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In the Middle East, as elsewhere, the protracted transition from empire to nation-state was accompanied by a brutal tide of ethnoreligious homogenisation. One of the more dramatic examples was the destruction of the Arab world’s millennia-old Jewish communities.While this destruction is often discussed only in reference to the creation of the State of Israel, this article proposes a complementary model for understanding it, a model predicated on these Jews’ status as ordinary, not exceptional, inhabitants of the Ottoman world, and the disruption caused by the end of the Ottoman empire and its replacement with European colonial rule.Using interwar Aleppo as a case study, this article demonstrates how the end of the Ottoman system of religious communities led to an extended period of dysfunction for Aleppo’s Jewish communal institutions. Under the French Mandate, this dysfunction left Aleppo’s Jews unable to contend with a succession of crises, including a three-way competition for the community’s loyalty between French administrators, Arab nationalists and the Zionist movement. This dysfunction set the stage for the community’s terminal crisis – the 1947 pogroms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adaptation to modernity generated among the Jews different amalgamations between European and Jewish concepts and brought about diverse and often opposed ideological trends and movements. One was Zionism, built on a concoction between Jewish tenets such as Shivat-Zion (Return-to-Zion) and European nationalism and secularisation. The result, Jewish statehood, failed to eradicate or diminish the tensions between non-Jews and Jews with the old Jew-hatred now transferred to Israel. This article examines the ideological background of the Zionist idea and the interaction among its components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses Benjamin Netanyahu's border discourse in the context of radical right-wing populism. It discusses how, in the speeches and statements appearing in his official government website, Netanyahu construes groups located spatially outside Israel's borders, mainly terrorists and migrants (the "wild beasts" and the "infiltrators"), as existential threats to Israel. The aim is to prove that, in legitimizing the militarization of borders through "security fences", so that the "other" can be excluded from the nation, Netanyahu uses the same power geometries and discursive strategies, i.e. Proximization (Cap 2013) and dehumanizing metaphors (Santa Ana 1999, Musolff 2015, Taylor 2021), typically used by right-wing populist parties and leaders. By appealing to both populism and certain interpretations of Zionism, his ethnonationalist view of borders is based on the normalization of the discourse of delegitimation and exclusion of those groups considered as a threat to the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martin Buber's perspective on Zionism was rooted in the view that 'two vital claims' were 'opposed to one another'. Stressing the role of justice and imagination during speeches at the Zionist Congresses of 1921 and 1929, his 'prophetic' perspective emphasised the indivisibility of politics and morality. Distinguishing between 'Israel' (nationalism) and 'Zion' (a spiritual ideal) led him to advocate for a bi-national state in Palestine. He called the way the State of Israel came into being in 1948 as an entry into history through 'a false gateway'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the movement advocating animal rights and welfare (animal rights movement), in parallel with the practice of ethical veganism, has become increasingly significant in Israel. Along with this trend, several studies examine and analyze the colonial aspects of the Israeli animal rights movement and its relevance to the Palestinian issue from the perspective of Critical Animal Studies. Critically examining preceding studies on veganism and colonialism, through analysis of the political discourses of leading activists and public figures within the newly popular Israeli vegan trend, as well as interviews with a sample of Israeli vegans, this article will demonstrate how veganism in Israel is associated with a narrative of Israeli national superiority. Such discourses may well be called 'vegan nationalism'. Vegan nationalism is a discursive and regulatory framework in which veganism is considered proof of the moral superiority of a nation in a settler colonialist context, implicitly stressing the barbarism and backwardness of the 'terrorists'. At the same time, as an article written by the Israel Defense Force indicates, in this framework, vegans present a welcome, appealing image that resonates even though it differs from the image of the stronger, more robust and powerful carnist traditionally favored by Zionists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populism and civilizationism have transformed the politics of many countries. Many scholars consider them the biggest challenges to democracy since the rise of fascism and