Showing papers on "Jewish state published in 2009"

The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State

Abstract: This text proposes a radical interpretation of the founding of modern Israel. The founders claimed that they intended to create both a landed state for the Jewish people and a socialist society, but this book argues that socialism served the leaders of the influential labour movement more as a rhetorical resource for the legitimation of the national project of establishing a Jewish state than as a blueprint for a just society. The book demonstrates how socialist principles were consistently subverted in practice by the nationalist goals to which socialist Zionism was committed.

The Israeli Palestinian‐Arab Vision of Transforming Israel into a Binational Democracy

Abstract: The idea of binationalism has risen anew as a result of several developments. It was invoked by the weakening of the nation-state which is identified with a single nation, a single language and a single culture. It was further stimulated by the ideology of multiculturalism that calls for the recognition of diversity and bestowal of cultural rights on cultural minorities. Transnationalism (i.e., activity of a certain nation in more than one country), facilitated by economic and political globalization, was an additional push. In the sphere of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the idea of binationalism rises as an option because of the political impasse and the spreading despair of the two-state solution. The Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel are also attracted to binationalism because they seek a radical remedy for their minority status in the Jewish state and fear lest the formation of a new Palestinian state alongside Israel will strengthen Israel’s Jewish-Zionist character and exacerbate their subordination. They are supported by a handful of post-Zionists, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists.1 Four “Arab Vision Documents,” in which Paestinian-Arab elties in Israel state their views of the present and desirable status of the Arab minority and Israel’s character, were published from December 6, 2006 to May 15, 2007.2 They share the demands to establish an independent Palestinian state and to turn Israel into a binational democracy. The adoption of this option entails renunciation of three other possibilities: individualbased liberal democracy in Israel in its pre-1967 borders; a single individual-based liberal democracy in the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea; and a single binational state in the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The common denominator of these four options is the eradication of Israel’s nature as a Jewish state. The ensuing discussion will focus on the binational option, addressing the following questions: What kind of binational democracy do the Arab Vision Documents advocate? What can be learned from the international and historical record of binational regimes? Does the Arab minority, apart from the Arab elites, reject Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and is it ready to wage an intense struggle for a binational democracy? Does the Jewish majority accept any form of binational democracy and what would be its reaction if Arabs fight for this goal? Will the Palestinian Authority deny Israel as a Jewish state and back up Arab minority’s endeavor for recasting it into a binational democracy? Would the international community lend legitimacy and support to the idea and campaign for setting up a binational democracy in Israel within the Green Line? Is the related idea of one-state in all of Palestine/Land of Israel acceptable and realistic? What are the likely repercussions of the spread of the Arab Vision Documents? The discussion has two dimensions: scientific-empirical and ideological-normative. Although a comprehensive scrutiny of the issues requires elucidation of both dimensions, this paper is limited to the scientific-empirical dimension as much as possible.

Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession

Abstract: Contents Preface xxx Introduction 1 1 Inaugurating Iran's Radical Alterity: Shifting Geopolitics, Oxymoronic Voices 000 2 Modernity in Crisis: Israeli Pipe-Dreams of Euro- America and the Iranian Threat 000 3 Iran and the Jewish State's Repertoires of Violence in the Post-9/11 World 000 4 The Unclassifiable: Iran's Jews in Zionist-Israeli Imagination 000 Postscript: A Few Comments on a "Known Rapist" 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000

Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

Abstract: This is an inspiring examination of young survivors of the Holocaust and their role in the creation of the state of Israel. Although they represented only a small portion of all displaced persons after World War II, Jewish displaced persons in postwar Europe played a central role on the international diplomatic stage. In fact, the overwhelming Zionist enthusiasm of this group, particularly in the large segment of young adults among them, was vital to the diplomatic decisions that led to the creation of the state of Israel so soon after the war. In Finding Home and Homeland, Avinoam J. Patt examines the meaning and appeal of Zionism to young Jewish displaced persons and looks for the reasons for its success among Holocaust survivors. Patt argues that Zionism was highly successful in filling a positive function for young displaced persons in the aftermath of the Holocaust because it provided a secure environment for vocational training, education, rehabilitation, and a sense of family. One of the foremost expressions of Zionist affiliation on the part of surviving Jewish youths after the war was the choice to live in kibbutzim organized within displaced persons camps in Germany and Poland, or even on estates of former Nazi leaders. By the summer of 1947, there were close to 300 kibbutzim in the American zone of occupied Germany with over 15,000 members, as well as 40 agricultural training settlements (hakhsharot) with over 3,000 members. Ultimately, these young people would be called upon to assist the state of Israel in the fighting that broke out in 1948. Patt argues that for many of the youth who joined the kibbutzim of the Zionist youth movements and journeyed to Israel, it was the search for a new home that ultimately brought them to a new homeland. Finding Home and Homeland consults previously untapped sources created by young Holocaust survivors after the war and in so doing reflects the experiences of a highly resourceful, resilient, and dedicated group that was passionate about the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Jewish studies, European history, and Israel studies scholars will appreciate the fresh perspective on the experiences of the Jewish displaced person population provided by this significant volume.

