This article examines how two recent artworks by Jewish Israeli artists—Paleosol 80 South by Amir Yatziv and Jonathan Doweck (2013), and Ella Littwitz’s Qasr al-Yahud project (2021)—critically engage with the legacy of biblical orientalism and its connection to ongoing colonial and ecological violence in Palestine/Israel. Focusing on biblical sites located in militarized border areas, both artworks self-reflectively invoke the orientalist tropes of wilderness and frontier, alongside typical genres of Western Holy Land literature. Simultaneously, they confront the present-day destruction of these sites through state violence, which turns the orientalist cliché into a reality. The article analyzes the contrasting registers of signification applied to the landscape—scriptural, military, and ecological—and explores how the artworks dramatize the tension between them. In doing so, they expose the mechanisms of power that shape the landscape and trace the marginalized histories that endure in their shadow.

This article examines the emergence of a new politics of vision shaped by the generative capacities of contemporary AI. It argues that generative technologies craft a distinct visual order, one that enables subtle yet devastating forms of harm through anticipation, projection, and the symbolic manipulation of the future by means of visual pre-enactment. I conceptualize this as speculative violence: a form of harm that does not depict bloodshed or explicit brutality but nonetheless embeds erasure and annihilation within the frictionless aesthetic of machine-generated futures. Speculative violence arises when generative AI is mobilized for its forward-oriented capacities in politically charged contexts, enabling images of possible futures to act upon the present; while not limited to war zones, this article focuses on the Israel–Palestine context for reasons of scope. It shows how, by giving visual form to what has not yet occurred, AI contributes to normalize the disappearance of populations and the destruction of places, stripping politically inflammatory ideas of their shock by rendering them aesthetically plausible. A striking instance is the “Riviera of the Middle East” video, circulated by Donald Trump in February 2025, whose synthetic fantasy of Gaza as a luxury resort visually anticipated – and helped normalize – the logic later formalized in policy proposals, such as the G.R.E.A.T. initiative and the 20-Point Peace Plan. More broadly, the article argues that generative AI functions as archival technology. Far from merely recalling past data, it generates speculative futures that accrue into a future archive: a corpus of synthetic images that shape political discourse and collective perception by visually scripting what should be imagined as likely, desirable or inevitable. In examining this archive, the article illuminates how generative AI transforms political imagination into an aestheticized form of world-making, with profound implications for contemporary regimes of power and violence.

This essay examines media bias, U.S. foreign policy, and the selective application of international law in the context of the Gaza Genocide. The author argues that Western governments and mainstream media outlets have consistently misrepresented Israel’s actions, framing them as defensive while erasing a history of Palestinian suffering and rights. Headlines, reporting practices, and editorial decisions shape public perception, creating a persistent disconnect between what occurs on the ground and what is widely understood in the West. Drawing on media analysis, the author highlights how firsthand reporting, social media, and grassroots activism have challenged entrenched narratives. Ultimately, the Gaza Genocide exposes the hypocrisy of the so-called rules-based international order and the notion of a free press, and underscores the need for an accountable media in confronting atrocities.

This article explores the paradoxical phenomenon of far-right “philosemitism,” in which political movements historically steeped in antisemitism present themselves as defenders of Jews and allies of Israel. Drawing on contemporary examples—such as the French National Rally’s claim to be a “shield for Jews,” and the American evangelical alliances with Israel—the study situates these gestures within a longer trajectory of far-right ambivalence toward Jews. While often dismissed by pundits and scholars as simply opportunistic weaponization of antisemitism, these pro-Jewish stances also reveal deeper discursive and ideological functions: self-legitimation, moral licensing, and the repositioning of Jews as symbolic allies against other outgroups. This article identifies such ambivalence in early 20th-century European thought, highlighting case studies from the German Empire where figures such as Börries von Münchhausen, Wilhelm Schwaner, and Max Hildebert Boehm articulated versions of philosemitism that combined admiration with exclusionary imperatives. Across contexts, a recurring logic emerges: a dualistic “Good Jew/Bad Jew” distinction, whereby “authentic” Jews—biblical, assimilated, or nationalist—are praised, while “inauthentic” Jews—cosmopolitan, liberal, or diasporic—are condemned. By historicizing far-right “philosemitism,” its function, and significance, this article is an attempt to combat its harmful normalizing effects.

