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This article investigates how the French antiracist movement and its main organizations dealt with Zionism and the Middle East conflict from the liberation of France until the early 1970s. Their generally positive view of Israel and their concern for Arab interests at the end of the 1940s demonstrate these republican organizations' desire to recognize ethnic identities. During the 1950s an ideological split between left-wing antiracism and Zionism began to develop, and by the end of the 1960s a number of new antiracist associations questioned the very foundation of the Jewish state. Overall, the study argues that antiracist organizations' stances on and statements about Zionism and the Middle East conflict influenced Jewish-Arab relations during the postwar period and played an important role for both Jews and Arabs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the Jews, the issue of slavery in the southern states, and the American Civil War has naturally focused on the Jews of the United States, who, as citizens, were reluctant to become involved in the debate that divided their country during those years. However, the attitude of the Jews in the Old World towards the events unfolding on a continent thousands of miles away has rarely been studied. This article examines the small group of Jews from Europe and the Land of Israel who became known as the "precursors of Zionism" and their attitude towards the American Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. This group was very sensitive to historical changes, sometimes even imbuing them with metaphysical meaning that went far beyond their political significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Western Jews' admiration for the new State of Israel on the basis of women's representation. Pamphlets, biographies, and whole series of fundraiser films, produced by Zionist women's organizations, depicted Jewish-Israeli women as carriers of democratic values, caring mothers for all of Israel's population, and courageous fighters for their people's survival. The Jewish-Israeli woman's image as "a better human being" served as an intriguing symbol through which Diaspora Jews could identify with the Jewish state and overcome feelings of impotence after the Holocaust in Europe. The idealized representation of Jewish-Israeli women primarily suited Western Jewry's need for Jewish empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores previously undervalued aspects of Zionist and Israeli visual culture in light of the (newly recognized) significance of Jews in the history of photography. Zionism and the emergence of the State of Israel accrued a great deal of good will and benevolent publicity due to the historical confluence between Jews and the rise of photojournalism especially from the 1920s to the 1950s. The first part of the article focuses on Robert Capa, Chim (David Seymour), and Alfred Eisenstaedt, who were far more important, Berkowitz argues, than expressly Zionist photographers. The piece furthermore details little-known attempts to establish the history of photography as a discipline in Israel under the tutelage of (photographer) Arnold Newman and (photographer and photo-historian) Helmut Gernsheim. Despite the immense overrepresentation of Jews among eminent photographers, and the pioneering roles of Jews in photography, the Hebrew University and Israel Museum could have – but did not – become leading centers for the history of photography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the Jewish Territorialist movement and the State of Israel during the first decade of the Jewish State's existence. Territorialism was never explicitly anti-Zionist, but it did grow increasingly critical of Zionist policies, especially regarding the Palestinian Arabs, and of Israel's militaristic character. While their stance vis-à-vis the young state became ever more negative, the Territorialists established contacts with members of the bi-nationalist Ihud movement. The fact that these "atypical" Zionists affiliated themselves with Territorialism during the 1950s demonstrates that May 1948 did not spell the end of alternative expressions of Jewish political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1897 to 1914, a small group of Danish Zionists presented the Danish Jewish community with a variety of Zionist objectives. In contrast to existing research, I argue that this activism played an important role in the communal change that took place among the Danish Jews before the outbreak of WWI. I identify how the salience of East European immigrants in Copenhagen compelled the self-conceived "ethnically" Danish Jews to reconsider and alter their boundaries of groupness in a significantly different way that resonated with the framework of Jewish groupness invoked earlier by the Zionists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a comparison between Jewish and Sahrawi nationalism, the article introduces James Scott's theorization of state-evading and state-making societies to the study of Zionist state formation. Given the state-evading features of Jewish Diaspora life (physical dispersion, segmentary kinship, acephalous social structure), the article argues that Zionism might best be compared to the state-making projects of other state-evading communities (including Kurdish, Berber, and Sahrawi nationalism). As an example for this comparative research agenda, the article explores the case of Sahrawi nationalism: While POLISARIO, the national liberation movement of Western Sahara, was consciously modelled after Third World