Israel Studies

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews around the world intensified their call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish Labour Bund, an Eastern European Jewish socialist party, had been, throughout its existence vehemently anti-Zionist, advocating instead its notion of doikayt (literally “here-ness”), which claimed that Jews should focus on building viable communities in any place in which they lived. This article will examine the way the movement remained steadfast in its opposition to Jewish statehood in the aftermath of the Holocaust and even in the wake Israel's establishment in 1948, and it will chart the process by which the Bund embraced Israel as quickly in 1955, looking at the rise of a Bund organization in Israel. I will argue that the Bund's position was neither desperate nor naïve. It was grounded in the Bundists' traditional enmity towards Zionism, and reflected their faith in a universalist answer to the problem of Jewish survival. This story complicates contemporary understandings of postwar Jewish and European history, and sheds new light on notions of diaspora and experiences of displacement.

"Syria and Israel has some political problems since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. One of these problems is the Golan Heights. Syria controlled the Golan Heights from 1946 till 1967. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria after 6 Days War in 1967. Moreover, Israel annexes the Golan Heights via its laws to the territory in 1981. When Hafiz al-Asad came to power in Syria in 1970, Syrian foreign policy changed and it mainly focused on taking back the Golan Heights from Israel because, Syria lost the Golan Heights during the ministry of defense of Hafiz al-Asad.
On the other hand, the most important thing here is the peace process between Israel and Syria. It started with Madrid Peace Conference and still continues. This article will take the peace process between Israel and Syria from 1991 until 2000. It will also show what issues were discussed, what progress was made in this peace process. Of course, the problem analysis will be in this article. Moreover, this article will explain why the talks ultimately failed. In the conclusion, it will ensure overview of the analysis, briefly and it will try to mention about current status of the Golan Heights."

This study examines the associations between religious affiliation and religiosity and support for political violence through a nationwide sample of Israeli Jews and Muslims. Based on structural equation modeling, the findings show that by and large Muslims are more supportive of political violence than Jews and more religious persons are less supportive of political violence. Deprivation, however, was found to mediate these relations, showing that the more deprived - whether Muslims or Jews, religious or non-religious persons - are more supportive of political violence. The explanatory strength of religion and deprivation combined in this manner was found to be stronger than any of these variables on their own. The findings cast doubt on negative stereotypes both of Islam and of religiosity as promoting political violence. They suggest that governments which want peace at home, in Israel as elsewhere, would do well to ensure that ethnic and religious differences are not translated into, and compounded by, wide socio-economic gaps.

"Israel was established as a Jewish democracy. The relationship between state and religion,  therefore, is critical when one analyzes the protection of human rights in the country. It is argued  that human rights cannot be effectively secured without a clear separation between state and
religion is enacted. It is further argued that the safeguard of equal rights and liberties for all  citizens nothwithstanding nationality, religion, race or colour is a critical issue, in particular
when it comes to the rights of the Israeli-Palestinians. 
This Entry consists of five sections: (1) The Jewish Democracy and (2) Human Rights legislation which lay the foundations for understanding human rights in Israel. Sections (3) about
the Israeli-Palestinians (many Arabs in Israel prefer to be called Palestinians; in referring to this minority I use the terms “Palestinian” and “Arab” interchangeably), and (4) State and Religion probe the two major human rights concerns in Israel. Then section (5) will shed light on important human rights precedents aimed to secure fundamental rights and liberties of all Israeli citizens.  "

Haim Gouri’s poem “Hanishkahim” (The Forgotten Ones) has appeared in several versions and in a number of collections. Suggesting the noble heroism of soldiers dying in battle, this poem has become an example of the symbolic repertoire employed to enforce national myths. As part of the “Palmah generation” of poets, Gouri’s own life, as well as the imagery of the poetry, articulates the ideals of the sabras who fought and died in the Israeli War of Independence. However, this poem also challenges these myths. “Hanishkahim” questions the State’s memorialization of military heroism while ignoring those soldiers, particularly the disabled, who destabilize the authority of national narratives. In shorter editions of this poem, Gouri’s critique of war commemoration is obliterated. This article examines Gouri’s poem in light of the role editing plays in shaping ideological discourse.

This book explores the interrelations between male friendship in everyday life and national sentiments in Israeli culture. The author follows stories of friendship ranging over early childhood, school, the workplace, and some unique war experiences. Some semi-public, exclusive male settings, most noticeably in the military, encourage the production of intimacy and desire. Yet, whereas in most instances this desire is displaced through humor and aggressive gestures, it becomes acknowledged and outright declared once associated with sites of heroic death. The symbolism of friendship is revealed in rituals for the fallen soldiers, the commemoration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the national infatuation with recovering bodies of missing soldiers. The book concludes that the Israeli case offers an extreme instance of a much broader cultural phenomenon: declaring the friendship for the dead epitomizes the political "blood pact" between men, taking precedence over the traditional blood ties of kinship and heterosexual unions. The book underscores nationalism as a homosocial-based emotion of commemorative desire.

From the mid-2000s onward, tens of thousands of asylum seekers from Africa entered the Israeli territory. The concerns resulting from these developments have been of particular intensity in the country, partly due to the very specific identity of the state, as “Jewish and democratic”, and to its peculiar security situation. In this context, the government took different measures aiming at repelling asylum seekers, including deportations, “hot returns” and more recently, imprisonment. Against this backdrop, the paper analyzes how the arrival of non-Jewish external others has been framed in political discourse and how a dominant discourse has generated and legitimized the passing of policies denying asylum seekers the status of refugee, and criminalizing them. The paper argues that the way both dominant and marginal political actors have framed the issue in their discourses has not only resulted in the exclusion of these new others but has reinforced the boundaries of the Israeli regime as a polity primarily made by and for the Jewish people.

""In the conflict between Bedouin representatives and government authorities in the southern Israeli Negev, the term ‘insurgent building’ refers to the construction of buildings erected in the full expectation that they will be demolished by the Israeli police
shortly thereafter. This article analyses how insurgent building is employed as a spatial practice by emerging political actors to claim contested Bedouin landownership.
Importantly, insurgent building relies on the ability of media and advocacy organizations
to mobilize behind the issue. Most of the relevant scholarship takes the interpretative categories advanced by these actors at face value. Following anthropological debates regarding objectification and categorization, I examine the context of a specific case of insurgent building. Emerging political actors who employ insurgent building often rely on predefined ethnic categories and clear-cut people–state polarities. This case demonstrates the need for a more differentiated understanding of multilayered local dynamics than the one offered by mainstream linear interpretations. At a more abstract level, political actors contribute to the reproduction of the very categories against which they mobilize. """"

In this article, I launch a wholesale reexamination of the under-studied subject of American Jewish nationalism. With the focus on the road to Israeli statehood, scholars have ignored the complex, contradictory patterns of nationalist identification that marked American Zionist politics in the first half of the twentieth century. I explore this thesis through a re-reading of two key historical episodes: the American Jewish Congress movement of 1914-1920 and the American Jewish Conference, 1943-1949. In the process, I discuss the relationship between liberalism and nationalism in American Jewish political thought; the political conflicts between Jewish nationalism and anti-nationalism; and the nomenclature of Jewish nationhood in the United States. Ultimately, I conclude that the consensus position of American Jewish support for Israel after 1948 emerged only after Zionism had been separated from a more capacious form of American Jewish nationalism that existed before 1948. This leads to a reassessment of the origins of AIPAC (the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the current moment in American Jewish politics.