Hamas and civil society in Gaza Roy, Sara; Roy, Sara
2011., 20131110, 2013, 2011, 2011-06-01, 2014-01-01, 20110101, Volume:
50
eBook
Many in the United States and Israel believe that Hamas is nothing but a terrorist organization, and that its social sector serves merely to recruit new supporters for its violent agenda. Based on ...Sara Roy's extensive fieldwork in the Gaza Strip and West Bank during the critical period of the Oslo peace process, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza shows how the social service activities sponsored by the Islamist group emphasized not political violence but rather community development and civic restoration.
This book details online academic collaborations between universities in Europe, the USA and Palestine. The chapters recount the challenges and successes of online collaborations which promote ...academic connections and conversations with the Gaza Strip, despite a continuing blockade imposed on Gaza since 2007, and forge relationships between individuals, institutions and cultures. The chapters examine, from different perspectives, what happens when languages and the internet facilitate encounters, and the fundamental importance this has as a form of defiance and of resistance to the physical confinement experienced by Palestinian academics, students and the general population of Gaza. They highlight the limitations of multilingual and intercultural encounters when they are deprived of the sensory proximity of face-to-face situations and what is lost in the translation of languages, practices and experiences from the 'real' to the 'virtual' world.
This first complete history of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip allows us to see beyond the smoke screen of politics in order to make sense of the dramatic changes that have ...developed on the ground over the past forty years. Looking at a wide range of topics, from control of water and electricity to health care and education as well as surveillance and torture, Neve Gordon's panoramic account reveals a fundamental shift from a politics of life—when, for instance, Israel helped Palestinians plant more than six-hundred thousand trees in Gaza and provided farmers with improved varieties of seeds—to a macabre politics characterized by an increasing number of deaths. Drawing attention to the interactions, excesses, and contradictions created by the forms of control used in the Occupied Territories, Gordon argues that the occupation's very structure, rather than the policy choices of the Israeli government or the actions of various Palestinian political factions, has led to this radical shift.
Gaza Finkelstein, Norman G
2018., 20180109, 2018, 2018-01-09
eBook
Gaza is among the most densely populated places in the world. Two-thirds of its inhabitants are refugees, and more than half the population is under eighteen years of age. Since Israel occupied Gaza ...in 1967, it has systematically de-developed the economy. After Hamas won democratic elections in 2006, Israel intensified its blockade of Gaza, and after Hamas consolidated its control of the territory in 2007, Israel tightened its illegal siege another notch. In the meantime, Israel has launched no less than eight military operations against Gaza--culminating in Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014--that left behind over three million tons of rubble. Recent UN reports predict that Gaza will be unlivable by 2020. Norman G. Finkelstein presents a meticulously researched and devastating inquest into Israel's actions of the last decade. He argues that although Israel justified its blockade and violent assaults in the name of self-defense, in fact these actions were cynical exercises of brutal power against an essentially defenseless civilian population. Based on hundreds of human rights reports, the book scrutinizes multifarious violations of international law Israel committed both during its operations and in the course of its decade-long siege of Gaza. It is a monument to Gaza's martyrs and a scorching accusation against their tormenters
Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by Israel, the EU, the USA and the UN. It has made itself notorious for its violent radicalism and uncompromising rejection of the Jewish state. So after ...its victory in the 2006 elections the world was watching. How would Hamas govern? Could an Islamist group without any experience of power - and with an unwavering ideology - manage to deal with day-to-day realities on the ground? Bjorn Brenner investigates what happened after the elections and puts the spotlight on the people over whom Hamas rules, rather than on its ideas. Lodging with Palestinian families and experiencing their daily encounters with Hamas, he offers an intimate perspective of the group as seen through local eyes. The book is based on hard-to-secure interviews with a wide range of key political and security figures in the Hamas administration, as well as with military commanders and members of the feared Qassam Brigades. Brenner has also sought out those that Hamas identifies as local trouble makers: the extreme Salafi-Jihadis and members of the now more quiescent mainstream Fatah party led by Mahmoud Abbas. The book provides a new interpretation of one of the most powerful forces in the Israel-Palestine arena, arguing that the Gazan Islamists carry a potential to be much more flexible and pragmatic than anticipated - if they would think they stand to gain from it. Gaza under Hamas investigates the key challenges to Hamas's authority and reveals why and in what ways ideology comes second to power consolidation.