insurgencies in Algeria and Palestine, the Sahrawi proto-state (the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) applies a model of state-driven nation-building that corresponds closely to the statism (mamlakhtiyut) of the Zionist state-in-the-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the shifting meanings of the tarbush (or fez) among Oriental Jewish men in late-Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. It demonstrates how the seemingly superficial issue of what men wore on their heads in fact reveals much about the broader historical changes in Oriental Jewish social identities and political loyalties during a period of rising Jewish and Arab tension in Palestine. Under late-Ottoman rule, many urban Jewish, Christian, and Muslim men alike donned this red, felted headgear as a unifying symbol of local and Ottoman identity. Over time, however, as the Jewish-Arab national boundary grew more rigidly defined under British rule, the tarbush increasingly became a marker of difference : It came to signify predominantly Arab, non-Jewish identity. While some Oriental Jewish men in Palestine continued to wear the tarbush for decades, thereby preserving a visible sartorial link with Palestinian Arabs, most eventually abandoned this headgear. Some did so in favor of more "modern" clothing endorsed by the British rulers and European-dominated Zionist leadership, while others were forced to abandon the tarbush during outbreaks of ethnic and national violence, when they were occasionally targeted by both Palestinian Arab and Jewish militants. Building on recent scholarship exploring the role of Oriental Jews in the Zionist movement and Arab-Jewish social relations in Palestine, this article demonstrates that removing the tarbush was not simply a matter of changing fashions; it was socially and politically imposed through symbolic and real violence that sought to eliminate any Arab-Jewish middle ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In duty bound, on 17 December 1942, Australia quietly and belatedly endorsed her allies' recognition of the ongoing Nazi genocide of Europe Jewry. This recognition placed no practical demands on Canberra. At the time, Australia herself feared invasion by the rampant forces of Japan. Nonetheless, when that national crisis had passed, the fate of the Jews in Europe was regarded as none of Australia's business. This attitude had a very familiar ring as it was, in essence, the continuation of the country's attitude towards the plight of German Jewry under the Nazis during the 1930s, when their plight was viewed as a domestic matter requiring no intervention from Australia. This was a mindset born of cultural and historical influences which guaranteed that any pleas for the rescue of European Jews would be ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ramifications of the fact that a majority of (Jewish) Israeli citizens no longer considers the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territory of the West Bank to be an 'occupation'. Informed by qualitative research conducted in Israel and the occupied territory of the West Bank, the paper argues the case for understanding of this process of social legitimation as being rooted in complex structures of cultural processes and practices grounded in ideological and religious beliefs. Identifying Zionism as an ethno-national ideology, located within the wider ethno-national impulse of nineteenth century Europe, the paper further investigates a number of cultural processes that have led to the domestic justification and rationalisation of occupation in the Israeli public consciousness and consequently, the legitimisation of continued occupation. These cultural practices are inherently highly political, constituting a long-term strategy aimed at maintaining the occupation. The paper argues that this strategy is articulated not only by cultural practices of ethnonationalism and identity politics, but ultimately by various acts and facets of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the impact of the Security Network on domestic politics in Israel after the 1967 War. It identifies three basic approaches to the study of the association between Israeli civilian and military spheres: the Traditional Approach; the Critical Approach; and the New Critical Approach. The relationship between the structure of the defense network and the political system is discussed, as well as the connection between the creation of the State of Israel and Zionist militarism.

The article looks at the history of the Zionist movement since Israel achieved its independence in 1948. It discusses the effect of opposing directions of the Zionist movement on the meaning of the Zionist historical narrative. The return of the Israelis from exile to sovereignty and the creation of the state of Israel are also explored.

The article deals with the history of the identity of Jewish women in the military, religious and public spheres since the independence of Israel in 1948. It looks at changes in many aspects of gender relations since the creation of the State redirected Religious-Zionist history. Other topics discussed include the participation of women in religious activities and the promotion of women's rights.

The article chronicles the history of Jewish immigration from Arab countries to Israel in the 20th century. It discusses the integration of immigrants into Israeli society, as well as the progression of the ethnic conflict in Israel following the declaration of statehood in 1948. The role of the Zionist movement in the creation of the state of Israel is explored.

