Book Review: Apartheid in Palestine: Hard Laws and Harder Experiences by Ghada Ageel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ageel, Ghada, ed. Apartheid in Palestine: Hard Laws and Harder Experiences. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2016. xiv + 268 pages. Paperback, $59.95. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complex political conundrum which leaves observers little or no room to objectively discuss the situation without blaming one party. An attempt to objectively provide any analysis on the conflict is considered subjective as there are two schools of thought: the right of Israel to exist as a state versus how Palestinians driven from their homes in (p. 4). Yet, as editor and political science professor Ghada Ageel (herself a childhood victim of cruel treatment in the Gaza strip) contends, no matter how thorough an analysis may be, the fact is that Palestinians are confined to an open-air prison guided by the Israeli military. In addition, despite the depiction of Palestinians as terrorists in literature, since 1948 Israelis have killed more Palestinians than vice versa and the trend is not changing This three-part book presents different views through the lenses of many: academicians, politicians, activists, Israelis, and most importantly, the indigenous Palestinians. Parts One and Two of Apartheid in Palestine: Hard Laws and Harder Experiences reflect the hardship conditions under which Palestinians have lived since 1948, and continue to live under the Israeli occupation which has crippled [Palestinians] by the constraints of segregation, the chains of occupation, and many discriminatory measures including... the wall of apartheid (p.18). However, Part Three of the book presents both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian situation through a more objective lens, including analyses by academics and experts. In Part One, Indigenous Voices, the book conspicuously portrays Israel not only as the occupier but as the oppressor. The hard laws and policies toward the Palestinians make the defenceless, oppressed people live in perpetual fear. While it could be argued that the emotional accounts captured in the book allowed Palestinians to tell their stories in their own words, it is possible that some of these stories have been exaggerated. However, these stories do conform to what other oppressed people such as the American Indians of North America, the indigenous people of Brazil, and enslaved Africans have told in the literature. (1) Part Two of the book, Activist Views, collectively trumpets the Palestinian story for international attention. Here, activists not only support the Palestinian cause, but also organize its resistance into a non-violent for the international mainstream media. Interestingly, not all the activists are Palestinians. As Huwaida Arraf notes, there were other people who sympathized with the Palestinians and wanted better living conditions for the oppressed. For example, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) co-founded by Arraf and others, including Israeli activist Neta Golan. The goal of the activist group was to support and strengthen the Palestinian popular resistance by providing the Palestinian people with a resource, international protection, and a voice with which to resist, non-violently an over whelming military occupation force (p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".