The Islamic Regime in Iran and Its Attitude towards the Jews: The Religious and Political Dimensions

Abstract: Anti-Semitism is deeply ingrained in Shi `i Iran, both religiously and historically. Apart from being the first enemies of Prophet Muhammad, Jews have been been the subject of gross accusations, such as having a desire for world control, exaggerating the dimensions of the Holocaust, committing genocide, using blood in making unleavened bread, and distorting Holy Scriptures. The establishment of a Jewish state, Israel, added a political dimension to the already hostile religious attitude towards the Jews. This hostile religious-political attitude was contained to a large extent under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, but it burst out with vigour after Khomeini and his fellow clerics took over the reins of power in 1979. Faced with the constraints of international game rules and the pressure of a Western public opinion sensitive to expressions of anti-Semitism, the ruling clerics attempted to conceal their anti-Semitism by adopting a number of tactics, such as issuing far fewer public anti-Semitic statements, or ...

A Dangerous Obsession

Abstract: A Dangerous Obsession Un nom imperissable. Israel, le sionisme et la destruction des Juifs d'Europe (A name that cannot die: Israel, Zionism and the destruction of the Jews of Europe), by Georges Bensoussan, Editions du Seuil, 2008, 300 pp. [French] Reviewed by Michelle Mazel How central is the Holocaust to the narrative and the reality of presentday Israel? This is the question which the reputed French scholar Georges Bensoussan asks in his provocative work. Professor Bensoussan has already written a number of books on the Holocaust including The Intellectual and Political History of Zionism (2002) and more recently Europe, a Genocidal Passion (2006). 1 One of the criticisms leveled at the embattled Jewish state today is that the western world, by creating Israel, was atoning for the annihilation of European Jewry - in effect forcing the Palestinian people to pay for the Holocaust. President Ahmadinejad of Iran expressed this view in his speech at the Second Durban conference in Geneva, saying that "following World War II, they (the West) resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering." Wrong, on two counts, says Bensoussan. There is nothing to support this claim in the UN declaration of 29 November 1947 that paved the way to partition, or in other declarations made at that time. In fact Great Britain, which could have felt a degree of guilt for having closed the doors of Palestine to would-be immigrants, did not endorse the declaration and abstained. Even more decisive is the argument that the UN was only giving an official stamp of approval to a de facto situation on the ground. Bensoussan quotes the White Paper published on 18 June 1922, a few weeks before the League of Nations formally granted the mandate of Palestine to Great Britain. In fact, as Winston Churchill said of the Jewish community in Palestine at the time, its business is conducted in Hebrew as a vernacular language, and a Hebrew Press serves its needs. It has its distinctive intellectual life and displays considerable economic activity. This community, then, with its town and country population, its political, religious, and social organizations, its own language, its own customs, its own life, has in fact "national" characteristics.2 (32) This view, says Bensoussan, is reiterated in the Peel report of 1937 which underlines the fact that, should independence be given to the Jewish National Home in Palestine, it could start functioning as a state immediately (33). It even had its self defense force, created in 1907, which in 1920 became the Haganah. When the Second World War broke out, the Haganah was already an effective fighting force with its elite Palmach commando troops (36). Therefore, the State of Israel would have come into being without the Holocaust. Having dealt with that issue, Bensoussan devotes the greater part of his work to the consequences of the Holocaust and its aftermath for the Jewish State. Far from contributing to the birth of the State, he says, the destruction of European Jewry exacted a terrible toll: "the Holocaust has emptied the human reservoir of Zionism while intensifying a demographic weakness which is felt to this day in the Arab-Israeli conflict" (12). …

Ties that bind: John F. Kennedy and the foundations of the American–Israeli alliance

Abstract: In August 1962, John F. Kennedy became the first American President to sell a major weapon system, the Hawk anti-aircraft missile, to Israel. The Hawk sale was part of a much larger shift in thinking about the role of the bilateral relationship with Israel in achieving America's regional objectives. This article analyses the motives for President Kennedy's decision, which represented a decisive break from the arms control and diplomatic policies pursued by Presidents Truman and, especially, Eisenhower. The article ultimately concludes that President Kennedy's new orientation was driven primarily by his affinity for the Jewish state and his more receptive attitude towards Israel's security needs, whose accommodation he thought necessary to achieve stability in the Middle East.

