Social Crisis Prevention: A Political Alert Index for the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Abstract

This study presents a novel approach to crisis prevention based on data on premonitory political and religious events and the international media coverage of publicly sensitive circumstances. We implement our method to the IsraelPalestine conflict. First we identify two main political scenarios associated with "good" and "bad" political times of low or high levels of political unrest using a hierarchical clustering technique. Then we construct a political alert index to predict the probability of occurrence of good and bad times. Bad times are positively and significantly associated with the number of Israeli victims at the checkpoints, the number of homeless or injured Palestinians and with the number of demolitions. The number of Palestinian prisoners and injured Israelis negatively affect the probability of occurrence of a bad time. Media coverage is positively and significantly associated with the transition to bad times. Our results show that our statistical tool can be a reliable method for early warning of social crisis and can be effectively replicated to other social crisis situations.

Relationship between body mass index and women’s body image, self-esteem and eating behaviours in pregnancy: A cross-cultural study

“…(Haertsch et al, 1999) Israeli women have 12 procedures (State of Israel, Ministry of Health, 2012) including more than 8 genetic tests required for Jewish Ashkenazi women including fragile-X and Tay-Sachs (Sher et al, 2003). Moreover, as Israel is a country which suffers from the threat of continuous conflict (De Palma et al, 2013; Meijer, 1985), we hypothesised that the differences in everyday life and potentially higher levels of stress for Israeli women might affect levels of self-esteem, body image and eating behaviours during pregnancy.…”