New Article: Bashir, On Citizenship and Citizenship Education

Bashir, Bashir. “On Citizenship and Citizenship Education: A Levantine Approach and Reimagining Israel/Palestine.” Citizenship Studies 19.6-7 (2015): 802-19.

ְְ 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2015.1007033

 

Abstract

This article argues in favor of a Levantine approach to citizenship and citizenship education. A Levantine approach calls for some sort of Mediterranean regionalism, which accommodates and promotes overlapping and shared sovereignties and jurisdiction, multiple loyalties, and regional integration. It transcends the paradigmatic statist model of citizenship by recasting the relationship between territoriality, national identity, sovereignty, and citizenship in complex, multilayered and disaggregated constellations. As the case of Israel/Palestine demonstrates, this new approach goes beyond multicultural accommodation and territorial partition. It proposes, among other things, extending the political and territorial boundaries of citizenship to take all the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as one unit of analysis belonging to a larger region.

 

 

 

CFP: The Past in the Present of the Middle East (CBRL Conference, April 15-16, 2016, London)

 

CBRL Conference: The Past in the Present of the Middle East

15 & 16 April 2016 at the London Middle East Institute in SOAS

The Council for British Research in the Levant is pleased to open a call for papers and posters for a two-day conference to be held in London with the LMEI to showcase the work of CBRL and its partners in the region. The conference will present sessions on a number of themes linking the past to the present day in the Middle East.

• Cultural heritage in conflict

• Cultural heritage, society and economics

• Britain and the Levant: Culture and (Mis)Communication

• The past in the political present: the legacy of colonialism and intervention

• The Politics of Dissent: challenges to Orientalism and Zionism

• The impact of research – working with humanitarian agencies/practitioners

Closing session: The future of the past in the Middle East

Participants in the conference will include both invited speakers and participants who respond to this call, including early career scholars sponsored by CBRL to undertake new research, as well as established scholars presenting their own research, and research partners from the region. The conference is intended as an opportunity to speak to a wide audience, not only the academic community but also policy makers, practitioners and members of the public. We believe that this event will make an important contribution to the profile of research in the region.

Please send proposed paper or poster titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words to CBRL@britac.ac.uk by September 7th 2015. We will notify participants whether their paper or poster has been accepted by the end of October.

The conference fee is £50 (with an early bird rate of £40 until 15 January 2016), with a discounted rate of £20 for student participants. The fee will cover attendance at the conference, including lunches during the conference and the conference reception.

The CBRL is the British Academy-sponsored organization that promotes, sponsors and carries out high-quality research in the humanities and social sciences throughout the countries of the Levant.

Please circulate to all interested colleagues.

Council for British Research in the Levant

10 Carlton House Terrace

London SW1Y 5AH.  UK

www.cbrl.org.uk

New Article: Bashir, On Citizenship Education: A Levantine Approach and Reimagining Israel/Palestine

Bashir, Bashir. “On Citizenship and Citizenship Education: A Levantine Approach and Reimagining Israel/Palestine.” (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2015.1007033

 

Abstract

This article argues in favor of a Levantine approach to citizenship and citizenship education. A Levantine approach calls for some sort of Mediterranean regionalism, which accommodates and promotes overlapping and shared sovereignties and jurisdiction, multiple loyalties, and regional integration. It transcends the paradigmatic statist model of citizenship by recasting the relationship between territoriality, national identity, sovereignty, and citizenship in complex, multilayered and disaggregated constellations. As the case of Israel/Palestine demonstrates, this new approach goes beyond multicultural accommodation and territorial partition. It proposes, among other things, extending the political and territorial boundaries of citizenship to take all the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as one unit of analysis belonging to a larger region.

