Showing papers on "Jewish state published in 1989"

Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond

Abstract: Part 1 The international context: Palestine - the international conflict the Jordanian dimension going home? the refugee issue. Part 2 The challenge today: the occupied territories - from control to revolt the Israeli Palestinians - how they are controlled Palestinian responses to the Jewish State dilemmas of the Jewish State. Part 3 Looking to the future: the past revisited the occupied territories - the prospects Israeli Palestinians - the prospects the choices that must be made.

Israeli visions and divisions : cultural change and political conflict

Abstract: This finely etched, on-site work examines the relationships between the changing political system and political culture in Israel, with particular focus on the decade of the 1980s. Written by a scholar equally at home in the United States and in Israel, and intellectually equally at home in political science and anthropology, "Israeli Visions and Divisions "is a fundamental contribution to a literature long on passion and short on reason, which perhaps is an academic reflection of social life in this deeply troubled land. Aronoff starts from the belief that the basic conflicting and even contradictory interpretations over what should be the exact character of Israel as a Jewish state continues to be the source of the most serious division among Jews within contemporary Israel. As a consequence, consensus politics yields to coalition politics; and prospects for a future consensus are dim. Conflict among Jewish political and religious groups, and between Jews and Arabs, is aggravated by the uses of Zionist symbolism in a fragmented political culture. This is a serious critique made from a sympathetic quarter. Aronoff suggests that the Israeli political system is undergoing a crisis of political legitimacy, exemplified by the rise of extraparliamentary movements. The parliamentary system accentuates' these divisions by making every minor tradition and vision part of the legislative and executive processes. "Israeli Visions and Divisions "is not a pessimistic reading. The author is convinced that the way is open for a move away from particularism and tribalism, and toward a new universalism and humanism. The old policies have proven bankrupt, and th, e old ideologies have lost their salience. The book is rich in detail and profound in outlook. It will be greeted by those interested in new policies as well as by students of the Middle East who hope to piece together what has gone awry in the land of milk and honey.

The Beisan lands issue in mandatory Palestine

Abstract: Land and its utilization, ownership and availability were vital issues in mandatory Palestine. Land is, of course, a basic resource in the life of individuals and nations. It is a primary means of livelihood and in this sense its importance increased as Palestine's population grew from about 600,000 in 1920 to approximately two million in 1947. This population growth placed extreme pressure on the land, especially when we remember that only about a third of the country was regarded as cultivable. Land also meant different things to Arabs and Jews. To the Arab it was his country, his patrimony. To the Jew the soil of Palestine was the focus of thousands of years of longing, the answer to Jewish landlessness, the nationalist solution to the Jewish problem. Land is also the span of national boundaries and its ownership took on strategic significance as two emerging nations struggled within the womb of a single state for the right to control Palestine west of the Jordan river. And, when the idea of partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews gained currency in international circles, land ownership became vital and Jewish land purchase and settlement policy was directed to maximizing the Zionist case for a sizeable Jewish state. With Britain pledged by the Balfour Declaration to use its 'best endeavours' to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, Zionists expected the govenmment to foster actively Jewish immigration, land acquisition and settlement. Under the terms of the League of Nations' Mandate, Britain was required, 'while ensuring that the rights and position' of the non-Jewish population were 'not prejudiced', to encourage 'close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes'. A further article, relating to the development of the country, called on the mandatory power to 'introduce a land system appropriate to the needs of the country having regard ... to the desirability of promoting the close settlement and intensive cultivation of the land'. A senior Jewish National Fund official summarized his view of Britain's obligations with respect to land as follows:

