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The objective of this research was to analyse poetry written by Israeli high-school students during or after visiting Poland within the framework of Holocaust education. I describe first the stages of shaping the discourse of Holocaust memory in Israel, and of Holocaust education; the Holocaust's place in the world of young Israelis; and the journeys to Poland as reflected in research. Following that, I present the results of the research and an analysis of the findings. The paper will discuss how Israeli adolescents cope with a cultural trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary aim of this paper is to introduce valuation modeling applicable to thin housing markets, with a focus on the Arab housing sector in Israel. The estimation procedure utilizes two input values: transaction data and subjective valuations provided by property owners, the data for which are derived from the Israel Tax Authority (ITA) and the Household Expenditure Survey (HES). Average property values are also weighted and ranked according to location, size, and average income factors. The main contribution of these modeling techniques is that they can be employed to estimate the residential property values in markets that experience a low frequency of housing transactions and where information is limited, with the added benefit of understanding housing value movement and market dynamics. Housing policies could be influenced by this deeper understanding of house price behavior within localities and submarkets, potentially with the ability to monitor changes in dwelling values and segmentation and segregation effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on field work, focuses on the relationships between football, femininity and gender, specifically on how an Israeli female footballer describes, evaluates and interprets her status. The underlying assumption of this study is that in accordance with the status of women's football, female players enjoy 'relative autonomy' dictated by their surroundings. In practice, their surroundings are male dominated: football institutions (local and international) are predominantly dominated by men, and female players are subjected to the daily operation of their relative autonomy. The female players that were interviewed in this study are conscious of the critical impact of gender, and the restrictions that are imposed upon them because football is 'a man's game'. Although they are partially satisfied, at present they do not have much hope regarding their football when compared to their male counterparts: the anticipated future is similar to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The total fertility of Muslims in Israel declined from a level of nearly ten children per woman in the mid-1960s to about 4.5 children per woman in the mid-1980s. It then remained close to 4.5 children per woman for nearly 20 years. The reasons for this long stall in the fertility decline are not understood. This paper explores the roles of marriage patterns and marital fertility in the development of the stall in Muslim fertility decline in Israel from 1986 to 2003. The results show that the fertility decline among Muslims in Israel stalled owing to abrupt discontinuations of declines in both the proportion married and marital fertility. The former is explained by the relaxation of a marriage squeeze that had resulted from past fluctuations in fertility. These findings have implications for debates on the determinants of fertility stalls and for demographic transition theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israel's highly restrictive citizenship policy constitutes the clearest indicator of its dominant ethnic model of citizenship. However, this policy has faced new challenges since the early 1990s, following the mass migration of non-Jewish immigrants. This paper examines and characterizes changes in immigrants' entitlement to Israeli citizenship since the 1990s. It indicates that while Israel's traditional citizenship policy has not undergone any significant change, two trends are evident: a much more restrictive policy towards Arab immigrants; and a somewhat more inclusive policy concerning other immigrants. To explain how these conflicting trends have coexisted, this study identifies three major characteristics of the Israeli policy: widespread use of the 'divide and rule' technique; managing policy through bureaucratic decisions; and the growing assimilation of liberal and republican principles into Israel's citizenship policy, although without undermining—on the contrary, even reinforcing—the dominant ethnic model of citizenship. These findings indicate that although the dominant ethnic citizenship model in Israel remains stable, and can successfully tackle significant obstacles, limited opportunities exist for greater inclusion of specific non-Jewish populations within the Israeli polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that during the Mandate period the Labor Zionist movement was able to successfully create a Sabra identity based on its ideology that was constructed in opposition to the presumed characteristics of the "exile Jew" and how such an identity played a central role in the formation of a security oriented foreign policy. Labor's creation of the Sabra through the "Hebrew Revolution" can be considered as one of the most successful episodes of the twentieth century in which a new identity was created in order to serve ideological goals. Labor's Zionist ideology, which sought to create a "new Jew" that would form the basis of the Jewish national movement, was translated into an identity that in contrast to the diaspora Jew relied on collectivism, agriculture, secularism, and most important of all physical strength and sacrifice in defence of the Jewish nation. This translated into a security-oriented foreign policy that heavily relied on military force and emphasized internal power and strength, which Labor elites argued could only be achieved through self-reliance and independence particularly in regards to defence issues. Such an orientation would form the basis of Israeli foreign policy for years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the multifaceted quality of ethnicity in the Jewish population of Israel by probing into the ethnic categories and their subjective meaning. The analyses utilise data collected during 2015–2016 on a representative sample of Israelis age 15 and older, as part of the seventh and eighth rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS). Hypotheses are developed concerning the