In a tweet posted on 29 March 2018, a bidūn activist—who was later jailed from July 2019 to January 2020 for peacefully protesting against the inhumane conditions under which the bidūn are living—shared a video. The brief video zooms in closely on an ID card, recognizable as one of those issued to the bidūn, or long-term residents of Kuwait who are in contention with the state regarding their legal status. More precisely, the mobile phone camera focuses on the back of the ID card, on one line with a special mention added by the Central System (al-jihāz al-markazī), the administration in charge of bidūn affairs. Other magnetic strip cards hide the personal data written above and below it. A male voice can be heard saying that he will read this additional remark, but before even doing so he bursts into laughter. The faceless voice goes on to read out the label in an unrestrained laugh: “ladayh qarīb … ladayh qarīna … dālla ʿalā al-jinsiyya al-ʿIrāqiyya” (he has a relative … who has presumptive evidence … suggesting an Iraqi nationality). The video shakes as the result of a contagious laugh that grows in intensity. In the Kuwaiti dialect, the voice continues commenting: “Uqsim bil-Allāh, gaʿadt sāʿa ufakkir shinū maʿanāt hal-ḥatchī” (I swear by God, it took me an hour to figure out the meaning of this nonsense), before reading the sentence again, stopping and guffawing, and asking if he should “repeat it a third time,” expressing amazement at its absurdity. The tweet, addressed to the head of the Central System (mentioned in the hashtag #faḍīḥat Sāliḥ al-Faḍāla, or #scandal Salih al-Fadala), reads: In lam tastaḥī fa-'ktub mā shaʾt (Don't bother, write what you want).

As indicated in the title, this study will deal with Jewish sects in Israel, not with Moslem or Christian ones. The restriction is not altogether arbitrary, for while one could beneficially explore other religious sects in modern Israel, both for their own sake and in order to analyse their position in the predominantly Jewish society, it is the exploration of the Jewish sects which, besides dealing with a matter of intrinsic interest, may provide a peculiar insight into the meaning of Jewishness in Israel.

In the two decades between 1953 and 1973 the rapidly growing industrialization of Iran has shifted to industry much of the former emphasis on agriculture. During the last five years of the period, the share of agriculture in the GNP declined from somewhat under 25 percent to i6 percent. Despite its decreasing part, agriculture in 1972/3 was still responsible for the largest portion of consumer expenditures, and agricultural products, notably such traditional items as carpets, dried fruit and nuts continued to rank next below oil as Iran's largest exports, and so were the second largest provider of the country's foreign exchange.

Psychologists attribute great significance to slips of the tongue. In such moments, the train of normal speech is interrupted by a word that seems to be out of context. Yet analysts say that this interruption actually betrays an inner truth hidden, consciously or not, behind the screen of “normal” speech. I suggest here that the 1931 Arab–Jewish transportation strike against the Mandatory government in Palestine can be seen as a historical slip of the tongue in the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Historical sociology has long been concerned with the study of organized state violence. Since the mid-1970s, a substantial body of work has come to focus on the importance of warfare to historical processes of state formation. The first generation of this literature proposed that the relentless existential struggle between the warring polities of medieval Europe had favored the survival of states that could adopt ever more efficient means to extract and mobilize resources from the local population to feed the war effort. Early states therefore evolved the institutions to collect taxes and administer territory largely as a functional byproduct of interstate military competition. From this perspective, the logic of war making was the driving force behind the rise of the modern state in Europe.

From 1891 to 1911, a disenfranchised shaykh of the Muntafiq tribe, Saʿdun al-Mansur, led a large uprising against Ottoman rule in southern Iraq. Feeling that he had been disinherited from properties that were his birthright, he fought battle after battle against rival family claimants, shaykhs in Arabia and the Gulf, and reformist Ottoman governors in Baghdad and Basra. This article analyzes Saʿdun's insurgency both within the context of his life and against the background of shifting socioeconomic and political events in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf at the turn of the 20th century. One of the last rebellions against Ottoman central authority in southern Iraq, the insurgency was also notable for the indirect but intriguing links between the rebel shaykh and his nominal overlord Sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid II, who paid special attention to the rebel's fate.

“They say the city never sleeps, they say it bursts at the seams. The city rotates and revolves. The city branches out. The city beats, the city bleeds.” This unnamed city is Cairo, Umm al-Dunya or “mother of the world,” at once a vibrant character and the pulsating backdrop of Ahmed Naji's scandal-rousing Istikhdam al-Hayat (Using Life) and countless other works in Egyptian literature. Cairo, Amitav Ghosh has argued in his autobiographical chronicle of historical research and anthropological fieldwork in the Egyptian Delta in 1980 and beyond, is “Egypt's own metaphor for itself.” If that is the case, what does this sprawling and pervasive synecdoche reveal and what does it obscure?

Since at least the 1930s, Palestine has had a continuous role as a laboratory of counterinsurgency. During the British Mandate, Palestine saw a consolidation of the techniques of imperial policing and the development of a complex military-legal apparatus of control, from “security fences” and watchtowers to mass incarceration and collective punishment to emergency laws and administrative detention. Palestine has continued to be the setting for counterinsurgency military exercises, with Israel incorporating the British Mandate laws in its legal corpus and British military practice in its doctrines. Based on extensive primary research, this essay traces the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice and the legal apparatuses that uphold it and argues that both in the incorporation of British transmission of doctrine, law, and practice from Palestine, and in the Israeli military's deployment of new and transportable techniques of control, Palestine has been gradually transformed into a central node of military knowledge/power within a global matrix of counterinsurgency.