communism in the first half of the last century. The close affinity between populism, civilizationism, and rightwing politics has also been analyzed and recognized in many countries from Turkey to India to the US. However, there are three areas that distinguish the appearance of civilizationism in Israel. First, in contrast to many other countries, civilizationism in Israel is not a new phenomenon. It has been an essential part of Israeli nationalism or Zionism since the early 20th century. Second, unlike many countries, Jewish civilizationism in Israel is an article of faith for all major Israeli political parties. It is not a slogan raised only by the rightwing, conservative part of the political spectrum. Finally, one observes an affinity between civilizationism and populism. Civilizational rhetoric is the mainstay of populist leaders, such as Trump, Erdogan, etc. In Israel, populism and civilizationism have no special relationship as civilizationism is mainstream politics. All politicians, populists and non-populists, have to pay homage to Jewish civilizationism; otherwise, they will not succeed. This paper analyzes the Israeli founding fathers' statements, the Declaration of Independence, Israeli state symbols, the revival of the Hebrew language, the Law of Return, the first debate in the Knesset, and the more recent Nation-State Law to demonstrate how Jewish civilizationism is old, mainstream, and not exclusively populist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biblical tales resonate powerfully with Israeli Jews who live with, in and through their religious past, occasionally re-experiencing it, even as they resist it. The article considers the political sentiments of Israeli Jews through the life and death of the biblical Samson in order to revisit the emotional and moral drivers of their public beliefs, behaviors, and identities. I identify the biblical story's main facets and show how they resonate with Israel's political sentiments: the fantasy of a sacred supremacy; the mistrust of adversaries from within and without; a fear of humiliation and isolation; and recourse to sacrificial revenge. I suggest that while the Bible has become a bone of contention between secular and religious Zionists, Israel's "Samsonian" qualities exist in a dialectical process of divergence and convergence over meaning-making. If Israel is Samson in chains, it may be time for liberation in life rather than death after bringing down the Philistine temple. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, the State of Israel enacted a new constitutional law: 'BASIC LAW: ISRAEL-THE NATION STATE OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE'. The Law reflects diverse Zionist ideologies which were nevertheless all 'land-centered' rather than state-centered from an early stage; it reformulates that intellectual tradition, however, promoting Jewish settlements in conditions of occupation and celebrates, for the first time, settlement as the prime and exclusive goal of the state. Partly to facilitate this goal, and to further blur borders, the law also contracts the meaning and status of Palestinians' citizenship in Israel, thus at least symbolically narrowing the (still significant) political-legal gap between these citizens and the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Finally, the Law seems to vacate the state from its ethical dimension and commitments as defined by its Declaration of independence (1948) — including its commitments to the democratic principles of political liberty for all and equality — thus manifesting the influence ruling and subjugating others through military government is having on Israel's constitutional framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new perspective on the early stages of Zionism, adopting the ethno‐symbolic approach to the study of nationalism. Scholars who follow this approach assert that in order to achieve a complete understanding of nationalism, we must address its cultural pre‐modern dimension. I argue that in the case study of Jewish nationalism presented here, this approach offers us a more nuanced understanding of early Zionism. First, the article explores the formation of the Zionist conception of the Jewish past and shows that this developed in the second half of the nineteenth century before the inception of political Zionism. Second, the article demonstrates that political Zionism was deeply connected with cultural issues. Two key issues that generated much internal debate and conflict during the early years of the Zionist movement are presented as examples: the schism between 'East' and 'West', and the debate over 'the people versus the land'. Exploring these political conflicts from a cultural perspective highlights the strong connection between the Zionist movement and the pre‐modern Jewish past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores George Mosse's complex attitude to both nationalism in general and particularly to Zionism and Israel. It examines how Mosse was explicitly caught between a critical analysis of nationalism, and