relationship between demographically based ethnic origin and national identity, as well as the effect of ethnically mixed marriages on ethnic and national identities. The analyses reveal a strong preference among Jews in Israel to portray their ancestry in inclusive national categories – Israeli and Jewish – rather than more particularistic, ethno-cultural, categories (e.g. Mizrahim, Moroccan, Ashkenazim, Polish, etc). Yet, whether Israeli or Jewish receives primacy differs by migration generation, socioeconomic standing, religion, and political dispositions. While the findings clearly add to our understanding of Israeli society, they are also telling with regard to immigrant societies more generally. First, they reveal a multi-layered structure of ethnic identification. Second, they suggest that ethnic identities are quite resistant to change. Third, ethnically mixed marriages appear to erode ethnic identities and are likely to replace them with national identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic aim of the present paper is to provide a historical overview of Bulgarian–Israeli relations from 1948 to 1990 (when diplomatic relations were re-established following their break off in 1967), and of Bulgarian state policy towards Jews in the country during the Second World War and the post-war Socialist period. The paper analyses the variety of factors that have affected that ‘triangular relationship’, such as the positive historical legacy of Bulgarian–Jewish relations that contributed to the salvation of Bulgarian Jews during the Holocaust, and the role and place of Bulgaria and Israel in the cold war confrontation that dominated international politics from the end of the 1940s to 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article updates the author's article which opens this issue, and responds to the other contributions. Composed over the winter of 2011–2012, the opening paper was commissioned for a private conference held in Europe. The difficulties academics from Israel or Palestine (and elsewhere) experience in convening to discuss the subject matter explain why the conference was private. It was not officially conceived as a ‘track-two’ contribution to the possibilities of a peace initiative from the second Obama administration, or from the European Union, but it was intimated that such possibilities might shape the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the political role of urban design in the transformation of urban and rural, central and peripheral, formal and informal landscapes in Israel. Based on design anthropology methodology, the political role of urban design in the production of aesthetic objects and landscapes that signify the control over individuals and communities will be explored. As this paper suggests, such a new form of political influence is hidden beneath an aesthetic and user-oriented façade, making it even more dangerous than previous more direct actions, such as gated communities separated from public space by stone walls. The paper’s interdisciplinary approach that is rooted in anthropology, design, architecture and politics will also point out some similarities between specific sites that are often considered different, namely Tel Aviv’s global and privatized gated communities on the one hand and the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the peripheral Negev region on the other. It will be argued that these similarities are the product of the politics of militarization, privatization and social fragmentation that are translated into urban design practices from ‘above’ via state and municipal planning policy as well as formal design, and from ‘below’ through informal and often unauthorized construction initiated by marginalized communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few winters, shark communities have been aggregating near the Israeli Mediterranean coast, at a specific point, near Hadera power station. This unusual phenomenon has fascinated residents, visitors, kayakers, divers, and swimmers. We analyse the effects of this intense human interest on the sharks, using contingent behaviour, in Hadera and in Ashkelon, where sharks are present and there is available infrastructure for their observation. We also report on changes in shark behaviour due to change in tourism intensity. We find a change of about ILS 4.1 million annually for both sites but a larger individual consumer surplus in Hadera, where sharks are currently observable. Touristic intensity crosses the threshold level by about 12% and making the socio-equilibrium sustainable for both humans and sharks would have a social cost of ILS 0.157 million. This paper, which is based on the assessment of conservation values to marine and coastal tourists, raises a need for spatial planning in order to protect this endangered species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Palestinian women's bodies constitute a central site of the struggle between the Zionist state and Palestinian 'citizens' in Israel. At the intersection of critical feminist and settler colonial studies scholarship and drawing on empirical data collected in 2013-2014, it will be argued here that Israel's continuous drive to control Palestinian women's bodies plays a pivotal role in the completion of the Zionist project. In line with classic settler colonial logic, this project has always closely linked native women's bodies and native land in its discourses and practices. Therefore, Zionist settler colonialism must be considered a not only racialised but also gendered process. Palestinian women's stories are complex and contradictory and cast the body as the key medium through which they experience citizenship in Israel as a continuation of settler colonialism by other means. This paper claims that it is, in fact, via citizenship that the Palestinian women's forced exclusion from the Israeli body politic is realised, thereby debunking prevailing Zionist myths of citizenship in Israel and the Nakba as a one-off event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge production in, for and by settler colonial states hinges on both productive and repressive practices that work together to render their history and present 'normal' by controlling how, where, to and through whom they tell their story. This makes the production and dissemination of knowledge an important battleground for anti-colonial struggles. The State of Israel, in its ongoing search for patrons and partners, is focused on how to produce and appropriate 'knowledge', and the arenas in which it is developed and shared. In so doing, it works to