Palestine

The Palestinian territories have been under foreign military occupation since 1967 and this research is set to examine the implication that this situation has had on the built environment in the historic city of Nablus. Nablus like many other towns and villages in the occupied W…

“Engineering Progress” is a comparative study of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century regional development. It situates nature, technology, and culture within the wider global processes by which an abstract but universal ideal of progress spread around the world. In theor…

Snake objects discovered in archaeological contexts in ancient Canaan are studied and classified for clarification of their functions and socio-religious meanings. The archaeological context of each item is considered in order to determine its cultic connotations. Biblical passa…

In their struggle for separate states in the former Palestine, the Arab and Jewish national movements used non-conventional violence and terrorism as one of their tactics to achieve their goals. This dissertation examines the role terrorism played in promoting or hindering this …

Patriarchy functions to maintain order through hierarchal relations of power by ascribing different roles to individuals based on gender. The activism of women in resistance movements generates a disruption of patriarchal order dissolving major barriers of gender relations betwe…

This study examines the textual production and narration of “multiple identities” in third world and US third world feminist writings of the last three decades. These feminist writers suggest a tactical articulation of their identities between, across, and through a transnationa…

This study examines the Egyptian “colonial” presence in Early Bronze I Palestine. The emerging role of the Egyptian state in the enforcement of social and cultural boundaries is an important focus of this research. The pottery analysis in this study and review of publications ha…

This dissertation examines the constellation of forces that precipitated the Zionist movement and Jewish colonization of Palestine. The primary goals are to identify and contrast the aspirations and final objectives of the Biluim and halutzim, the pioneers of the first and secon…

The character of the Anglican church in Palestine changed considerably over the first century of its history. In 1841 King Frederick William IV of Prussia proposed a Protestant bishopric in Jerusalem to bring the Protestant churches of England and Prussia closer together and to …

This Dissertation examines the early, pre-Marxist years of Hashomer Hatzair youth movement from a wider perspective of European intellectual and cultural history. The movement originated in the Habsburg province of eastern Galicia around 1911 and was founded in Vienna in 1916. D…

Each society that relies on divination curates an ensemble of means and personnel that comprise a divinatory economy. Dreams represent a peculiar means of acquiring divined knowledge in the divinatory economy of the ancient Near East. They may be uninduced phenomena; or they may…

As a socio-cultural history of disease in Palestine, this dissertation examines the problem of malaria during the period of British rule, focusing specifically on the place of Zionist anti-malaria campaigns in the processes of Zionist nation-building and in the transformation of…

The dissertation argues that the Jerusalem temple functioned in ancient Israel/Judah as an economic institution in ways similar to Mesopotamian temples of the seventh to fifth centuries B.C.E. The study analyzes the administrative and economic information from temple archives in…

This dissertation examines the creation of a Jewish physical culture in Mandatory Palestine through the analysis and comparison of the following national festivals: the beauty competitions for Queen Esther in conjunction with the Purim carnivals in Tel Aviv from 1926–1929; the f…

This work examines the behavior of riparians in water scarce regions and in a protracted conflict environment. It seeks to answer two questions: why would a riparian that is more politically, militarily and economically powerful still choose to cooperate and even to compromise o…

In mandatory Palestine, Zionist civil society proved to be a powerful instrument for institution- and state-building. Civil society developed around four conditions: shared values, horizontal linkages of participation, boundary demarcation and interaction with the state. These f…

In the pre-state era before Israel's establishment in 1948, when most Zionist organizations concentrated on political lobbying and land development to advance the Zionist cause, Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, adopted a radically different—and at the time,…

This is a genealogy of the “new accent” in Hebrew poetry in Palestine. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Hebrew language “revivalists” made a concerted and ultimately successful effort to adopt Hebrew as a modern spoken language in the Jewish settlement in Pal…

The purpose of this thesis was to examine if Palestinian Women in the Diaspora demonstrate political agency to preserve the Palestinian ethnic and nationalistic identities. Historical and modern-day accounts are analyzed in evaluating the motivations of Palestinian Women’s polit…

The significance of water cannot be overstated. Water is necessary for the metabolic functioning of all life. From the earliest records of human social life, water has determined where people settled and how societies formed. Yet the biological role of water does not capture its…