ToC: Israel Studies Review 30.2 (2015)

Israel Studies Review 30.2 (2015)

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note
pp. v-vi(2)

 

Articles

Labor Zionism, the State, and Beyond: An Interpretation of Changing Realities and Changing Histories
pp. 1-27(27)
Author: Cohen, Mitchell

Does Israel Have a Navel? Anthony Smith and Zionism
pp. 28-49(22)
Author: Berent, Moshe

The Women of the Wall: A Metaphor for National and Religious Identity
pp. 50-70(21)
Author: Lahav, Pnina

Yiddish, Israel, and the Palestinians: Yosl Birshteyn’s “Between the Olive Trees”
pp. 71-91(21)
Author: Mahalel, Adi

Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy: Looking at Five Israeli Dystopias
pp. 92-112(21)
Author: Katz, Gideon

The Politics of Emotion: A Case Study of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
pp. 113-129(17)
Author: Gold, Dana

 

Book Reviews

Book Reviews
pp. 130-155(26)

New Article: Omer, Hitmazrehut or Becoming of the East

Omer, Atalia. “Hitmazrehut or Becoming of the East: Re-Orienting Israeli Social Mapping.” Critical Sociology (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0896920515604475

 

Abstract

Through developing of the concept of hitmazrehut, the article highlights avenues for decolonializing and de-orientalizing sociopolitical theory and practice in Israel/Palestine. Hitmazrehut (literally ‘becoming of the East’) is understood as the transformation of relations between space, identity, and narrative through an intersectionality framework of social movement activism and intellectual counter-discourse. Exposing the intersections among sites of marginality as well as cultivating localized interpretations of identity (delinked from the orientalist positing of Israel in the ‘West’) would contribute to the possibility of the formation of transformative coalition building across national boundaries. Hitmazrehut is both an outcome and a necessary process for enabling geopolitical reframing. The article begins with the ahistorical and orientalist biases of sociological inquiry into the region. It continues with an analysis of efforts to localize and re-orient Jewish identity as well as the Mizrahi discursive critique of epistemological violence guiding sociological scholarship, double consciousness and patterns of ethnic passing.

 

 

New Book: Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom

Kotef, Hagar. Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

 

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

• Introduction
• 1. Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine / Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir
• 2. An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads—On Freedom and Movement
• 3. The Fence That “Ill Deserves the Name of Confinement”: Locomotion and the Liberal Body
• 4. The Problem of “Excessive” Movement
• 5. The “Substance and Meaning of All Things Political”: On Other Bodies
• Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

HAGAR KOTEF is based at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.

 

 

New Article: Segalo et al, Engaging Memory and Imagination Within Decolonizing Frameworks

Segalo, Puleng, Einat Manoff, Michelle Fine. “Working With Embroideries and Counter-Maps: Engaging Memory and Imagination Within Decolonizing Frameworks.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 3.1 (2015).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v3i1.145

 

Abstract

As people around the world continue to have their voices, desires, and movements restricted, and their pasts and futures told on their behalf, we are interested in the critical project of decolonizing, which involves contesting dominant narratives and hegemonic representations. Ignacio Martín-Baró called these the “collective lies” told about people and politics. This essay reflects within and across two sites of injustice, located in Israel/Palestine and in South Africa, to excavate the circuits of structural violence, internalized colonization and possible reworking of those toward resistance that can be revealed within the stubborn particulars of place, history, and culture. The projects presented here are locally rooted, site-specific inquiries into contexts that bear the brunt of colonialism, dispossession, and occupation. Using visual research methodologies such as embroideries that produce counter-narratives and counter-maps that divulge the complexity of land-struggles, we search for fitting research practices that amplify unheard voices and excavate the social psychological soil that grows critical analysis and resistance. We discuss here the practices and dilemmas of doing decolonial research and highlight the need for research that excavates the specifics of a historical material context and produces evidence of previously silenced narratives.

