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The article discusses the concept of Zionism in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Topics covered include the reasons why Palestinians have always referred to Israel as the Zionist entity or enemy, the use of Zionism as an excuse for anti-Semitism to flourish in places that profess to abhor prejudice, and how Zionism has inserted an element of Chosen-ness into the alchemy of Jewish democracy.

In September 2014, the Member States of the League of Arab States approved the Statute of the Arab Court of Human Rights finalising a 20-year process to put in place a human rights protection mechanism which resembles mechanisms operating in other regions. This article examines the defunct Arab Charter on Human Rights of 1994, the revised Human Rights Charter of 2004 as well as the mandate and the activities of the Arab Human Rights Committee. It then explains the drafting of the Court's Statute, analyses the salient features of its Statute, which was concluded independently of the 2004 Charter, and makes pertinent comparisons with the European, Inter-American and African regional mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how readers can hear Arabic voices within Hebrew novels written by Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries or who were born in Israel to Arabicspeaking parents.1 I look at the ways in which the Arabic language itself, as well as Arabic literature and Islamic religious texts, are mediated in these novels. The inclusion of Arabic voices within the Hebrew texts, I argue, acts powerfully against national monolingualism and generates a new understanding of Arab-Jewish relations and of Mizrahi Diasporic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Governmental Arab College of Jerusalem is a little-known constructed space that emerged and then disappeared in just a few decades, a remarkable while extremely limited time if we reflect on the ancient history of the town that hosted it. However, it would be a great mistake not to consider these 30 years of history, from 1918 to 1948, and especially the wealth of cultural consciousness that the College was able to instill in its students. Ihsan Abbas (1920-2003), Ismail Ragib Khalidi (1916-1968), 'Abdul Latif Tibawi (1910-1981), Irfan Shahid (1926) as academics, and Haidar Abdel Shafi (1919-2007), Halil-Salim Jabara (1913-1999), Hasib Sabbagh (1920-2010) etc. as politicians and activists are some of the most important names in Arab Palestinian culture and politics of the twentieth century, and all of them studied at the Arab College of Jerusalem. In this article, I would like to focus attention on the importance of this secondary/preparatory school, the social and cultural values that the teaching body was able to impart, and the role it played within the increasing and violent debate that the Arab College ignited concerning the growing Arab Palestinian-Jewish conflict in the first half of the twentieth century under the British Mandate. The Palestinian intelligentsia that was shaped within the Arab College symbolizes a cultural elite that, even if it would learn what it means to live as refugees, continued to work in different ways on its own cultural tradition. A key subject in understanding the main reasons behind the roots of identity within this divided city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the political import of the hike or walk (ha-tiyul; plural, tiyulim) among Jewish settlers in Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century. Situating this travelling practice within the broader Zionist discourse of which it was a part, I will suggest that the tiyulim conducted by Jewish settlers were important technologies of settler nation-making which helped to rewrite Arab Palestine as a Jewish geography. Drawing on postcolonial arguments about imperial travel, this essay presents both a condensed history of such travelling practices and a close reading of some of the travelogues they spawned. I focus on two divergent itineraries: (a) accounts of travel within the borders of the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) replete with classic colonial tropes of conquest, the empty landscape, and Palestinian-Arab culture qua ethnographic object; and (b) accounts of Jewish travel to neighbouring Arab countries (Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon) from which colonial tropes are frequently absent. I suggest that these postcolonial readings of Zionist travel and travelogues advance the scholarship on Zionist coloniality by suggesting the role of everyday culture within the settler-national project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the impact of state rule on the Bedouin-Arab community in Al Naqab and their subsequent resistance. It is said that the European-based Zionist movement to settle Palestine, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the change of Palestinian-Arab population into a minority have greatly affected the Bedouin-Arab community in Al Naqab. The Al Naqab Bedouins are said to have inhabited Al Naqab Desert from early periods. After the establishment of the State of Israel, the Israeli authorities closed most of the land in Al Naqab to the Bedouin Arabs and prohibited them from migrating seasonally.

This paper examines the Zionist national mission to mobilise Jewish ethnic communities in Arab countries, in the period preceding the establishment of the state of Israel. It draws on archival texts to trace a phenomenon known in Jewish historiography as 'Shadarut'; a voluntary religious practice of fundraising which was widespread in the Jewish world for hundreds of years. The paper shows how this prenational religious practice (to be labelled 'the cloak') was adopted and incorporated into the Zionist national project ('the cage'), first generating tension between the Jewish religious establishment and the Zionist 'secular' movement, and then blurring the distinction between Judaism as a religion and Judaism as a national identity. The paper shows how secular emissaries of European origin arrived in Arab countries as religious emissaries ('shadarim') and aspired to discover a strong religious fervour among members of the Jewish communities there. This is because in the eyes of the Zionist (ostensibly secular) movement, being religious Jews in Islamic countries was a criterion that demarcated them from their Arab neighbours. This analysis entails two main conclusions: (a) that contrary to the experience of the European Zionist national movement in which secularism and the revolt against the Jewish religion played a central role, in Islamic countries it was particularly the Jewish religion, and not secular nationalism that was used to mobilise the Jewish community into the Jewish national movement; (b) that the 'shadarut' practice refuses to yield to the epistemological imperatives and the common divisions that arise from the binary distinction between 'religiousness' and 'secularity', particularly in the Middle East. Some implications for contemporary Israeli society are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past thirty years, Israel tried to cope with the difficult problem of an Arab minority having culture, identity, community, resources and a non-Zionist ideology significantly differing from those of the Jewish majority. It managed to neutralize Arabs as a threat to national security and the Jewish Zionist nature of the state as well as to harness their services in manpower, lands and other resources. Under these complex circumstances, domination is a more effective means of buying peace than the less practical ways of consensus-building and consociational partnership. It is reasonable to assume that as long as no revision is made to the exclusionary ideology of a Jewish Zionist state in which there is no real room for Arabs. It is also assumed that the Israeli-Arab conflict endures to sustain the basic Jewish mistrust and legitimizes the inferior and dominated status of Arabs in Israel and the machinery of control continues to keep order at a low cost. When the domination policy encounters difficulties the establishment responds by seeking for remedy through different kinds of reforms. During the decade of 1970, many liberal reforms were suggested.