This chapter concludes the book and considers its major theoretical and practical implications. It begins by exploring how the book pushes us to think about fake news and factual misperceptions as an important “layer” of war – a layer that has been largely neglected despite the burgeoning attention to these issues in other domains. This final chapter then examines what the book’s findings tell us about such topics as the psychology and behavior of civilian populations, the duration of armed conflicts, the feasibility of prevailing counterinsurgency models, and the depths and limits of misperceptions more broadly in social and political life. It also engages with the practical implications of the book for policymakers, journalists, activists, and ordinary politically engaged citizens in greater depth, exploring how the problems outlined in the research might also be their own solutions. Ultimately, this chapter shows how the book has something to offer to anyone who is interested in the dynamics of truth and falsehood in violent conflicts (and beyond) – and perhaps the beginnings of a framework for those who would like to cultivate more truth.

The conclusion situates this volume in its wider historical context and assesses the gains derived from the methodology it employs. Unlike its situation after 1948, during the last decades of Ottoman rule Gaza was in no way an anomaly but rather an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. This contrast helps better understand depictions of Gaza in current day discourse: it was never integrated into any modern nation-state, and more closely resembles a relic of the pre-nation-state period. Countering the widespread fallacy that Gaza does not fit into any meaningful historical narrative, this work reimagines Gaza without the cumulative effects of the successive catastrophic events since WWI and the strictures of the Gaza Strip, but rather in terms of its multiple connections in time and space as they evolved over the centuries. Its reliance on an empirical, source-driven GIS-supported methodology constitutes a major advance that highlights the centrality of political factionalism for the city and its region and sheds light on the lifeworlds of Gaza’s commoner population. Overall, this work provides a rich terrain for formulating new hypotheses on social strategies in Gaza’s society and examining the strategic constructedness of claims found in contemporary texts.

Chapter 4 begins with a look at the decline of the IDF’s once-unassailable reputation due to perceived failures on the battlefield. In the aftermath of the debacle of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the IDF underwent important changes, mirroring changes in Israeli society, which negatively impacted the generals’ role in shaping public opinion. The second Intifada, moreover, led the general public to conclude that Israel lacked a Palestinian negotiating partner – a widely accepted opinion that has been firmly entrenched in Israeli society in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The “no partner” mantra has further diminished the generals’ clout given the security establishment’s association with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This chapter also addresses the implications of the national religious camp’s ascent and its increased influence in both the IDF and in the political arena.

This chapter explores the consequences of war for water security and insecurity. It maps out and analyses four main ways in which war matters for water: through infrastructure destruction; through population displacement; through the expropriation of resources and infrastructures; and through war’s profound if mostly indirect ramifications for state-building and development. Empirically, the chapter draws on evidence from across the divided environments considered in this book, including the ongoing wars in South Sudan, Syria and Lake Chad, the 2003–5 Darfur war, recent Israeli wars on Gaza and key historical conflagrations such as the 1948–9 Arab-Israeli war. The chapter argues through all of this that war is deeply contradictory, being simultaneously highly destructive and highly productive in its water security consequences. And it argues that this is likely to remain the case in an era of climate disruption: while, for some, war is likely is have sharply negative climate vulnerability consequences, it is nonetheless also the case, the chapter shows, that adaptive capacities are often founded on infrastructures and hierarchies of political violence.

These were the years of Netanyahu’s reign in power. The Hamas took over the Gaza Strip. Israel went to another was in Lebanon in 2006 and assaulted repeatedly the Gaza Strip as a retaliation for the Hamas war of liberation. The West Bank was domiciled; the peace process dead; and the Knesset passed a number of racist laws against the Palestinian minority in Israel. Israel’s international image was damaged, but it still had the support of governments all around the world.

Following unsuccessful attempts to keep the descendants of Nebuchadnezzar II on the throne, the usurper Nabonidus became king. Persian tribes had moved into Elamite lands, and the Medes made Harran a dangerous city; Nabonidus‘ mother, an aged acolyte of Ashurbanipal, resided there. His lengthy inscriptions are informative about his deeds and his character. He dedicated his daughter to the Moon-god at Ur according to precedent, and spent ten years in Arabia, leaving his son Belshazzar in charge in Babylon. He returned and restored the temple in Harran. Cyrus the Great brought his rule to an end, but continued to employ some high officials. Cyrus was probably of mixed Elamite and Persian descent. The Cyrus Cylinder, inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform for a Babylonian audience, used traditional denigration of the previous king Nabonidus, and acknowledged Marduk as Babylon’s god. In another cuneiform text, Nabonidus was mocked for his scholarly pretensions and for sacrilegious acts. Babylon continued to be the centre where all subsequent kings felt obliged to celebrate the New Year festival to be accepted as legitimate rulers. Old monuments were not defaced. Cyrus may have been responsible for an imitation of Babylon’s glazed bricks at Persepolis. He made his son Cambyses co-regent.