The article presents a discussion on the relationship between the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel, adapted from the book "In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea" by Michael Brenner. It recognizes the roles of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, and Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, in the Zionist movement. The growth of the sense of Israel's uniqueness among the political right and national religious movements is discussed.

This article examines the different ways that anti-Semitism and Zionism have confronted and influenced one another through a tension-filled dialectic that is simultaneously self-evident and counterintuitive. The essay begins with a discussion of the central place of anti-Semitism in canonical Zionist texts such as Leon Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation and Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State. Both Pinsker and Herzl believed that anti-Semitism was a permanent or immovable force, and this interpretation of anti-Semitism led them to embrace, if not create, political Zionism. The following section analyzes the works of two émigré scholars, Salo W. Baron and Hannah Arendt, who wrote fervently about the need to avoid "the lachrymose conception of Jewish history" and the school of "eternal antisemitism," and to focus instead on the actions that Jews undertook as historical actors in specific contexts. Despite their influence, the study of anti-Semitism over the past two generations has returned to a perspective that is strikingly similar to traditional Zionist interpretations. The penultimate section of this piece delineates how two historians in Israel, Shmuel Ettinger and Robert S. Wistrich, reinforced and reaffirmed key aspects in this interpretive paradigm, including anti-Semitism's unique nature as "the longest hatred," the recurrent abandonment of the Jews by their neighbors, and the strange, befuddling, and problematic relationship between anti-Semitism and Zionism. The essay ends with a discussion of the different ways that anti-Semitism and Zionism continue to interact with and influence one another, in particular through current debates in and between the public and the scholarly realms regarding "the new anti-Semitism." The article concludes by suggesting that scholars return to the contextual-comparative approach to the study of anti-Semitism as part of larger efforts to separate and insulate academic research on the topic from contemporary political considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judah Leib Magnes was founder, chancellor, and president of the Hebrew University from when it officially opened in 1925 until his death in 1948. He became the symbolic embodiment of the idea of bi-nationalism for Palestine. He was a pacifist, hated violence above all, preached his moral and political lessons at the university and everywhere else, and often raised severe and hostile antagonism against himself among the leadership and public of the Jewish community in Palestine and abroad. This study will briefly present his vision and his positions, the development of his political beliefs and activities, against the background of the Hebrew University which he headed for the entire period. This study is partly based on research done for a wider subject, 'Politics on Mount Scopus' published in the History of the Hebrew University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines landlessness among Palestinians as a facet of colonial policy in Mandate Palestine before the 1936 revolt. The growth of what was sometimes called a ‘landless class’ came into official view after the violence of 1929. Subsequent investigations indicated that landlessness was a significant problem and that it threatened to destabilize the Mandate. The effort to ameliorate the crisis of landlessness, however, clashed with the dominant colonial conception of settler developmentalism, the notion that Jews, not Arabs, were the agents of modern economic development in Palestine. The first part of this examination revisits the contest over the 1930 White Paper, focusing on its relationship to the advent of mass landlessness. The rapid defeat of the new policy via the MacDonald letter left the landlessness problem to fester while simultaneously obscuring it. As the situation in the Arab countryside continued to deteriorate, the onset of the fifthaliyatemporarily reinforced erroneous assumptions about the potential to rectify the problem through theyishuv's development.By the time mass landlessness was ‘rediscovered’ and new land controls designed to protect Arab smallholders were on their way to promulgation in 1935–1936, the Palestinian countryside was just months away from determined revolt. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the Ottoman Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha's 1918 declaration on Great Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British pledged to assist in the development of a Jewish state in Palestine. An overview of the impact of the Ottoman's Germans allies on the Ottoman Empire's policies towards Zionism, including in regard to German ambassador Johann-Heinrich von Bernstorff's impact on Ottoman policies, is provided.

The article discusses what the author conceives of as the Turks and Arabs' acceptance of Great Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British pledged to help establish a Jewish state in Palestine, with the context of the Balfour centennial. The Hashemite emir Faisal I's relations with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, including the former's perspective on Jewish-Arab relations, are discussed.