Why has the West disbursed vertiginous sums of money to the Palestinians after Oslo? What have been donors’ motivations and above all the political consequences of the funds spent?
Based on original ...academic research and first hand evidence, this book examines the interface between diplomacy and international assistance during the Oslo years and the intifada. By exploring the politics of international aid to the Palestinians between the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the death of President Arafat (1994-2004), Anne Le More reveals the reasons why foreign aid was not more beneficial, uncovering a context where funds from the international community was poured into the occupied Palestinian territory as a substitute for its lack of real diplomatic engagement. This book also highlights the perverse effects such huge amounts of money has had on the Palestinian population and territory, on Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian territory, and not least on the conflict itself, particularly the prospect of its resolution along a two-state paradigm.
International Assistance to the Palestinians after Oslo gives a unique narrative chronology that makes this complex story easy to understand. These features make this book a classic read for both scholars and practitioners, with lessons to be learned beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
'In meticulous detail, she traces the international aid effort, and identifies why it has so dramatically failed to deliver the ‘tangible results’ it once promised. Her answer is clear: heavy Palestinian dependence on the Israeli economy, coupled with Israeli policies of territorial control—illegal settlement activity, roadblocks and other mobility restrictions, and construction of the separation barrier—have made it all but impossible for the West Bank and Gaza to flourish, even with large amounts of external assistance......this is an excellent volume. It certainly should be required reading for anyone studying the conflict—and most especially for diplomats, aid officials and others directly involved with the issues that Le More so ably explores'- Rex Brynen, McGill University, Canada; International Affairs
"...the strength of this book lies in the breadth of analysis, its well-articulated and evidenced arguments, and its focus on the role of the four main third-party actors: the United States, the EU, the UN and the World Bank..." -- Mandy Turner, University of Brandford; International Peacekeeping Journal
'International Assistance to the Palestinians After Oslo, the first in Routledge's Studies on the Arab-Israeli Conflict Series, provides an important critique of the belief that reconstruction, development, and humanitarian aid form essential counterparts to political processes aimed at resolving longstanding violent conflicts....Le More does a masterful job placing ostensibly technocratic donor mechanisms in political context.' - Ali Abunimab - Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 2009
'This monograph tackling the thorny question of the politics of aid in Palestine is essential reading for anyone interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more broadly, the politics of aid in a conflict environment....The message in Le More's book is as meticulous and clear as it is sobering.' - Nathalie Tocci, The International Spectator, Vol.44, No. 3, September 2009
Introduction 1. Aid Because of Politics: The Analytical, Legal and Institutional Frameworks 1.1 Analytical background: aid, politics, conflict and peacebuilding 1.2 International law, discourse, and perceptions 1.3 The aid coordination architecture: a political framework for assistance 2. Israeli Policies: The Territorial, Demographic, and Socio-Economic Fragmentation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory Territorial separation, cantonment, dispossession, and segregation 2.1 De-development and macroeconomic decline under Oslo and the intifada 2.2 The emergence of a humanitarian crisis 3. Palestinian Adjustment: The Rise and Fall of Arafat’s Regime 3.1 Authoritarianism and the personalization of power 3.2 Corruption 3.3 Security, human rights abuses, and the failure to rein in domestic opposition 4. Aid Instead of Politics: Multiple Actors, Fragmented Interests, Limited Influence 4.1 The bilateral protagonists: the US plays; the EU pays 4.2 American-European rivalry 4.3 The multilateral sponsors: the UN ‘processes’; the World Bank leads 5. Espousing Israeli Policies: Supporting the ‘Peace Process’ 5.1 Short-term fixes, political relief, and variation on a similar theme 5.2 Mitigating the socio-economic and humanitarian crises 5.3 Underwriting the process of Palestinian territorial fragmentation 6. Funding Palestinian Adjustment: Regime Creation and the Undermining of Palestinian State Building 6.1 Bailing out the PA: budget support, 1994-1998 & 2000-2005 6.2 Legitimizing the regime; de-democratizing Palestinian politics 6.3 Reforming the regime, 2002-2005 Conclusion
Anne Le More currently works for the United Nations in New York. She holds a PhD in International Relations from Oxford University. Her research interests include the Middle East, and the Arab and Muslim world more broadly. She has published a number of articles and is the co-editor of Aid, Diplomacy and Facts on the Ground: The Case of Palestine (Chatham House, London, 2005).
