Clive Jones

Clive Jones is senior lecturer in the School for Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. He has published widely in the field of Middle East policies and security studies and is author of Soviet Jewish Aliyah (Frank Cass, 1996), co-author of Israel: the Challenge to Democracy, Identity and the State (Routledge, 2002 with Emma Murphy) and co-editor of International Security in a Global Age (Frank Cass, 2000 with Caroline Kennedy-Pipe) <email: iiscaj@leeds.ac.uk>.

This article analyses the rationale behind the pursuit of nuclear energy by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, a rationale that is best understood by a particular construct of “stateness”. While the drive towards nuclear energy is justified by a growing demographic, it is also about the projection of prestige which cuts to the very core of regime legitimacy. This in turn feeds into the growing ideational competition between and among the Gulf states and Iran, with nuclear energy increasingly being “securitised” in pursuit of this “stateless”. However, the development of a nuclear programme by Saudi Arabia in particular has come to test the normative frameworks that have hitherto regulated the transfer of nuclear technologies. With regionalism in retreat, and concern over the longer-term commitment of the United States to underpin Gulf security, the development of nuclear energy in the Gulf is leading to a truly “atomised” security complex, the dynamic of which can like...

Beset by multiple security challenges, not least the emergence of a powerful Al Qaeda franchise, Yemen appears the antithesis of the “Weberian” state model. But while these challenges are acute, they should be seen as part of a wider “political field,” dominated by powerful tribes and conditioned by patrimonial networks that have long framed the modes of political exchange between the center and periphery. This remains crucial to understanding the wider eddies of tribal politics in Yemen, and in turn, the limits of a purely military response by Washington as it seeks to confront Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

This article explores intelligence collaboration between British Intelligence and the Jewish Agency during the Second World War. Most accounts of this period highlight the functional nature of this collaboration, accounts that inevitably have come to be viewed through the prism of the Holocaust, and with it the prevailing sense that Britain offered ‘too little too late to help’ in using its clandestine assets to help rescue the remnants of European Jewry. By focusing however on collaboration primarily between the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Jewish Agency, this article argues that intelligence liaison and collaboration at an operational level was closer and less conditioned by adherence to stated British government policy than hitherto suggested

Aviv’s advantage proved decisive . . . The fate of Wadi Salib was sealed primarily . . . by urban planning, which brought about its final demise’, whereas the value of the houses declined, that of the urban land increased (p.164). In recent years, ‘in the wake of the construction of courts of law serving Haifa and the North . . . law and accountancy offices have begun to purchase plots in what was Wadi Salib’. In the ‘Epilogue’ (pp.177–83), Yfaat relates the story of a Palestinian refugee and his wife, Ghassan Kanafani, who tells the story of his youth in Haifa, from his present residence in Beirut. It was after the 1967 war; ‘Said and Safiya’, the protagonists of this story, are residents of Ramallah, and have been given the chance to visit Haifa where they were born. In the panic of their flight from Haifa in 1948 ‘Safiya had lost her son’, a few months old at the time. It was now nearly 20 years later and the couple had assumed that the toddler was killed during the battle. The couple was driving through streets they had not seen for 20 years, yet Said told his wife that ‘he was driving his car as though he had not been away those twenty bitter years’ (p.177). When Said and Safiya arrived at their previous home, they were met by its present occupant, Miriam Goshen, a holocaust survivor who had been given the empty apartment upon her arrival in Haifa in 1948. ‘Between them stands the intermediate link, the son, Khaldun-Dov, who enters the dwelling in Israeli army uniform. . .’ (p.179). Even his name is significant, Ibn Khaldun was a well-known Muslim historian, whereas Dov means ‘bear’ in Hebrew. The fact that Khaldun, Safiya’s and Said’s son, was in the Israeli army is rather significant. The story of Ghassan Kanafani has been retold many times, for instance by the Hebrew novelist, Sami Michael, an Iraqi Jewish author. However, Yfaat Weiss tells it in a different manner; her book emphasizes the human angle rather than the political.

On 16 January 1968 the Prime Minister, Sir Harold Wilson, in a supplementary statement on British defence policy, announced that the complete withdrawal of British armed forces from the Gulf was to be completed by the end of 1971. This declaration was made in response to chronic problems in the British economy and, in particular, the need to cut defence expenditure in light of the devaluation of the pound announced in November 1967.’ While seen at the time as

Since the beginning of 2003, events in Israel and Palestine have been somewhat overshadowed by the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein. While Washington and London struggle to translate their military success into tangible political gains throughout Iraq, political progress appears to have been made between Israelis and Palestinians. The 'Road Map', with its reciprocal confidence-building measures outlined in three main stages, is designed to secure an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state, living in peace and security with Israel, by December 2005. Like the much-maligned Oslo process however, the 'conceptual' land on which the veracity of the map depends remains prone to political earthquakes. Moreover, as all good cartographers know, there is a distinction between true north and magnetic north. The extent to which either Israel or the Palestinians remain able to readjust their respective conceptual compasses in short, to compromise with each other, let alone their own constituencies, must remain the subject of much circumspection. On 4 June 2003, the triumvirate of President Bush, Prime Minister Abu Mazan, and Prime Minister Sharon reaffirmed their commitment to the Road Map at the end of their summit meeting in Aqaba, Jordan. Yet for Sharon, the more immediate map shaping the political landscape was the one detailing the phased construction of Israel's security fence in and around the West Bank. Many Israelis welcome its construction. They look at the effectiveness of a similar construction around the Gaza Strip and note, approvingly, that only two suicide bombers, both holding British passports, have ever penetrated into Israel proper from an area noted for its support of radical Islamist groups. Moreover, the imposition unilaterally of the fence offers, de facto, a solution to a problem which, above all others, threatens the Jewish character of the state of Israel: demographics. While differences exist over exactly when the demographic curve will reach a critical point, most informed observers are in agreement that given the current disparity in birth rates between Israeli Jews and Palestinians (both within the pre-1967 border and in the Occupied Territories) by 2020 there will be a Palestinian majority in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. In short, the

The role of the private military company (PMC) remains one of the more controversial aspects of security studies. For many, they represent little more than corporate 'dogs of war', beneficiaries of misplaced munificence from donor countries unable or unwilling to intervene in failed ...

BETWEEN TERRORISM AND CIVIL WAR Definitions of the Al-Aqsa intifada have ranged from being part of the global war on terrorism, an asymmetric inter-state war, to being part of the on-going Palestinian struggle for national liberation. All have validity as explanatory ...