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This article follows Charles Maier's notion of two global moral-historical narratives dominating our world: the Holocaust narrative and the post/anti-colonial narrative. The article follows some of the relations between these narratives and their inherent tension and clashes, focusing primarily on the context of Palestine-Israel. It ends with a hint to a third way which it calls 'bi-national'., Author(s): Amos Goldberg [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.9619.7, 0000 0004 1937 0538, Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, , Jerusalem, Israel In recent years we have witnessed [...]

S. Yizhar's literary persona is known to be central in the making of the Sabra identity. This article offers an interpretation of the role played by his poetics of space in shaping both the spatial and social boundaries of this new elitist identity. These boundaries are read as driven by poetic interests in a Zionist literary context. For Zionist literature, representing the land of Israel as real is the literary equivalent of the theopolitical shift from myth to history. The Sabra generation is expected to overcome Jewish strangeness and to capture the land both politically and literarily. But Yizhar's poetics refuses to grasp the land; it follows modern philosophy and sees the full representation of reality as impossible, hence he creates boundaries for the poetic self. This refusal to fully represent is portrayed here as creating the political sense of boundaries out of poetics. Yizhar's poetics of space is demonstrated in the short stories included in Sipurei mishor and the story "The Prisoner" as well as in his spatial stance both in Jewish-Arab conflict and in questions of nature preservation. His point of view appears as kernel that can explain sociopolitical trends in modern Israel and its quasireligious motivation., S. Yizhar, the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, is considered the first native (Sabra) writer of Hebrew prose and one of the prominent articulators of Sabraness. His works achieved a [...]

The first significant clash between European Jewish agricultural colonists and Arab peasants in Palestine, a conflict over peasant grazing rights in Petah Tikva, took the life of one Jewish person, an older woman named Rachel Halevy. This article traces the commemoration history of the event in Zionist sources, particularly local Petah Tikva sources, between its occurrence in 1886 and the mid-1960s. It looks at both the evolving ghostly presence of the central Jewish female victim, who disappears, reappears, and lurks on the margins of the story, and Halevy's son, Sender Hadad, who becomes increasingly prominent over the years as he is configured as an archetypal Zionist guardsman and hero. Through the commemoration history of these figures, the article traces shifting Zionist narratives about heroism and victimhood in Petah Tikva; the construction of Petah Tikva, founded before the Zionist movement, as a locus of foundational Zionist bravery; and the gendered notions by which men and women are remembered and forgotten. Key words: First Aliyah, Zionism, collective memory, gender, On March 29, 1886 (22 Adar II 5646), Arab peasants from the village of Yahudiya attacked the new Jewish colony (moshavah) of Petah Tikva (founded in 1878) and injured five [...]

IN 1924, ABRAHAM KAMBERG, a young attorney living in Spring-field, Massachusetts, and an ardent Zionist, wrote a series of articles in the local press that pondered the Jews' lack of [...]

The figure of Daughter Zion and her relationship to the larger Zion tradition have emerged as important areas of inquiry in recent decades. This essay argues that the parabolic 'Song [...]

Abstract This essay examines the concept of shelilat hagalut (negation of exile/Diaspora) and argues that in many ways, the political and structural changes entailed in the granting of citizenship to [...]

Secularity among Israel's Jews retains many elements associated with traditional Judaism. Comprising 80 % of Israel's Jews, they define themselves as secular but nevertheless 'do Judaism' by performing rituals and hold to traditional religious worldviews and values. Such behavior is comprehended in Eisenstadt's 'multiple modernities' as well as Berger's multiple 'altars' and 'coexistence.' Such behavior may be explained in a new balance between the traditional triad of Peoplehood/Torah[The Law]/and the Land of Israel that has characterized Judaism through the ages and found expression by a Hebrew-speaking people who imported new and diverse modern concepts and sources of authority in the return to their homeland where they constructed a 'Jewish' state of ambiguous meanings., Author(s): I. Troen[sup.1] Author Affiliations: Ilan Troen is the Stoll Family Chair in Israel Studies and founding Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. This symposium [...]

