THE PALESTINIAN CASE AND ITS PLACE ON RUSSIA’S FOREIGN POLICY AGENDA

The events of the “Arab spring” and its consequences as well as the “Iranian threat”, which became a key security challenge for the Gulf States, not without the efforts of Benjamin Netanyahu and supported by the pro-Israel Trump administration (2016-2020), seemed to have removed the Palestinian case from the priority list of Middle East issues. The role of Russia, the traditional partner of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) since Soviet times, also looked more low- key after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, especially amid resolution of the military-political crisis in Syria. Russian diplomacy on the Palestinian track remained unnoticed compared to the activity in the region of Donald Trump’s envoys, who promoted a peace plan for settling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict known as the “deal of the century”. Having failed to achieve the main goal, the White House contributed to the signing of the “The Abraham Accords”, which was a breakthrough given that the Arab states declared the solution of the Palestinian issue as precondition for formal relations with the Jewish state. If Arab-Israeli normalization continues, Israel will have peace treaties with more than half of the Arab and Muslim states despite the deadlock in the peace process with the Palestinians. Based on the analysis of political processes amid the unresolved Palestinian problem, and above all, Russia’s attempts as a mediator to achieve a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the author suggests that the Palestinian issue has not lost its political significance and relevance as much as the Israeli government under Netanyahu tries to sell it.

"If you rake me over the coals…" – The Emotional Intelligence of Benjamin Netanyahu: The Prime Minister of Israel, as Perceived by Israeli Citizens

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, held the premiership for the longest period in the history of the Jewish nation. He considered as a very strong and influential leader. Leadership has manifestations of Emotional Intelligence (EI). The study aims to construct new knowledge about how Israeli citizens perceive the EI of Netanyahu. Questionnaire was sent to 414 Israeli participants who own first academic degree or above. Results show that the Israeli citizens perceived Bibi’s EI as high, with average of 5.08 out of 7. It was assumed that in order to achieve his goals, Netanyahu uses also dark side of EI. This study demonstrated that EI could be used with positive-oriented and can also use with negative-oriented. Keywords: emotional intelligence, Benjamin Netanyahu, leadership, dark EI

Los retos del presidente Biden en el Medio Oriente tras los ¿éxitos? obtenidos por el ex -presidente Trump. De Trump a Biden ¿ruptura o continuidad?

La zona del Medio Oriente ha encontrado en los últimos tiempos unos vigorosos rayos de luz en las relaciones árabes-israelíes, como lo demuestran los ya conocidos Acuerdos de Abraham, liderados por el ya ex-presidente Donald Trump y por el también ya ex-primer ministro israelí Benjamin Netanyahu. Quedan, sin embargo, dos grandes temas muy importantes sin resolver: uno de ellos es el de Irán y los grupos armados apoyados masivamente por Teherán, como Hamás, Hezbolláh y otros que empiezan a tener una cierta relevancia tanto en Irak como en Siria, como lo pone de relieve la actualidad internacional; y el otro, que es más preciso, atañe a la cuestión del programa nuclear iraní, aspecto que se está tratando actualmente en las negociaciones nucleares de Viena, tras la retirada de los Estados Unidos del acuerdo nuclear de julio de 2015 por parte de Donald Trump. Esto pone de manifiesto que Irán se ha convertido en uno de los actores más importantes de la zona, lo que trae consigo que Israel siga vigilando de cerca sus actividades, y no solo las nucleares, sino también la de los diversos grupos armados que se encuentran bajo su patrocinio económico, militar y político.

La doctrina Netanyahu. Un cambio de paradigma en la política exterior de Israel

En los casi 75 años de existencia del Estado de Israel, su política exterior ha mantenido una cierta continuidad. Algunos primeros ministros como David Ben-Gurión, Menahem Begin, Issac Rabín han dado giros a la política exterior que a largo plazo han condicionado el futuro de Israel. El pasado verano Benjamín Netanyahu salió del gobierno después de más de doce años en el cargo convirtiéndose en el mandatario israelí que más tiempo ha permanecido en el cargo. A lo largo de estos años, Benjamín Netanyahu ha introducido importantes reformas estructurales en país. Uno de estos campos ha sido la política exterior donde se puede considerar que se ha instalado una doctrina propia, la Doctrina Netanyahu. Este artículo tratará de construir los puntos fundamentales que componen esta doctrina de política exterior. Se adoptará una aproximación interpretativa usando los discursos más importantes de Benjamín Netanyahu.

The Impoliteness Strategies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Twitter

Deep Neural Network Analysis for Environmental Study of Coral Reefs in the Gulf of Eilat (Aqaba)

Coral reefs are undergoing a severe decline due to ocean acidification, seawater warming and anthropogenic eutrophication. We demonstrate the applicability of Deep Learning (DL) for following these changes. We examined the distribution and frequency appearance of the eleven most common coral species at four sites in the Gulf of Eilat. We compared deep learning with conventional census methods. The methods used in this research were natural sampling units via photographing the coral reef, line transects for estimating the cover percentage at the four test sites and deep convolutional neural networks, which proved to be an efficient sparse classification for coral species using the supervised deep learning method. The main research goal was to identify the common coral species at four test sites in the Gulf of Eilat, using DL to detect differences in coral cover and species composition among the sites, and relate these to ecological characteristics, such as depth and anthropogenic disturbance. The use of this method will produce a vital database to follow changes over time in coral reefs, identify trend lines and recommend remediation measures accordingly. We outline future monitoring needs and the corresponding system developments required to meet these.

Deep neural network recognition of shallow water corals in the Gulf of Eilat (Aqaba)

PHASE: PHysically-grounded Abstract Social Events for Machine Social Perception

Image interpretation by iterative bottom-up top-down processing

PHASE: PHysically-grounded Abstract Social Events for Machine Social Perception

The ability to perceive and reason about social interactions in the contextof physical environments is core to human social intelligence and human-machinecooperation. However, no prior dataset or benchmark has systematicallyevaluated physically grounded perception of complex social interactions that gobeyond short actions, such as high-fiving, or simple group activities, such asgathering. In this work, we create a dataset of physically-grounded abstractsocial events, PHASE, that resemble a wide range of real-life socialinteractions by including social concepts such as helping another agent. PHASEconsists of 2D animations of pairs of agents moving in a continuous spacegenerated procedurally using a physics engine and a hierarchical planner.Agents have a limited field of view, and can interact with multiple objects, inan environment that has multiple landmarks and obstacles. Using PHASE, wedesign a social recognition task and a social prediction task. PHASE isvalidated with human experiments demonstrating that humans perceive richinteractions in the social events, and that the simulated agents behavesimilarly to humans. As a baseline model, we introduce a Bayesian inverseplanning approach, SIMPLE (SIMulation, Planning and Local Estimation), whichoutperforms state-of-the-art feed-forward neural networks. We hope that PHASEcan serve as a difficult new challenge for developing new models that canrecognize complex social interactions.