The politics of Israel's security

Abstract: In purely military terms, Israel is today stronger than at any time in its 40-year history. The Jewish state is at peace with Egypt. It may not be exactly the sort of peace that many Israelis hoped for on that day in November 1977 when President Sadat stood at the podium of the Knesset in Jerusalem. But the peace treaty, bolstered by large quantities of US aid to both parties, nonetheless survived the strain of Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon and the protracted wrangling with Egypt over the Taba enclave. In Lebanon itself, Israel has largely extricated its own forces and its self-declared security zone has worked well, reducing hostile incursions to a minimum. Iraq, one of Israel's most implacable opponents, has only just emerged from its bruising and lengthy conflict with Iran. Syria alone remains in the front line of the anti-Israel struggle, but President Hafiz al-Asad, whatever his rhetoric, knows full well the potential folly of a solo military adventure against Israel. In any case he has his own problems in Lebanon-a country where Syria and Israel both understand the other's security concerns and where for the most part they behave accordingly. However, if the current assessment of the military threat facing Israel gives planners in Jerusalem sound grounds for satisfaction, there is no room for complacency. There are some worrying straws in the wind. The Iran-Iraq war has seen the widespread use of tactical ballistic missiles and poison gas; Iraq's forces have dramatically increased in both size and proficiency; and Syria, Jordan and other states in the region have continued to receive new and sophisticated weaponry at a time when Israel's own defence budget has been under growing pressure. This makes all the more serious the failure to capitalize on this period of relative military advantage to advance the cause of peace. The lack of movement here cannot all be laid at Israel's door, but the stridency of the Begin years and the espousal of the doctrine of 'a Greater Israel' helped to block progress on the political front. The deeply divided National Unity government ushered in by the July 1984 general election-an experiment that continues in an updated form today-only makes matters worse. The political challenges to the status quo in the region are growing. The Palestinian uprising or intifada in the Occupied Territories has painted the dilemmas of continued Israeli control of these areas in stark terms. Spurred on by the desperation and fury of the intifada and helped by the Palestine Liberation Organization's apparent concessions to Washington's demands, the outgoing Reagan administration bequeathed to its successor a dialogue with the Palestinian leadership. Nobody knows where this may lead, though the breaking off of these talks, once started, might have serious implications for US policy in the region. Meanwhile, Israel's friends both in the United States and Western Europe are urging the divided government in Jerusalem to compromise, lest an historic opportunity be missed.

Protestantism, Palestine, and Partisan Scholarship

Abstract: A partisan scholarship has developed since the early twentieth century to demonstrate that British Protestant culture supports the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Both before and after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, scholars pointed to the extensive references in British thought from the Reformation through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries which purported to deal with a Jewish "Restauration" to Palestine. After the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, and again after the 1967 War, historians hastened to associate those writings of the English and Scottish divines with the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem. All agreed that since the sixteenth century British Protestantism had unwaveringly supported a Jewish state and that the vast literature on Restoration was proof of the inevitability of the Jews' complete occupation of Palestine. It is true that from the late sixteenth century, there began to appear in England and Scotland, and later in France, Holland, Germany, and New England, writings that called for the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine, the eradication of the native Christian and Muslim inhabitants, and the second coming of the Messiah. There were various theologians and poets, lunatics and "prophets," soldiers and scientists who wrote in support of Restoration, and who were subsequently cited by twentieth-century historians bent on supporting Zionist claims to Palestine. Indeed, from the turn

Why Be a Nebbish? A Response to Marshall Grossman

Abstract: The version of Jewish history implicit in Marshall Grossman's article would have it that the Jewish people, between the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (70 A.D.) and the establishment of the state of Israel (1948), were continuously, monolithically, and indiscriminately reduced to the status of the nebbish. It is in relation to this historical degradation that Zionism defends its own ideology of salvation through identity, strength, and homeland, and is able to condemn its and the Israeli government's Jewish critics for threatening the unity of the Jewish people. In Israel, where I was raised and lived until 1976, we were taught year in and year out that the two thousand years of Jewish Diaspora life was a virtual eternity of destitution, homelesness, and exclusion. Our educators aimed to convince us that Jews living in the Diaspora were a culturally static pariah people without dignity, able to live only by plying the unseemly trades of middlemen, innkeepers, tax collectors, shmate (junk) dealers, and the like; they were doing nothing besides praying three times a day, so that upon the arrival of the Messiah, they would be counted among those who will return to Zion live, dead or resurrected. The lesson, which remains one taught throughout Israeli culture, is that Messianic aspiration and the unyielding adherence to their God were the principle reasons for their persecution and the emergence of anti-semitism throughout the ages. The Jews as despised, degraded, and abject: the allegory of Diaspora is only completed with the metaphorical reconciliation of world Jewry in the reality of the Jewish state of Israel; through the purging of centuries of negativity and passivity, uncompromising aggression against those who would deny Israel its exclusivity and its will to power, its right to name its enemies, and its claim that it alone has an interest in national security that is moral as well as practical. This history and its allegory is intended to highlight the immanent significance of the Zionist revolution and to insure that it be a per

Joyce, Jews and History

Abstract: Coincidences between Joyce’s life and Jewish history are not the purpose of this chapter despite the existence of many intersections: 1882, the year of his birth, for example, marked the beginning of the forced exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe to the West initiated by the murder of Alexander II in 1881 and the promulgation of the notorious May Laws in Russia in 1882 under Alexander III. The year also initiated a decade of Jewish immigration to Ireland which saw the Jewish population quadruple from 472 to 1779 between 1881 and 1891. The first so-called international Anti-Jewish Congress held in Dresden also occurred in 1882, as well as the second attempt to establish Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine in four new locations.

