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This chapter examines the suicide missions (SMs) related to the Arab-Israeli conflict that took place from 1981 to December 2003. SMs are a relatively recent phenomenon in the Middle East, with only sporadic cases before 1981. In the two decades under examination, the great majority of the SMs related to the Arab-Israeli conflict took place in three geographic areas: Israel, the Occupied Territories (Gaza Strip and the West Bank), and Lebanon (primarily in the south). This concentration is largely due to the outcome of the 1967 war, the so-called Six Day War. Israel managed to sign effective peace agreements with its neighbours in the south (Egypt) and in the east (Jordan), but not in the north (Syria). Hence, a shift in the conflict towards the Occupied Territories and Lebanon, the latter squeezed between the Israeli army in the south and Syrian influence in the north.

In the popular legends that float around the Bank and Strip, much is made of Yasin's paralysis. The accident is commonly viewed as the source of his power. As they say, truly great men bear the signs of great affliction and these signs are consonant with and proportionate to the particular form of power they possessed. The most reliable account of how Yasin was confined to a wheelchair was a 1991 biography written by “Atif Ibrahim” Adwan, a professor of political science at the Islamic University of Gaza. When Yasin was a boy, he and his friends liked to hold religious sports contests on the beach of Gaza. One day, Yasin had sustained the contortionist position for an hour when he suddenly fell to the ground. When his friends tried to stand him up, they found that his body had become completely rigid.

Despite its swift rise to power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Hamas did not become a topic of debate outside Palestine until the early 1990s. There were two basic schools of thought, both obstinately ideological. According to the first, Hamas was a pragmatic political organization that followed its interests like any other political organization. Toward that end, it built schools, libraries, orphanages, and infirmaries, and provided much-needed services to the people of Gaza and West Bank — services that other political bodies of Palestine ignored or left to the United Nations. Proponents of the second school, on the other hand, argued that Hamas was antipolitical to the hilt, the very id of the Palestinian body politic. Through its various pedagogic institutions, it indoctrinated children with visceral hatred.

In the summer of 1994, Arafat suddenly appeared in the sands of Gaza after an absence as long as the occupation. Thousands of Palestinians thronged the streets of the newly autonomous realm, hoping for a chance of glimpsing “the Old Man”, as he was then affectionately called. Within days of the homecoming, the tide began to turn, as if the people were afraid of their own optimism. The leader was openly mocked. Many began to doubt that they'd even seen the man, insisting that the man they welcomed home could not possibly be the real thing.

There is a tree that grows in Gaza that Yusuf said was called al-majnuna, “the crazy girl”. Its huge blossoms are unnatural, shockingly hot orange that cascade downward in flaming clusters. The authors dutifully recorded the tree's existence in their notes and later asked others about it. No one had ever heard of it. It seems that Yusuf had made the whole thing up.

The induction ceremony had been held shortly after they first arrived in Gaza. Yusuf had led them in to Beach Camp, then under siege by what seemed like hundreds of Israeli soldiers. The mass confrontations between hundreds of Palestinians and Israeli soldiers would be later replaced by battles between organized groups of shabab and soldiers. But back then, the intifada was young, and the throngs on the street were ordinary people. They bumped into a young Palestine guard on duty who led them to a sanctuary. When the battle died down, they were able to navigate their way out of the camp back to the relative safety of the streets of Deir al–Balah, their eyes and throats stinging from tear gas, burning trash, and rubber.

This chapter documents the authors' lunch conversation with Hasan, the older brother of Yusuf's best friend, Jamal. Hasan's family house was situated at the major war zone between Bani Suhaial and Khan Yunis. Hasan questioned the democracy of America and insisted that the people who did this to them should pay. He was still smiling when he said that Americans should be thrown out of the Middle East. It was his way of making them feel that the problem was as much theirs as his. He also insisted that he wanted to die, seeking an effect.

Between December 2008 to January 2009, the Israel militaries assaulted the Gaza Strip displacing over 50,000 people. This assault accentuated the already long history of Palestinian forced migration. It created ‘internally stuck persons’ (ISPs) who were no longer able to flee conflict areas to safer grounds. For the ISPs, the Gaza Strip has become a prison which is controlled by outside force. Within the context of open-air prison, the ISPs have become ‘internally displaced persons’ because they are compelled to remain within this circumscribed boundary. IDPs receive less assistance and protection than refugees. This chapter discusses the scope, extent and repercussions of the involuntary migratory movements within the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It focuses on the physical barrier created by the Government of Israel (GoI) within the oPt. Although the displacement in Gaza, the East Jerusalem, and the West Bank is often triggered by similar and indirect factors, the latter two areas face a distinct set of triggers. A review of the preliminary displacement patterns have shown that forced displacement is both a result of and a means by which the GoI has expanded its hold of East Jerusalem and the prime areas of the West Bank. This review thus asserts that displacement cannot be simply viewed as a humanitarian crisis or a consequence of conflict or Israel’s security needs.