reshape critique of its political, social and economic relations and redefine the moral parameters that inform its legitimacy and entrench its irrefutability. Inspired by existing literature on and examples of anti-colonial struggles, this paper challenges the modalities through which Israel produces and normalises the colonial narrative. By critiquing existing representations of the Israeli state - and the spaces and structures in which these take hold - our article contributes to the range of scholarship working to radically recalibrate knowledge of 'Israel' and 'Palestine'. As part of this work, the article purposefully centres indigenous anti-colonial frameworks that reconnect intellectual analysis of settler colonial relations, with political engagements in the praxis of liberation and decolonisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper considers the use of longitudinal qualitative research (LQR) as a means to capture both change and stability in people's lives. We use an LQR study conducted in continuing care retirement communities to demonstrate three dimensions that should be taken into consideration when addressing change vs. stability. Three waves of interviews with older adults and their family members as well as memos and reflections concerning interview data are used. The first dimension concerns the question of: "who defines change?" A second dimension raises the question of, "what has changed?" Finally, a third dimension concerns the timeframe of change. We argue that LQR provides a tremendous richness of time dimensions and perspectives. Discrepancies between dimensions, perspectives and timeframes can be particularly enriching. Moreover, LQR allows also for the opportunity to examine stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined History textbooks taught in East Jerusalem. The political context of East Jerusalem and its education system manifests a continuous power struggle between the Palestinian National Authority and Israeli authorities, in this case, the Israeli Ministry of Education. Through analyzing the textbooks, this study speaks of the power dynamics and systems of political control manifested through the Israeli censorship. The aim of this paper is to present the intricate power relations of the education system in East Jerusalem as it is revealed in the censorship of textbooks. In analyzing the content censored in textbooks for elementary and high schools, three main censorship categories emerged: “erasing symbols,” “leaving out segments,” and “deleting the content of whole pages.” These are presented and analyzed within a political context in the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of the micro-geography of the village of Lifta, Jerusalem, and the history of one particular home there, applying the archaeology of the address methodology. A new terminology of fragmented settler colonialism is used, in combination with the contact zone concept, to help better understand planning situations ‘after colonial times’. Introducing macro and micro scales of contact zones, the formal texts of the Lifta Regeneration Plan 6036 and the ensuing legal appeals submitted to the Israeli court are analyzed. By also studying the informal contact zone at the micro (address) level, the paradoxical relations between the Mizrahi and the Palestinians are exposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the current study was to explore new Israeli principals' perceptions, during the first three years in post, of the impact of their mentoring process on their leadership experiences. Based on 12 interviews with newly appointed school principals in the Israeli State Education System, the study found that many of them indicated that their mentor gave them professional and practical advice and performance feedback, especially on technical and administrative issues rather than on issues related to instructional leadership. In addition, the new principals shed light on the significant impact of proper educational and emotional matching between the mentor and the new principal on the mentoring process. We suggest some practical implications for establishing effective mentoring programs for new principals at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of crime in the Palestinian society in Israel from the perspective of political relationships. It illustrates that the state of Israel is trying to define and identify crime through ideologies and narrow interests. This process is part of a mechanism of control, which intends to criminalize the daily life of the Palestinians. Discriminatory behavior against Arabs by police is more apparent and the records on crime are sometimes inaccessible, with a mania for secrecy, and view the whole Arab community as a security danger. The Israeli social control policy politicizes this community, with excess control in some areas and a lack of control in others. The paper concludes that no detailed arguments are needed in order to see the ineffectiveness of the Israeli control policy as long as the basic root of the political struggle is not answered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After severe illness, there are stories: narrative strands to suture discontinuities of identities, practices, and lives. But within these narratives of illness and recovery, the body's discontinuities stand apart, striking in the materiality of change, in the tangible multiplicity of bodies – healthy, ill, recovering, recovered – that a person can call one's own. Based on longitudinal research interviews with Israeli women who identified as recovered from long-term eating disorders (fieldwork conducted in 2005–2006 and in 2011), this paper explores how these bodily discontinuities are expressed, drawing particular attention to the narrative role of embodied memory in linking past and present-tense bodies and selves. Embodied memory, as narrated by the participants, is deeply, sometimes surprisingly, embedded in lived experience, imbuing recovered bodies with moments of sensory continuity, the past coming into presence through forms of sensation and perception learned at the height of disorder. Examining narrative moments of sensory remembrance, this paper analyses how participants narrate embodied memory as a mode of reflection, self-protection, and dynamic integration, wherein the experience of disorder informs practices of recovery, and the body becomes a site for the reconciliation of past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study focusing on differences in Israeli Jewish and Arab chemistry teachers’ beliefs regarding teaching and learning of