Showing papers on "Jewish state published in 2017"

The Jewish State of Anxiety: Between Moral Obligation and Fearism in the Treatment of African Asylum Seekers in Israel

Abstract: Since 2005 around 60,000 asylum seekers, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan, have entered Israel by crossing the border from Egypt. Notwithstanding the Jewish history of persecution, and Israel being a signatory to the UN Convention for the protection of refugees, modern Israel systematically refuses to grant a refugee status to asylum seekers. Since 2012, the tenacious hostile approach of Israeli policy-makers and state-agents towards asylum seekers has resulted in an outburst of racist verbal and physical attacks against them. This article analyses the socio-legal location of asylum seekers in Israel by examining how their position is articulated by different parties, deploying competing discourses of human rights, citizenship, security and sovereignty. The article advances that appeals—mostly made by critical non-governmental organisations (NGOs), journalists and academics—to human rights, Jewish morals and historic sensitivities are beguiling; while they arouse hopes for compassion and moral obligation, th...

The nationalisation of the Israeli ethnocratic regime and the Palestinian minority’s shrinking citizenship

Abstract: The main issue this paper deals with is the status of the Palestinian minority in Israel (Referred to in the literature using different terms: ‘Palestinians in Israel’, ‘Arabs in Israel’, ‘Arab cit...

Israel and its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State

Abstract: This volume presents new perspectives on Israeli society, Palestinian society, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on historical foundations, it examines how Israel institutionalizes ethnic privileging among its nationally diverse citizens. Arab, Israeli, and American contributors discusses the paradoxes of democratic claims in ethnic states, as well as dynamics of social conflict in the absence of equality. This book advances a new understanding of Israel's approach to the Palestinian citizens, covers the broadest range of areas in which Jews and Arabs are institutionally differentiated along ethnic basis, and explicates the psychopolitical foundations of ethnic privileges. It will appeal to students and scholars who seek broader views on Israeli society and its relationship with the Arab citizens, and want to learn more about the status of the Palestinian citizens in Israel and their collective experience as both citizens and settler-colonial subjects.

From the pergonal project to Kadimastem : a genealogy of Israel’s reproductive-industrial complex

Abstract: In the Israeli ‘start-up nation’ biotechnology has emerged as one of the most thriving knowledge-intensive industries. Particularly the med-tech and repro-tech sector are widely regarded as world class in their ability to develop experimental therapies and medicines based on topnotch ‘pioneering’ biomedical research. These developments have rightly been attributed to the neoliberal turn of the late seventies when Israel started to position itself as significant player in the global health and research market. By exploring the (dis)continuities between Pergonal, a fertility drug developed in the late 1950s by the Israeli scientist Bruno Lunenfeld and the Swiss-Italian pharmaceutical company Serono, and the experimental stem cell therapies that are currently being developed by the Israeli biotech company Kadimastem, this article argues, however, that a much older, but still ongoing history of Zionist settler colonial warfare in Palestine/Israel also lies behind the emergence of Israel’s flourishing reproductive-embryonic industry. A Zionist demographic logic that aims to consolidate a Jewish majority in a Jewish state has created fertile conditions for the emergence of a reproductive-industrial complex in which the interests of a pronatalist Jewish state and a biomedical establishment – consisting of academic entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, biotech companies and pharmaceutical giants – have coalesced. The bodies of Israeli women play a pivotal role in this process, not only as reproducers of the settler nation but also as providers of the raw biological materials that are needed to produce experimental research results and to generate surplus bio-value.

The Future Foretold: Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Congressional Support for Israel

Abstract: Lyndon B. Johnson became a senator the year of Israel’s creation: 1948. Moral, political, and strategic considerations guided Johnson’s outspoken support for Israel from an early point in his political career. This analysis reveals that Johnson’s advocacy of Israel whilst a senator foreshadowed his policy as president of championing the Israeli-American military-strategic alliance. Beginning with his time in Congress, Johnson had many Jewish American friends supporting the establishment of a Jewish state and, due to the importance of Jewish-American backing of the Democratic Party, Johnson supported Israel for significant political reasons. From a moral and strategic perspective starting in the 1950s, Johnson believed that Israel served as a humanitarian refuge for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust and, as a liberal democracy, was well suited to oppose the expansion of Soviet influence and communism in the Cold War Middle East. For these reasons, Johnson supported the initiation of American a...