 

 

New Article: Neuman, Al Mansfeld and the Interpretation of the Israel Museum

Neuman, Eran. “Al Mansfeld and the Interpretation of the Israel Museum.” Journal of Architecture 20.5 (2015): 803-30.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1092166

 

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem has been the subject of post-colonial interpretations which likened the organisation of the pavilions that make up the museum to the form of an Arab village. Focusing on the organisational and formal similarities between the museum and the typology of the Arab village, these interpretations propose that Israel, even before the 1967 War and the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, had already begun to appropriate Palestinian symbols. These interpretations often refer to drawings made by Al Mansfeld, the museum’s architect. This essay argues that while the post-colonial interpretations may be correct, they neglect to address yet another big influence on Mansfeld’s thinking when he conceptualised the Israel Museum in the late 1950s. During the early 1930s in Berlin, Mansfeld was a student of two German Expressionist architects, Hans Poelzig and Heinrich Tessenow. During these years, Mansfeld was exposed to expressionist ideas about architecture that later permeated his designs and artwork, including the design of the Israel Museum.

 

 

 

New Article: Ghebrezghiabher & Motzafi-Haller, Eritrean Women Asylum Seekers in Israel

Ghebrezghiabher, Habtom M., and Pnina Motzafi-Haller. “Eritrean Women Asylum Seekers in Israel: From a Politics of Rescue to Feminist Accountability.” Journal of Refugee Studies (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fev006

 

Abstract

Despite acclaimed gender equality during the struggle for liberation and post independence in their country, the entrenched system of gender-based inequality has forced many Eritrean women to flee their country. On their difficult flight and during their journey, Eritrean women were exposed to blackmail, sexual abuse and rape. Those who made it through the difficult journey sought asylum in Israel but have not been able to escape gender violation and discrimination in their host state. This article traces the experience of Eritrean woman asylum seekers in Israel from the moment of their escape from Eritrea, through their torturous journey and after their entry into a state that refuses to consider their right to refugee status. Data were obtained using in-depth interviews with women asylum seekers in Israel, records of radio interviews and Paltalk discussions in the Tigrigna language, and close reading of unpublished reports by human rights activists and of Hebrew-language Israeli newspapers. Analysis of these diverse bodies of data reveals that gender is largely ignored by the few scholars who attempted to document the Eritrean asylum seekers experience in Israel. Drawing on post-colonial feminist Canadian scholar Sherene Razack (1999), who urges us to develop ‘a more political understanding of why women flee’, we examine here the experience of Eritrean women asylum seekers in Israel within a critical feminist analytical framework that documents their agency within changing historical and political circumstances and forces. We use this larger historically specific framework to disengage from the trope of ‘pity and rescue’ and offer instead a critical examination of how Eritrean women act as agents from the moment they decide to flee their country and until they settle in Israel.

 

 

New Article: Bar-Yosef, Heart of Darkness in Israeli Culture

Bar-Yosef, Eitan. “‘The Horror’ in Hebrew. Heart of Darkness in Israeli Culture.” Interventions (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2015.1079499

 

Abstract

Tracing the intricate presence of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Israeli culture, this essay explores how elements of the novella (the journey to Africa, the iconic Kurtz, and the nature of ‘darkness’) have been repeatedly evoked, both implicitly and explicitly, in various cultural contexts. Focusing on three major episodes – the emergence of political Zionism in the 1890s; young Israel’s intensive involvement in Black Africa in the 1960s; and the pessimism that engulfed Israeli society after the 1973 war – the essay suggests that the novella’s relevance to Israeli culture is rooted in the work’s fluid allegorical mode, which parallels tensions and contradictions that have characterized the Zionist project from its inception. This mirroring reached a climax in the journalistic work of Adam Baruch, who offered a highly stylized postcolonial reworking of Heart of Darkness in his influential account of a journey undertaken to find a disgraced Israeli general, self-exiled in Africa. The search for the Israeli ‘Kurtz’ thus continues to function as a powerful emblem of Israel’s colonial violence.