chemistry in the upper secondary schools. Israel is a country experiencing the problems of diverse cultural orientation of its inhabitants but applying the same educational system to its diverse cultural sectors. Education includes the same curriculum in chemistry for both the Israeli Jewish and Arab cultural sectors as well as final examinations (matriculation) set centrally by the Ministry of Education. Thus, this study can serve as a striking case for other countries facing similar cultural diversity. The study is based on two different instruments that are both qualitative and quantitative in nature. The qualitative data stem from chemistry teachers’ drawings of themselves as teachers in a typical classroom situation accompanied by four open questions. The data analysis follows three qualitative scales: beliefs about classroom organization, beliefs about teaching objectives and epistemological beliefs. A quantitative study gives insights into teachers’ beliefs about what characterizes good education. The main goal of the present paper is to determine whether both groups of chemistry teachers with different sociocultural background in Israel hold different views about education in general and chemistry education in particular. The findings provide evidence that in Israeli chemistry classrooms, the beliefs of Arabic teachers differ from those of the Jewish teachers, although both groups live in the same country and operate the same educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we describe an approach to the study and development of school principals’ school creed. The approach and its underlying method are grounded in the phenomenological tradition, predominantly in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. School principals are asked to imagine an ideal school and present it both visually and verbally. We illustrate the potential of this process using one ideal school proposal developed by a high school principal in Israel. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the approach for research, theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Druzes in Israel have been accused of being completely loyal to the Israeli state since 1948. This study will challenge the so-called “Druze–Zionist covenant”. The aim of the paper is to show that the Druze fought Zionism in 1948 and later accommodated the Israeli state as the only viable choice to survive in the land of their ancestors. For this purpose, the paper will investigate the role of the Druze community in the 1948 war, followed by the Druze struggle to preserve their Islamic and Arab identity in the face of the Israeli attempts of ethnicizing the Druze. The Druze religious establishment and some Druze elites who happen to adhere to Arab nationalism challenged the Israeli state by capitalizing on the historical ties of the Druze faith with Islam and Arabism. The policy of Israel is aimed at detaching the Druze from their Arab belongings, thus the introduction of mandatory military service to the community. The paper will conclude by explaining the Druze policy of accommodation toward the Israeli state and its relation to the concept oftaqiyah(dissimulation) from a political perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a model for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of judicial involvement in educational reforms. It uses the model to analyze two case studies of court-led educational reforms in the third rail of Israeli politics – the curricula and the admission policies of ultra-Othodox (Haredi) schools. These case studies are located at the knotty junction of human rights, religion, and politics in education policy, generating concern in many countries. The conclusions demonstrate that even when the courts are cautious, judicial involvement in third rail educational reforms may produce impacts that drive the cogwheels of policy-making in directions that are apt to undermine the interests of the petitioners. Therefore, the choice of courts as a forum for shaping education policy in political third rails should be prudently considered. The paper also demonstrates the need to evaluate litigation by means of a contextual, evidence-based analysis. It highlights that in certain cases, what may appear to be unjustified judicial activism or restraint is, in fact, a reasonable response, whose harmful ramifications may be attributed to the context of political third rails. Even the best judges are not immune to the well-known assertion that ‘hard cases make bad law.’ [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discusses academic papers on power relations between the United States and Israel, published in the July 2004 issue of the scholarly periodical "Ankara Papers". Multidimensionality of factors influencing Israeli regional policy; Possibility that Israeli policies were designed to act simultaneously within the regional sphere as well as the international sphere; Cross-border reprisal policy leading up to the 1956 War.

The present study examined the relationship between workgroup emotional climate in schools, teachers' burnout and coping style. Data were collected from 278 teachers in 19 state elementary schools in Israel. Confirming the hypotheses, there was a positive relationship at the individual level between an other-focused negative workgroup emotional climate and burnout, and a positive cross-level relationship between an ego-focused negative workgroup emotional climate and burnout. In schools with a high ego-focused negative workgroup emotional climate, teachers' active coping style impacted less on their burnout than in schools with a low ego-focused negative workgroup emotional climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a theoretical model, this paper analyses the evolution of gaps in entrepreneurial activity between the core regions of a country and the periphery. Using data from Israel, the results of the model indicate that endogenous decisions made by entrepreneurs increase the gap in entrepreneurship between the regions, creating a dynamic in which the gap grows continuously. When the model allows for movement between the regions, we find that the most talented entrepreneurs migrate from the periphery to the core region, leading to a brain drain of entrepreneurs from the periphery. Implications of the findings and recommendations based on them are also discussed. The paper contributes to the existing literature by analysing entrepreneurs as individuals, not as one unified group. Doing so facilitates a better understanding of the dynamic process that contributes to the growing gaps between core