an intellectual commitment to liberalism and Bildung, on the one hand, and on the other, an existential attraction to the blandishments and emotional power of nationalism and, given his Jewish identity, especially Zionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years of the British Mandate in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael were a time of struggle between two competing movements, Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism, both of which dreamed of sovereignty over every part of the country. The article considers a third contested field, namely, the design, content and language of the postage stamps issued by Mandate authorities in the service of all inhabitants of Palestine. Stamps were viewed by the British, the Jewish leadership of the Yishuv and the leaders of the Arab-Palestinian population alike as a public opinion battleground in miniature, and a means of shaping the precarious future of the land. Stamps were powerfully symbolic devices, often illustrating sacred sites (like the Dome of the Rock or Rachel's Tomb), with captions in the corresponding languages (English, Arab or Hebrew), and relative script size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines current manifestations of Zionist political-economy by analyzing discourses that frame Israel as a "Start-Up Nation"—that is, a unique economic achievement that offers a successful business model for the world. By focusing on the 2009 book from the Council of Foreign Relations, Start-Up Nation, this article theorizes "neoliberal Zionism" as a manifestation of Zionism that valorizes specific kinds of neoliberal rationalities in order to garner support for the State of Israel. In particular, neoliberal Zionism produces an entrepreneurial Israeli citizen-subject whose unique cultural attributes derive from compulsory military service and a Zionist past sanitized of conflict with Palestinians. Further, these discourses position this neoliberal Zionist subject as economically out-competing Arabs and Palestinians. At stake is how neoliberalism and exclusionary nationalism potentially mobilize each other and operate as "management" models for other states to adopt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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134 REVIEWS War over Peace: One Hundred Years of Israel's Militaristic Nationalism joins a growing body of literature arguing that Israel's military (the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF) and its broader security establishment regularly intervene in political decision making that in most democracies is the prerogative of the elected civilian government. But he argues that Kohn's typology highlights the consistent unwillingness of the leading currents of the Zionist movement to envision a multi-ethnic, multi-religious polity in Palestine/Israel. According to Ben-Eliezer, Israeli militarism began to emerge at a very early stage of the Zionist settlement project in Palestine. [Extracted from the article]

This article looks to European Jewry between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to illuminate the role of love in a modern nationalist movement. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the political activist Moses Hess (1812–1875) and the historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) professed a sentimental love of Jews and of the land of Israel. In the 1880s, the hovevei tsion (Lovers of Zion) movement produced poetry in which attachment to Zion and the Jewish people was more romantic than sentimental, oscillating between a passive, mournful yearning for the land and an active, muscular striving to rebuild it. With the advent of Herzlian political Zionism, the Zionist labor movement, and the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, the more dynamic variety of romanticism became dominant, and it assumed more explicitly erotic and militant dimensions than had previously been the case. Older forms of sentimental love did not disappear, however. Until the end of his life, the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow (1859–1936) remained convinced that sentimental love was Zionism's overarching organizing principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looks at cultural policy through the analytical lens of two major theories of mass media that are considered of major significance in understanding the reproductive roles of media in nation building and maintenance. Focusing on the Israeli context, it examines the reciprocal relations between the State of Israel during its first decade of independence and its developing cinema industry. It highlights the institutionalised processes through which cinema policies were formulated. The study is grounded on discourse analysis of the minutes of Israeli parliament (Knesset) discussions that preceded enactment of the "1954 Law for Encouragement of Israeli Cinema". The findings show that the legislative initiative, legislation process and the Law itself reflect the hegemonic "Statist-Zionist" ideology that the ruling