Israel's Security and the Holocaust: Lessons Learned, but Existential Fears Continue

Abstract: The article analyzes David Ben-Gurion's lessons from the Holocaust and from Israel's War of Independence and deviations from his strategy. The lessons of the Holocaust were three-fold: First, that Israel, Zionism and Jews as well were a unique historical phenomenon, and therefore could expect to be alone and remain alone for decades to come. That Zionism, having lost its European backbone in the Holocaust, would have problems of legitimacy unless the Jewish state would accept the partition of Western Palestine and avoid ruling over a large number of Arabs, especially in the politically sensitive West Bank. Second, that every Israeli-initiated war will not be accepted by the Arabs as final, since they would recover and get ready for a new round, whereas Israel could not sustain one crucial defeat. Third, that the longer range solution to the total imbalance between Arabs and Jews in conventional terms, such as numbers, political and strategic clout, oil and vast territories, must be counterbalanced by invoking unconventional deterrence. The ensuing, even if limited to the elite, discussion of alternatives to this strategy was coined in terms of conventional preemption and acquisition of more territory, especially in the West Bank. The demise of Ben-Gurion's leadership in the early 1960s, and the emergence of security alternatives to his, in addition to role of the US in making the unconventional option illegitimate, would explain the road to the Six-Day War of 1967 and its ramifications until today.

Oriental Jewry and the Holocaust: A Tri-Generational Perspective

Abstract: This article deals with one of the most dominant elements in Israeli national identity—the Shoah. The paper asks how the Mizrahim in Israel related to it, since for most of them it was a remote historical chapter. The answer is given through an analysis of three generations of Mizrahim—those who lived during the Second World War and immigrated to Israel during its formative years; their children, most of whom were born in the Jewish State and educated in the Israeli educational system; and their grand children. The first generation viewed the destruction of the European Jews with profound compassion, but felt that the Shoah was a chapter in the history of the European Jews. Their children attempted to connect, facing, to a large extent, resentment and alienation. Their grand-children already have the Shoah burnt in their souls—being an integral part of their self-definition as Israelis.

The Arab Public Sphere in Israel: Media Space and Cultural Resistance

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Media Space, Political Control, and Cultural Resistance 2. The Indigenous Arab Minority in the Israeli State 3. Israeli Media Policies toward the Arab Minority 4. Arabic Media Space in the Jewish State: Seeking New Communicative Action 5. Arabic Print Media and the New Culture of Newspaper Reading 6. Resisting Cultural Imperialism: Alienation and Strategic Reading of the Hebrew Press 7. Electronic Media and the Strategy of In-Betweenness Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Bnei Sakhnin through the documentary looking glass: telling the story of Arab football in a Jewish state

Abstract: Hapoel Bnei Sakhnin Football Club made history when it became the first Israeli club representing an Arab town to win the Israeli State Cup in May 2004. As part of a wider study, this essay looks a...

Diaspora Nationality vs Diaspora Nationalism: American Jewish Identity and Zionism after the Jewish State

Abstract: Shall we perhaps begin anew, small and toddling with a small folk? We two, homeless and wandering among the nations? Begin once more! Be the small God of a small people! Us didst thou choose. Thou ...

Arab and Jewish Students’ Participatory Action Research at the University of Haifa

Abstract: National identity and religion have been core issues within the protracted conflict between Jews and Arabs in Israel. The dynamics of identity formation among Arabs and Jews in Israel reflect a complex political and historical context characterized by conflict such as the 1948 war, subsequent wars with neighboring Arab countries, and more recently, the “Intifada” of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Since 1948, Israel has been a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, maintaining a moderate democracy, with only partial equality of civic rights for the Arab minority (White-Stephan, Hertz-Lazarowitz, Zelniker, & Stephan, 2004; Yiftachel, 2006).

A Land Without a People

Abstract: Consider a few dates and numbers that bear testimony to the demographic transformation effected by the Zionists in Palestine during the first half of the twentieth century.