regions and the periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the Crete Development Plan, prepared in the mid-1960s by a team of Israeli and Greek planners and funded by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the context of post-Second World War development. It discusses the export of professional knowledge in the micro-/macro-political contexts of national and international processes. Analysis of controversies within the Israeli team draws attention to incongruities and dissonances between regional concepts and their applications. It emphasizes how professionals interested in democratic and participatory processes used data sources to guide implementation, but also had to rely on mediated information, were removed from actual decision-making and thus were not directly responsible for the implementation of such decisions. The paper highlights the political role of expertise in post-Second World War development, and the ambivalent position of international experts serving both their countries’ and their own professional goals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

State-assisted return programmes (SARPs) have emerged as key components of diaspora mobilisation strategies in countries of origin. Especially in countries where the principle of jus sanguinis underpins citizenship regimes, these programmes have often been drawn from ostensibly national(istic) discourses in order to encourage the repatriation of (mostly highly skilled) citizens residing abroad. Drawing on interviews with public officials and migrants as well as content analysis of primary and secondary materials, this paper examines SARPs deployed by Israel and Germany. It argues that while the discourse and practice within which state programmes are embedded (re-)construct the nation in certain ways that are commensurate with perceived determinants of return, migrants have often rejected these formulations, underscoring instead a range of neglected personal and professional return-oriented risks. The paper's main contribution lies in better clarifying the links between highly skilled return migration policy, national identity and migration determinants and uncovers the diverging articulations of return used by state and migrants alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an ethnographic analysis of religious healing rituals in Israel, this paper addresses the question of how healer–client relations are structured on these rituals. An examination of what takes place at the rallies held by Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak indicates that, apart from the regular blessings, which can be referred to as ordinary healing, there are some ritual events that can be referred to as ‘deep healing’. The current paper demonstrates how deep healing rituals are generally conducted in severe cases through give-and-take between the rabbi and the person upon whom the blessing is bestowed, and that they are linked to relationships between people and the ethic of mutual support. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores Gershom Scholem's notion of an ‘apocalyptic sting’—a messianic political theology which, he feared, haunted Jewish and Israeli politics through the Hebrew language. The paper makes four key moves. First, I unpack Scholem's ‘sting’ in relation to contemporary Israeli religious radicalism. Second, I tie that notion of a sting to Frankfurt-School discussions of reification and its political effects. Third, I survey attempts to critique this notion of a sting, through the work of Israeli International Relations (IR) Realist Yehoshafat Harkabi. Drawing on the negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno, I then draw out and deepen Harkabi's reflexive stance, with an eye to setting out a vocation for critical IR-realism in the context of contemporary Israeli security discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, higher education institutions have invested significant resources to internationalise, due to economic, political, academic and cultural pressures. Students play a dual role in this process: as customers, selecting institutions based on respective reputations (including the international dimension) and as outputs of institutional internationalisation processes aiming to produce internationally oriented graduates. Universities aspire towards integration of international, global and intercultural dimensions as main aims of higher education, reflecting the upsurging prominence of cosmopolitan capital among their future graduates. Indeed, cosmopolitanism is increasingly considered desirable on individual and institutional levels. Using data from a student survey (n = 1650) gathered at seven geographically and otherwise diverse colleges in Israel, this paper investigates Israeli college students’ perceptions of internationalisation and estimation of their institutions’ internationalisation activities. Parents’ education, previous experiences abroad, proficiency in English and institutional efforts to internationalise were found to positively impact students’ perceptions of on-campus internationalisation initiatives and characteristics. Such differences were also found to relate to the university’s general status and context. This paper presents the findings of the survey and discusses possible implications for policy and practice at institutional and national levels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the complex identity of Kessoch immigrants in Israel. One group of Kessoch is regarded as ‘young’ and the other as ‘old’. These are two ‘invisible’ groups, which cope in their own way with their social and cultural marginality. They are delegitimized within both Israeli society and the religious establishment. Among the older Kessoch, the authors differentiated between those who have found new meaning for their life in Israel, while attempting to preserve significant ‘scraps of identity’, and those who are disconnected from their present-day life materials and find little meaning in them. In contrast, the younger Kessoch, 1.5-generation immigrants, express varied behaviour patterns of daily resistance to the host society. Their personalities and leadership patterns also indicate selective adoption of significant bits of reality that suit them. Their intelligent use of ‘scraps of identity’ serves their social integration processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates the value of researching the emic perceptions expressed by participants of sport for development and peace (SDP) programs about their program. An Israeli SDP program was chosen which addresses