elite sought to promulgate and naturalise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the concept of 'land‐centred' nationalism and suggests that it is important for distinguishing among different types of nationalism and for better understanding the role of land and place in this ideology. In order to demonstrate what land‐centred nationalism actually means, the article examines Zionism as a case study, arguing that some of the leading, early intellectual schools of this national movement (cultural, socialist, and religious Zionism) tended to underscore the role of the Land of Israel in collective identity rather than the role of the political community. Despite many differences in their general outlook, these schools all celebrated the land's spiritual role while neglecting or even opposing the idea of a Jewish state. This devaluation of the bond among citizens in favour of the bond of a people with their ancient land contributed to Zionism's contemporary difficulties and manifests the dangers of land‐centred nationalism more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the life and career of the late Israeli prime minister and teacher Golda Meir. Topics discussed include Meir's nationalism and loyalty to Zionism, her main achievements including leading the Labor Movement, laying the foundations for Israel's relationships with Third World countries and guiding Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and the renewed interest in her due to turbulent developments in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While discussions of Israeli cuisine as a distinct cultural field are relatively new, the cuisine already proliferates in media, food service, and industrial production. In content, it reflects influences from a variety of global sources. This article argues that Israeli cuisine arose through the application of Zionist historical intelligibility to diasporic and indigenous Arab cuisines. The result is a cuisine that embodies the characteristic, teleological "ingathering of exiles" to appropriate diasporic culinary traditions. This process characterizes Israel's hegemonic control of the means of narration and the production of a superfluous diasporic Jewish and indigenous Arab population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on decolonization in Palestine and settlers becoming native. Topics discussed include ethical duty of the colonized to offer solutions to colonizer, national identity of Palestinians and impact of Palestinians winning on Zionism. Other topics include citizenship of Palestinians and two-state solution to end Arab-Israel conflict.

This article advances a non-groupist understanding of the foundation, operation and self-perpetuation of states that scholars have hitherto labelled ethnocracies or ethnic democracies. Such states create and ignite zero-sum internal conflicts between portions of their populations. They do so by demarcating the population into ethnic categories. They apply labels to individuals and hierarchically order the categories to which they are deemed to belong, awarding one cohort more privilege than the other. Existing literature on such states has obscured the processes by which states reify and institutionalise identity, instead presenting it through groupist frames in which ethnicity is a pre-existing variable. Re-conceptualising the doing of ethnicity as a process enables us to study internal dissent against ethnic privilege and consider its transformational capacity in inspiring new nationalist discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Names Law adopted by the Israeli Knesset in July 1956 established that Israeli citizens must bear a first name and family name. The adoption of Hebrew names was a key strand in Zionist ideology and part of the creation of a Hebrew culture and a national identity. Although the enactment of the Names Law formed part of the state policy of the Hebraization of names in the early 1950s and was directed at Jewish immigrants in general, and those from Arab and Muslim countries in particular, some of whom did not have a family name, it was intended mainly for the Palestinian Arab population that remained in Israel after the 1948 War and who lived under military rule. The Names Law can thus be understood as part of the strengthening of Israeli control and supervision of the Arab population during a period of state building, and as a process of social, cultural, and national integration that took place against the background of absorbing Jewish immigrants into the nation state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the influence of kibbutz in the Israeli identity, focusing on its provocative and pervasive presence in the formation of the Hebrew fiction and literacy culture of the country. It explores the response of ideology to the contingency in various periods , as well as the conflicts between aspirations of individual and the collective and between the Jewish diaspora and Zionist socialist revolution. Also discussed is the portrayals of European immigrants in Hebrew fiction.

