This essay starts by accepting Cécile Fabre's argument in her book Spying through a Glass Darkly that intelligence work, including using incentives and pressures to encourage betrayal and treason, can be morally justified based on the criteria of necessity, effectiveness, and proportionality. However, while assessments of spying tend to be based on Cold War notions, I explore it here in the messier reality of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and “new wars.” In addition, I suggest a methodological expansion: adding a sociological perspective to the ethical discussion by exploring the wider effects on society, over longer periods, of the operation of informers. Based on these shifts in perspective and context, I identify additional social harms generated by espionage that should lead to a more restrictive view of ethical espionage than the one emerging from Fabre's work. I argue that many of these social harms are created by the mass recruitment of informers, in asymmetrical conflicts where governments have leverage over suspected communities, and given the (often mistaken) belief that everyone recruited to act as informer is an “asset,” primarily providing advantages. I argue, therefore, that the decisive issue is one of scale: many of the ethical problems created by espionage in these contexts result from the widespread systematic recruitment of informers, while small-scale, targeted, ad-hoc recruitment can more easily avoid such problems.

In summer 2014, southern Israel experienced rocket attacks from the Hamas-ruled Gaza strip on a nearly daily basis for over 50 consecutive days. We exploit this unexpected escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and variation across localities in Israel in the amount of sirens that warned of rocket attacks to measure the effect of conflict intensity on birth weight and gestation length among pregnant women during this period. In addition to the common notion that conflict intensity induces stress and anxiety, we show changes in prenatal care in response to sirens. This maternal behavioral response varies based on socioeconomic status, which ultimately differentially affected birth outcomes. While mothers ranked high socioeconomically likely had the resources to increase their prenatal care and shield their fetuses from the negative shock of sirens, mothers ranked low socioeconomically did not have these resources and even decreased prenatal care.

Pre-transitional justice activities that expose past injustices during entrenched conflicts can incite strong reactions among actors who feel threatened by or dislike such activities, and who thus attempt to silence controversial truths. This article illuminates how attempts to silence controversial truths, in parallel with shutting down debate, can also have the unintended outcome of enlarging public discourse on previously marginalised issues. Thus, paradoxically, efforts to curb freedom of expression sometimes result instead in an expanded public capacity to debate previously silenced truths about the conflict. We conduct a case study of reactions to pre-transitional justice in Israeli society focusing on the so-called Nakba Law, enacted in 2011. Through interviews with members of the non-governmental organisation Zochrot, politicians, teachers and media persons, we first show the relationship between pre-transitional justice and enacting the Nakba Law. We then demonstrate that while the Nakba Law indeed aimed to hamper freedom of expression, it also enabled increased public knowledge about the meaning of Nakba. Our theoretical proposition regarding this paradox, in this case activated by instigating new memory laws, is highly relevant to other conflicts-in-resolution that experience pre-transitional justice processes.

This article analyses third-party mediation of identity-based conflicts, which are notoriously difficult to resolve. It seeks to reconcile the contradiction in the mediation literature between the need for less coercive strategies to ensure ownership of a peace agreement and the need for more coercive strategies to reach a final agreement. Through an analysis of mediation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the article makes four contributions to existing literature. First, the article develops a theoretical ‘best fit’ model that proposes a u-shaped relationship between intensity of mediator coercion and transition through phases of negotiation. Second, it challenges the prevailing notion that pre-negotiation does not involve coercion. Third, it suggests that epistemological and ontological understandings of a conflict and the role of a mediator by both the mediator and the parties mean that mediators enjoy limited capacity to effectively shift from high- to low-coercive strategies. Multi-party mediation can provide the flexibility needed to execute the coercion u-curve effectively. Fourth, it challenges existing understandings of the US-mediated negotiations during the Annapolis process, 2007–08.

This article analyses the scope of the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank. The author has found that this scope differs fundamentally between acts of direct transfer and indirect transfer because of Israel's status as a non-member state of the Rome Statute of the ICC and the specific nature of Article 8(2)(b)(viii). Whereas procedural arguments relating to third party rights do not prove to be valid jurisdictional obstacles, the Court's temporal and territorial jurisdiction could nevertheless be limited to acts of direct population transfer committed after April 2015. In conclusion, the article argues that the most promising strategy for the Office of the Prosecutor would be to focus on recent large-scale instances of direct transfer.

The Principle of Competitive Exclusion, first articulated by Gause in 1934, states that two species or populations cannot inhabit the same niche: one will consistently out-compete the other. Of four possible outcomes, the logistic equations that describe such interaction present only one possibility for coexistence, that being when the density-dependent mechanisms of one population become activated before intergroup competition eliminates the other. In applying Gause's Principle as an explanatory model to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this research explores the present bantustanization of the West Bank as a logical outcome of interspecific competition, but sees the competition coefficients of the equations as the key factors in promoting a stable equilibrium.

This paper examines the efforts of the European Union to advance Security Sector Reform and to bridge the gap with the Judiciary Sector Reform and the rule of law in the Occupies Palestinian Territories. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the EU engaged actively in the state-building project in the Occupied Palestinian Territories by taking a number of initiatives in situ. Security has been a key issue in all Israeli-Palestinian agreements concluded during the post-1993 Oslo interim period up to 1999 and then, with the resumption of the Palestinian intifada in 2000, security became primordial to all internationally-sponsored diplomatic initiatives and peace plans. The article analyses the EU initiatives undertaken to help the Palestinian Authority reform its security and judiciary sectors, and argues that while the European Union has, in theory, supported the rule of law perspective in Palestinian Security Sector Reform, in reality it has not paid much attention to improving democratic civilian oversight and accountability.

The impartial and nearly unanimous advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice in the Wall case put the role of politics and diplomacy in the settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in its proper place, within the context of the rule of law. The significance of the opinion goes far beyond the illegality of the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The Court wisely and courageously seized the opportunity of its first direct involvement in the conflict to speak in plain legal terms about the tricky political problems that have ruined the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. It ascertained the present responsibility of the United Nations to protect Palestine's statehood. It affirmed the applicability of the prohibition of acquisition of Palestinian territory by Israel and confirmed the illegality of the Israeli settlements in the OPT. Moreover, the existence of the Palestinian people as the rightful claimant to the OPT is no longer open to question. One may only regret that the UN was not able to ask the Court to throw light on the Palestinian question at a much earlier stage.