Arab children’s educational needs through sport. Ten semi-structured interviews were held with participants: two Jewish male managers, two Arab male principals and six Arab female volunteers, and a three-stage qualitative data analysis was implemented. The analysis revealed that the participants had constructed a complex array of different meanings and were switching them in the changing social contexts. In the discussion we provide the following explanatory framework: the emic data revealed an ‘impression management’ dynamic, which on the one hand exhibits the agency of the participants to control their short-term reality, but on the other hand conceals a miscommunication problem and discrepancies that weaken the impact of the program as a whole. Better dialogue between the actors may present a risk of controversy and perhaps even the dismantling of the program, yet offers a chance for reform and better development achievements. A routine of emic research could benefit SDP programs in uncovering these and other hidden phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an Israeli national-level research examining the extent to which admissions of elementary school students to the gifted programmes based on standardised tests are gender-fair. In the research, the gifted students consisted of 275 boys, 128 girls, and additional 80 girls who were admitted to the gifted programme through affirmative action (AA). To assess these young students’ scientific thinking skills, also referred to as science practices, open-ended questions of case-based questionnaires were developed. The investigated scientific thinking skills were question posing, explanation, graphing, inquiry, and metacognition. Analysis of the students’ responses revealed that gifted girls who entered the programmes through AA performed at the same level as the other gifted students. We found significant differences between the three research groups in question posing and graphing skills. We suggest increasing gender-fairness by revising the standard national testing system to include case-based narratives followed by open-ended questions that assess gifted students’ scientific thinking skills. This may diminish the gender inequity expressed by the different number of girls and boys accepted to the gifted programmes. We show that open-ended tools for analysing students’ scientific thinking might better serve both research and practice by identifying gifted girls and boys equally well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israeli students ranked in the bottom third of the countries surveyed by PISA 2012 in mathematical literacy, while the gap between the highest and lowest scores was the second largest in the OECD. This paper explores which variables led to disparities in mathematical literacy between different socioeconomic levels and between Israeli Arabs and Jews as well as in comparison with Australian students. Different instructional approaches that are known in the literature to have a positive impact on students' achievement are not observed in the relationship between teachers and students in Israel. In Israel, schools contribute to the perpetuation of socioeconomically driven educational inequality by using tracks that are characterised by different teaching pedagogies and different content, with little or no upward mobility between tracks, leading to structural exclusion. By comparison, in Australia, ability tracking is less rigid and mathematical literacy far higher than in Israel. The policy implication is that either teachers must work differently in a track-based system to overcome the process of exclusion dictated by the structure itself or the system must reduce the use of tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational policy borrowing has become rather common in our globalised world. However, the literature lacks contextual criteria that may be employed by researchers and policy makers to assess the correspondence of a particular policy to the local context of a borrowing system. Based on a secondary analysis of documents and research reports, this paper describes the process of policy borrowing in the Israeli and Turkish educational systems. Discrepancies were found between the basic qualities of the borrowed policies and the contextual features and processes that characterise each educational system. The lack of congruency appears to be even deeper in centralised structures where the act of policy setting is done by top-level policy makers who are isolated from local school circumstances. Threshold criteria referring to fundamental considerations during decision making are offered and their theoretical and practical implications for centralised structures are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The main issue this paper deals with is the status of the Palestinian minority in Israel (Referred to in the literature using different terms: ‘Palestinians in Israel’, ‘Arabs in Israel’, ‘Arab citizens of Israel’, ‘the Palestinian minority’ and ‘Palestinians inside 1948’.) as part of what Israel considers its national security. It will examine the centrality of Israel’s Jewish character, as a component of Israeli national security, representing a model for the expansion of that which is encompassed by the concept of national security. Within this context, the minority’s presence and demands for equality poses a threat to the national security of Israel and of the Jewish majority. This concept and trend has gained traction in recent years with the ascension to power of the right wing and the ‘rising threats’ to Israel following the Arab Spring events. Majority forces within and outside the Knesset have attempted to consolidate Israel’s Jewish character by passing laws and formulating policies that identify its Jewish character as a red line – a key plank of national security. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the consequences of a large-scale emigration to Israel by the Yemenite Jewish population in the late 1940s. The foci for this examination are the marriage patterns of this population across the three generations directly affected by the emigration. More specifically, the fate of the henna, a premarital ceremony revered by the Yemenite Jews, is examined as it has changed in form and function over time and space. An ethnographic study of the Yemenite Jewish henna ceremony, as it is currently practiced today, illuminates the consequences of this populations’ adaptation to contemporary Israel society. The author suggests that the henna ceremony is a valuable fluid cultural form that enables the Yemenite Jewish population to mediate between its history in Yemen and its migratory experience in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present paper is based on thrice-repeated measures. The sample constituted 561 Jewish Israeli adults who experienced these terror attacks. The study examined individual, community and national resilience and their associations with resilience-promoting factors (sense of coherence, social support, and self-efficacy); as well as resilience-suppressing factors (distress symptoms, sense of danger, and exposure). Results indicated that resilience scores were quite stable across the three repeated measures, whereas sense of coherence, distress symptoms, sense of danger, and exposure significantly changed across the three repeated measures. Sense of coherence was the best predictor for individual, community, and national resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many websites allow users to rate items and share their ratings with others, for social or personalisation purposes. In recommender systems in particular, personalised suggestions are generated by predicting ratings for items that users are unaware of, based on the ratings users provided for other items. Explicit user ratings are collected by means of graphical widgets referred to as 'rating scales'. Each system or website normally uses a specific rating scale, in many cases differing from scales used by other systems in their granularity, visual metaphor, numbering or availability of a neutral position. While many works in the field of survey design reported on the effects of rating scales on user ratings, these, however, are normally regarded as neutral tools when it comes to recommender systems. In this paper, we challenge this view and provide new empirical information about the impact of rating scales on user ratings, presenting the results of three new studies carried out in different domains. Based on these results, we demonstrate that a static mathematical mapping is not the best method to compare ratings coming from scales with different features, and suggest when it is possible to use linear functions instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses papers published within the issue, including one by Robert Springborg on the Egyptian military establishment, another by Noha Mellor on the efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood to Islamize the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and lastly by Ronen Yizhak on the relations between Jordan and Israel since 1967.

Inspired by the Arab Spring, massive social movements have erupted since 2011 in many places around the world. Despite their differences, these movements have had at least two remarkable common features: all of them struggled for ‘real democracy’ and occupied prominent urban public spaces to erect temporary tent encampments. By focusing on the case study of the 2011 Israeli tent protests, this paper argues that the production of such places of resistance works as a crucial, albeit ambivalent, strategy to confront hegemonic power relations. On the basis of the literature on the spatialities of contentious politics, the article demonstrates that the establishment of more than 70 tent camps in public spaces all across Israel was of vital importance not only to challenging the post-democratic political system but also to overcoming an internal crisis of representation within the Israeli protest movement. However, the case of the Israeli J14 tent protests also underlines that while the production of place can be a powerful starting point for social movements, it is not a durable alternative to multi-scalar, networked forms of organisation, which are also able to confront state authorities in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Heritage’ is a term that is ambiguous in the best of circumstances; however, it becomes even more so in urban environments where conflicts of identity and culture are pivotal, as in Israel’s mixed Israeli-Palestinian cities. In this paper, I examine the recent redevelopment of the Jaffa port, Israel. Jaffa’s ancient port has had a significant role in facilitating industry, commerce and social ties in the area, and it has recently been remodelled by the city as a cultural and entertainment hub. Through interviews with key stakeholders and observations, I examine the role of heritage in the redevelopment using two broad categories: heritage of the built environment and cultural heritage, including the practice of fishing. I argue that while efforts have been made to conserve the waterfront’s heritage, the redevelopment has resulted in an artificial space that does not speak to the local culture of Jaffa as it is interpreted by the port community, including the fishermen. The Jaffa case study suggests that more attention should be paid to the delicate role of urban planners in facilitating change in a politically and culturally contested environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines changes that have occurred in Israel's citizenship policy towards family immigrants since the early 1990s, when it became a country of immigration. Its findings indicate that Israel now has a much more restrictive policy towards Palestinian family immigrants, and a somewhat more inclusive policy concerning the naturalization of various other groups of family immigrants. In a broader perspective, while there is evidence that the influence of the liberal perception of citizenship on policy-making processes has increased in some respects, this process has occurred within an overall ethnic, even ethnicizing, context. Accordingly, the inclusive trend toward non-Olim, non-Palestinian family immigrants may stem not only from a process of liberalization within Israeli society. Rather, it may also serve ethnic motivations by absorbing immigrants who are likely to eventually join the Jewish, or at least non-Arab, sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with a description of the way in which a particular group of marginalized peoples in Palestine are using digital network technologies as part of a campaign of non-violent resistance to their conditions. It is an engaging story of what is a case study in the way communications technologies are becoming part of broader struggles for liberation not just in the ‘connected’ centres, but also in more isolated areas. The aims of the international empowerment project called ‘Nonviolence 2.0’ are to serve as a forum for developing peace, understanding and tolerance between groups engaged in a long and ongoing conflict. What is significant in it is the use of