•The mixed columnar-equiaxed solidification during steel strip feeding in continuous casting was studied.•Steel strip feeding can improves solidification quality by increasing the equiaxed grain ...percentage.•A mathematical relationship between equiaxed grain percentage and initial temperature and size of strip was established.
Feeding a steel strip into a continuous casting (CC) mold is an effective method for improving the internal quality of CC slabs. An alloy experiment and three-phase mixed columnar-equiaxed solidification modeling were used to investigate the solidification structure evolution during the cold strip feeding process. The Euler method was adopted to treat the liquid phase, columnar grain phase, and equiaxed grain phase as continuous phases, and the mass, momentum, energy, and species transport equations of each phase, as well as the equiaxed grain density equation, were solved simultaneously. A comparison of the simulation and experimental results shows that the model can be used for calculating phase transitions, thermal-solute convection, grain deposition, macro-segregation, and the transformation of columnar grains into equiaxed grains in the solidification-melting system, which reveals the inherent relationship between the cold strip parameter and equiaxed grain percentage that is unquantifiable in the experiments. The results show that cold strip feeding improves the solidification structure quality by accelerating nucleation, strengthening convection, and promoting the columnar-equiaxed grain transition (CET). The subcooling nucleation rate around the cold strip first increases to a maximum and then decreases over time. A mathematical relationship between the equiaxed grain percentage and the initial temperature and size of the cold strip was established.
Hot-rolled strips are cooled on the run-out table to achieve the customer-required mechanical properties. Cooling reduces the oxidation, which can assist the coiling operation. The ability to obtain ...a range of mechanical properties from a single steel grade reduces the use of alloying elements (elements added to a metal or an alloy which are incorporated in the metallic structure and change in the properties of the basic alloy) and the size of the slab inventories. So in this paper, the high-temperature steel strip cooling pattern with the temperature of 870 °C and reaching the temperature of 630 °C using water and air is studied. Moreover, the numerical simulation of the high-temperature strip cooling and its cooling method is carried out. The results are compared with the similar sampler ones. The changes of three key parameters such as change in strip speed and its effect on cooling rate, change in pattern and arrangement of water showers and its effects and change in the cooling water temperature are investigated. It was found that the uniformity of the heat distribution inside the strip was increased, but the temperature of the strip was lower than the required temperature. The middle and up surface temperatures of the strip were performed at a speed of 3.48 (m s
−1
), which showed a very good match with the actual tested sample.
Freeform surfaces from single curved panels Pottmann, Helmut; Schiftner, Alexander; Bo, Pengbo ...
ACM transactions on graphics,
08/2008, Volume:
27, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Motivated by applications in architecture and manufacturing, we discuss the problem of covering a freeform surface by single curved panels. This leads to the new concept of semi-discrete surface ...representation, which constitutes a link between smooth and discrete surfaces. The basic entity we are working with is the developable strip model. It is the semi-discrete equivalent of a quad mesh with planar faces, or a conjugate parametrization of a smooth surface. We present a B-spline based optimization framework for efficient computing with D-strip models. In particular we study conical and circular models, which semi-discretize the network of principal curvature lines, and which enjoy elegant geometric properties. Together with geodesic models and cylindrical models they offer a rich source of solutions for surface panelization problems.
The production of strip sensors for the ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk) started in 2021. Since then, a Quality Assurance (QA) program has been carried out continuously, by using specific test structures, ...in parallel to the Quality Control (QC) inspection of the sensors. The QA program consists of monitoring sensor-specific characteristics and the technological process variability, before and after the irradiation with gammas, neutrons, and protons. After two years, half of the full production volume has been reached and we present an analysis of the parameters measured as part of the QA process. The main devices used for QA purposes are miniature strip sensors, monitor diodes, and the ATLAS test chip, which contains several test structures. Such devices are tested by several sites across the collaboration depending on the type of samples (non-irradiated components or irradiated with protons, neutrons, or gammas). The parameters extracted from the tests are then uploaded to a database and analyzed by Python scripts. These parameters are mainly examined through histograms and time-evolution plots to obtain parameter distributions, production trends, and meaningful parameter-to-parameter correlations. The purpose of this analysis is to identify possible deviations in the fabrication or the sensor quality, changes in the behavior of the test equipment at different test sites, or possible variability in the irradiation processes. The conclusions extracted from the QA program have allowed test optimization, establishment of control limits for the parameters, and a better understanding of device properties and fabrication trends. In addition, any abnormal results prompt immediate feedback to a vendor.