New Book: Alpher, Periphery – Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies

Alpher, Yossi. Periphery. Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

 

 

Since its establishment after World War II, the State of Israel has sought alliances with non-Arab and non-Muslim countries and minorities in the Middle East, as well as Arab states geographically distant from the Arab-Israel conflict. The text presents and explains this regional orientation and its continuing implications for war and peace. It examines Israel’s strategy of outflanking, both geographically and politically, the hostile Sunni Arab Middle East core that surrounded it in the early decades of its sovereign history, a strategy that became a pillar of the Israeli foreign and defense policy. This “periphery doctrine” was a grand strategy, meant to attain the major political-security goal of countering Arab hostility through relations with alternative regional powers and potential allies. It was quietly abandoned when the Sadat initiative and the emerging coexistence between Israel and Jordan reflected a readiness on the part of the Sunni Arab core to deal with Israel politically rather than militarily. For a brief interval following the 1991 Madrid conference and the 1993 Oslo accords, Israel seemed to be accepted by all its neighbors, prompting then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to muse that it could even consider joining the Arab League. Yet this periphery strategy had been internalized to some extent in Israel’s strategic thinking and it began to reappear after 2010, following a new era of Arab revolution. The rise of political Islam in Egypt, Turkey, Gaza, southern Lebanon and possibly Syria, coupled with the Islamic regime in Iran, has generated concern in Israel that it is again being surrounded by a ring of hostile states—in this case, Islamists rather than Arab nationalists.

The book analyzes Israel’s strategic thinking about the Middle East region, evaluating its success or failure in maintaining both Israel’s security and the viability of Israeli-American strategic cooperation. It looks at the importance of the periphery strategy for Israeli, moderate Arab, and American, and European efforts to advance the Arab-Israel peace process, and its potential role as the Arab Spring brings about greater Islamization of the Arab Middle East. Already, Israeli strategic planners are talking of “spheres of containment” and “crescents” wherein countries like Cyprus, Greece, Azerbaijan, and Ethiopia constitute a kind of new periphery.

By looking at Israel’s search for Middle East allies then and now, the book explores a key component of Israel’s strategic behavior. Written in an accessible manner for all students, it provides a better understanding of Israel’s role in the Middle East region and its Middle East identity.

Table of Contents

For Whom it May Concern
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. The Periphery Doctrine at Work

1. Evolution of a Grand Strategy
2. The Northern Triangle: Iran and Turkey
3. Morocco
4. The Southern Periphery
5. The Levant Minorities
6. The Kurds of Northern Iraq
7. The Jewish Dimension
8. The American Dimension
9. End of the First Periphery, 1973-1983

2. Ramifications

10. Iran: periphery nostalgia and its costs
11. Israeli skeptics
12. Between peripheries: peace, isolation and Islam
13. Is there a new periphery?
14. Arab reaction

3. Conclusion

15. Can Israel find a regional identity?

Heads of Mossad
Persons interviewed
Maps:

1. The original periphery concept
2. The expanded southern periphery
3. The ethnic periphery
4. A new periphery?

Index
About the Author

Yossi Alpher was an officer in Israeli military intelligence, followed by twelve years of service in the Mossad. Until 1995, he was director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. In July 2000, he served as Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Israel during the Camp David talks. From 2001 to 2012 he was coeditor of the bitterlemons.net family of internet publications.

New Book: Halperin, Babel in Zion

Halperin, Liora R. Babel in Zion. Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

 

 

The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew, traditionally a language of Jewish liturgy and study, was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine in the years following World War I. Viewing twentieth-century history through the lens of language, author Liora Halperin questions the accepted scholarly narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism, demonstrating how Jews in Palestine remained connected linguistically by both preference and necessity to a world outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew community even as it promoted Hebrew and achieved that language’s dominance. The story of language encounters in Jewish Palestine is a fascinating tale of shifting power relationships, both locally and globally. Halperin’s absorbing study explores how a young national community was compelled to modify the dictates of Hebrew exclusivity as it negotiated its relationships with its Jewish population, Palestinian Arabs, the British, and others outside the margins of the national project and ultimately came to terms with the limitations of its hegemony in an interconnected world.

Table of Contents

Note on transliteration and translation

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Babel in Zion

Languages of Leisure in the Home, the Coffeehouse, and the Cinema

Peddlers, Traders, and the Languages of Commerce

Clerks, Translators, and the Languages of Bureaucracy

Zion in Babel: The Yishuv in Its Arabic-Speaking Context

Hebrew Education between East and West: Foreign-Language Instruction in Zionist Schools

Conclusion: The Persistence of Babel

Notes

Bibliography

Index