The chapter delves into the iconic imagery and contested legacy of Moshe Dayan as the “minister of victory” during the Six-Day War. It examines the strategic decisions and military maneuvers orchestrated by Dayan, shedding light on his pivotal role in shaping the objective and management of the war. The emphasizing his focus on neutralizing the Egyptian military threat and avoiding unnecessary entanglements with other Arab armies. Dayan’s adaptability and opportunistic approach to seizing fleeting opportunities are highlighted, underscoring his influence on major decisions while attempting to minimize intervention in routine management. Furthermore, the chapter delves into Dayan’s considerations of international sensitivities, particularly regarding the Holy Basin and the potential involvement of the Soviet Union. The controversy surrounding the war’s objectives and priorities, as well as the tensions between the political and military echelons, is also examined. Additionally, the chapter delves into Dayan’s interactions with political figures and military leaders, revealing the complexities and challenges he faced in navigating the rapidly evolving dynamics of the war.

The chapter provides a detailed account of the second part of Yom Kippur War, starting with the turning point in the war on October 12. It highlights the existential danger that Israel’s leaders believed they faced before the turning point and how Israel’s leaders strategized and made a bold move to cross the canal and encircle Egypt’s Third Army, a move that changed the course of the war. It also discusses the differences in approach between Dayan and Elazar in achieving a ceasefire and how Israel’s leaders used a ruse or move to force one of their enemies to lay down their arms. It also sheds light on the difficult decisions that leaders must make during times of crisis, such as Dayan’s decision to give the order to prevent more losses that could weaken the new defense line. The chapter also discusses the aftermath of the war, including the establishment of a National Commission of Inquiry, the Agranat Commission, to examine the war’s prelude and conduct until October 8. It held the military echelon responsible for the catastrophe, a decision which escalated antigovernment protests and calls for Dayan’s and Meir’s resignations.

This chapter investigates the life and ideas of Syrian dissident thinker Jawdat Said, who attempts to balance an absolute moral obligation to bear witness with a systematic rejection of political compulsion through scriptural models from Abel to Bilal ibn Rabah.

Chapter 2 provides background on the WPS Agenda and UN mediation. It first discusses the politics of the WPS Agenda in the UN by focusing on three main dynamics: how UN actors articulate what the WPS Agenda is, how the UN's mediation architecture has adopted the Agenda, and how actors within the UN resist the Agenda, both passively and actively. It then provides an overview of the UN's mediation role and how it is institutionalised. The chapter illustrates the different forms UN mediation can take by describing three processes that come up throughout the book: the Great Lakes of Africa (which deals with the national and regional dimensions of the conflict in the DR Congo), Syria, and Yemen. This chapter is especially useful for readers who may not be familiar with the WPS Agenda in the UN system and/or UN mediation.

Chapter 6 analyses narrative representations of local women, who feature throughout UN mediation texts as ‘the women’. This subject position is multifaceted and articulated differently according to different logics of UN mediation. Especially within the logic of UN mediation as a science, ‘the women’ are expected to play a legitimating, information-providing role to support the UN. This is an extractive, rather than an empowering, relationship. UN narratives position ‘the women’s’ labour as central to mediation effectiveness, but they also question their abilities and authenticity as representatives of their communities. Capacity-building training is one method that the UN, and particularly gender advisors, use to discipline women into appropriate forms of participation. The logic of UN mediation as an art has less use for 'the women' in its narratives and instead questions whether they are 'political enough' to be appropriate representatives in negotiations. In turn, local women resist and navigate the subject position of ‘the women’ through strategic essentialism, critique, or opting out.

This chapter explores whether the arguments in this book can extend to the third type of strategic displacement – depopulation – and not just forced relocation. To do so, it examines the use of displacement by pro-government forces during the civil war in Syria. This chapter analyzes quantitative and qualitative data from a range of sources, including media reports, human rights records, data on violence and displacement collected by nongovernmental organizations, and interviews with activists, journalists, combatants, and regime defectors that were conducted in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon. The findings question the common characterization of state-induced displacement in Syria as ethno-sectarian cleansing and challenge the notion that these tactics have been intended solely, or even primarily, to achieve demographic change. The regime induced displacement to separate and differentiate the loyal from the disloyal, improve the “legibility” of local communities, and extract much-needed revenues, military recruits, and symbolic benefits from the population – showing that strategies of depopulation can also exhibit the sorting logic of strategic displacement, similar to strategies of forced relocation.

The framing of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in relation to the postwar Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region grafted a political geography onto a broad range of ecological areas. Planners, drawing on climate models, classified the region in agro-ecological terms devised in reference to the tropics. Functionally, their logic shored up a focus on rainfed, or unirrigated, agriculture in semi-arid and arid lands. But their rendering of dry areas masked the geopolitical framing of international agricultural research in the postwar period. Born of the Cold War, ICARDA emerged from exercises of European imperialism, Great Power rivalries, and the improvisation of modern nation-states in Western Asia and North Africa. The chapter charts the imperial origins of international agricultural research in Syria, the Cold War on hunger, and CGIAR’s classification of arid regions, towards an account of (1) the geopolitical logic of international agricultural research and (2) dryland agricultural science as the ground for technological and political intervention in decolonized lands.

A synthetic, concluding discussion addressing the relationship between Ur-Aeolic and Special Mycenean and providing a historical framework for, especially, the introduction of Aeolic language and culture (pre-Thessalian/Boeotian) into European Greece following the Bronze-Age collapses and for the spread of pre-Aeolians (Iron-Age Ahhiyawans) eastward into Cilicia.

This chapter investigates how civilians sort truth from lies in the context of the Syrian civil war. In particular, it plumbs a rich batch of semi-structured interviews conducted with Syrian refugees in Turkey that was generously shared by Schon (2020). These interviews include people’s confidence in their truth discernment ability – their ability to distinguish true vs. false information – during the war, along with detailed information on what they heard and experienced while they were in Syria. The chapter analyzes these interviews with a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative analyses show that those who spent longer in Syria, witnessed a wider range of events in the war, and explicitly rely on personal experience to assess new information are much more confident in their truth discernment ability. This is supported by ample qualitative material from the interviews, which demonstrates how Syrian refugees put stock in many of these same factors and drew many of these same connections themselves when discussing informational dynamics in the war.

This chapter analyzes the history of preventive attacks against nuclear programs. It identifies when nuclear latency invites military conflict. It includes four detailed case studies: US-considered use of military force against Iran, the North Korea Nuclear Crisis, Israel’s preventive strike against Syria, and the US-considered use of force against Syria.

Part III centers on eastern Mediterranean places loosely designated as the “Holy Land” in British heritage discourse. Sites in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria were especially important within Christianity, generating new biblical historicisms in the face of geological deep time and a booming tourism industry. However, the same cultural heritage that underwrote British imperialism and articulated a mission to modernize the “East” maintained that some historically significant places should be preserved. This tension is central to the temporal forms of ruin and profanation, which I define in Part III. The desire to claim Eastern sites as the origin of Western culture conflicted with the simultaneous desire to distance current populations there as “Other.” Laying claim to the history of a place like Palmyra, an ancient Roman city in Syria still popular with Western observers, both complicated and facilitated the relationship with present life there.

The Roman conquests in the western Mediterranean saw the arrival of Roman coins, but in the east the local coinages at first remained and were manipulated.

Since the 1930s, archaeologists have excavated over 300 mosaics at Antioch and its environs. This essay explores the developments and historiography on Antioch’s mosaics as well as new methodological approaches.