This article examines the problem of the chasm between Zionist ideology, Jewish cultural reality in interwar Poland, and the praxis of Zionist education of this period, manifested in the activities of the Tarbut school network. According to the Zionist idea of monocultural nationalism, the process of acculturation to which interwar Polish Jewry was subjected was conceived as assimilation, which threatened the possibility of the existence of Hebrew culture and Zionist activities in the diaspora. In this article I present reactions to acculturation (or assimilation) through the prism of the polemic of Polish- and Erets Yisrael--based ideologues and educators and through the dissonance between Tarbut educational ideology and praxis, as manifested in the Hebrew educational journal Ofakim, in other publications, and in school programs. I also analyze recollections of Tarbut pupils, their educational experiences, and accounts of how they were perceived in those schools. Key words: assimilation, education, Tarbut, Zionism, Poland, Yehoshua Thon was one of the leading voices of interwar Polish Zionism. The philosopher, sociologist, and rabbi played a crucial role in the birth of Galician and Polish Zionism from [...]

How did different facets of Zionism resonate with Jews in the mid-twentieth century, and how did ethnic origin affect this relationship with Zionism? In this article, I examine how the kibbutz figured in the immigration stories of well-educated women who came to Israel from Iraq and Poland in the 1950s. Both groups of women report that upon their immigration, they saw the kibbutz as the culmination of the Zionist project, and were excited about living in one. They also have a shared central complaint that kibbutz life was inconsistent with the life course goals they brought to Israel, such as their desire to attain university educations. Despite this overall similarity in stories, however, there was a critical difference. Though women from both groups valued the kibbutz as a community, Poles, who were normally Holocaust survivors and who had often lost their families in the Holocaust, speak of the separation from the kibbutz with emotion and sense of betrayal, while Iraqis, who arrived with intact families and ethnic communities, are considerably more instrumental in their tone. The analysis points to the complicated interface between ethnicity and Zionism and Zionist institutions, as well as the resonance of the ideology for new immigrants, and indeed the range of needs the new state's institutions were expected to address., INTRODUCTION A CENTRAL CONCERN OF WORK ON THE KIBBUTZ HAS BEEN INTERNAL change and the possible failure of its radical social experiment. Beginning as early as 1948 and due to [...]

Israel's establishment as a Jewish state in 1948 confirmed the success of Zionism even as it raised questions about whether the movement dedicated to forging Jewish sovereignty was still relevant. But even as a cornerstone of Israel's culture, Zionism triggers controversy not only about its meaning but also about its moral status, particularly with regard to the issues either never acknowledged or never fully addressed. The article examines how Zionism works in the contemporary Israeli political scene and how and why it has become a contested rather than a unifying element in the country's public discourse., THE YISRAEL BEYTEINU [ISRAEL IS OUR HOME] PARTY DECORATES ITS platform with an embrace of Zionism. Contrast this with the Labor Party's website that does not mention Zionism but prominently [...]

When Haredi Jews talk ideology, they talk with enormous self-confidence and single-mindedness. Yet, when one scratches underneath the surface of Israeli Haredi rhetoric, one discovers enormous ambivalence: ambivalence about Zionism, ambivalence about the State of Israel, ambivalence about secular Jews, ambivalence about isolationism, ambivalence about Torah-only education, ambivalence about Israel's multiculturalism, ambivalence about poverty and the kollel life, and even ambivalence about gender roles and rabbinic authority. Haredi ambivalence in Israel stems from the complexities of trying to implement dogmatic isolationism in the context of a modern, open Jewish society and from the odd situation of being economically and militarily dependent on a State the existence of which Haredi ideology opposes. Borrowing models of sociological ambivalence from the writings of Robert Merton, Zygmunt Bauman, and Victor Turner, this article suggests that 'ambivalence' is central to understanding the complex relationship between mainstream Israeli Haredim and the State of Israel. Furthermore, I argue that the current narrative that dominates Israeli studies of Haredi society--the narrative of Israelization--does not succeed in capturing the complexity and multidimensionality of the Haredi encounter with the State., On 22 November 2012, Israel's largest selling Haredi weekly, Mishpacha, published a potentially provocative cover. (1) A week of battles between Israel's Air Force and Palestinian fighters in Gaza had [...]