This article looks at Grace Aguilar (1816-1847), a well-known Anglo-Jewish author, as a religious Zionist, and it analyzes Aguilar's work in order to challenge three scholarly assumptions about the history of Zionism. First, that British Jews have never genuinely supported Zionism; second, that Zionism did not exist before Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism; and third, that Jewish women rarely voiced Zionist ideas before the establishment of the State of Israel. Aguilar, an Anglo-Jewish woman writer, published during the mid-Victorian period, when she espoused orthodox views about the Jews' restoration to Palestine. Aguilar's belief in the biblical precept of Jewish nationhood was a precursor to the thought of later Zionists such as Herzl, as well as the convictions of religious Zionists such as Rav Kook. Her religious nationalism provides an important counterpoint to scholarly claims that Victorian Jews identified only as British, as no different than their Christian neighbors. Instead, Aguilar characterizes the Jews as a nation apart, a people bound together by an ancient religion with roots (and a future) in Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the political and ideological quarrels over Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there hasn't been much of a dialogue between the research on the history of Zionism and postcolonial studies. In fact, the two disciplines have often been rather antagonistic. In contrast to this, the essay attempts to show that an association of these disciplines would be extremely productive and that it would open up new research perspectives. Taking German Zionism as an example, it discusses possibilities to apply postcolonial concepts and demonstrates that Zionism and anti-colonial nationalism are structurally related phenomena. A dialogue between postcolonial studies and the historiography of Zionism, it is argued, would be important not only from a scholarly point of view. It could also help to replace the unfortunate opposition that all too often exists between the struggles against racism and against anti-Semitism by a joint confrontation of historical and contemporary forms of suppression and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the way in which Jewish and Israeli institutions commemorated the Balfour Declaration from its inception to the 100thanniversary in 2017 with particular emphasis on the 1967 Jubilee celebrations. In contrast to the government's desire to use the event as a vehicle to strengthen the state's legitimacy and validate the hegemony of the Labor-oriented Zionist leadership, the event reflected political and ideological fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ze'ev Jabotinsky viewed the Balfour Declaration as a commitment to establish the Jewish State in Mandatory Palestine. He believed that public and diplomatic pressure on decision-makers and opinion leaders in Britain could cause that commitment to be fulfilled, either as an independent state or as a dominion within the framework of the British Commonwealth. Personally, he favored the latter. Even as the conflict of interests between Zionism and Britain became increasingly apparent, Jabotinsky maintained his faith in the Zionist connection with Britain-at least up until the publication of McDonald's White Paper on 17 May 1939. As he saw it, the obstacle to fulfil the British obligation was the political game that the Mandatory Administration in Palestine played. He put the blame on the local administration, rather than on His Majesty's government in London. This article presents the interpretation of the Balfour Declaration-and, by extension, the British Mandate-through the eyes of the leader of Revisionist Zionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the attitude of Angelo Roncalli, at that time Nuncioto Paris and successively Pope John XXIII, toward the establishment of the State of Israel. Through research based on various archival sources and personal papers, it shows how Roncalli's attitude toward Zionism, the Middle Eastern question, and the establishment of Israel wasn't the fruit of a deliberate political decision, but the result of a cultural and religious openness toward other faiths and cultures, including Judaism. Due to his background and experience, Roncalli was certainly one of the Vatican's most sympathetic diplomats toward Jewish illegal immigration to EretzIsrael immediately after WW II, which he primarily considered a humanitarian issue. At the same time, he frequently showed his friendship toward Israel's envoys and representatives, even if he never took an overt position toward the political aspects of the Middle Eastern crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin's concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin's life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin's Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the combined use of maps and symbols as an official symbol of political organization. Used in combination, a map and an emblem push the geographical component to the forefront of cultural–political discourse as an element of myth, drawing attention to an aspect that is not a conscious part of daily life. The article explores how the map of the Land of Israel was used as an official symbol by Zionist organizations, and attempts to decipher the political–cultural significance of the symbolic geography they employed. A symbolic map of Eretz Yisrael was adopted by three Zionist organizations: the Jewish National Fund (JNF); HaMahanot HaOlim Socialist–Zionist youth movement and the Revisionist movement. Aside from their differences in mission and raisons d’être, the organizations in this study represent different models of map and symbol usage. The main distinguishing feature was in their use of outlines and borders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents the very beginning of Albert Einstein's involvement on behalf of the Zionist movement. Although he was familiar with Zionist activists, it was only World War I and the rabid anti-Semitism attending it that led him to rediscover his affiliation with the Jewish people and to subscribe to the Zionist solution to their misery. Einstein tried to combine his support for the national Zionist ideals with the universal worldview to which he adhered from time immemorial, gradually coming to support establishment of the national home in Palestine as a solution for 'The Jewish Problem'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores on the writings of Orthodox Rabbi Haim Hirschensohn regarding the proposed Jewish state and the embrace of Zionism religion and culture.

