The 14th Annual Conference of the Ezri Center for Iran and Gulf States Research On 30 May 2022, the Ezri Center for Iran and Gulf States Research at the University of Haifa held its 14th Annual Conference on "Iran and the Gulf States in the Shadow of Recent Events". The conference was held in English via zoom, in order to allow for the participation of more scholars from abroad....

Benny Spanier, Orin Shefler, Elai Rettig(eds.) This joint publication by the Maritime Policy & Strategy Research Center (HMS) and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) examines the emerging challenges and threats to maritime “chokepoints” that connect the Arab Gulf with the Mediterranean Sea. As issues such as piracy, autonomous vessels, and deliberate sabotage come to the forefront, this edited volume offers us new insight into how The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) can help ensure the protection of innocent and transit passage in the volatile waters of the Middle East....

The oil and gas business can be complicated. It is often influenced by personal interest, conflicting values and ideologies. This report presents a technological, legal and economic solution for installing an offshore CALM buoy for offloading and exporting condensate[1] from offshore gas fields in Israel, and it also aims to navigate through the aforementioned challenges commonly found in the energy industry with respect to condensate. According to a new government policy, further development of new offshore oil and gas fields[2] will be encouraged in the future and there will be a need to provide satisfactory solutions for disposing of additional condensate and other liquid byproducts that will be produced from such fields....

six postgraduate students from the University of Haifa and the University of the Free State met each other virtually, and held a fruitful webinar where a wide range of research topics were presented, and ideas were shared. This ranged from terrorism and drugs, to liberal democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa, organised crime and political elites in Sub-Saharan Africa, to a study on Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy and a study on China’s maritime activities around the Horn of Africa....

With the signing of the Abraham Accords at the White House on 15 September 2020, a new historic era in relations between Israel and the Arab Gulf States was inaugurated. What was previously a limited, secretive relationship has suddenly flowered into a multi-faceted public courtship. With this backdrop, the University of Haifa’s Ezri Center for Iran & Persian Gulf Studies—operating as part of the Haifa Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center (HMS)—hosted its annual symposium on 3 October 2020 entitled "The Gulf States – from Periphery to Center."...

This research paper is a product of the research collaboration between the Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center, Haifa University (HMS), Israel, and the National Maritime Foundation, New Delhi, with the aim of providing policy recommendations to the respective governments of India and Israel. With reducing resources on land, the oceans have become the next ‘pit stop’ for humans for fulfilling their needs. Today, the oceans and the seas around us are bristling with activities. These activities range from trade, fishing, offshore gas, offshore wind farms, exploration activities for deep seabed mining, marine scientific research, offshore solar farms, submarine cable lying, and many more activities both benign and offensive. For all these activities to be possible, there exists a n...

This research paper is a product of the research collaboration between the Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center, Haifa University (HMS), Israel, and the National Maritime Foundation, New Delhi, with the aim of providing policy recommendations to the respective governments of India and Israel. The issue of climate change continues to hog the lime-light. Even though there is no unanimity in the scientific community about the rate at which climate change is actually occurring, there is no doubt that climate change is actually happening as we speak. Currently, climate change is confined to the field of climatology/ meteorology alone, however, it has implications in many other processes, some of which are natural and some man-made. As the Earth warms up due to climate change, it is r...

This research paper is a product of the research collaboration between the Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center, Haifa University (HMS), Israel, and the National Maritime Foundation, New Delhi, with the aim of providing policy recommendations to the respective governments of India and Israel. Over the past few years, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has generated substantial interest amongst various countries, irrespective of their individual approaches to sustainable growth in their national policies. There is either an increasing keenness to collaborate with China in this initiative or to maintain a guarded and cautious approach. Even the political analysts and policymakers, both admirers and critics, acknowledge that China’s rise and its impact on the world can no longe...

This volume is a collection of the proceedings of the webinar “Developments in the Middle East” that was the first international webinar to mark the academic collaboration between the Ezri Center for Iran & Gulf States Research, University of Haifa, Israel and the Department of Political Studies and Governance, University of the Free State, South Africa....

Nitin Agarwala, Semion Polinov     Abstract Public health emergencies of the likes of epidemics and pandemics have been affecting human life for many years now. Many of these health emergencies have forced humans to bring about radical improvements to the then existing health and safety standards and to improve his living conditions and eventually come out stronger to continue business-as-usual. A public-health-emergency-in-waiting, climate change, is however, likely to change the demographics and the future of humans entirely if changes to the existing business-as-usual model are not made. Though humans have the resilience to fight any public health emergency, climate change is one public health emergency that has a slow effect and has the ability to create complex chall...

