Forensic medicine in Palestine is a new branch of medicine compared with other medical specialties and is still at a nascent stage. Only 6 medical doctors specializing in forensic medicine are ...currently practicing in Palestine, including only one female specialist (the author). Palestine has adopted a system that combines clinical forensic medicine and forensic pathology. Forensic doctors can deal with both the living and the dead and deal with cases of physical and sexual assault, gender-based violence, and domestic violence.
In different courts, such as civil, military, and shariah, Palestinian judicial decisions depend primarily on forensic medical reports and the testimonies that forensic doctors provide for the court to explain their reports. Forensic medicine has a significant role and crucial impact on achieving justice for victims of all types of abuse, either dead or alive. However, the role of forensic medicine in achieving justice for victims, and hence fighting and eradicating violence, is underestimated and not fully understood by the general population.
This paper introduces to the reader the status of forensic medicine in Palestine, focusing on the challenges and obstacles faced by both the victims and forensic doctors. Meeting these challenges and overcoming obstacles is essential for fighting all types of violence, including violence against women in Palestinian society.
The current provision of forensic medical services in Palestine is less than satisfactory, being considerably hampered by the lack of legislation and regulations.
Palestine is in great need of continued international support for forensic medicine and forensic services. Two projects supported by the United Nations put the country on the road, but there are still many miles to go toward the aim.
•This paper highlights forensic medicine in westbank Palestine.•Aimed to clarify the role of forensic medicine in establishing justice and the faced challenges.•Forensic medicine in Palestine combines between clinical forensic medicine and forensic pathology.•Nine forensic medicine specialists in Westbank Palestine among them only one female, who became the first in Palestine.•Palestine needs continued international support for forensic medicine and forensic services.
In settler colonial settings, agriculture is a means of reclaiming territorial sovereignty and indigenous identity. Turning attention to the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and their multiple uses ...and abuses of organic farming, this article explores epistemic and political spatial operations on the colonial frontier. Applying a relational conceptualization of three spatial modalities—soil, territory, and land—we explore the ways in which these modalities serve as political apparatuses: Soil designates the romantic perception of cultivable space, territory is concerned with borders and political sovereignty, and land is seen as a space of economic value and as a means of production. While agriculture is a well-known instrument of expansion and dispossession, organic farming contributes to the colonial operation by binding together affective attachment to the place, and new economic singularity in relation to environmental and ethical claims. We argue that organic farming practices converge claims for local authenticity, spatial appropriation, and high economic values that are embedded in what we term the colonial quality turn. Ultimately, organic farming in the West Bank normalizes the inherent violence of the colonial project and strengthens the settlers’ claim for political privilege.
In 'Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank: Our Human Faces,' Varghese traces five Palestinian theatre companies—Al-Kasaba Theatre, Ashtar for Theatre Productions and Training, Al-Harah Theatre, The ...Freedom Theatre, and Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theatre Training Society—from the first intifada (1987–93), or uprising, to today, to show how abject counterpublics in the West Bank resist Zionist erasure narratives. In the book, Varghese weaves thick description of examples and performances with historical contextualization to draw readers into what motivates Palestinian theatre-makers. Varghese shows there is potential for resistance through the border anxiety developed in sites of colonial abjection. Ultimately, this text argues Palestinian theatres in the West Bank do more than just perform plays—they provide needed space where issues are exposed, communities gather, and marginalization is responded to with beautiful resistance.
This paper critically examines Theodore Herzl’s canonical Zionist novel, Altneuland /Old New Land as a frontier narrative which depicts the process of Jewish immigration to Palestine as an inevitable ...historical process aiming to rescue European Jews from persecution and establish a multi-national Utopia on the land of Palestine. Unlike radical Zionist narratives which underlie the necessity of founding a purely Jewish state in the holy land, Altneuland depicts an egalitarian and cosmopolitan community shared by Jews, Arabs and other races. The paper emphasizes that Herzl’s Zionist project in Altneuland is not an extension of western colonialism par excellence. Herzl’s narrative is a pragmatic appropriation of frontier literature depicting Palestine as a new frontier and promoting a construct of mythology about enthusiastic individuals who thrived in the desert while serving the needs of an enterprising and progressive society. Unlike western colonial narratives which necessitate the elimination of the colonized natives, Herzl’s novel assimilates the indigenous population in the emerging frontier community.
To resist the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners are smuggling sperm samples out of Israeli prisons to enable their wives to undergo fertility treatment. Bodies and ...bodily matter figure as central actors in this practice of resistance. In this article, I draw from fieldwork I conducted with Palestinian women and medical staff in the occupied West Bank to examine the tension between carcerality and matter(ing). I argue that bodies and bodily matter are constitutive of the relationship between oppression and resistance. I analyze how Israeli military authorities assign evidentiary status to Palestinian bodies and illustrate how Palestinian families challenge the Israeli carceral system through new modes of embodied resistance. This article demonstrates how intersecting forms of oppression shape and are being shaped by bodies and their materiality. It also suggests that theorizing the materiality of power from Palestine offers new ways of understanding the political work that bodies do.
In light of the crucial role public diplomacy plays in shaping perspectives around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this research paper assesses the Palestinian public diplomacy practised by both ...governmental and non-governmental actors. The article firstly showcases public diplomacy in context and its importance for Palestinians. Then, the article sheds light on the most common characteristics of the Palestinian public diplomacy programmes. Finally, the paper discusses the drawbacks and challenges of improving public diplomacy, and suggests practical steps to improve Palestine’s stand in the international realm.
Why have Israel and the Palestinians failed to implement a 'land for peace' solution, along the lines of the Oslo Accords? This paper studies the application of strategic behavior models, in the form ...of games, to this question. I show that existing models of the conflict largely rely on unrealistic assumptions about what the main actors are trying to achieve. Specifically, they assume that Israel is strategically interested in withdrawing from the occupied territories pending resolvable security concerns but that it is obstructed from doing so by violent Palestinians with other objectives. I use historical analysis along with bargaining theory to shed doubt on this assumption and to argue that the persistence of conflict has been aligned with, not contrary to, the interests of the militarily powerful party, Israel. The analysis helps explain, from a strategic behavior perspective, why resolutions like the Oslo Accords, which rely on the land for peace paradigm and on self-enforcement, have failed to create peace.
Summary Background National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective ...medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. Methods We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure–the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index–on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r=0·88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions ( r =0·83), and human resources for health per 1000 ( r =0·77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Findings Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28·6 to 94·6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40·7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39·0–42·8) in 1990 to 53·7 (52·2–55·4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21·2 in 1990 to 20·1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73·8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. Interpretation This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-system characteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
This article makes two related arguments. First, that the continuum of hazards that people can experience in relation to waste infrastructures can include unstable epistemic and political ...positionings of olfaction, alongside other impingements of human excrement such as toxicity to the human body and damage to ecologies. I show this by paying attention to how people are sensitized to smell and by paying attention to how diverse forms of scientific measurement have responded to embodied attunements under nonsovereign conditions in Palestine. Second, I argue that olfaction can be key to shaping infrastructures’ specific trajectories while also creating open-ended possibilities for the making of political subjects and futures. In Palestine, olfaction is an object of interpretation, a sensory tool for interpretation, and a shifting marker of belonging to different types of collectivities. Holding one’s real or proverbial nose—or not—contributes to the conditions that facilitate or preempt livability there. This article draws on fieldwork among Palestinian environmentalists, Palestinian Authority bureaucrats, and municipal employees between 2007 and 2017 to show how human bodies—and their interpreted and interpretive attunements—must figure in our investigations of infrastructural spaces in the Middle East and beyond.
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