Elia Zureik

Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy

From the Publisher: From computer networks to grocery store checkout scanners, it is easier and easier for governments, employers, advertisers, and individuals to gather detailed and sophisticated information about each of us. In this important new collection, the authors question the impact of these new technologies of surveillance on our privacy and our culture. Addressing the global integration of surveillance, social control, new information technologies, privacy violation and protection, and workplace surveillance, the contributors to Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy grapple with the ramifications of these issues for society today. Timely and provocative, this collection will be of vital interest to anyone concerned with resistance to social control and incursions into privacy.

Constructing Palestine through Surveillance Practices

State-building is normally associated with the setting-up of institutions such as the army, police force, judiciary and political system. By considering the Palestinian case of state-building, the paper relies on constructivist analysis to examine the use of surveillance as a discursive practice in State construction. Two central aspects of surveillance practices are considered in this paper: population count and spatial monitoring. Examination of these practices is situated in the asymmetrical power relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Conflict over land and people is manifested in the construction of citizenship, identities and geographical boundaries. The paper examines the historical and contemporary role of the census in both the Palestinian and Israeli case in the social construction of spaces and categorization of people. Examples are drawn from the first Israeli census taken in 1948, the monitoring of Palestinian refugees by the United Nations, and the contest over Jerusalem and borders as a consequence of the Oslo Agreement.

Prospects of the Palestinians in Israel: II

Haidar, Aziz. Social Welare Sernces for Israels Arab Population. Westview Special Studies on the Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. 175 pages. Al-Haj, Majid. Education and Social Change among the Arabs in Israel. Tel Aviv: International Center for Peace in the Middle East, 1991. 176 pages. Al-Haj, Majid and Henry Rosenfeld. Arab Local Government in Israel. Westview Special Studies on the Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990. 211 pages.

Consumer power in the digital society

A shift in the balance of power brings with it increased potential for influence.

Demography and transfer: Israel's road to nowhere

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which dates back to the latter part of the nineteenth century, has always been a conflict over land and population balance. At the start of the twenty-first century, with no end in sight to the conflict, the issue of demography stares both sides in the face. Israels ability to maintain military and economic superiority over neighbouring Arab countries in general and the Palestinians in particular is matched by its inability to maintain long-term numerical superiority in the areas it holds west of the Jordan River. It is expected that within 10 to 15 years there will be parity between the Arabs and the 5.5 million Jews who currently live in historical Palestine. While discussion of Arab population transfer has been relegated to internal debates among Zionist leaders, the idea itself has always remained a key element in Zionist thinking of ways to solve the demography problem and ensure Jewish population dominance. A recent decline in Jewish immigration to Israel, the rise of the religious-political right, continuing Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza and the recent Palestinian uprising have moved this debate to the public arena. Fractions among Israels intellectuals, political figures and Sharon government ministers have raised the demography issue publicly, calling openly for the transfer of the Palestinian population to Jordan.

The Child's Conception of the Queen and the Prime Minister

What difference does it make that Britain has a monarch? ‘Some political scientists,’ as Edward Shils and Michael Young remarked at the time of Queen Elizabeth IIs coronation, ‘tend to speak as if Britain is now an odd kind of republic which happens to have as its chief functionary a Queen instead of a President’. 2 Shils and Young felt that the intensity of public interest in the coronation quite clearly belied such a commonsense and demystified interpretation of British politics. Two decades later, signs of lively interest in the monarch still abound, as do the many royal activities that sustain that interest: the investiture of the Prince of Wales, the BBC film of the Royal Family, the London walkabout of the Royal Family, the engagement and wedding of Princess Anne. Even controversies over such matters as the size of the Civil List appear to enhance interest in the monarchy. Yet in this era of empirical political studies there has been little systematic analysis of the impact of the monarchy on Britain. The evidence is especially weak about the impact of what Bagehot considered to be the monarchys most important function — not the occasional and subtle royal initiatives at

Deregulating telecommunications: The workers' view

This paper draws on data gathered in the course of a two-year study of the Canadian telecommunications industry workforce. The study contributes to the international literature on telecommunications deregulation by providing the first systematic data on how the telephone industry workforce views the policy of deregulation. If found that opposition to deregulation is widespread, and even stronger than opposition to technical change. The findings support anecdotal experience from other countries that deregulation even poses a significant threat to jobs.

