proche-Orient.

The purpose of this thesis is to identify the reasons for Israeli and Palestinian religious objections to peaceful co-existence in a two-state solution to the conflict over the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. Developing an understanding of the basic religious requirements and precedents, while consistently considering religious impact in politics, may help to open dialogue between Jewish Gush Emunim and Muslim Palestinian Hamas, strong opponents to land compromise. Arguments by Gush Emunim and Hamas from the two major religious works, the Jewish Tanakh and the Muslim Qur’an, and associated commentaries, the Jewish Talmud and Muslim Hadith, are compared and evaluated for religious insights into the disputed areas. Contemporary interpretations of each major writing and political objections based on religious argumentation create a strong context for modern conflict. The requirements and precedents for peace that come from religious texts also promote open dialogue. This thesis suggests ways to open dialogue between the Israeli and Palestinian cultures, comparing religious texts, interpretations, and concepts, in an effort to promote peaceful co-existence and build an effective strategic narrative.

This thesis examines the political trajectory of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) during the period from the 1982 eviction of the Palestinian factions from their headquarters in Beirut, to the 2006-07 division between Hamas and Fatah in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). During this period, the PFLP experienced a process of decline that resulted in its marginalisation within the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the wider Palestinian national movement. This study addresses the issue of the PFLP’s decline by focusing on its own political agency to determine the role of policy and decision making, ideology and political narrative in the marginalisation process. This work therefore, on the one hand, aims at putting the PFLP’s decline into historical perspective, identifying it as a process rather than simply the effect of outstanding events as it is often argued. On the other, its goal is to ascribe to ‘subjective factors’, namely aspects directly linked to the PFLP’s agency, the adequate weight in determining its decline. This appears particularly significant as the weakening of the Palestinian left has been frequently explained as a by-product of global and local external or ‘objective’ developments such as the downfall of the Soviet Union or the emergence of political Islam. By providing a comprehensive and processual analysis of the PFLP’s decline, this study not only aims at complementing the literature on the Palestinian national movement, which still lacks a focused approach on the main Palestinian leftist force. It also aims at shedding light on a major cause, and its historical origins, of the current Palestinian political impasse, namely the absence of an alternative between Hamas and the PNA’s governing entities, both crippled by a legitimacy crisis and unable to progress Palestinian interests. By virtue of its close survey of the PFLP’s conduct, a further goal of this thesis is to address the historical role of the PLO and its de-facto heir, the PNA. What is evidenced is the double, and contradictory, role of the essential but also constraining framework that the PLO and later the PNA represented for the PFLP’s policies. The focus on the PFLP’s political agency allows the identification of a pattern in its policy which affected negatively its standing within the Palestinian national movement. Throughout the period addressed, policy fluctuation marked the PFLP’s action, undermining the effectiveness of its political line and jeopardising its political weight. The present study highlights how such a policy fluctuation pattern originated from major dilemmas and contradictions that the PFLP had to consider while producing its policies. The main dilemma, informing all other sources of tensions affecting the PFLP, has been defined as an ‘opposition-integration’ dilemma. In other words, the PFLP, while opposing the PLO leadership’s policies, first and foremost its quest for a diplomatic settlement with Israel under US patronage, needed to maintain its integration within the PLO regime, which represented an essential economic and political framework. This produced inconsistent, ‘fluctuant’ policies that prevented the PFLP from maintaining its political weight and stopping its marginalisation process. This opposition-integration dilemma was combined with other sources of tensions marking the PFLP such as: relations with other PLO opposition factions, relations with Arab partners, its contacts with Palestinian Islamists, the confrontation with the PNA after the 1993 Oslo accords or the internal divide between the exiled leadership and the cadres located in the OPT. The PFLP’s official publications, mainly retrieved from its mouthpiece, Al-Hadaf magazine, embodied the main source upon which this study relies. Beside this corpus of documents, other primary sources, such as documents issued by relevant actors, have been scrutinised, while all information has been read against the background of the wider academic literature currently available on the Palestinian national movement. This research also drew information from interviews with former and current PFLP members as well as with experts of the Palestinian national movement.