With the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionist claims to Eretz Israel became realized. Disputes over the authenticity of those claims, however, have continued unabated to this day, and are challenged by counter-claims. Their assertions extend far beyond criticizing the actions of the Israeli government; rather, they focus on the legitimacy of the Jewish state, and the idea that in Palestine there should be 'Jewish' land. Zionism, which was founded on the idea of Jews returning to their homeland in the East, is challenged in maintaining its rights in Eretz Israel because its opponents mark it as irrevocably and permanently Western or in other ways 'foreign' to the land. The first part of this article examines the nature of Zionist claims and contemporary counter-claims. The second part focuses on the challenges inherent in carrying out the normal activities of a modern state in such a contested land. Activities that would elsewhere seem mundane--mapping, zoning, tree-planting, preserving nature, and hiking--are skewed by assertions of the alleged foreignness of Zionism. By examining these and other activities, the paper will illustrate and explore the sometimes-overlooked real-world implications of this unresolved historical debate., INTRODUCTION It was simpler for Zionism to claim the Land of Israel/Palestine a century ago. During the British Mandate the abbreviation E.I. or Eretz Israel [Land of Israel] appeared regularly [...]

The past decade has seen a turn in the study of Borges's writing. His 'irrealidad' (1)--previously regarded as an escapist mode (2)--is being reconsidered and incorporated into the discussion of [...]

Using recently uncovered writings by Leon Pinsker, the proto-Zionist thinker, the current article challenges the generally accepted understanding of Pinsker's intellectual development as moving 'from assimilation to nationalism.'In particular, the article reevaluates the idea that in his pamphlet 'Autoemancipation!' Pinsker proposed territorial nationalism as an ideological substitute for Jewish civic emancipation in the Diaspora, particularly in the Russian empire. Rather, Pinsker held that the establishment of a national Jewish territory would, by its very existence, pave the way for the enhanced emancipation of those Jews who continued to live outside the territorial homeland. Key words: Zionism, Russian empire, Leon Pinsker, Jewish emancipation, Read today [Pinsker's] pamphlet, 'Autoemancipation!'. ... Dumbfounding agreement on the critical side, great similarity in the constructive. A pity that I had not read it before my own pamphlet was [...]

In 1964 an Israeli film was nominated for the first time ever for an Oscar as the best foreign film. This film has since become the most popular Israeli film [...]

INTRODUCTION In May of 2010, I directed a study abroad program for St. Mary's University graduate students studying human security within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (1) The program [...]

This issue of IJWP contains articles on three different topics, Chinese economic growth, politics in Turkey, and Zionism. The first article, 'Reinterpreting the 'Chinese Miracle'' by Xingyuan Feng, Christer Ljungwall, [...]

Challenging the widely accepted premise that the 1948 war was a war of Jewish self-defense, the author demonstrates that the 1947 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) partition resolution was fundamentally a green light for the Yishuv's fully mobilized paramilitary organizations (supported by the resources of the World Zionist Organization) to effect the long-planned establishment of a Jewish state by force of arms. He further argues that as a national movement, Zionism was inherently conquest-oriented from the moment of its birth in Basel in 1897 and that it most closely resembles--in the alchemy of its religious and secular motivation and its insatiable land hunger, irredentism, and indifference to the fate of the 'natives'--the Iberian Reconquista of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. DOI: jps.2010.XXXIX.1.24.

This article deals with the place of the oriental Jewish immigrant question within the matrix of policy debates and political dilemmas faced by Mapai in the early years of the state. Its main argument is that conflicts over the oriental Jewish immigrant question were, in part, a manifestation of a conflict-ridden political culture, which fluctuated between two poles: centralism and egalitarianism. Alongside support and endorsements of a policy that would encourage paternalism, dependency, and patronage in the relationship between the government and the country's new immigrants, we can also find clear, well-articulated, and not infrequent protests against the promotion of passivity in political life. These oppositional voices sought to advance a distinct vision of their own that called for giving real political power to immigrants in order to transform them from a controlled public into an active partner in government. Key words: Mapai, oriental Jews, immigration, Zionist-socialism, Hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived in Israel from Islamic countries following the Jewish state's independence in 1984. These "oriental" Jews constituted approximately half of a mass of newcomers who [...]

