Israeli Far-Right Organizations and the Ongoing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

For the midterm assignment for PIED3305, you are asked to write a 1,000-word opinion piece about an issue relevant to the far right. It should be informed by your knowledge of far right, its style and content should be aimed at an audience who are well informed but not specialist. Lots of jobs these days consist in part of writing about complicated issues for non-specialist audiences, so this will be good practice for when you for the future!

More concretely, the opinion piece asks you to comment on a contemporary topic in news, politics, or popular culture, and discuss it using some material, concepts and ideas covered in the module. In so doing, the following three things are required:

First, you must draw on at least four academic texts.

Second, you must relate these to a contemporary issue of your choice.

Third, you must communicate your ideas in a clear and accessible way.  

In terms of topic, you can choose literally anything, as long as it has some relevance to the politics of the far right and you are able to talk about it in an interesting and engaging way.

In terms of style, we expect the piece to be written clearly and accessibly in terms of its position. You must not just describe an issue: outline your stance and defend that view. So, if there is an issue relevant to the far right that fires you up – that would be a good choice. With regards format, what I´m looking for is like that found on websites such as The Conversation, Open Democracy, LSE Policy blogs, The Fair observer, CARR, Rantt to mention a few. These are forums in which academic research is brought to bear on contemporary issues in the news. You can also look at comments in quality newspapers.

With regards structure, up to you. Any structure will do if it allows you to do all the essential things outlined above.

Referencing, you should reference your piece using the Harvard style as per usual. I know that most published comment pieces aren’t referenced in this way, but I think it would cause confusion if I were to suggest a different approach to referencing.

Examples of what I´m looking for are provided under ´opinion pieces´ in the weekly core reading in the handbook. You will also find more blogs and opinion pieces in the units on Minerva under ´additional learning resources´.