Israel's Foreign Policy

Abstract: Israel's Foreign Policy Published in the Spring 2009 Middle East Quarterly, pp. 82-83. by Efraim Inbar Defending the Holy Land. A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy. By Zeev Maoz. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 714 pp. $45. Maoz, professor of political science and director of the International Relations Program at the University of California-Davis, has written a long, well-organized, and detailed book. But those attributes are not enough to distract from the author's often unhinged animosity to Israel. For Maoz, practically everything the Jewish state has done in the area of defense and foreign policy over the last sixty years was wrong. His last chapters are devoted to explaining the failures, ending with some policy prescriptions. For anyone who enjoys sophisticated Israel-bashing and has the patience to read more than 600 pages, Maoz has provided the book. His narrative of unrelenting criticism erodes the credibility of his arguments. The author implausibly tries to show that Israel's "military adventurism" was much to blame for the 1967 war and argues that Israel played "more than a small part" in the outbreak of the War of Attrition (1967-70) although Cairo clearly initiated that combat. The author's account of the Arab-Israeli conflict reflects a total misunderstanding of the central role played by Israel's use of force in compelling the Arabs to come to grips with Israel's permanence. Military victories in 1956 and 1967 are curiously and myopically seen as exacerbating Israel's relations with its neighbors, rather than as important events in Egypt's gradual realization that Israel could not be destroyed - a process that culminated in the 1979 peace treaty. Similarly, the author fails to see that the military victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, despite the strategic surprise on two fronts, was another significant step in the Arab recognition of Israel as an entrenched fact. The most astonishing critique is directed at Israel's nuclear policy, despite its obvious success. Maoz advocates Israel's renouncing nuclear weapons and joining a regional security regime. Greater naivete can hardly be imagined. Maoz repeatedly belittles the dangers posed by the Arab states and portrays Israel's perception of those dangers as unwarranted. Indeed, Maoz views Israel's defensive military operations as trigger-happy, ignoring that the Middle East is conflict-ridden and war-prone, and that Israel's neighbors often resort to the use of force. The author generally dismisses Israel's right to attack states and organizations that refuse to live in peace with it. One can doubt the wisdom of the 1982 Lebanon war, but it included defensive aims. But the author ignores the threat of terrorist and Katyusha attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organization . The oft-repeated accusations of Israel's "disproportionate use of force" or "excessive force" blissfully ignore the fact that states in war have no obligation to limit military responses to the level pursued by their enemies but, instead, have the duty to use force to defeat their opponents. Escalation often attains military and political goals. The learned author turns a blind eye to Arab reluctance to accept Israel. He displays a misguided preference for diplomacy in an area where the best political currency is brute force. It is the Pavlovian instinctive reaction of liberals to suggest engagement and peace talks, insisting that the Arabs are ripe for peacemaking with the Jewish state when even today, thirty years after the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the State of Israel still does not appear on maps printed in Egypt. …

The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot

Abstract: It is one of the curiosities of history that the most remarkable novel about Jews and Judaism, predicting the establishment of the Jewish state, should have been written in 1876 by a non-Jew -- a Victorian woman and a formidable intellectual, who is generally regarded as one of the greatest of English novelists. And it is still more curious that Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's last novel, should have been dismissed, by many of her admirers at the time and by some critics since, as something of an anomaly, an inexplicable and unfortunate turn in her life and work. Yet Eliot herself was passionately committed to that novel, having prepared herself for it by an extraordinary feat of scholarly research in five languages (including Hebrew), exploring the ancient, medieval, and modern sources of Jewish history. Three years later, to reenforce that commitment, she wrote an essay, the very last of her writing, reaffirming the heritage of the Jewish "nation" and the desirability of a Jewish state -- this well before the founders of Zionism had conceived of that mission. Why did this Victorian novelist, born a Christian and an early convert to agnosticism, write a book so respectful of Judaism and so prescient about Zionism? And why at a time when there were no pogroms or persecutions to provoke her? What was the general conception of the "Jewish question," and how did Eliot reinterpret that "question," for her time as well as ours? Gertrude Himmelfarb, a leading Victorian scholar, has undertaken to unravel the mysteries of Daniel Deronda. And the mysteries of Eliot herself: a novelist who deliberately wrote a book she knew would bewilder many of her readers, a distinguished woman who opposed the enfranchisement of women, a moralist who flouted the most venerable of marital conventions -- above all, the author of a novel that is still an inspiration or provocation to readers and critics alike.