This essay examines Chaim Shapiro's 1913 essay, "Thoughts About Freedom," tracing the individuals and ideologies that influenced his ideals and the ways in which he acted upon them during his fifty years as an activist and organizer in Los Angeles. Shapiro's essay provides a compelling example of the dynamic, heterodox ways that Jewish immigrant radicals reimagined traditions and fashioned their own understandings of what it meant to be a modern Jew in the particular context of the American West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a comparative cultural history of Zionism and Irish nationalism, focusing on themes of race, gender and identity. It seeks to highlight the strong similarities of both nationalist projects: to show how Zionists and Irish nationalists were both heavily invested in state-building projects that would disprove European racist stereotypes about their respective nations and yet, paradoxically, were also part of the general history of European nationalism. Both Zionism and Irish nationalism sought to create idealised images of the past and claimed to be rebuilding a glorious ancient society in the future as a means of escaping a degraded present. Both movements saw language revival as a key means of carrying out this ‘return to history’. And both emphasised martyrdom as a way to build up prideful ideals of devotion to the nation and used sport, militaries and agriculture as forms of nationalist social engineering. Despite their claims to the contrary, neither national movement was truly unique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The foreclosure of the Balkans’ postcoloniality is a fragment of a much larger strategic manoeuvring inside a European historiography ruled by the national paradigm aimed at disowning colonial history. Because the European Union is a new political entity without a previous history, and because it has formally denounced colonialism and anti-Semitism, there is a creeping assumption that it somehow deserves a clean slate and the right to shift the ownership of its colonial histories to its former colonial subjects. As an effort to ‘de-provincialize’ Europe from the position of the Balkans’ marginal history, Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova, the leading scholar in the critical studies of Balkanism, insists on the incommensurability between Orientalism and Balkanism on the grounds that the Balkans, unlike the Orient, ‘lacks colonial predicament’. The history of Bulgarian Zionist settlers in Palestine challenges Todorova's claim. Bulgarian Zionists were agents of a double colonization, in Bulgaria as subjects of internal colonization, and in Palestine as colonizers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Zionist Hebrew literary realism from the 1920s and 1930s is usually considered to be nothing but propagandistic literature, working in the service of national ideological imperatives. Challenging this literary-historical narrative, this essay argues that Zionist realist writers attempted to imagine radical collective transformation, which cannot be reduced to (and was at times at odds with) the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel. Emphasizing the formal similarities between Zionist realism and the structure of utopian novels, the essay suggests that the realists did not simply celebrate a Zionist metanarrative. Rather, realist works by Ever Hadani and Yisrael Zarchi thematize in a variety of ways the contradiction between emancipatory goals and the everyday realities of workers. The essay argues that S. Yizhar’s “Khirbet Khizeh” should be read as expressing the crisis of the collective transformative project that animated the realists’ literary imaginary. In this sense, Yizhar’s novella signals the foreclosure of transformative possibilities in the late 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on German-Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss's view between philosophy and Judaism which can be discerned in his skeptical engagement with Zionism. Topics include Strauss's commitment, interpretation of and conversion to Zionism, his rejection of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine of Redlichkeit, a radical kind of dogmatic atheism, and his sharp distinction between the claims of cutural, political and religious Zionism throughout his writings.

This article analyzes central elements of Martin Buber's political thinking from a postcolonial perspective. It examines Buber's view of the 'Orient,' his ideas about the social and economic constitution of the Arab-Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, and his attitude toward the evolving national conflict between Jews and Arabs. Buber's Zionism, despite its deep roots in European nationalist ideologies and entanglement with European colonialist ideas, nevertheless had much in common with the nationalism of anticolonial movements and is therefore best conceived as a subaltern nationalism. The incorporation of postcolonial theory makes it possible to see these anticolonial features and at the same time acknowledge Buber's indebtedness to European nationalism and colonialism, thus contributing to a more complex understanding of the history of Zionism and of its position in the European and global context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the boycott of tourism in Mexico as a result of the country's vote in favor of Resolution 3379 of the United Nations of 1975, which defined Zionism as a form of racism. The author comments on the reaction of Jewish people living in the United States, who called for a boycott of tourism in Mexico.

