New Article: Harpaz and Heimann, Sixty Years of EU-Israeli Trade Relations

Harpaz, Guy, and Gadi Heimann. “Sixty Years of EU-Israeli Trade Relations: The Expectations-Delivery Gap.” Journal of World Trade 50.3 (2016): 447-74.

 

URL: http://www.kluwerlawonline.com/abstract.php?area=Journals&id=TRAD2016020

 

Abstract

This article identifies a common thread throughout the sixty years of European-Israeli relations, namely a gap that has prevailed between the lofty rhetoric of the EU regarding envisaged special trade relations and its much more modest willingness/ability to establish such relations. At various junctures of these relations (three of which are analysed in this article), turgid European promises were not fully realized. Consequently, a wide gap has been created between rhetoric and concrete actions and between the de jure and de facto economic and trade value of the legal regimes governing EU-Israel bilateral relations. The article reveals that gap and offers a typology and analysis of various factors which contributed to the creation and widening of the Expectations-Delivery Gap.

New Article: Heimann, The Negotiations for a Trade Agreement with Israel

Heimann, Gadi. “The EEC Commission and the Negotiations for a Trade Agreement with Israel, 1958–1964.” Journal of European Integration (early view, online first).
 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2016.1193175
 
Abstract

This article examines the role played by the European Commission in negotiations between the European Economic Community and Israel concerning a trade agreement. It demonstrates that the Commission’s attitude to such an agreement was far more positive than that of the six member states. The Commission’s leadership pushed the Israelis into pursuing an association agreement, and when this was revealed to be impossible, it took a leading role in concluding a more limited trade agreement. The Commission’s proposal formed the basis for the final agreement, which took shape in 1964. The article attempts to discern the motives behind the Commission’s behaviour; its central claim is that the Commission’s leadership viewed negotiations with Israel and the conclusion of an agreement as a means to achieve their ideological and institutional goals.

 

 

 

New Article: Shtern, Urban Neoliberalism vs. Ethno-National Division in Jerusalem’s Shopping Malls

Shtern, Marik. “Urban Neoliberalism vs. Ethno-National Division: The Case of West Jerusalem’s Shopping Malls.” Cities 52 (2016): 132-9.

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2015.11.019

 

Abstract

Most research on ethnically and nationally contested cities posits that urban spatial segregation trends will remain decisive so long as the macro level national conflict persists, and assumes that the neoliberalization of urban space would only strengthen such trends. Over the last decade however, and despite the ever deepening national conflict, Jerusalem has seen the emergence of neoliberal spaces of consumption that serve as resilient spaces of intergroup encounter between Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab populations. In this article I will examine and compare two such neoliberal spaces in Jerusalem, and show how under certain conditions, privatized urban spaces can undermine processes of ethno-national segregation. I argue that interactions between members of the two rival groups are challenged and reshaped by neoliberal spaces and that the relocation of the ethno-national intergroup encounters to privatized spaces of consumption could represent a temporal shift to a class based encounters.

 

 

 

New Book: Yacobi, Israel and Africa

Yacobi, Haim. Israel and Africa. A Genealogy of Moral Geography, Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Geography. New York: Routledge, 2015.

 

 

Through a genealogical investigation of the relationships between Israel and Africa, this book sheds light on the processes of nationalism, development and modernization, exploring Africa’s role as an instrument in the constant re-shaping of Zionism. Through looking at “Israel in Africa” as well as “Africa in Israel”, it provides insightful analysis on the demarcation of Israel’s ethnic boundaries and identity formation as well as proposing the different practices, from architectural influences to the arms trade, that have formed the geopolitical concept of “Africa”. It is through these practices that Israel reproduces its internal racial and ethnic boundaries and spaces, contributing to its geographical imagination as detached not solely from the Middle East but also from its African connections.

This book would be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East and Jewish Studies, as well as Post-colonial Studies, Geography and Architectural History.

 

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Family Album

Part One: Israel in Africa
Chapter 1: Africa’s Decade
Chapter 2: The Architecture of Foreign Policy

Part Two: Africa in Israel
Chapter 3: Consuming, Reading, Imagining
Chapter 4: North Africa in Israel
Chapter 5: The Racialization of Space

Part Three: Israel in Africa II
Chapter 6: Back to Africa

Conclusion

Haim Yacobi is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

 

 

Reviews: Ben-Porat, Between State and Synagogue

Ben-Porat, Guy. Between State and Synagogue: The Secularization of Contemporary Israel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

 

Reviews

• Lassen, Amos. “The Times They Are A-Changing.” Reviews by Amos Lassen, April 7, 2013.
• Tabory, Ephraim. “Review.” Middle East Journal 67.4 (2013): 646-7.
• Omer, Atalia. “Review.” American Journal of Sociology 119.5 (2014): 1518-1520.
• Sorek, Tamir. “Review.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46.2 (2015): 421-2.
• Weiss, Shayna. “Review.” Journal of Church and State 57.3 (2015): 565-7.
• Hollander, Philip. “Judaism in Israel.” VCU Menorah Review 82 (Winter/Spring 2015).

 

 

 

New Book: Katz, Bringing Zion Home. Israel in American Jewish Culture

Katz, Emily Alice. Bringing Zion Home. Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015.

 

 

Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel’s “natural” place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America’s relationship with Israel today.

Katz shows that American Jews’ promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned “culture” as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel’s American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America’s interests in the Middle East and helped spread the “American way” in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America.

Emily Alice Katz teaches history at the University of California, Irvine.

 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Postwar American Jewry Reconsidered

2. Before Exodus: Writing Israel for an American Audience

3. Hora Hootenannies and Yemenite Hoedowns: Israeli Folk Dance in America

4. A Consuming Passion: Israeli Goods in American Jewish Culture

5. Cultural Emissaries and the Culture Explosion: Introducing Israeli Art and Music

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index