personal narratives that humanize both sides of the conflict, as well as of mobile technologies to record and reflect conflict by general citizens. The paper deploys some theoretical constructs (such as imagination actions) to frame its – purposefully in large parts rather descriptive than analytic – presentation of this ongoing project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning systems throughout the world are rooted in the modern, western-oriented worldview and the rationale of liberal nationalism. In this view, society consists of relatively equal and free individuals, operating in a fairly free market, while state intervention in people's lives and in the economy is only required in extreme cases such as market failure, as with urban and regional planning, and is conducted via top-to-bottom regulations. However, whether this outlook is suitable for sociopolitical cultures other than liberalism is questionable. This paper examines the modern planning machinery with respect to traditional, family-based societies, in particular the Arab towns and villages in Israel. It claims that, in addition to the national conflict between Arab citizens and the State of Israel, the embedded tensions between the spatiality of the Arab city and modern planning systems have given rise to the informal, gray urbanism currently typical of Arab towns. The paper analyzes the different planning tools resulting from the two worldviews. The use of a culturally based urban code and mutual agreements between interested parties form central planning instruments in familial societies, while administrative planning and regulation are central to modern traditions. Based on this analysis, the paper offers a framework for overcoming existing tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the political behaviour of religious groups in a democratic setting. In particular, it suggests an explanation as to why the same religious group might adopt very different modes of engagement with the state, over the same issues, at different times. The proposed framework combines two components: (1) a communitarian understanding of civil society; and (2) the concept of bifurcated loyalty which grasps the unique tension experienced by religious groups in democratic regimes, and its effect on their political behaviour. I go on to apply this framework in the case of religious Zionism in Israel. This case, which explores important events and trends in the history of the religious Zionist group in Israel, with special emphasis on the post-1967 era, nicely demonstrates the shifting strategies of engagement of this group with the state. The behaviour of this group ranged from constructive collaboration through participation in government to outright violent clashes with the state. Such dramatic changes expose the link between changing levels of bifurcated loyalty and political behaviour in response to changes in state policies towards religious actors and contents. The paper concludes with a brief discussion about the general applicability of such an approach to the study of religious groups in democratic politics and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the meeting point of photojournalism and death and maps the tensions involved. Most of the literature on news-media and death explores the problematics of covering death during wartime. Less attention has been given to violent death in civic settings (as opposed to war zones) and to mundane deaths. The civic death scenes are not subject to military or governmental censorship, and the moral and professional burden to report such events falls on the journalists' shoulders. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the representation of death in Israeli news-media. Findings from interviews and a quantitative content analysis shed light on journalistic practices, and show how the news-media self-regulate their working practices. Lastly, the paper identifies breakdowns of this self-regulated mechanism as it points at two different approaches to presenting death images according to the national affiliation of the dead. The paper argues that these practices delineate and maintain the distinction between Israelis and “the Other”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How does granting certificates of ‘business clean of Arab workers’to owners of shops, stores, and Jewish businesses who prove they are not employing Arab workers shape identity? Identity development involves making sense of, and coming to terms with, the social world one inhabits, recognizing choices and making decisions within contexts, and finding a sense of unity within one's self while claiming a place in the world. Since there is no objective, ahistoric, universal trans-cultural identity, views of identity must be historically and culturally situated. This paper explores identity issues among members of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel. While there is a body of literature exploring this subject, we will offer a different perspective by contextualizing the political and economic contexts that form an essential foundation for understanding identity formation among this minority group. We argue that, as a genre of settler colonialism, ‘pure settlement colonies’ involve the conquering not only of land, but of labor as well, excluding the natives from the economy. Such an exclusion from the economy is significant for its cultural, social, and ideological consequences, and therefore is especially significant in identity formation discussed in the paper. We briefly review existing approaches to the study of identity among Palestinian Arabs in Israel, and illustrate our theoretical contextual framework. Finally, we present and discuss findings from a new study of identity among Palestinian Arab college students in Israel through the lens of this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies assessing national policy reforms in education focus on the likelihood of acquiring an advanced education and the associated returns in the labor market. In this paper, the authors investigate the impact of the Israeli Academic Colleges Law that was designed to promote the acquisition of higher education among all segments of the Israeli population. They found that this law, in fact, contributed to making higher education accessible more to the Israeli Arab minority than to the rest of the population. In addition, they demonstrate that the influence of the law on improving access to higher education is reflected in the increase in the earning potential of Israeli Arabs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]