Search Results (4)

Sea transportation plays a vital role in global trade, and studying the impact of emergencies on global sea transportation is essential to ensure the stability of trade. At present, the conflict between Palestine and Israel has attracted extensive attention worldwide. However, there is a lack of specific research on the impact of conflict on shipping, particularly on global shipping costs. By using the global vessel trajectory data of tankers from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and taking the global sea transportation of large tankers as an example, this paper quantifies and visualizes the changes in global sea transportation before and after conflicts from a data-driven perspective. Firstly, the complete vessel trajectory, as well as the port of departure and the port of destination are extracted. Then, from the perspective of shipping cost and vessel traffic flow, we evaluate the vessel traffic flow changes caused by the conflict by using the route distance to replace the shipping costs and quantify the cost increase for the relevant countries caused by the vessel detour based on the shipping cost increment index. The research results show that after the outbreak of the conflict, the number of vessels passing through the Red Sea area has decreased significantly. About 3.1% of global vessels were affected, with global sea transportation costs of large tankers increasing by about 0.0825%. This study takes the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as an example and analyzes the impact of emergencies on the global sea transportation situation of tankers based on AIS data. The research results reveal the characteristics of international shipping to a certain extent and provide guidance for global sea transportation route planning. Full article

Here, we apply a novel framework, termed Subjective Game Structures (SGSs), for uncovering and analyzing hidden motivations in ecological conflicts. SGSs enable the examination of implicit attitudes and motivations within individuals and groups. We elicited SGSs from Israeli and Palestinian participants between March 2019 and February 2020 (approximately three years before 7 October 2023), trying to answer the questions of whether Israelis and Palestinians perceived the conflict in a similar manner, whether they have identical assessments of the associated payoffs, and what can be done to reduce future hostilities and attain peaceful solutions. The results reveal meaningful differences between the parties. Israeli SGSs largely reflected expectations of mutually cooperative outcomes, while Palestinian SGSs exhibited ambivalence and a higher occurrence of confrontational expectations from both parties. Approximately 70% of Israeli SGSs and 40% of Palestinian SGSs were categorized as absolutely stable games, indicating that a meaningful portion of participants implicitly anticipated cooperative and mutually beneficial resolutions. Additionally, Palestinian participants’ perceptions of strategic similarity with Israelis were considerably lower than the perceptions of Israeli participants, pointing to meaningful gaps in the alternatives each side was expecting the other side to choose. The discussion highlights the importance of enhancing subjective perceptions of similarity and shaping parties’ perceived payoff structures as two key pathways to fostering peaceful interactions in diverse social and political conflicts. Full article

The new millennium has seen increased hostility to Israel among many progressive constituencies, including several mainline Protestant churches. The evangelical community in the US remains steadfastly Zionist, so overall support for financial aid to Israel remain secure. But the cultural impact of accusations that Israel is a settler colonialist or apartheid regime are nonetheless serious; they are proving sufficient to make support for the Jewish state a political issue for the first time in many decades. Despite a general movement in emphasis from theology to politics in church debate, there remain theological issues at the center of church discussion. The Protestant church with the longest running and most well-funded anti-Zionist constituency is the Presbyterian church in the US. In the last decade, its Israel/Palestine Mission Network (IPMN) has produced several increasingly anti-Zionist books designed to propel divestment resolutions in the church’s annual meeting. The most widely debated of these was 2014’s Zionism Unsettled: A Congregational Study Guide. This essay mounts a detailed analysis and critique of the book which documents the IPMN’s steady movement toward antisemitic positions. Among the theological issues underlying debate in Protestant denominations are the status of the divine covenant with the Jewish people, the role that the gift of land has as part of that covenant, and the nature of the characterization of the Jews as a “chosen people”. These, and other issues underlying Protestant anti-Zionism, have led to the formation of Presbyterians for Middle East Peace (PFMP), a group, unlike IPMN, that supports a two-state solution. The competing positions these groups have taken are of interest to all who want to track the role that Christian denominations have played in debates about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Full article

Whereas the conflict over Palestine’s’ holy places and their role in forming Israeli or Palestinian national identity is well studied, this article brings to the fore an absent perspective. It shows that in the first half of the 20th century Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem shared holy sites, religious beliefs and feasts. Jewish–Muslim encounters of that period went much beyond pre-modern practices of cohabitation, to the extent of developing joint local patriotism. On the other hand, religious and other holy sites were instrumental in the Jewish and Palestinian exclusive nation building process rather than an inclusive one, thus contributing to escalate the national conflict. Full article