Based on a wide array of archival sources of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), the article explores the historical relationship between the Party, Israel and the Jew and focuses on the real motivations behind the current divide between Israel and the European (Communist or former Communist) Left. The articles argues that Communism for Israel has not been lost for the presumed discriminatory attitude of the Jews in the Communist world, nor for historical growing Communist support of Palestinian guerrilla groups, but because of the increasing militarism and nationalism of the Zionist Left and the erosion of Communist and pacifist ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ernest Gellner notes that the quarrel between himself and Anthony Smith could be summarized by the question: do nations have navels? According to his modernist outlook, while some nations might have navels, others do not, and in any case it is not important; while in Smith's conception, navels constitute an 'ethnic core', essential for nation-building. Yet in the pre-independence nation-building process, what Smith considers Israel's ethnic core-mainly the concepts of the 'Chosen People' and 'Holy Land'-either did not have the same meaning or did not play the important role that Smith attributes to them. Indeed, Smith's account of Zionism is a post-independence invention and in this respect a further corroboration of modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the concept of identity by juxtaposing New Age philosophy and nationalism in the Israeli context. Based on my qualitative research, I deconstruct the Israeli New Age discourse on ethno-national identity and expose two approaches within this discourse. The more common one is the belief held by most Israelis, according to which ethno-national identity is a fundamental component of one's self. A second and much less prevalent view resembles New Age ideology outside Israel and conceives of ethno-national identities as a false social concept that separate people rather than unite them. My findings highlight the limits of New Age ideology as an alternative to the hegemonic culture in Israel. The difficulty that Israeli New Agers find in divorcing hegemonic conceptualizations demonstrates the centrality and power of ethno-national identity in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates Israeli national identity and its core founding tenets of Zionism, democracy, and Judaism. For decades, demographic changes and associated cultural and ideological fluctuations have gradually pushed Israel into a national identity conflict, as multiple ethnic and sectarian identity groups have come to promote competing interpretations of the state's purpose, political nature, and connection to territory. Continued demographic shifts, situated amid the sociopolitical dynamics of what this article will define as Israel's "democratic tribalism," will further test the compatibility of the constituent parts of Israeli national identity: the respective roles of Zionist ideology, democratic institutions, and the territory of the historic Jewish homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism. Particular focus is given to the role of Zionism in Israeli recognition of Palestinian Arabs' viewpoints and claims regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict and in possibilities for reconciliation. It is suggested that Zionism has always been interpreted in different ways depending on circumstantial needs and interests and is therefore neither a significant aid nor a significant impediment to an Arab-Israeli peace process. Details on the history of Zionism are presented.

Since the mid-1980s the state of Israel has introduced dramatic changes in its economic policies, from a centralized, planned economy, to a liberal, open one. This process entailed important consequences for the state's Jewish identity at both the national and religious levels, mainly as a result of state retreat from spheres in which it had previously been present (e.g. privatization of land, labour during the Sabbath, relaxed food-related prohibitions, etc.). The cumulative impact of this process points to a gradual, yet important shift in Israel – from a Jewish state to a state that privatizes Jewish identity, a process that may be termed economic post-Zionism, as it is a by-product of the noted economic changes, and is dissimilar to other forms of post-Zionism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the book "A Just Zionism: On the Morality of the Jewish State," by Chaim Gans. It rethinks Israeli politics along less exclusionary and more accommodating lines while examining the internal and external critique directed at Gans's book. The author highlights challenges posed by his normative principles to Palestinian nationalism and influential interpretations of Zionism, and the opportunities for new venues for Palestinians and Arabs to engage with the Jewish question.

The transnationalism literature has redefined the concept of diaspora, claiming it to be de-rooted, de-centred and detached from the nation-state rhetoric of ‘one nation, one land’, primordial belonging and common origins. In this article I revisit the Jewish diaspora, once the classic case, as it navigates the reality—and tension—of its own transformation: from myth to reality of homeland return, although most have not returned. Specifically, I analyse March of the Living (MOL), a Holocaust education programme for international Jewish youth, that seeks to resolve this tension and shape the next generation of Jewish diasporans by strategically moving between old and new understandings of identity, homeland and diaspora. Discussed in this article are the various ways in which MOL emphasises to its participants the boundaries—and centre(s)—of Jewish diasporic identity. I conclude that transnational redefinitions of diaspora fail to adequately capture the mechanisms of all diasporic processes. The Jewish case calls for an in-between form of old and new diaspora that challenges but also recognises persistent claims of ethno-diasporic identity as essentialised and ultimately rooted in the homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses two basic issues of the Zionist vision: 1. Was the Jewish state planned as an ethnic or civic state? 