Modern sovereignty and the non-Christian, or Westphalia’s Jewish State

Abstract: This article participates in efforts by IR theorists to clarify aspects of modern sovereignty – an idea currently in rupture and being rethought – by returning to its founding ‘Westphalian moment’. While recent work has reconnected modern sovereignty to religion, considering Westphalia as a religious settlement and Christian concerns persisting in the groundwork of IR, our work looks beyond Christian concerns and asks how Westphalian sovereignty addressed non-Christians. We trace a yet-untapped discussion of the Jews – presented as a paradigmatic religious ‘other’ – among architects of Westphalian sovereignty from Bodin through Grotius, Hobbes, Harrington, and Spinoza. We demonstrate that foundational theorists of modern sovereignty considered religious diversity a political problem. Some cited essential sameness, minimising difference between Jews and Christians. Others considered the possibility of Jewish sovereignty long before this idea is usually considered to have entered modern consciousness. While the discussion of Jewish sovereignty among architects of modern sovereignty may seem to justify a Jewish state in a world of Westphalian states, it also emphasises Westphalia’s territorialising of religious difference. This aspect of the Westphalian framework is surely inadequate today, when territorialising religious difference is neither normative nor likely possible.

“A Glorious Spiritual and Political Achievement”: Reinhold Niebuhr on Zionism, Israel, and Realism

Abstract: Reinhold Niebuhr is remembered as an inspiration for the revival of “realism” in US foreign policy. He was also one of America’s most visible Christian supporters of the state of Israel. Niebuhr rejected eschatological interpretations of Jewish destiny. But his lifelong support for Zionism rested partly on religious grounds—including a conception of providence that linked America’s global responsibility with the survival of the Jewish state.

Triangular Relations: Israel, Latin American Jewry, and Latin American Countries in a Changing International Context, 1967–2017

Abstract: Moshe Sharett, Israel's first foreign minister, referred to the Jewish State's relationship with Latin America as a “triangular harmony,” referring to Jerusalem's ties with Latin American governmen...

Critical reading of talkbacks discourse as separatist integration: on the Israeli 2004 Football Cup victory

Abstract: The historic victory of the Arab Bnei Sakhnin Union Football Club in the 2004 Israeli State Cup finals triggered an active public discourse about the Arab sector’s position in Israeli football and in Israeli society in general. The study’s premise is that the victory of an Arab club in the Jewish state’s National Cup games and the events surrounding it outside the football pitch are thematically inseparable. Content analysis of talkbacks on the Ynet online news site revealed the Israeli public discourse about the difficulties and complexities involved in the integration of Arab citizens in a Jewish state.

History Education for Arab Palestinian Schools in Israel

Abstract: Since 1948, the Educational system for Palestinian Arabs in Israel was affected by political and ideological considerations of the Jewish state policy. Nurit Peled -Elhanan (2012) argues that the textbooks used in the school system in Israel are laced with a pro-Israel ideology and that they play a part in priming Israeli children for military service. She analyzes the presentation of images, maps, layouts and use of language in History, Geography and Civic Studies textbooks, and reveals how the books might be seen to marginalize Palestinians, legitimize Israeli military action and reinforce Jewish-Israeli territorial identity. Up until 1987 the Department for Arab Education was headed by a Jewish-Israeli director who was appointed by the Ministry of Education and involved in policy making for ensuring control ov er the Palestinians. Since then Palestinians have been appointed to lead the Department but they have been lacked of power or decision making, which remained under the direct control of the Ministr y of Education. Thus the Department for Arab Education has no autonomous decision and authorities, but only meant to supervise the education of Palestinian Arabs and answer to Jewish-Israelis who continue to be in charge. Since the first years Israeli politicians saw in the state education system, an instrument to realize Zionist political ob jectives, and on the other hand the educational system was used to ensure weakening of Arab and Palestinian identity in the country .

Synagogues for sale: Jewish-State mutuality in the communist Czech lands, 1945–1970

Abstract: The Jewish communities of communist Czechoslovakia enjoyed the right to receive in restitution property which had belonged to their interwar predecessors and which had been lost or stolen during the Second World War. The efforts to recover, manage, and dispose of these properties brought the interests of the Council of Jewish Religious Communities in the Czech Lands into alignment with those of their minders at the State Office of Ecclesiastical Affairs and its successor institutions. Their collaboration in the sale of surplus synagogues and the protection of cemeteries (as a class of properties) helped them develop a close working relationship characterized by limited mutuality. This, in turn, contributed to the context which gave rise to an efflorescence of Jewish cultural life in the 1960s. While self-consciously revisionist, this article in no way seeks to deny the prevalence of state and popular antisemitism in the postwar years, which often came in the guise of anti-Zionism. It seeks, rather...

