Ehud Eiran

University of Haifa | haifa · School of Political Sciences

This article seeks to examine what motivates Palestinians living in East Jerusalem to apply for Israeli citizenship, and whether those who receive Israeli citizenship identify less with the Palestinian nation. To examine this, we conducted qualitative research through in-depth personal interviews with Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem (resear...

The following paper investigates past and present cultural exchanges between Jews (and from 1948 to Israelis) and Asian cultures. It then offers some ideas and thoughts about the future of such exchanges. By culture, this article follows portions of the definition offered by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, which refers to culture as: “the customary...

This paper analyzes Israel’s changing understanding of its geostrategic posture from its establishment in 1948 to the current era. It starts by reviewing traditional Israeli geostrategic ideas and their implementation, mostly, as reflected in the nation’s national security doctrine. The paper then investigates the effect of Israel’s territorial exp...

A 2020 APSA panel that discussed (and reprinted in ISR 2021) Ian S. Lustick, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

The piece suggests that security studies scholars should include food security as part of their understanding of the field.

This chapter investigates Israel’s concept of maritime security and the institutional arrangements that flow from it. This focuses on an analysis of Israel’s maritime threat perception, its responses, as well as the challenges that it faces in this realm. The chapter reviews the various maritime spaces that Israel operates in. It further examines I...

This study argues that the effect of third-party trade on dyadic conflicts is conditional on the naval power of both the potential conflict initiator and its target state. This conditional effect occurs mainly because naval power allows trade-integrated initiators to reduce their trade dependence on a given trade partner and its allies more easily....

The Middle East is experiencing growing tensions as a result of competing geopolitical agendas and reciprocal meddling in the internal affairs of states. This volume – the outcome of a joint FEPS–IAI project – examines various means to foster de-escalation, dialogue and confidence-building in the Middle East. It does so by mapping the viewpoints, i...

This short report for the Center for International Maritime Security reviews the transformation of the Israeli Navy in the last decades, ties it to Israel's broader "turn to the sea", and highlights some of the future challenges it may face.

The piece reflects on the structural features that led Israel to greater involvement in the Mediterranean and analyzes the promises and concerns that flow from this engagement https://www.ispionline.it/it/pubblicazione/geopolitical-sea-new-scramble-mediterranean-26988

The book by Prof. (emeritus) Uri Bialer about Israel’s foreign policy opens by closing a circle. Bialer reports that one of the experiences that sparked his interest in the history of Israeli foreign policy was a course he took in 1970 with Prof. Michael Brecher at the Hebrew University.

The book by Prof. (Emeritus) Uri Bialer about Israel’s foreign policy opens by closing a circle. Bialer reports that one of the experiences that sparked his interest in the history of Israeli foreign policy was a course he took in 1970 with Prof. Michael Brecher at the Hebrew University. Brecher, a famous and prolific political scientist from McGil...

The article analyzes the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to foresee the Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on Israel in 6 October 1973. The paper deconstructs the various elements of the American failure and explores the reasons that led to it. The paper shows that at the heart of the flawed American assessment was a paradigm formulated by...

The piece analyzes the immediate and long term implications of the March 2020 elections in Israel and the May 2020 new government that followed

The chapter investogates the early phases to the Israeli reponse to the Coronavirus crisis in 2020. For now, the response further supports Israel's existing identity: a Jewish, Zionist state that relies on a technologyprone, forward-leaning security establishment.; thus, protecting its core value of providing physical security, while deflecting ont...

This policy brief reviews continuity and change in Israeli foreign and security policy

Recent developments in the eastern Mediterranean, such as significant gas finds; disagreements over the demarcation of maritime boundaries; large-scale violence and political instability following the Arab Spring; mass migration via sea routes; Great Power dynamics in the region; and environmental hazards, make the political entities along the shor...

The article analyzes the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to foresee the Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on Israel in October 6, 1973. The paper deconstructs the various elements of the American failure and explores the reasons that led to it. The paper shows that at the heart of the flawed American assessment was a paradigm formulated by...

Settlement projects are sustained clusters of policies that allow states to strategically plan, implement and support the permanent transfer of nationals into a territory not under their sovereignty. Once a common feature of the international system, settlement projects are now rare, and contradict international norms. Yet, these modern projects ha...

The chapter explains the launch of the Israeli settlement project in Gaza and the West-Bank (Including East-Jerusalem) following Israel’s occupation of these regions in the 1967 Six-Day War. The chapter uses the theory advanced in the book and shows that Israel launched the settlement project in order to secure permanent territorial expansion into...

The chapter investigates the Moroccan settlement project in the Western Sahara and the Indonesian settlement project in East-Timor (1975-1999). It uses the framework advanced in the book and shows that both projects were meant to secure permeant territorial expansion into occupied regions. Following the model, the chapter analyses the four variable...