Opposing Partition: the Zionist Predicaments after the Shoah

Abstract: In 1937, the Zionist movement was equally divided over the British proposal to partition Mandatory Palestine as enunciated in the Peel Commission report. By 1945, the enormity of the ravages of the Shoah produced a new realism. Thus, the urgency of the survivors in post-war Europe induced a change of mind. Figures such as Golda Meir and Eleanor Roosevelt now supported partition. Majorities for partition emerged in Zionist parties such as Hapoel Hamizrahi, which had adamantly opposed it previously. The Soviet Union's backing for a Jewish state, following Gromyko's UN speech, brought the Palestine Communist Party into line and persuaded Hashomer Hatzair to abandon its embrace of a bi-national state. By the UN vote on 29 November 1947, only the Revisionists, the Irgun and Lehi, still adhered to their former positions and opposed partition. Amongst the Zionist leadership, the schism was more a tactical division than an ideological one. Nahum Goldmann's speech in July 1946 in which he proclaimed that the three choices—trusteeship, bi-nationalism, and partition—had now been reduced to one, brought these differences to the surface. He argued that there were now simply not enough European Jews to create a Jewish majority in a non-partitioned state. Abba Hillel Silver opposed this approach, claiming that a maximalist pitch was necessary since the British would whittle down even minimalist borders. By the summer of 1947 with the UNSCOP recommendations, even Silver had accepted the inevitability of partition.

States of Exile: Visions of Diaspora, Witness, and Return

Abstract: States of Exile: Visions of Diaspora, Witness, and Return. By Alain Epp Weaver. Polyglossia: Radical Reformation Theologies. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2008. 214 pp. $18.99 (paper). Reflecting on his work with Palestinians who have been dispossessed of their homes. Alain Epp Weaver has given us a collection of essays that seeks "to think exile and return together instead of in binary opposition to one another" (p. 17). On the one hand, this involves the rethinking of exile as not only the material and political condition of actual refugees, but also "a critical mode of standing apart from dominant ideologies" open to all, especially the church (p. 15); on the other, it requires the rethinking of return as "a homecoming in which exile shapes the meaning of home" (p. 18). The result is an exilic political theology: a theology open to encounter and dialogue with others, encouraging us to live rightly on our land and in our homes such that justice is done to those who have been dispossessed. The book is divided into three sections according to the themes of the subtitle. The first section, "Diaspora," explores John Howard Yoder's work on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and its reception by Jewish thinkers, Edward Said's thought on the exilic stance of the intellectual, and Daniel Boyarin's notion of "diasporized states" as an alternative to the "Jewish state" affirmed by the document Dabru Emet. The point here is to affirm that the church, insofar as it is in exile in the sense of not being politically in charge, should also not be theologically in charge. The challenge is to recognize and yet not reify difference: true dialogue requires an "other" to whom we are open, whom we allow to set the terms of conversation. Such vulnerability is the existential condition of actual refugees, but the rest of us can cultivate an exilic consciousness, gaining the moral insights of exile that require that we live uncomfortably on our land and in our homes so long as there are others who are homeless. Politically, exilic consciousness supports a positive bi-national solution in Israel and Palestine, where according to Epp Weaver a destructive bi-national reality based on walls, fences, and fear already exists. Beyond exile and exclusive nationalism lies the possibility of politics that "affirm the particularity of difference while also affirming that identity is not self-enclosed but constituted through encounter with others" (p. 63). The second section, "Witness," is theological. Here Epp Weaver discusses Yoder's understanding of the high Christology of the creeds and the church as the embodied witness of a nonviolent way of life, as well as Karl Barths notion of "secular parables of the kingdom. …

Partition and the Arab Palestinian Minority in Israel

Abstract: In late 2006, leading Palestinian Arab intellectuals, political leaders, and activists in Israel compiled The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel . The document rejected the designation of Israel as a Jewish State, which they argued was exclusionary and denied the Arabs full equality. The document went on to de-legitimize the Zionist enterprise as "colonialist" and "imperialist", but at the same time sought to obtain recognition of the Palestinians in Israel by the Jewish majority as a national minority. This paper argues that while recognition of the Palestinians in Israel as a national minority is an eminently reasonable demand, the Jewish majority would find it difficult to accept so long as the national rights of the Jewish majority were simultaneously denied by the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It is not what the Palestinian minority in Israel demands for itself that is the problem, but rather the rights it seeks to deny the Jewish majority, especially the right to self-determination that is, inter alia , the right of the majority to define the state as it sees fit.

The Evolution of Israeli–Lebanese Relations: From Implicit Peace to Explicit Conflict

Abstract: This essay considers the evolution of Israeli–Lebanese relations since the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine in 1948. It argues that the two countries' relations, which remained quiet until...

Delegitimizing Jews and the Jewish State: Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism after Auschwitz

Abstract: Yves Pallade is director of the Foreign Affairs Network at B’nai B’rith Europe, where he deals in particular with the question of Israel’s image in Europe and the political fight against antisemitism. The focus of Dr. Pallade’s academic research and writing is on modern antisemtism, political extremism and international terrorism. His monograph, Germany and Israel in the 1990s and Beyond—Still a “Special Relationship”? was published in 2005.