Anti-Semitism, the "Longest Hatred"

Abstract: Anti-Semitism, the "Longest Hatred" Anti-Semitism: A Specific Phenomenon. Holocaust Triviali zation-Islamism- Postcolonial an d C osmopolitan A ntiZionism. By Clemens Heni. Berlin: Edition Critic, 2013. 676 pp. $42, paper.The subtitle of this encyclopedic and much-needed-if sometimes rambling and repetitive-book says it all. Anti-Semitism, the "longest hatred," is indeed, as described by one of its best-known historians, Robert Wistrich, a specific phenomenon different from other forms of racism and xenophobia. It is the only form of prejudice where the targeted group can be perceived as both preternaturally clever and ineffably clueless, impossibly strong and preposterously weak-all at the same time.But not everyone agrees that it is indeed "a specific phenomenon." In fact, after World War II, the preponderance of both scholarship and political thinking about anti-Semitism-including in the Jewish intellectual establishment of the United States and Europe, as expressed by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Stephen S. Wise-held it to be a form of racism like any other, no different from that against blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or Native Americans. Heni's book is the first fulllength work to argue against that misguided consensus. He deserves great praise for it."Anti-Semitism means hatred of Jews as well as the Jewish state of Israel, and it means the distortion of the Holocaust," Heni declares, a view which dovetails closely with his critique of the banalization of the Holocaust as merely a product of modernity, maintained by Martin Heidegger, perhaps the twentieth century's most influential philosopher. As part of this ever-expanding legacy, new "blood libels" find expression in conspiracy myths such as the claim that the terror attacks of 9/11 were an inside job perpetrated by Jews.Tragically, much of the Left, like the Islamists with whom it is often allied, sees the Jewish State as peopled not by human beings but rather by some sort of bacillus, or a unique race of demons-deserving of special treatment. Of course, they are not the first to make that argument.To illustrate anti-Semitism's uniqueness among the many forms of ethnic and religious hatred, Heni argues that it is not only the oldest-making Jews the target of everyone from GrecoRoman-era Egyptians to Christians, Muslims, and neo-pagans (like the Nazis)-but also the only one to produce anything like the Holocaust. "Even horrible regimes, which killed political or other enemies in their own countries did not aim at a specific group of people [for complete extermination] everywhere they could find them," Heni notes.Heni takes particular aim at the oftenintertwined worlds of political activism and academe, in which anti-Semitism is increasingly widespread but typically denied by those who have embraced it. This is seen most clearly in the postcolonial and cosmopolitan schools of thought that dominate today's universities. Postcolonial theorists and writers, such as Edward Said and Judith Butler, pigeonhole Israel as simply a colonial-settler state, guilty of imposing European values and populations onto the natives of Palestine. By doing so, they purposely ignore both ancient and modern history-disregarding the fact that the Jews waged struggles against the great colonizing powers of their day-Babylon in 605 B. …

The Angel: the Egyptian spy who saved Israel

Abstract: Israel emerged triumphant from the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Indeed, had the superpowers not intervened in the hostilities to save Egypt, the Jewish State would most likely have won an even more impress...

Israel’s cooperation with east african states in security and development domains: case of kenya

Abstract: In February 2016, the Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu declared Israel’s come-back to Africa and Africa’s comeback to Israel. He stressed that the Jewish State is ready to help African countries both in security and development domains. Netanyahu sees these domains, fighting the forces of terror and seizing the opportunities of tomorrow, as interrelated. Due to the recent Israel’s traditional partners’ grievances of Netanyahu’s unwillingness to make compromises on the Palestinian policy, Israeli government is looking toward extending the sphere of influence, adding new partners from Africa, Latin America and Asia. This paper examines the Israeli-Kenyan cooperation as an example of a successful partnership between the Middle Eastern country and the East Africa - its priority region. Special attention is paid to Israel’s military and non-military assistance to Kenya. For strengthening its national security, the Kenyan govern-ment is seeking to gain an access to Israeli military know-how and a vast Israeli counterterrorism expe-rience. Extending military cooperation with Israel, Kenya is also open to Israeli development innovations, especially in the field of agriculture and medicine. The Jewish state is trying to get some economic and trade preferences from Kenya, a diplomatic loyalty in the United Nations, and, finally, a support in de-terring Iran’s African ambitions. The aim of the study is an analysis of the contemporary Israeli-Kenyan cooperation in security and development domains. It was examined official documents of Israeli Foreign Ministry, Knesset and the Kenyan Parliament. The author concludes that to maintain a positive course, Israel and Kenya should con-tinue to deepen their cooperation demonstrating mutual respect for each other's national interests.