EMERGENCE OF POLITICAL THOUGHT AMONG YOUNG ENGLISHMEN: A CONFLICT PERSPECTIVE

IN the last decade or so a great deal of attention has been devoted to the study of young people’s political attitudes. While originally this research developed in the United States with no less than half a dozen books written exclusively on the subject of ‘Political Socialization’, it is clear that the subject is now attracting the interest of British researchers. Most of the explanatory tools used in this research could be classified as sociological and psychological in a rather narrow sense. Research in the sociological tradition has concentrated on the influence of primary socialization agencies such as the family, the school, the mass media, and the peer group in transmitting political orientations to the child. The psychological approach has two branches to it, one grounded in Freudian psychology and the other in developmental psychology. The former stresses the child’s early experiences with immediate authority figures such as parents and how these are transferred to his perception of more remote authority figures such as heads of state. The latter, drawing heavily on the work of Piaget and other developmentalists, emphasizes the interaction between the psychological make-up of the individual and the development of his thought processes. The central theme is that certain sophisticated political ideas, similar to other types of abstract thought, emerge only when the child has reached that stage in his ego development which enables him to develop a socio-centric, in contrast to egocentric, view of the world around him.’ While not denying the utility of the above approaches, it is curious that little effort has been made to incorporate the historical-social perspective in analyzing the political attitudes of young people.2 On the one hand much of the political socialization literature lays too much stress on the individual and fails, in consequence, to recognize, as Mannheim pointed out, that it is not men as individuals who think but ‘men in certain groups who have developed a particular style of thought in an endless series of responses to certain typical situations characterizing their common po~it ion’ .~ Even where groups such as social classes are treated as something more than just useful ‘control variables’ which account for a certain amount of variance and offer statistical relationships, political socialization research still tends to treat them

Palestinians on the Peace Process

In November 1988, the Palestinian parliament-in-exile, the Palestine National Council (PNC), adopted at its Algiers meeting a series of bold and historic resolutions in which the Palestinians indicated for the first time and in a formal manner their acceptance of the principle of partition of the historic land of Palestine. At the same time they accepted, based on the principle of mutual recognition, Israels right to exist in part of what they consider their own patrimony, renounced the use of political violence, and declared the establishment of their state in exile to be eventually concretized in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital. Absent from this political vision was a detailed Palestinian conceptualization of how to bring it about. What kind of state do the Palestinians want to have? Will it be like the other Arab states in the region? Will it be democratic or authoritarian? Will it be secular or religious? What kind of economic system do the Palestinians have in mind? Is it likely to be a viable entity, or a ward of the international community? Will it be demilitarized, or will it insist on having a military force? What kinds of relations will it have with its neighbors, Israel and Jordan? Do the Palestinians expect to have this

Palestinian Perceptions of the Israeli Position on the Refugee Issue

While the Israeli-Palestinian debate surrounding the refugee issue has undergone discernable changes since the early 1990s, certain important elements have remained constant throughout. Hebrew literature from 1991 to 1995 on the subject of Palestinian refugees offers a meagre 15 references in the public domain, and these include newspaper articles and opinion pieces. Repeating the exercise for the period 1995 to 1999 reveals 275 such references, which includes academic and popular writings – a clear rise in interest in the subject. And if one were to update this figure, in order to cover the last four years, Israeli interest would be reflected in even higher numbers.1 Today, hardly a week goes by without comment, as Israeli public figures, political pundits, and others all tend to chime in on the subject of Palestinian refugees. But are there any significant qualitative changes in the Israeli position in the midst of what appears to be a quantitative leap in writings on the subject? The official position has arguably remained in fossilised form since 1948, although as of late one detects minor admissions surrounding Israel’s role in creating the refugee problem. Hence, this paper examines whether Israeli discourse on the refugee issue is still dominated by power and demographic considerations, given that these two venues are unlikely to resolve the conflict. Reconciliation that is based on admission of the injustice suffered by Palestinian refugees is a viable alternative for dealing with this intractable conflict. The