The Significant Warming of Indo-Israeli Relations in the Post-Cold War Period

Abstract: The Republic of India and the State of Israel, both territories formerly administered by Great Britain, were established less than a year apart (India in August 1947 and Israel in May 1948). From the beginning, relations between the two new states proved rather arduous. Since the 1920s, the leaders of the Indian liberation movement Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had fervently opposed the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state on this territory. On November 29, 1947, India's representative to the UN General Assembly had voted against the partition resolution. While the State of Israel proclaimed its independence in May 1948, it was only two years later, in September 1950, that India officially recognized the Jewish State. Even then, the two states did not establish full diplomatic relations. In 1952, India reluctantly permitted the opening of an Israeli consulate in Bombay and maintained a fairly hostile posture toward the Jewish state in the following decades.A confluence of ideological, strategic, and political factors-both international and domestic-impeded the relationship between India and Israel. While the Indian rejection of the partition of Palestine and the anti-Western, anti-imperialist worldview of Indian leaders certainly played a role in the country's stance toward Israel during the entire period of the Cold War, India's strategic interests and political constraints-in particular those related to India's close links with the Arab and Muslim world and to India's Muslim domestic population- contributed to India's anti-Israeli stance. Despite occasional cooperation between Indian and Israeli authorities- especially the military and security establishments-it took India nearly 40 years to change its stance toward the Jewish state. On January 29, 1992, Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao officially normalized relations with Israel.This article examines the dynamics of Indo- Israeli relations since normalization. First discussed are the three main areas of bilateral cooperation-diplomatic and political, military, and economic- followed by the main constraints hindering the advancement of these ties in each area of cooperation. Last, the nature of the Indo-Israeli relationship is discussed, with particular focus on the question of whether the Indo-Israeli relationship forms a "strategic partnership."BILATERAL COOPERATION BETWEEN INDIA AND ISRAELDiplomatic and Political CooperationSince the end of the Cold War, there has been significant progress in Indo-Israeli relations on the diplomatic and political level. In the early 1990s, several major shifts in the international system as well as changes on the regional and domestic levels decreased the impact of the constraints that had hindered relations between India and Israel throughout the Cold War and created favorable conditions for the rapprochement and normalization of relations between the two states. India's fear of alienating Arab and Muslim states if it forged ties with Israel diminished when it saw those states soften their attitudes toward Israel with the opening of the peace process. The impact of the Muslim factor on India's domestic politics decreased on account of the ascension to power in the 1990s of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party with very favorable views towards Israel.1Even more significant were new constraints that made it necessary for India to rethink its foreign policy and favor rapprochement with Israel. First and foremost, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union greatly affected India's interests. India and the Soviet Union had been close allies for several decades and above all, the Soviet Union was meeting nearly 80 percent of India's military needs in 1991.2 During the early 1990s, it thus became imperative for India to find itself new partners and most importantly, new military suppliers. Improving relations with Israel was therefore an interesting option, especially in the field of defense. …

Die schweizerische Linke und Israel: Israelbegeisterung, Antizionismus und Antisemitismus zwischen 1967 und 1991 (review)