‘Terra nullius’ and planning : Land, law and identity in Israel/Palestine

Abstract: This chapter discusses the relations between planning, land, law and identity. It focuses in particular on the concept of 'terra nullius' (TN), land deemed as 'empty' of rights, as key to understanding these relations. The empirical focus is on the charged context of Israel/Palestine where the settler Jewish state has extensively used legal and planning tools to seize, control and manage contested indigenous Bedouin lands. Importantly, the TN concept is often used implicitly by policy makers, through the discourses, narratives, norms and practices of hegemonic groups that attempt to seize and control ethnic and racial minorities. Moreover, TN is not limited to reconstruction of the legal past and present, as it also reconstructs the future, mainly through land allocation and urban and regional planning. The legal basis of the denial is Israel's total refusal to recognise the validity of a pre-state indigenous land system. History, however, tells a different story, in which a well-established indigenous system operated for generations.

Absorbing Coaches and Athletes from the Former Soviet Union in Israel

Abstract: The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in the opening of its gates and a mass exodus of Jews to Israel. Around a million Soviet Jews immigrated to the Jewish state. Among them were al...

Roots of Identity, Canopy of Collision: Re-Visioning Trees as an Evolving National Symbol Within the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Abstract: Jewish immigrants settling Israel/Palestine since the end of the nineteenth century, with the objective of creating a national Jewish state, have strongly identified with trees. They perceived the planting of trees as an act of making the barren wilderness come to life and also as a symbol for planting themselves as permanent beings in their homeland from which they had been uprooted thousands of years ago. In a process of structured identity based on hierarchical binaries, they perceived the Palestinians as the opposite of themselves – neglectful of the land and lacking strong ties to it. In the ensuing and ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict trees have become signifiers of progress as well as of dispossession, weapons in the escalating cycle of planting and uprooting. In this article I show that environmental policies have been co-opted and used by the State of Israel to further marginalize the Palestinians and take over lands, in what can be termed nationalistic/ethnic environmentalism or “Green” nationalism.

The Uses and Abuses of Collective Memory

Abstract: The Uses and Abuses of Collective Memory Tamir Sorek, Palestinian Commemoration in Israel: Calendars, Monuments, and Martyrs. Stanford: Standford University Press, 2015. 328 pp.Thomas Philip Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 288 pp.One of Michel Foucault's enduring scholarly legacies is his formulation of biopolitics as a potent force in our lives. What he had in mind, among other issues, was the pervasive and comprehensive power of states and industries to affect all aspects of life. Power, for Foucault, could insinuate itself into all microphysical social and physical contact and thus disciplined bodies and minds alike. Ever since his death in 1984, we are looking for ways of shaking off his gloomy observation that rings true and yet we wish to resist (Foucault 2003:242-243).Quite surprisingly, Foucault did not relate the concept of biopolitics, or biopower, to racism and colonialism as Robert Young observed already in 1995. For Foucault this was the domain of the modern nation state and its particular mode of domination (although he inspired one of the most important work on colonialism, Edward Said's Orientalism [1979]). However, what happens if the modern state is a settler colonial state? Are we allowed to apply this micro domination to such a case study? I think we can, as the two books under review-without committing them to this paradigm they have not chosen-indicate the usefulness of this possible departure point for discussing the relationship between the settler colonial state of Israel and the native Palestinian population.The first book, Palestinian Commemoration in Israel: Calendars, Monuments, and Martyrs, by Tamir Sorek examines the commemorative culture of the Palestinian minority in Israel through formative events in their national lives (beginning, of course, with the 1948 catastrophe, the Nakbah). For Sorek, these commemorative spaces empower the minority within the Jewish state, but also indicate its willingness to dialogue with it. His approach is multidisciplinary and he provides us with a very thorough and comprehensive view on this culture in various manifestations since the inception of the Jewish State.In Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012, Thomas Philip Abowd roams the streets of Jerusalem with local friends and tries to share with them the harsh reality of colonization. His focus is the urban reality as a scene of colonialist erasure and counter commemoration by the colonized. The book moves in and out of history, covering some of the most known acts of urbicide that Israel committed in Jerusalem as well as less known instances of the colonization as a project of the de-Arabization of the city. He gives much space to the people themselves and conveys not just their thoughts, but their emotions and aspirations as much as he can.There are still today quite a few students of Israel and Palestine who find it hard to append the adjectives colonial, or settler colonial, to the Jewish State. However, recent scholarship is quite adamant that this is the appropriate paradigm for analyzing the past and the present of Israel and Palestine.1 This paradigm was applied by scholars to review the events of 1948; the Judaization policies in the south of Israel; the economic policies of Israel in the occupied West Bank and the industrial relationship during the Mandatory period, to mention but few of the major works in this area of inquiry (Lloyd 2012, Nasara 2012, Hever 2012, Mansour 2012). Major works in the field are those by Patrick Wolfe (2006), Lorezno Veracini (2006), and Gaby Piterberg (2008).The modern settler state of Israel represents a rare combination in our time of a nation-state still practicing settler colonialism (and by this, I do not mean just in the occupied West Bank but rather all over Israel). …