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The Israeli ‘Tent Protest’ movement enjoyed wide popular support, but displayed a distinct lack of political radicalism. Not only did calls for discrete welfare policies replace explicit anti-capitalism, but there was a widespread insistence on the movement's ‘apolitical’ nature and an avoidance of any direct confrontation with the neoliberal Netanyahu government or calls for new elections. The article argues that these anomalies can be explained by the chilling effect of the patriotic, state-loyalist discourses which reached unprecedented prominence in Israeli society in the past year. This led movement participants to avoid at all costs being perceived as left-wing and disloyal, and created an atmosphere of deliberate self-censorship which silenced any engagement with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict during the mobilization. The movement is understood here as an all-too-brief interlude in Israel's ongoing move away from democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the increasing incorporation of professional therapeutic knowledge and practices into the state-led apparatus of absorption of new immigrants in Israel. Singling out this phenomenon is the seemingly unexpected alliance between the therapeutic ethos, which leans on individualist, a-national and universal values, and state-led absorption practices, based on a Zionist, collectivist and local ethos. According to the Zionist ethos, the newcomer 'returning to an historical homeland' is expected to become part of a territorially bounded collective entity and to adopt a new national identity that will predominate over other identities. The therapeutic ethos undermines moral authorities promoting collective redemption through identification with community goals and challenges a patronizing attitude towards new immigrants. Analysing the rhetoric and practice of Na'aleh - a decade-and-a-half-old project for adolescents immigrating from the former Soviet Union, characterized by a 'therapeutic absorption policy', this article examines the meaning of 'therapeutic' absorption in shaping a new Israeli citizen within the current social context. In order to clarify the historical uniqueness of this phenomenon, Na'aleh's absorption paradigm is compared to Youth Aliyah - the project that absorbed youngsters in a distinctly different ideological period of Israeli history (early 1940s), particularly with regard to the status of Zionism. A locus of comparison is the perceptions of the absorbing personnel and the absorbed immigrants in both ventures. The main claim of this article is that the psychologizing of the absorption apparatus both challenges and fortifies the traditional role of statist Zionism under global, postmodern conditions, typified by the erosion of the nation-state and questioning the moral status of its constitutive ethos. Therapeutic absorption transforms the newcomer into the object of therapeutic intervention rather than assimilative education. However, it simultaneously enables the 'Russian' teenagers from a 'pre-therapeutic society' to internalize a 'therapeutic habitus', which grants them the skills and competency to become a 'local' and to attain symbolic goods significant in their new social environment. Therapeutic personnel, characterized by emotional skills and cultural proximity to the absorbed pupils, rather than ideological identification with Zionist project, serve as a newer version of traditional agents of Israeli socialization, by virtue of their own unique course of absorption in Israel that blends the process of 'becoming Israeli' with socialization into a professional/therapeutic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postcolonial theory is of some value in acquiring empirically referential historical knowledge on the phenomenon of Zionism, its causality, genesis, and development, issuing in the establishment of the State of Israel, and for comprehending the interaction of Zionists with their sociopolitical environment in Palestine, resulting in the chronic Israel--Arab conflict. The situation of the Jews within the majority societies of their domicile prior to, and during, the nineteenth century process of Jewish emancipation was in significant respects like that of colonized peoples all over the world. The Jews were 'subaltern' victims, subject to various forms of domination by the majority society, not least of which was a hegemonic cultural discourse that represented Jews as the quintessential Other; indeed as the 'Oriental' Other. Accordingly, many of the characteristic effects that are illuminated by postcolonial theory can be comparably identified in European Jewry in general and in the genesis of Zionism in particular. Hence, moralistic privileging of all subaltern victims of colonial-like domination-characteristically attendant upon postcolonialist theory--if applied without a priori prejudice or hostility, ought also to attach to the case of Zionism. No comparison of Zionist colonization praxis with theoretical models of European colonialism can provide profound historical comprehension of the Zionist-Arab conflict if it denies or overlooks the ontological nature of Zionism as an ethnonationalist ideology and movement. Categorization of Zionism as a case of colonialism does not serve genuine historical enquiry and knowledge. It is insidiously fallacious as an analytical tool, serving only partisan rhetorical ends. The essence of the conflict has always been a clash of nationalist aspirations. One may identify distorted Orientalist and Occidentalist representations respectively by Jews of the Arab 'Other' and by Arabs of the Jewish 'Other', but the empirical evidence shows overwhelmingly that the Zionist leadership was never blinded to reality by Orientalist representations of the Other. It recognized that the Arab Other had a valid claim, but held that the Jewish claim deserved precedence on the grounds of the Jews having a greater existential need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It reveals that the first intifada happened when Yaser Arafat proclaimed the foundation of an independent state in Palestine and recognized the existence of the State of Israel. The second intifada began in 2000 that destabilized Arab and Jewish communities reaching Europe and France. Due to evolution of conflict in the Middle East, Jews started developing their own diasporic nationalism around Israel and achieved their victory in 1967.

Over several decades, the East German stance towards Israel was marked by condemnation of Zionism, a unilateral position on the Arab-Israeli conflict and denial of reparations and restitution claims. This position had its ideological background in the communist approach to the “Jewish question,” anti-Semitism and nationalism, while the most important criterion in shaping attitudes towards Israel was the incorporation of the German Democratic Republic's Middle East policy into the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. In addition, the East German political elite followed its own political interests when it tried to break through the West German Hallstein doctrine with the help of some Arab countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What gives ethical and political validity to a state? This is to ask what a state is for and to provide a means to determine whether or not a constitution is just. In this paper I compare the account given by Tamir in Liberal Nationalism with that of Rawls, in order to clarify the decisive differences. Although both recognize the importance of particular associations and the moral imperative to be fair, Tamir places priority on the first and Rawls on the second. I explore their practical implications in regard to the ethical defensibility of Israel's self-identification as a Jewish state and to conflicting nationalistic territorial claims for the Temple Mount (Haram esh-Sharif) in Jerusalem. I suggest that if Tamir is correct in her analysis of nationalism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a problem that is without the sort of solution that is sought by those who are both interested parties and rational agents of good will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]