Abstract: Die schweizerische Linke und Israel: Israelbegeisterung, Antizionismus und Antisemitismus zwischen 1967 und 1991, by Christina Spati. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2006.360 pp. euro29.90. Various reports prove that antisemitism did not disappear after World War II but continues to influence the political culture in Europe even in the 21st century. It can be found in West European countries on the right and the left of the political spectrum, in liberal circles and-as a new phenomenon-among the growing Moslem population. While the hatred of Jews by the right is obviously linked with Holocaust denial, xenophobia, and racism, the left is very often accused of merging anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The association of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not new but intensified after the foundation of the State of Israel and especially after the Six-Day War of 1967. When does criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism become antisemitic? How can it be explained that many left-wing circles in Europe and North America substituted their enthusiasm for the Jewish state and its socialist agenda for a harsh criticism of Israel after 1967? Christina Spati examines the Swiss Left for answers to these and other questions. She first introduces definitions of antisemitism and and-Zionism and underlines antisemitism's transformations in Europe after 1945. While an open hatred of Jews remained "politically incorrect" after Auschwitz, new issues appeared: the denial or trivialization of the Holocaust and Israel. In addition, philosemitic attitudes emerged. The author sets up three interesting propositions for Swiss approaches to antisemitism after 1945: First, antisemitism was limited to Nazi Germany and did not exist in Switzerland. Second, antisemitism was regarded as a marginal phenomenon existing on the extreme right; the antisemitic attitudes of broader population groups and their articulation in daily life were ignored. Third, antisemitism was associated with the ideology and politics of the Third Reich and "disappeared" together with the Nazi regime. Once merged, these views prohibited a deeper debate on antisemitic incidents in Switzerland after World War II (p. 32f ). The author does not ignore the fact that anti-Zionism very often includes antisemitic tendencies; however, she does emphasize that it cannot be characterized as anrisemitism. According to Span, criticism of Israelis or Zionists becomes antisemitic when the persons criticized are explicitly characterized as Jews and Israeli politics is described as the politics of "the Jews" (p. 49). Span focuses her research on the Swiss Left, including Social Democrats and trade unionists, communists, the "New Left," new social movements, autonomous and antifascist groups of the 1980s, and independent Leftist journals and newspapers. She bases her study on many published and unpublished primary sources, including rich archival material. Interviews with journalists or political actors were not conducted. The author analyzes publications across the Left in Switzerland during four periods: from the Six-Day War to the Yom Kippur War, from 1974 to 1982, from the Lebanon War to 1987, and from the outbreak of the first Inrifada to the Iraq War of 1991. There was no unified Left position regarding Israel (p. 325), she concludes, but rather a range of attitudes from the principled opposition to the Jewish state and its delegitimization, to the unconditional support of Israel. The periodization follows the Middle East conflict and attaches only minor significance to international developments and domestic issues. The reader unfamiliar with the history of Switzerland would appreciate some introductory information on concrete numbers, leading figures, and the political role of the Left in society. …

The Hebrew Reconquista of Palestine: From the 1947 United Nations Partition Resolution to the First Zionist Congress of 1897

Abstract: Challenging the widely accepted premise that the 1948 war was a war of Jewish self-defense, the author demonstrates that the 1947 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) partition resolution was fundamentally a green light for the Yishuv9s fully mobilized paramilitary organizations (supported by the resources of the World Zionist Organization) to effect the long-planned establishment of a Jewish state by force of arms. He further argues that as a national movement, Zionism was inherently conquest-oriented from the moment of its birth in Basel in 1897 and that it most closely resembles——in the alchemy of its religious and secular motivation and its insatiable land hunger, irredentism, and indifference to the fate of the "natives"——the Iberian Reconquista of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

Anti-Semitism and Zionism

Abstract: Zionists have long claimed that their movement was a reaction and a solution to anti-Semitism. They favor this explanation because it provides a convenient moral cover to their colonial project; as perennial victims of Gentile persecution, the Jews have an unqualified right to their own state. This explanation is scarcely plausible. Broadly, three responses to anti-Semitism had emerged during the nineteenth century: assimilation, revolution, and political Zionism. Political Zionism was the last to appear on the scene; and until the start of World War I, it was also by far the weakest of the three.

Role of American Policy in the Palestinian Catastrophe between 1939-1948: Prevention of Palestine Independence and Creation of the Jewish State

Abstract: This research investigates the American policy role in contributing to the Palestinian catastrophe by helping to create a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948. It defines the domestic American and international factors which affected the US policy on Palestine, and how it reflected on the American national interests in the Middle East. It discusses the American institutional participation in policy decision-making where the Zionists and their supporters played specific roles in defending the Jewish demands in Palestine. This work shows that they used their positions in the executive and legislative branches of government to create homogeneous American-Zionist interests to unify their activities in the US, foreign countries and the United Nations. It studies the development of the US-British cooperation with Zionism and its impact on the status of Palestine. These aspects of the research will also be analyzed by the use of historical methodology to find out the reasons responsible for the persistence of the US in taking a pro-Zionist stand in the face of Palestinian-Arab opposition. The findings of the research show that

Jewish education and history : continuity, crisis and change

Abstract: Moshe Aberbach: A Biographical Foreword David Aberbach Introduction: The Origins of Jewish Education in the Ancient World Part 1: Essays 1. Aaron, Jeroboam, and the Golden Calves 2. Joseph and his Brothers and the History of the Twelve Tribes 3. Anti-Hellenism in the Book of Daniel 4. Imperial Greek Freedmen and the Fall of the Jewish State, 70 CE 5. Herod and Josephus: Patriots or Traitors? 6. Opposition to the Prophets in the Talmud 7. Pharaoh and Roman Egypt in Rabbinic Literature 8. King Hezekiah and Judah Hanasi: Messianic Links 9. The Rabbis, Education and the Obliteration of Class 10. Charismatic and Anti-Charismatic Elements in Judaism 11. Saadia Gaon: the Struggle for Jewish Unity 12. Maimonides: Myth and Reality 13. Ancient Roots of European Anti-Semitism and Jewish Patriotism 14. Abraham Geiger and Samson Raphael Hirsch 15. On Being a Jewish Historian 16. The Roots of Religious anti-Zionism 17. Halakhah and the Modern World: the Question of Smoking 18. Demented Messianists and Modern Secularists Part 2: Viennese Memoir, 1924-38 1. A Viennese upbringing 2. Father 3. Mother 4. Family history and legend 5. My parents and me 6. Hebrew teaching and holidays 7. Relatives and friends 8. School 9. The Chajesrealgymnasium (1934-1938) 10. My schoolmates 11. Under Nazi rule (March-December 1938) 12. Kindertransport

