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This book traces the interaction of biblical studies and archaeology in Palestine. It highlights the field aspects of biblical archaeology, and clarifies the theoretical and methodological framework of the original excavators. Although biblical archaeology has been dismissed in favor of the new paradigm of Syro-Palestinian archaeology, the recognition of its positive contributions would restore a much needed balance to the current understanding of the growth and development of the field.

In 1993, when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin sealed the Oslo peace agreement, it was heralded as the beginning of a new era in the Middle East peace process. Instead, violence on both sides has continued to plague the region. The brutal facts on the ground have called into question the style of diplomacy that saw its greatest triumph with the Oslo Accords. This book asserts that the failure of the peace process stems in large part from its complete neglect of cultural and religious factors; attempted solutions have ignored the basic needs and values of average people. The author argues for a far greater integration of the religious communities of the region into peace‐building efforts. Drawing on his own personal experience with religion‐based peace initiatives in Israel and Palestine, he writes of the individuals and groups that are already attempting such reconciliations. He offers a detailed prescription for future negotiations using methods specifically designed to undermine the appeal of religious extremists by subtly incorporating religious values and symbols into the procedures of official and unofficial diplomacy, believing that a combination of secular and religious methods of peacemaking will yield a rich and creative model for conflict resolution. Any effort at peacemaking that fails to take into account the deep religious feelings of Muslims, Jews, and Christians is destined to fail. Only by including religion in the peace process can we move past fragile and superficial agreements and toward a deep and lasting solution. The book is arranged in two parts – Analysis, and Practical applications.

This book attempts to shed light on suicide missions and provide answers to the questions we all ask. Are these the actions of aggressive religious zealots and unbridled, irrational radicals or is there a logic driving those behind them? Are their motivations religious or has Islam provided a language to express essentially political causes? How can the perpetrators remain so lucidly effective in the face of certain death? And do these disparate attacks have something like a common cause? It focuses on four main instances: the Kamikaze, missions carried out by the Tamil Tigers in the civil war in Sri Lanka, the Lebanese and Palestinian groups in the Middle East, and the al-Qaeda 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For more than two years, the authors have pursued an unprejudiced inquiry, investigating organizers and perpetrators alike of this extraordinary social phenomenon. Close comparisons between a whole range of cases raise challenging further questions: If suicide missions are so effective, why are they not more common? If killing is what matters, why not stick to ‘ordinary’ violent means? Or, if dying is what matters, why kill in the process?

In third-century CE Palestine, the leading member of the rabbinic movement put together a highly popular wisdom treatise entitled Tractate Avot. Though Avot has inspired hundreds of commentaries, this book marks the first effort to situate it within the context of the Graeco-Roman Near East. Following his novel interpretation of Avot, this book relates the text to ancient Jewish literary paradigms as well as to relevant socio-political, literary, and intellectual streams of the contemporary Near East. Through comparisons to ancient wisdom literature, the Second Sophistic, Greek and Christian historiography, contemporary collections of sayings, and classical Roman jurisprudence, the book interprets Avot in light of the local Jewish context as well as the ambient cultural atmosphere of the contemporary Near East.

This book explores anti-Chalcedonian asceticism in Palestine, an area that has so far been relatively neglected in academic studies. Anti-Chalcedonian asceticism in Palestine is significant because it was in Jerusalem in the middle of the 5th century that monks who opposed the Council of Chalcedon first attempted to establish a dissenting anti-Chalcedonian ecclesiastical hierarchy. The monk Peter the Iberian, in particular, was a key force in this project because of his high-level political connections to the members of the imperial court in Constantinople. The beginnings of anti-Chalcedonian history in Palestine constitute the fist tangible manifestation of the schism between the adherents and opponents of the Council of Chalcedon, a schism which endures until today. This study also offers a further contribution in the field work carried out on site in the Middle East, which traced the footsteps of Peter the Iberian and his followers into the regions of modern Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Sinai/Egypt.

Peace and conflict‐resolution organizations (P/CROs) are civil society organizations dedicated to resolving protracted conflicts. Teams of local researchers coordinated by an international advisory board, investigate the characteristics, roles, similarities, and differences of P/CROs in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel/Palestine in the last third of the twentieth century. Comparative research of this sort throws up definitional, conceptual, and methodological difficulties. A historical overview of the three conflicts reveals shared features: disputes over land; forced settlements; ethnonational divisions; and the intersection of class and race. In South Africa, P/CROs engaged in antimilitarization activities, mediation, promoting contact between white and black communities, encouraging dialog between elites, and research, and with other antiapartheid nongovernmental organizations and the mass‐based resistance movements formed a “multiorganizational field.” In Israel, P/CRO activities included consciousness raising and protest, dialog promotion, some professional service provision, and the articulation of propeace arguments, but received little credit for any contributions they made to the peace process. Palestinian P/CROs were few and weakly developed as a result of Palestine's sociopolitical culture, although they performed human rights advocacy, international diplomacy, and domestic consciousness raising. Northern Ireland's voluntary sector was large, and included many P/CROs, which tended to focus on the symptoms of the conflict rather than the cause, and had little impact on the peace process beyond bringing an “inclusivist” philosophy to the political arena, fostering political debate, and providing some progressive leadership. Across the three regions, some P/CRO similarities emerged: foreign funding was crucial; charismatic leadership was important; almost all P/CROs became more professional and formal over time; and most P/CROs employed the same sorts of tactics, with some variation according to political context, but framed their conflicts differently. In general, it seems P/CRO impact was minimal: they played no direct role in the resolution of their respective conflicts but made indirect contributions.

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.