Den amerikanske luftmaktsteoretikern John A Warden III har skrivit ett flertal artiklar och böcker om vad han anser är det bästa sättet att använda luftmakt. Warden förordar luftmaktens offensiva natur och eftersträvar ett snabbt, för egen del, fördelaktigt slut på en konflikt. Warden har bl.a. liknat fienden vid ett system, där han menar att strävan skall ligga i att slå ut fiendens ledarskikt vilket får tillföljd att dess vilja till strid upphör. I detta arbete ges en sammanfattning av, enligt författaren, centrala delar av Wardens teorier. Sammanfattningen mynnar ut i tre stycken parametrar som kommer att utgöra Wardens teorier i detta arbete. De tre parametrarna är "enemy as a system", "center of gravity" samt "parallell attack". Dessa parametrar ligger sedan till grund för en analys av Israels luftkampanjer i dess krig mot Hizbollah 2006, Operation Change of Direction samt dess krig mot Hamas 2008-09, Operation Cast Lead. Syftet med detta är att ta reda på om Israel använde sig av Wardens teorier under dessa båda operationer. Anledningen till valet av dessa två konflikter är att Israel bl.a. sin doktrin slagit fast att de aldrig har råd att förlora ett krig. Detta tvingar Israel att optimera sin taktisering. Slutsatsen blev att det tydligt går att se att Wardens teorier genomsyrade Operation Change of Direction. Det var enbart "parallell attack" som inte tydligt efterföljdes genom hela operationen. Under Operation Cast Lead däremot så följde Israel Wardens teorier i mycket mindre utsträckning. Det var enbart "center of gravity" som följdes genom hela den operationen.

The thesis deals with terrorism and its development as a social phenomenon since 1970s. It has argued that terrorism has undergone a process of radicalization and globalization, particularly as a result of the changed international situation and proliferation of modern technology. Nationalistic terrorism has been replaced with a global form of terrorism. In a similar vein, revolutionist ideologies, typical for terrorist groups of 1970s and 1980s, has given a way to radical interpretations of religions, namely Islamism, which has received substantial popularity as a result of prevailing grievances of the Muslim world. Even though there is no clear distinction between the old and the new form of terrorism, the two social phenomena differ to an important extent. During the second half of 20th century leftist terrorist groups dominated the scene with their fight for a regime change and battle against capitalism as well as imperialism. The organization of the groups took the form of hierarchy and had only limited number of members. At the beginning of the new millennium, the situation changed dramatically with the proliferation of Islamic groups, including the global terrorist group al-Qaeda. The groups work without a formal power structure and are able to hit targets anywhere in the world, as the...

Nowadays, the theory of proxy warfare receives more and more attention. However, it is not an entirely new phenomenon. Recent conflicts in Syria and Yemen got proxy warfare to the forefront of academic and public interest. This thesis aims to describe the existing proxy relationships in the area of the Middle East and analyze those relations from the perspectives of an actor's motivation to forge such a relationship and management of the proxy. The principal-agent (p-a) analysis is the approach that allows us to do that. We apply this approach to three case studies. In the first case study, we analyze the principal-agent relationship between Iran and Hezbollah. In this relationship, we can observe a high alignment of interests, and therefore it should be a textbook example of the p-a relationship. In the second case study, we focus on the relationship between Israel and Hamas. However, it may seem like there is no possibility these two actors will cooperate in any sense. We described that if "declared interests" (ideology) are put aside, both principal and agent can find a common pragmatic interest enabling them to establish the p-a relationship. The third case study analyzes Hamas as a hybrid actor, suggesting that one agent (Hamas) can be in the principal- agent relationship with two hostile...

This thesis examines the reactions to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 on the political left. The focus is on understanding how the German left’s responses differ from those of the global left and the extent to which these differences are influenced by the concept of "German guilt." The study employs content analysis of social media statements, guided by theoretical insights from Karl Jaspers' notion of metaphysical guilt and Moishe Postone's critique of violence against civilians. The findings reveal a distinct divergence in responses: while the German left uniformly condemned the violence, the global left displayed a wider range of reactions, including significant support framed as “resistance”. This thesis suggests that beneath the apparent national or ethnic differences, there lies a more fundamental divide grounded in Postone’s critique of the left’s approach to violence against civilians as a legitimate means to achieve progressive goals.