The article examines the Zionist Revisionist movement and discusses its key features, ideologies as well as shortcomings.

ABSTRACT Since the 1960s, when he emerged as one of the main literary voices of a new generation of Israeli writers, Amos Oz came to represent, both in his writings [...]

I've been trying to evade Zion for 63 years. It's proving increasingly difficult. My uncle thought Israel was an oasis for the Jewish people; my father thought it was a [...]

The religious Zionists, who organized since 1902 in an international movement called 'Mizrachi', realized the need for a revolutionary movement to free from the grip of a diasporic malaise, unlike the ultra-orthodox Jews who saw the Zionist movement as an ungodly presumption. Religious Zionism, despite its attempts to limit the impact of the modernist, critical, social engineering dimension of its commitment, it could not do so entirely without ceasing to be a Zionist, and the logic of religious Zionism, no less than secular Zionism, attracted its followers toward collectivist economic policies.

A militarized alliance of state-subsidized software firms, real-estate developers and captive Orthodox labour is forging the path of the Separation Wall in the Occupied Territories. The largest information technology (IT) company, Matrix, in Israel has come up with a novel idea of introducing the first Zionist local offshore outsourcing by using low-paid ultra-orthodox women workers in state-subsidized settlements in the Occupied Territories.

THE BALFOUR DECLARATION: DISTORTED LANGUAGE AND DEVASTATED LIVES IT MAY HAVE TAKEN PROPHETIC inspiration to write in 1921, as Ameen Rihani did in The Descent of Bolshevism, that the Bolshevik [...]

IN 1989, THE MA'ALE SCHOOL of Television, Film, and the Arts was founded in Jerusalem with the primary purpose of providing religiously observant Jews with the opportunity to receive the […]

THE AIM OF THIS PAPER is to identify and survey some significant voices in the current post-Zionist critique of Israel among Jews and Israelis, and assess their development and political […]

FOR A LONG TIME, studies of Zionism were focused on the development of Zionism, its history, its ideas, its internal struggles, and debates as par of Jewish history. It was […]

Former Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini once said that Italy never had financial or military resources commensurate with its foreign policy ambitions, and that its efforts to maintain friendship with all [...]

In a search for some keys to understanding the complex relations between workers, Labour and nationalism, this article focuses on the problematic presence of nationalism in strikes in Mandate Palestine. [...]

January 17, 2002: Is There an Alternate Route? A COUPLE OF DAYS AGO, WE TOOK SOME JEWISH educators who are studying here at the Mandel School for a couple of [...]

No man is strong or wealthy enough to move a people. Only an idea can do that. -- Theodor Herzl All good history is revisionist -- it revises, adds to, […]

This article examines Israeli Zionists' anti-Arab propaganda and its influence on public opinion in Europe and America of the conflicts in Israel and Palestine. The author focuses on the Left Zionist party's interpretations of events surrounding the Camp David Accords and Ehud Barak's role in it.

This article analyzes myths held by Zionists about the foundation of Israel, include ideas of Jewish sovereignty over Israel prior to exile, an interim period of exile, and a return from exile resulting in the resettlement of Palestine. The author relates these Zionist concepts to the Jewish-led ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, Jewish anti-Arab propaganda and its influence on foreign policies regarding the emergence of the nation-state.

This article examines the history and underlying causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and troubles in the Middle East. Issues addressed include the rise of Zionism, the Intifada, British colonialism in the region and US relations with and support for Israel.

The article examines the social and political implications of using Hebrew place names in the 1958 publication of a map of Israel. Topics include toponomy, Zionism, and the legitimization and negation of competing ideologies.

It is perhaps because the greatest unifier of Jews during the past half-century has been the idea that Israel is the Jewish homeland, that one of the least doubted notions [...]