The post-Oslo period in which this study is situated refers both to the buoyancy of a potential reconciliation in the immediate wake of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords and the subsequent demise of a viable two-state solution. As evidenced in this chapter, perceptions of the formulation of the Oslo Accords and the reasons for the agreement’s key successes and failures remain a subject of narrative dissent. Rather than provide the reconciliatory framework and confidence-building measures to address past grievances, as was intended through the interim nature of the 1993 agreement, the post-Oslo period therefore witnessed an ongoing irreconcilability of key narratives. This chapter offers both a holistic understanding of the political and societal impact of these historic accords and an overview of the key events that were influenced by – and affected – subsequent implementation and interpretations of the Oslo peace agreements. The events and societal trends highlighted in this chapter do not provide an exhaustive analysis of Israeli-Jewish or Palestinian politics in the post-Oslo era; however, they do seek to render formative insights into the societal underpinnings that explain the rise and persistence of exclusionary identity politics that form the main interest of this work.

Chapter 7 presents the historical reality of the period between the murder of Sennacherib in 681 BCE and the defeat of Assyria at the borders of Egypt in 673 BCE. Scholars did not consider the historical reality of Egypt and Kush, which excludes portraying Taharqa as a heroic victorious figure after 671 BCE, after which he could not have been depicted as the savior, who would come to the rescue of Jerusalem, since during the period from 671 BCE until his death in 664 BCE he was repeatedly defeated by the Assyrians and his kingdom conquered and subjugated. Thus, only a narrow window of opportunity can be detected for the composition of BII – the years between the murder of Sennacherib (681) and the conquest of Egypt by Assyria (671). During this period Assyria suffered a disastrous defeat, which might have been portrayed as the intervention of God’s angel in Isa 37:36. After the conquest of Egypt by Assyria in 671 BCE and the expulsion of the Kushites from Egypt never to return, Taharqa’s elevation to the role of savior would be highly improbable.

In Chapter 5, it is shown that Source BI reflects the events and atmosphere during the days of the Assyrian campaign of Sennacherib in 701 BCE. The Assyrians devastated Judah in Sennacherib’s third campaign – a claim corroborated by 2 Kgs 18:14–16; Mic 1:10–16 and Isa 1:4–9, and the extensive archaeological excavations and surveys of the Judean kingdom. 2 Kings 18:14–16 (source A) preserves an account of Hezekiah’s subjugation to Sennacherib and payment of an enormous tribute. Hezekiah’s submission occurred, according to the biblical narrative, at the beginning of Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah. Following the payment, Sennacherib sent his envoys to demand Hezekiah’s capitulation. The Assyrian annals describe the total submission of Hezekiah and a victory over his Egyptian allies. Hezekiah remained king of Judah and was not punished. The original Source BI, portraying the events during the 701 campaign, did not contain a description of an Assyrian defeat nor of the murder of Sennacherib, which occurred twenty years after his campaign to the Levant.

Already in 1886, Stade suggested that the Hezekiah-Isaiah narrative is a composite literary creation. He detected literary seams and suggested a combination of three sources. Source A: A chronistic record (2 Kgs 18:14–16, which is absent in Isaiah). Two further independent traditions about the deliverance from the Assyrian threat have been combined into one story: (a) Source B1: 2 Kgs 18:13, 17–19:9a and (b) Source B2: 2 Kgs 19:9b–37. Most scholars have accepted the identification of two consecutive accounts with an almost similar development of the narrative. Some scholars suggested different reconstructions of the putative sources and distinguish up to six strands spanning for hundreds of years.

Recently, proponents of the synchronic literary approach analysed the Hezekiah-Sennacherib narrative (Isa 36–37/2 Kgs 18:13–19:37) as a coherent literary composition; some include the putative source A, while others exclude it. They are mainly focused on the message, meaning, devices of writing, and form and structure of the narrative as it stands in its final form.

This chapter continues the bottom-up approach to history with a focus on a specific day of crowd action, Quds Day. History infuses this day of protest with immense meaning and importance. In the 1970s all revolutionary factions in Iran championed throughout the region were championing Palestinian liberation, and the Islamists institutionalized the emancipation of Palestine as an integral part of the state’s ideology after consolidating power. Freeing Palestine became part of the nation’s visual culture, and the discourse of Palestinian liberation was taught to a generation of Iranian youth raised under the banner of the Islamic Republic. The state even designated the last Friday of Ramadan as Quds Day (Jerusalem Day). Thirty years later, Iranian youth used the occasion of Jerusalem Day to circumvent the security crackdown, re-emerging to protest the election results and the state that had ratified them. They used specific Palestine-centered imagery and slogans to either negate the state, or to legitimate their own uprising and portray the state as the usurper of power akin to Israel. The protest was continued online with specific digital displays of subversion.