2. What was the character of the Zionist vision? Was it a holistic utopian vision, or a minimalist vision for creating a Jewish national state? This research concludes that the state of Israel, which developed from a nationalist ethnic-cultural movement, integrated within it ethnic values as well as Western civic values. The founders of the central wing of the movement all aspired to create a Jewish national state that upheld these values. Furthermore, the planning of the Zionist Utopia by the central group of the Zionist leadership was usually realistic and minimalist, not holistic. This position enabled the leadership to strike a balance between vision and reality, and to address the historical circumstances on the path toward establishment of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the emergence of 'alternative Jewish travel' to the West Bank and within Israel. One programme, aimed at diaspora Jews, reframes religious, cultural, and ethnic Jewish identity to include non-violence and solidarity with Palestinians as part of what it means to be Jewish. Another programme, aimed at Israeli citizens (both Jews and non-Jews), reframes Israeli national identity to include post-Zionist solidarity with Palestinians, but is not necessarily Jewish in any religious or ethnic sense. Alternative Jewish travel programme tours explore complicated questions of justice and nationalism in different ways that reflect their simultaneously local and global positions, who organises them, and how they define Jewishness differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The paper deals with the connection between the project of translating anthropological texts from a foreign language to Hebrew, and the associated ideological changes, shaping of sociological and cultural identities, and dissemination of scientific knowledge. At the beginning of the translation project the European Jewish readers were the target of the anthropological texts in Hebrew as a corollary to the revival of the Hebrew language, the dissemination of universal scientific knowledge in the Haskala era, and Zionist motivation. With the establishment of socialist Israel, texts that supported collectivist ideas were translated. Later, the requirements of academic study, the theoretical schools in the main anthropology centers and their connection to Israeli anthropology directed the choice of texts for translation. A century after the first texts appeared, the anthropological discipline has been enhanced by private publishers who were aware of the lacunae in classical anthropological texts and have, over the past few decades, published new translations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contribute to the ongoing debate over population politics and the perceived reinvigoration of eugenic practices in "people's home" countries. The ability of governments to subsidize genetic technologies or familial lifestyle choices also gives them the ability to choose who has access to these technologies and in so doing the ability to favor the procreation of one group over another. The authors suggest that such subsidization is used under the guise of productivist strategies by nations interested first and foremost in preserving their ethno-national identity. Although these countries, adhering to liberal democratic economics, profess to reward productivity, there seems to be more than a coincidental relationship between the "productive" and the ethnic national stock. The authors use as a case study a comparison between Israel and Sweden to show how such eugenic strategies arose over time in people's home countries that synthesized productivism and national welfare. They suggest that genetics today is just as prone to being used for purposes of social engineering in welfare states and results in exclusion of individuals and communities. Indeed, as the authors demonstrate, welfare states provide generous benefits such as reproductive technology and child allowances to members of their national stock, at the same time hardly providing benefits to those who do not have share in ethnic membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Jewish community of Palestine was an extremely family-oriented society and the institute of the family played a major role in the establishment of the new Zionist nationhood, the historiography has henceforth paid little attention to its role, images, and functions. This article will examine the diverse and often contradictory perceptions and influences that have shaped the Zionist discourse regarding the family in the Jewish settlement of Palestine during the British mandate period. Traditional Jewish perceptions intertwined with modern, bourgeois, and revolutionary notions of the family, whether national or socialist. These contradictory perceptions were manifested in the contested professional and public discourse regarding the many dysfunctional urban families in Tel Aviv, who were treated by welfare authorities and mental health specialists during the 1930s and 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts forward an in-depth examination of the Wadi Salib events. The recently disclosed proceedings of the Wadi Salib Committee of National Inquiry are interpreted to show how the Oriental Jews (Mizrachim) explained their actions in Zionist terms centered on Jewish kinship. The Western Jews (Ashkenazim) in turn, rejected the Oriental Jews' sense of alliance and underlined the colonial element of Zionist identity. Identity threat theory is incorporated to explain how the two