The Local Government Pension Scheme (“LGPS”) is typically administered by local authorities. Somewhat incongruously with its localised nature, or even recent pooling measures, there are attempts by those campaigning for boycott, divestment and sanctions (“BDS”) against the State of Israel to extend the reach of the town hall into the geopolitical arena. The decision in R. (on the Application of Palestine Solidarity Campaign Ltd.) v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government [2020] UKSC 16 is seen by those BDS activists as providing a self-contained roadmap for LGPS divestments and boycotts. They are mistaken. This article considers the questions that remain to be addressed and the need for local government lawyers to look beyond local government law to the rules of equity. When the principles and rules of equity are violated in adopting divestment or exclusion policies, a court of equity will not hesitate to intervene. This is not equity’s incursion into the local government arena. For insofar as the conduct of administering authorities as fiduciaries, or quasi-trustees, is concerned, it was always there.

War is a lucrative business for the military industry, particularly in contexts of mass and structural violence, extensive violations of international law and genocide. For economically advanced states, the profits generated by military businesses are often seen as beneficial under the dynamics of the military-industrial complex. Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has caused untold suffering that has ‘scarred the consciousness of humanity’, aptly illustrates this dynamic.

In such a context, states and corporations arguably have a duty under international law not to contribute to or benefit from the war economy of the state committing such violations. In practice, however, adhering to these obligations conflicts with the lucrative economic and geopolitical opportunities that this war economy provides. This essay reflects on the argumentative techniques used by states and corporations to justify continued military support for Israel, despite its clear contradiction with their international legal obligations.

In 1958, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority established a fifteen-minute daily Persian-language program targeting Iranian listeners, restarting segments that had begun almost a decade earlier. These broadcasts were written and produced by recent Iranian Jewish immigrants to the country, who brought press and activism experience and expertise from their country of origin. The purpose of these broadcasts was to highlight Israel’s economic and technological achievements, convey its foreign policy perspectives, and strengthen elite connections with Iran. In the process, such broadcasts also became the focal point for an increasingly internationalizing Iranian population, a fact that remained true up to and beyond the country’s 1978–79 revolution. Studies of radio in Israel have noted the medium’s function in both domestic constructions of the new state’s identity and culture as well as public diplomacy facing its enemies and allies. This article shows that Persian-language radio broadcasts served both these purposes, as well as positing a further function in their use as a point of transnational connectivity, beyond relations with Israel alone. In so doing, this article points to the power of listeners in structuring their own communities, even in response to state-centric media campaigns.

This article explores how emotions can affect policies of hostage rescue and recovery. Any hostage rescue/recovery strategy must consider the relative weights of at least three major goals: 1) maximising chance of recovering/rescuing the hostages; 2) punishment of the kidnappers; and 3) avoidance of collateral damage and killing of bystanders. This article will show how an understanding of emotion can help explain why one of these goals comes to dominate another, why one goal fades in importance. The article will argue that a specific combination of two emotions – anger and contempt – drives the elevation of the punishment goal above that of maximising chances of hostage recovery while also greatly diminishing any value of collateral damage avoidance. The article considers these issues with a short case study of hostage taking at Attica Prison in 1971, which serves as a link to the main case – Israel’s post–October 7 hostage policy towards Gaza.

Building on untapped archival documents and press reports, I explore a seeming contradiction underpinning the Israeli authorities’ War on Drugs from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. While the state authorities clamped down on local cannabis users, it was heavily invested in covert cannabis trafficking operations into Egypt, its main enemy at the time. The primary targets of the domestic clampdown were the country’s Jewish consumers of the drug, mainly first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (collectively known as Mizrahim). Provoking latent class, racial, and gendered anxieties, the state authorities used hashish to further marginalize and criminalize Mizrahim in Israel. However, while the state cracked down on Mizrahi hashish dealers and users, the Israeli military was directly involved in large-scale hashish trafficking operations to Egypt. This enterprise aimed to immerse and immobilize the Egyptian population generally—and the Egyptian armed forces specifically—with hashish.