Introduction: ‘Aleph, Alpha’

Abstract: Shaun’s description of his twin brother Shem in Book iii.i of Finnegans Wake resonates with biographical detail about Joyce. His departure from Ireland with Nora, his exodus for thirty-seven years in Europe, his evolving but complex literary style (comically expressed as ‘throwing dust in the eyes of the Hooley Fermers!’ [424.4–5]), are among the many references in the passage. But no allusion is more direct than the quotation at the head of this paragraph which summarises Joyce’s longstanding and continual involvement with Jews. Moreover, the specific reference to Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, in which Herzl proposes a ‘Society of Jews’ to organise the political policies of the Jewish state, reveals the deeply rooted sympathy of Joyce with the Jewish condition. Removed from Ireland and situated in an unstable social, cultural and linguistic world that contrasted European traditions with Mediterranean spirit, the formidable Austro-Hungarian Empire with the dynamic Triestines, the stability of Switzerland with the destruction of the First World War, the comfort of Paris with increasing political dangers, Joyce could identify with only one group entrapped by similar contradictions: Jews. The reasons for this correspondence make up the content of this study; the impact on Joyce’s life and art is its theme.

A. M. Klein and Mordecai Richler: Canadian Responses to the Holocaust

Abstract: Second generation Montreal Jewish writers have manifested preoccupation with recent history of Jewish victimization. Their direct experience of anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s enhanced the sense of identification with the Holocaust. A.M. Klein’s and Mordecai Richler’s response to Jewish suffering reveals a continuum marked by gradual progression towards loss of hope in humanistic ideals. Klein, despite increasing disillusion, perceives the birth of the Jewish State as the symbol of moral rebirth in the wake of the European tragedy: Richler, despite his humanist liberal sympathies, sees the State of Israel as a deterrent of another outburst of anti-Jewish hatred. The consciousness of the fascist threat in Quebec has placed the nightmare of another Holocaust in the context of likelihood.

A Muslim Response to Chaim Seidler-Feller: The Land of Israel: Sanctified Matter or Mystic Space

Abstract: Like all political movements, Zionism not only perpetuates its myth but also uses basic myths to justify its goals and to legitimise its action. This chapter, written with an explicit purpose to justify the creation of the Zionist State and to confer legitimacy upon it, is a case in point. Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller uses the myth of the land of Israel to equate obligations to Zionism with Judaism. His presentation gives the impression that Zionism is the natural outcome of the whole of Jewish history and that it is also the intrinsic core of Judaism to which all Jews owe their allegiance. The author views the doctrine of the Land from two perspectives — mythic and legal — and employs preconceived ideas without discussing all their implications. The so-called ‘legal perspective’ is nothing but Zionist sophistry.

The USA and the Birth of Israel

Abstract: The years 1947 and 1948 saw America’s decisive entry into Middle East affairs when Truman first ensured that the resolution for the partition of Palestine found the necessary two-thirds majority in the United Nations General Assembly and then extended de facto recognition to the State of Israel within minutes of its proclamation. These actions were the logical sequel to the Yom Kippur statement but they only became possible as the result of a chain of events which could not have been foreseen and after keen in-fighting in the Washington bureaucracy. At the end of 1946, Henderson and his staff tried to undo the damage which they believed the President’s statement had dealt to American interests. Although acknowledging that ‘the almost world-wide feeling of insecurity felt by Jews, results in something like a cosmic urge with respect to Palestine’, they argued that Zionist lobbying had led the administration to adopt an ill-defined policy of support for a Jewish state through partition. Unconvinced of the wisdom of this, they returned yet again to their proposal for a continuing form of British trusteeship under the United Nations, pending a satisfactory formula for Palestinian independence.1 This stood no chance of satisfying the Zionists whose stance was, if anything, hardening.

Conflict resolution in an underground group: The Shamir‐Giladi clash

Abstract: Underground movements in a struggle for political independence experience processes of crystallization as well as schism. Many times, severe struggles develop in these groups and focus on issues of leadership, operations, and ideology. The success of these movements in achieving their explicit goals depends on their ability to develop an effective mechanism(s) for inner conflict(s) resolution(s). Such inner conflicts and tensions can change, in the most profound way, the way an underground movement Junctions, its ability to attract and recruit new members, and its survivability. Lehi was one of the three prestate Jewish underground groups in Palestine (the two others were the Hagana and Etzel), struggling against the British and the Arabs with the explicit goal of establishing a new Jewish state. Lehi was established in the summer of 1940 and, in the autumn and winter of 1942, was already in an advanced stage of disintegration due to the British success in arresting or killing most of its members...