Israel's healthcare system is currently gearing up to cope with the recent Corona virus outbreak, and the main entry point to the country, Ben-Gurion International Airport, is mostly deserted – a clear illustration of the severe impairment suffered by global air transportation due to the Corona virus epidemic....

On the 30th of October, 2019, the Ministerial Committee for National Security (the "Security Cabinet") passed decision 372/b on: "Determining a process and mechanism to examine national security aspects of foreign direct investment"1 (for the full version, see Appendix 1)....

A joint US-Israeli team of experts convened at the University of Haifa on August 22- 23, 2018 with the goal of discussing maritime security in the Eastern Mediterranean. The team’s work is part of the activity of a consortium established in 2016 between the Maritime Policy & Strategy Research Center at the University of Haifa and the Hudson Institute which is located in the US. This was a follow-up to the discussions of a joint team of experts on security and energy issues which took place in 2016 and which produced a joint report published in September 2016 on security and energy in the Eastern Mediterranean....

The goal of this chapter is to briefly describe the recent developments in artificial islands in Israel and the innovations in floating platforms....

At the beginning of 2016 and as part of Haifa University’s effort to take a leading role in national maritime research, the University’s Board of Governors approved the establishment of the Haifa Research Center for Maritime Policy and Strategy which will be involved in research related to regional security and foreign policy, the flow of goods, people and ideas, law, energy and the environment....

In early 2016, the Board of Governors of the University of Haifa approved the establishment of the Haifa Research Center for Maritime Policy and Strategy,1 with the goal that it would carry out research on issues of regional security and foreign policy, the flow of goods, people, and ideas, law, energy and the environment, from the perspective of their effect on Israel’s national security....

The last year has seen heightened international interest in the strategic and security aspects of the global maritime domain. The US and Russia published major maritime strategy documents in 2015 while China included a significant maritime portion in its strategy white paper....

Over the course of the last decade, we have witnessed a rise in the level of engagement with issues of maritime policy and strategy in many countries around the world. The motives for this have been global processes that magnify the importance of the seas and oceans as a common domain that has strategic importance for the world's states and that is related to all issues of global trade, economy, energy, and the passage of goods and people from one end of the world to another....

For at least three thousand five hundred years, since Egypt’s Pharaoh Thutmose III sent an army by sea to conquer Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean has been a principal theater of world politics. Its waters were, and remain, a highway critical not only for military operations but for trade....

How much and in what ways do individual leaders matter for international politics? This article sheds new light on these questions by considering the consequences of domestic revolutions in international relations. We argue that revolutions have international effects due to two separate pathways, one associated with the event and one associated with the new leader’s administration. In the first pathway, a revolutionary event disrupts established relationships and perceptions, creating uncertainty both within the state and abroad....

Few studies explain how wars affect trade with third parties. We argue that wartime trade policies should raise trade with friendly and enemy-hostile third parties but reduce trade with hostile and enemy-friendly third parties....

Since its inception, Israel has struggled to ensure reliable and affordable supplies of energy resources for its domestic market....

In 2009 and 2010 two major offshore gas fields were discovered in Israel's exclusive economic zone (EEZ); the Tamar Field, with estimated reserves of 500 bcm....

This is a study of Eastern Mediterranean security and how the United States and Israel can improve cooperation to protect their common interests. The study’s particular focus is the maritime domain....

This paper presents an overview reports of scientists and specialists of the Russianspeaking Aliyah at the Interdisciplinary Scientific Conference “Problems of the Development of the Territorial Sea of Israel”, Netanya, November 2018....

In 2013, the government of China announced an ambitious project called "One Belt One Road" (OBOR), whose name was changed in 2017 to the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI). The initiative includes a large number of massive infrastructure and transportation projects along two routes between Europe and China. The land route (One Road) traverses the countries of Central Asia and is based on the historic Silk Road which includes six logistic corridors. The maritime route (the maritime belt – the maritime Silk Road) runs through China, Southeast Asia, Indian Ocean ports, East Africa, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. At this point, the BRI framework includes about 200 joint projects (along both the land route and the sea route) and the initiative is intended to include about 64 countries....

At the time of the previous Israeli Maritime Strategic Evaluation (end of 2016),1 it was already known that a new US administration would be taking over at the beginning of 2017 and it was thought that this would perhaps herald a change in US foreign policy, including its policy in the Eastern Mediterranean....