“God will not remain silent”: Zionism, Messianism and Nationalism

Abstract: At a moment when the expropriation of the "occupied territories" by Israel has practically voided of its content the hypothesis of two states in Palestine by destroying and fragmenting the country in seemingly irreversible fashion, and when the conflict as such has largely lost its autonomy within the context of a regional war marked by the confrontation between U.S. imperialism, its allies and its diverse opponents (Islamist or otherwise), what purpose can possibly be served by new analyses of the constitution of Zionism? There would seem to be an abysmal gap between the complex historical and theoretical references these analyses propose, the distance they establish with respect to stereotypes, and the starkness of the choices that a century of wars, violence, diplomatic maneuvers and false political solutions offers in the end to the parties to the conflict: elimination or "transfer," in the short term, of the Arab populations with the exception of a few zones of concentration and surveillance, or, in the longer term, of the Jewish populations, at the price of a massive new emigration. Or, first one and then the other. (1) And yet such analyses are important in many ways; I am convinced that it is always worthwhile to take the time to conduct them and discuss them. First of all, they reveal the internal contradictions of an ideology and a policy which, under given conditions and a given balance of forces, has contributed like very few others to "making the history" of which we today are the subjects, wherever we may be in the world. We can of course use them as polemical arguments against given actors, but one can also see in them an indication of potentialities of division that crystallized in the past and could do so again if circumstances lend themselves to such an outcome, i.e., as a means contributing to avoiding the worst. The rise of critical thought in Israel--sometimes referred to as a whole as "post-Zionist"--within the small minority that truly opposes the settlements and seeks to act in concert with the Palestinian resistance, is indeed impressive. At the same time such analyses open pathways for comparison between an "extreme" and even unique case, and a multiplicity of state formations that also represent associations--of very different sorts--between "messianic" and "national" components, in a synthesis that is more and more problematic today. On the one hand, then, the idea is to bring out, against appearances, the indetermination lodged in the heart of a determined situation. On the other hand, the idea is to contribute to a comprehensive reflection on the forces and representations implicated in the changes on our cosmopolitical horizon. In both cases, we must recognize the capacity of the past to act in the present, by applying as much rigor as possible to the understanding of its powers. This is the perspective in which I would like to discuss three recent works on Zionism--a notion which continues to dominate the "common sense" of perceptions of the Jewish question and its entanglement with the history and the functions of the state of Israel. Despite the difference of the positions they take on key points, they all challenge the idea of a separation (coupuree) between the religious and the political and they all bring out, in Israel's trajectory, a history which is not "sacred" but rather a history of the powers of the sacred in the secular world and its effects on those very actors who make use of it. All three books have the added interest of articulating in timely fashion an astonishing intellectual conjuncture which has seen successive convergences and oppositions between the critique of the idea of a "Jewish state" in Palestine, the defenders of an alternative, "cultural" Zionism and the partisans of a cosmopolitanism rooted in the Jewish experience of exclusion, the most striking episode of which was the confrontation between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt just after the latter published her "report" on the Eichmann trial. …

Herzl, the scramble, and a meeting that never happened: revisiting the notion of an African Zion

Abstract: E. M. Forster’s quintessential Edwardian novel, Howards End, may seem a slightly odd place to begin a consideration of the classic Herzlian text, Der Judenstaat. Yet to me its relevance is so palpable that the temptation cannot be resisted. Jews, of course — unless they are extraordinarily well camouflaged — do not figure in the Forster story. The narrative follows the fortunes of the temperamentally bohemian, certainly cosmopolitan (indeed half-German) but nevertheless very comfortable Schlegel sisters and their relationship with the much more wealthy, practical, horribly confident but decidedly roast-beef English Wilcoxes. There is in these pages a hardly hidden treatise on the conflict between a money-driven materialism and a free-thinking, literary idealism. Caught in the middle and destroyed by both is the figure of Leonard Bast, a near impoverished clerk.