La thèse vise à examiner les politiques d'aide au développement de l'Union européenne (UE) et leur impact sur les conditions politiques, économiques, sécuritaires et sociales dans le Territoire palestinien occupé (TPO). De plus, elle vise à répondre à la question de savoir si ces politiques ont concrètement contribué à la construction d'une économie palestinienne solide conduisant à l'établissement d'un État palestinien, ou si elles étaient seulement des politiques destinées à protéger un processus de paix, délabré en permanence, et à maintenir le statu quo de l'occupation tout en répondant aux exigences de survie de la population palestinienne. L'étude met en lumière l'évolution de la politique d'aide européenne au peuple palestinien en accordant de l'intérêt à l'évolution de la politique étrangère de l'UE envers le conflit palestino-israélien et aux institutions en charge de la coopération au développement avec les pays tiers au sein de l'Union. La présente recherche a pour objet l'aide accordée par l'UE aux Palestiniens pour la période s'étendant de 1993 à 2014. Elle met en évidence un ensemble de résultats, dont le plus important est que cette aide a joué un rôle éminent afin d'éviter l'effondrement de l'Autorité nationale palestinienne (ANP) et d'aider le peuple palestinien. Elle s'est diversifiée au cours des années, en quantité et en qualité, afin de s'adapter à la situation politique, économique et humanitaire dans le TPO. Elle a contribué aux réformes réussies effectuées par l'ANP dans plusieurs secteurs, et elle a davantage soutenu les plans nationaux palestiniens de développement. Pourtant, cette aide n'a réussi ni à freiner les politiques de dé-développement pratiquées systématiquement par l'occupation, ni à mettre de la pression sur Israël. Cette recherche souligne que cette aide ne réalisera pas ses objectifs, notamment celui de l'établissement d'un État palestinien viable coexistant avec l’État d'Israël en paix et en sécurité, tant que l'UE n'utilisera pas son pouvoir économique et ne transformera pas sa rhétorique en actions concrètes sur le terrain. / The study aims to examine the policies of development aid of the European Union (EU) and their impact on the political, economic, security and social conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT). In addition, it seeks to answer the question whether these policies have helped to build a strong Palestinian economy leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state, or if they were only policies to protect the peace process, permanently dilapidated, and maintain the status quo of the occupation while meeting the basic requirements of survival of the Palestinian population. The study highlights the evolution of the European political support to the Palestinian people by highlighting the evolution of EU foreign policy towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the institutions responsible for the development cooperation with third countries within the Union. This research relates to the aid granted by the EU to the Palestinians for the period extending from 1993 to 2014. It highlights a set of results, the most important is that this aid has played a prominent role in avoiding the collapse of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and in helping the Palestinian people. It has diversified over the years, both in quantity and quality, to fit the political, economic and humanitarian situation in the OPT. It contributed to the successful reforms carried out by the PNA in several sectors, and has further supported the Palestinian national development plans. However, this aid has not succeeded to curb the de-development policies systematically practiced by the occupation or to put pressure on Israel. This research underlines that this aid will not achieve its objectives, including that of the establishment of a viable Palestinian state coexisting with the State of Israel in peace and security, as long as the EU does not use its economic power and does not turn its rhetoric into concrete action on the ground.

The main focus of this thesis is to examine Israel's counter terrorism methods and their consequences and to debate the effectiveness of Israel's counter terrorism policy. By stimulating a debate on these issues it is possible to identify a more effective counter terrorism policy. In order to examine Israel's counter terrorism methods, their consequences and effectiveness, it is necessary to first explore the overall concepts of terrorism and counter terrorism. Then, because counter terrorism policy is hard to evaluate if one does not look at the context which surrounds it, this thesis will therefore explore some aspects of Israeli security history which has and continues to influence its counter terrorism policy. Furthermore, this thesis will provide an introduction to the general development of Palestinian resistance movements which will include a scrutiny of Hamas. This thesis has selected some of Israel's counter terrorism methods, and will be examining the width and depth of these methods as well as their consequences on the Palestinian society in general and on Hamas in particular. In seeking to answer the more general question about the effectiveness of Israel's counter terrorism policy the thesis will evaluate this aspect by relying on qualitative and quantitative indicators. This thesis will show that Israeli counter terrorism methods do reduce the capacity of Hamas and as such has prevented certain attacks or incapacitated Hamas' military wing for a limited time; they have, however, had a limited effect in the long run. It will be shown that these methods have consequences far beyond reducing the terrorist organisation capacity, which deepen the root causes for terrorism and increase the motivation to continue the resistance.