On September 19, 2002, the author of this book spent her last day in an Israeli military court. She went with Andre Rosenthal, a leftist Jewish Israeli lawyer, to Erez, the court located in a base at the edge of the Gaza Strip. In the courtroom, waiting for the hearings to get underway, soldiers on guard duty kept instructing the five Gaza women and her not to talk or lean on the benches in front of them, and they periodically ordered one or another to move to a different spot. Rosenthal's first case was the high-profile and widely publicized “Palestinian from al-Qaeda.” Rosenthal pointed out a gap in logic between the charges and the confession. Here the author expresses how much she learned in an Israeli military court. In fact, she states that she not want to leave behind or turn away from the suffering and the struggles for rights and justice.

Before its involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the American Friends Service Committee had delivered relief and political and moral assistance to hundreds of thousands of refugees in Europe and other parts of the world. When war loomed in Palestine, the United Nations looked to the AFSC to nominate a Quaker municipal commissioner for an internationalized Jerusalem, in the expectation that the nominee would be acceptable to both Jews and Arabs. The volunteers encountered numerous obstacles in Palestine and Israel but managed to learn from them and to adapt in ways that contain useful lessons for today's relief workers and peacemakers. In Gaza, the volunteers found themselves in a territory administered by the Egyptian army. The small-scale grassroots advocacy and unofficial diplomacy that the Quakers pioneered in the early years of the conflict remain for many activists—Israeli, Palestinian, and international—the best hope for reconciliation and resolution of the conflict.

The Asceticon of Abba Isaiah is an intriguing work in that it contains works of Macarius in both the Greek and Syriac manuscript traditions. The Isaian material proper also contains clear signs of Macarian influence, although these are rarely very profound and tend to be located in a second redactional layer.

This chapter examines the Islamic Resistance Movement or Hamas, which was established at the beginning of the first Palestinian uprising in December 1987. This analysis of Hamas focuses on its social dimensions and on the relationship between its social and political sectors, primarily in the Gaza Strip, where the Islamist movement in Palestine is most concentrated. The chapter also explores the ways in which Islamic political institutions interact with and/or influence social institutions and vice versa, the nature of Islamic social and political mobilization in Palestine and the links between them, the changing nature of Islamically legitimized action in the public and political spheres, and the slowly emerging secularization of religious discourse as a way of adapting to existing social and political realities.

This chapter provides background and a general context for examining Hamas' specific role as social actor. The Islamic Resistance Movement or Hamas was born with the first Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, in December 1987. The birth of this organization represented the Palestinian embodiment of political Islam in the Middle East. Although Hamas itself is a relatively recent phenomenon, it is rooted in a decades-old history of Islamic activism that began with the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza City in 1945. Hamas' evolution and influence were primarily due to the nature of Hamas' participation in that Intifada: the operations of its military wing, the work of its political leadership, and its social activities.

This chapter explores the evolution and role of Islamist social institutions in Gaza, beginning with the reformist work and philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood and continuing through the first Intifada and the Oslo period. Emphasis is given to the primary role of the social sector (e.g., the Islamist institutions' contribution to community development, order, stability, and civic engagement); the political role and meaning of Islamist social work; and the impact of institutional work on grassroots development, community cohesion, and civism. There is no doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood has long used social institutions to spread its ideas and increase its influence. The Muslim Brotherhood's success was tied in large part to the fact that, until the first Intifada in 1987, the Brethren largely refrained from violent resistance against the occupation.

This chapter evaluates the political impact on the Islamist movement and its social institutions of the following: the second Intifada, Israel's 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza, Hamas' 2006 electoral victory, the subsequent international boycott of the Hamas-led government, and Hamas' June 2007 military takeover of Gaza. Particular consideration is given to how the role of social institutions changed after the second Intifada and after the 2006 elections. The chapter also shows how in the almost two decades since the Oslo process began, the quality of life in Palestine has declined markedly. The political, economic, and social possibilities of the past—both real and illusory—have since disappeared.