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In some instances the existence of a certain circumstance can deny a court jurisdictional competency to deal with the pending civil dispute. This chapter identifies these circumstances as those pertaining to land situated in the Palestinian Territories, family law disputes pertaining to Palestinian residents, and claims filed against the Palestinian Authority. The analyses offered in this chapter reveal once again the close connection between the jurisdictional doctrines that instructed Israeli courts when evaluating their jurisdictional competency to deal with such disputes and Israeli policies generally in relation to the Palestinian Territories.

Food security is crucial for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries operating a distributive social contract predicated on citizen wellbeing and prosperity in return for political acquiescence. This rentier bargain was threatened by the surge in food prices in 2008, leading some Gulf countries to invest in agricultural projects in developing countries. This study identifies the risks that such foreign land investments pose to the investor as well as to this chapter’s case study countries of Ethiopia and Cambodia. Criticisms of overseas agricultural investment centre on corruption; expropriation of land from local populations who are often subject to forcible eviction with minimal compensation; and a lack of provision for local people’s livelihoods or even access to food after they have been evicted. Yet, GCC states could reshape foreign investment policies as a means of improving productivity as well as bolstering economic development in impoverished rural areas of less-developed countries.

This chapter analyses three brief, powerful passages, from different environments and different literary genres. These reveal an enduring ambivalence towards Jewish life in ‘exile’, a reluctance to concede that the centuries of Jewish life in foreign lands were devoid of any positive qualities, and even — rather surprisingly — the suggestion that life in exile might have religious advantages for Jews that were not available in the Holy Land. In short, the actual treatment of exile in Jewish literary texts reveals more nuanced and multivalent aspects. The familiar geography of the traditional concept — exile as forced removal from the Land of Israel and the end of exile as return to that land — is occasionally subverted in unexpected ways. Perhaps even more surprising is a revalorization of the concept, in which living in the ancestral homeland is no longer automatically identified as good, and living outside the land as bad. This chapter attempts to illustrate some of the permutations of this central concept through a literary and conceptual analysis of the three pre-modern passages from Jewish literature.