opposing views of Zionism may have been constructed and how these may have contributed to the outbreak of the Wadi Salib events. Some conclusions regarding the nature of Israeli national identity, Ashkenazim-Mizrachim relations, and Majority-Minority, Immigrants-Veterans relations emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern-ethnic nationalist movement or a Western-civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern-ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalism is the untenable union of the impersonal, mechanistic, bureaucratic logic of the state and the intimate, emotional, organic logic of the nation. While practicing martial arts, the participants at the Israeli Survival School of Ju Jutsu create a utopian Israeliness, using bits of state-national understandings to form a family-like organicity. At the North Indian school of wrestling described by Joseph Alter, too, an organic utopian nationalism is practiced into existence through meticulous care for the body itself. A comparison between those modes of embodying the national, set in very different cultural and national realities, reveals not only different understandings of the national and of its organic nature, but also different uses of semiotic mechanisms. Whereas the Israeli world of the Survival School is based on representation, the Indian one is constructed from the body and the environment, set in dense connectedness forming this world in and of itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay takes advantage of recent publications by Jacqueline Rose, Idith Zertal, and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, which with different methodologies address the same "psychopolitical" nexus of nationalism and messianism commanding the structure of Zionism, before and after the emergence of the State of Israel. It seeks to assess the uniqueness but also the typical character of the ideological process and the narrative constructions through which an experience of persecution and victimhood becomes transformed into a consciousness of legitimate domination. Following the reviewed authors, the essay also emphasizes the importance of the controversy between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt whose works, in their very opposition, remain crucial sources of intelligibility for the tension of the theological and the secular in the politics of the Zionist State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacob Talmon was a believer in nationalism, and in Jewish nationalism of the Zionist variety in particular. He was convinced of the moral right of Jews to establish their own state in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. On the other hand, he was aware of the dangers inherent in nationalism, of its tendency toward chauvinism, intolerance toward “the other,” and violence. In the case of Zionism he contrasted the pre-1967 movement, which he believed was characterized by moderation in the spirit of his hero, Chaim Weizmann, and post-1967 Zionism, which took on the very characteristics he deplored in right-wing Polish nationalism and in the extreme national movements of other ethnic groups. This article analyzes his critique of Israeli ideology and policy in the post-1967 period, and asks whether the distinction he makes between “good” Zionism as formulated by the founders of the movement, and “bad” Zionism as personified by Menachem Begin and the leaders of religious Zionism, is justified. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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 major trends in Israeli economic history and the corresponding political transformations. It also discusses nationalism and master narratives intended to illuminate the re-invention of Israel within the context of the new regime. It explores the two visions of Israel within Zionism. It explains the stages in the Israeli economic history.

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]

No culture, no society, remains static but changes imperceptibly day by day. The struggle waged by western art music in Israel for survival is eerily suggestive of how Israeli society in general has changed since the early Zionists set the course for the creation of a Jewish nation-state. Once regarded as the civilized face and civilizing influence of the Jewish national endeavour in Palestine/Israel, its advocates claim ever more desperately that western art music in Israel is in a state of rapid decline. Yet public opinion surveys reveal that the Israeli public backs state support for arts and culture whether or not people participate in cultural activities. Despite this, the internal ethnic struggle for domination of the arts and culture world and the rearguard action by culture administrators are both in danger of being overtaken by the country's exposure to global popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of language preceded the founding of Israel. In the nineteenth century, the emergence of political Zionism was accompanied by a revival of Hebrew. In the early years of Jewish resettlement in Palestine, Hebrew slowly emerged as the popular language, a compromise between the Yiddish spoken by Eastern European immigrants and the Arabic or Ladino current among many Middle Eastern Jews. After World War I, as educational institutions proliferated, the challenge of French and German as languages of instruction was blocked by teachers' strikes. With the establishment of the state and the massive influx of Jewish displaced persons, mostly speakers of Yiddish, that language, regarded as a potential threat to the primacy of Hebrew, was systematically fought by the country's political and cultural elite. Today, the position of Hebrew as the national language of Israel is secure. English, however, has been asserting its influence in an increasingly postindustrial and globalised society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]