The chapter investigates three cases of states that sought territorial expansion into a neighboring territory in the post-colonial era. They then occupied the sought-after territory for an extended period of time. However, their control did not produce a settlement project: India in Goa (1961 onwards), Libya in Chad (1974-1992) and Mauritania in We...

The theory chapter explains how scholars analyse current-day post-colonial settlement projects. It shows that much of the focus in the literature is on internal explanations such as settler-driven or an audience costs perspective; or bicommunal/bilateral explanations such as social control or economic utilization.

The chapter investigates three cases of prolonged occupation from the post-colonial era that did not produce a settlement project: India in Goa (1961 onwards), Libya in Chad (1974-1992) and Mauritania in Western Sahara (1975-1979). The cases serve as “negative cases”.

Recent developments in the Eastern Mediterranean create strong incentives for greater interstate coordination in the maritime domain there, though current state preferences are expected to limit the gamut of joint action. Yet, the nature of early 21 st century maritime security challenges in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as the expected inabil...

When states reorient themselves towards the seas in a relatively short amount of time, it is usually due to a top-down decision or due to merchant-class activity. However, the Israeli case is different. Since the mid-1990s, both the Israeli state and its civil society have been developing and implementing several separate new policies regarding the...

The article analyses the effect of Israel’s new maritime orientation on its foreign policy. It first demonstrates that in the last two decades Israel has changed its maritime posture in three important ways: it has developed energy dependence on offshore gas, begun extensive seawater desalination and dramatically expanded its navy’s platforms and m...

The article describes how Israel's recent “turn to the sea” profoundly affects its economy, foreign policy, military, planning and education. This article compares this shift to historical precedents, offering Israel as a template for a new, cumulative model that does not conform to the existing narratives of how polities have turned to the maritim...

International territorial expansion faces three significant constraints: norms of “border fixity” that aim to preserve the status quo, norms of self-determination that seek to reverse foreign conquest, and the high costs of compelling territorial change. State-led attempts to expand their territory run directly into each of these constraints, which...

Between land and sea: spaces and conflict intensity. Territory Politics Governance. Do different levels of sovereignty affect the intensity of international conflicts that unfold there? The paper answers this question by comparing territorial conflicts between Israel and Lebanon in two spaces: land and sea. These spaces are subject to different lev...

In the early morning of July 31, 2015, masked attackers threw firebombs into two Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Duma, south of Nablus, killing three Palestinian civilians. Contrary to claims by Israeli and Palestinian politicians, this attack was neither an isolated anomaly nor just another incident of settler violence. Instead, it w...

Does religious identity prompt radical action? This article presents a model of individual-level radical action. Drawing mostly on collective action theory the piece posits that organizational membership drives the effect of religious identity on individual-level radical action. Using survey data the paper assesses the behavior of Jewish settlers i...

This paper offers a framework for analyzing governmental inquiries into intelligence failures. The paper argues that all investigations face three inherent tensions over their timing, purpose, and process. The benefits and disadvantages of conducting inquiries immediately after the intelligence failure or years later, engaging in investigations des...

Using the 2005 unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as a case study, this article exposes an apparent paradox: circumstances may exist in which an outcome that serves the interests of parties to a conflict cannot be achieved through bilateral negotiation but can be achieved by unilateral action. Although the withdrawal was seen at the time as se...

The papers investigaes the specifics of Israel threat perception of an Iran armed with a nuclear wepons. We The paper investigate the specifics of Israel's threat perception of an Iran armed with a nuclear weapons. We argue that Israel’s fears take at least four distinct forms, with a diverse set of sources: fear of annihilation, fear of a more dif...

In the summer of 2005, thirty-eight years after it gained control over the Gaza Strip, Israel left the sandy Mediterranean region. The Disengagement Plan, as the withdrawal was called by the Israeli government, was intended to benefit the state of Israel by finally defining its southern border, helping to secure a Jewish majority within its newly c...

Noel Malcolm Kosovo: a short history New York University Press (1998), New York, ISBN 0814755984 $38.95 (hbk).

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply paradoxical: the basic outline of a deal is reasonably clear and yet this violent conflict persists with over 4,000 causalities since the collapse of the last significant effort to bring peace in 2000. The paper suggests that this paradox stems from internal conflicts on each side. It focuses on the intern...

There is a danger inherent in devoting a panel to a discussion of the political aspects of the Israeli settlements issue: in attempting to discuss everything, we could have ended up talking about nothing because many practitioners and scholars view the settlements as primarily a political project. The multidisciplinary nature of this conference ref...

Because compensation and dispute resolution lie at the core of most resettlement proposals, this panel had two main objectives: to get an accurate grasp of the current Israeli approach to these challenges and to glean insights from relevant experiences in other settings. Before reading our panelists’ presentations, one might be forgiven for reasona...