This article proposes a new perspective on the much debated question of why the British government published the Balfour Declaration? It argues that the Declaration was published as part of the struggle that took place in the course of the First World War between two rival factions in the British government on the question of the future of the Ottoman Empire: the “radical” faction that strove to partition the Ottoman Empire as a means to extend the British imperial hold on the Middle East, and the “reformist” faction that opposed this. By promising to turn Palestine into “a national home for the Jewish people” the Declaration advanced the radical agenda of dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and expansion of British imperialism in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article deals with the Zarnuqa incident which took place on 23 July 1913 between the colonists and guards of Rehovot, and the Arab rural population in their vicinity, an incident which is considered by historians as a milestone in Zionist–Arab relations in late Ottoman Palestine. The aim of the article is to present the various narratives available to researchers today, starting with the various Jewish sources, then examining the Arabic sources and, finally, external ones. We analyse each of the sources and draw general conclusions about the sources historians can use today when studying this formative period of Zionist–Arab early encounters. The decision to examine several different narratives provides a multidimensional perspective on the event. Our aim is not to determine whose narrative is closer to historical reality (which would certainly be elusive), or to find out who started the fight and who is to be blamed but rather to present the different narratives, how each side described the event, and what the narrators chose to emphasize and what to omit. The article illustrates the difficult task facing historians dealing with late Ottoman Palestine, the period of the early Zionist–Arab encounter and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the formation of the animal collection at the Tel Aviv zoological garden. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the article analyzes the images and practices of animal importation. It shows that in spite of the importance of Zionist enthusiasm in driving the establishment of the Tel Aviv zoo, and the attribution of Zionist vocabulary to animals living in it, its significance cannot be reduced to Zionist ideology and practice. The zoo’s animal collection was the product of the specific historical, colonial-imperial circumstances formed under the British Mandate. The gathering of the animals reflects the indispensable British contribution to the development of cultural endeavors in Palestine, and the coexistence of British and Zionist aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The story of Kfar Etzion in Israel's War of Independence represents the constitutive heroic myth of the religious-Zionist community. No other event in the history of religious Zionism has grown to such mythical magnitude and had had such immense impact on the national-religious community in Israel as the story of Kfar Etzion. The article traces the origins and development of the myth and explains its central status in the ethos of religious-Zionist heroism. It explains the construction of the myth and its inculcation in the religious-Zionist Movement, and shows the close link between myth-making, memory, and the politics of the commemoration and historiography of the War of Independence. In presenting the elements of the Kfar Etzion myth within the religious value system, I show that it is not only a story of Zionist heroism, but primarily one that seeks to be a link in the historical chain of Jewish heroism and a core story in religious-Zionist history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article chronicles the way in which Israel's main institution for the dissemination of information (the national Publications Agency) described, between the early 1950s and 2004, the causes of 1948 Palestinian exodus, which led to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. This is done by analyzing all the Agency's publications that address these causes and were produced during this 50-year period. Generally, it was found that throughout the years, the publications presented the Zionist narrative of the causes of the exodus (willing flight of the refugees). Only three publications presented a narrative that slightly deviated from the Zionist narrative (Zionist-critical), addressing insignificant expulsions, while using euphemism and Softening References. In addition, the chapter describes (based on interviews with key figures in the Agency) the modus operandi of the Agency, and the reasons why self-censorship was practiced in addressing the exodus causes. Four main reasons for not addressing the 1948 expulsions of Palestinians were observed: 1) The wish to present Israel in a positive manner for domestic and international reasons; 2) Identification with the Zionist ideology; 3) Abiding by institutional norms; 4) Concern of sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of World War I on the Jewish immigrant community in Albany, New York, how they responded to the plight of their fellow Jews in Europe and Palestine, and the Zionist movement.