 

 

Dissertation: Harass, Reading the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict Through Theater

Harass, Azza. Reading the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict Through Theater: A Postcolonial Analysis, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis. University of Kent, 2015.

 

URL: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/47909/

 
Abstract
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to 1917, when British Prime Minister Balfour declared Britain’s support for the establishment of a homeland for Jews in the land of Palestine. The conflict has had many political, social, and artistic implications. On the political level, a struggle that has not been solved until this day has evolved. On a social level, many lives have been crushed: thousands of native citizens of the land became refugees, mainly in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, but also worldwide. Others, like the Arabs who stayed in what was in 1948 declared to be the state of Israel, have been suffering from an identity crisis; many of these Arabs face unlawful detention, demolition of houses, killing and racism. The Gaza strip has almost always been under siege by the Israeli military machine lately. Meanwhile, the Jewish society has never had a day of peace since the establishment of their state. On the artistic level, the conflict has always had implications for Arab/ Palestinian and Israeli writings., I seek to read the depiction of the conflict with its different violent confrontations from both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives starting with the Palestinian Nakba to the violent Israeli oppression of any Palestinian resistance in the Intifada. I also read literary texts about Palestinian resistance, actual material resistance of the first Palestinian Intifada as represented by both sides in postcolonial terms. In fact, I believe that both Palestinian and Israeli literature could be read in the context of postcolonial discourse. On the one hand, for Palestinian and Arab writers, Palestinian writing is and should be read as resistance literature, or ‘Adab al-muqawamah’, a term coined by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. Anna Ball’s study Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective examines Palestinian literature and film in the light of postcolonial feminism. Ball places the conflict in the context of colonial/ postcolonial discourse and breaks the taboo against using the word colonialism when speaking about Zionism. In fact, the research problem is based on the idea of the inadequacy of ignoring Palestinian and Israeli literature as part of postcolonial studies simply for fear of revealing the colonial status quo of the land. According to Anna Bernard, who seeks to draw attention to what she calls ‘blind spots in postcolonial studies’, mainly Israel/ Palestine: ‘by dismissing a ‘postcolonial’ approach to Israel-Palestine studies outright, [critics like] Massad and Shohat overlook the value of a literary study that seeks to demonstrate the collective and cross-cultural impact of the various modern forms of colonialism and imperialism on artistic production across the globe’. Massad’s argument that there is difficulty in describing space, time and body in Israel/ Palestine as postcolonial is based on his interrogations: ‘Can one determine the coloniality of Palestine/ Israel without noting its ‘‘post-coloniality’’ for Ashkenazi Jews? Can one determine the post-coloniality of Palestine/Israel without noting its coloniality for Palestinians? Can one determine both or either without noting the simultaneous colonizer/colonized status of Mizrahi Jews? (Although one could debate the colonized status of Mizrahi Jews) How can all these people inhabit a colonial/postcolonial space in a world that declares itself living in a post-colonial time?’ Ella Shohat, likewise, is against what she calls the ‘ahistorical and universalizing deployments, and potentially [the] depoliticizing implications’ of the term ‘post-colonial,’ especially that, according to her, it is used instead of important terms like imperialism and neo-colonialism. In spite of the importance of paying attention to the correct description of states of imperialism and neo-colonialism, I still find it possible to read both Palestinian and Israeli texts in postcolonial perspective, agreeing with Bernard ‘that the tools that have been developed for reading these texts comparatively – including colonial discourse analysis, national allegory, minority discourse, and so on – can be usefully applied, tested, and revised in the analysis of Palestinian and Israeli literary and cultural production’. This view resonates with Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths’s in their study The Postcolonial Studies Reader (1995), when they comment on this wide range of relevant fields that the term postcolonial suggests: ‘Postcolonial theory involves discussion about experience of various kinds: migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, [and] place’ . In fact, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not necessarily restricted to a real colonial period; it could be used, according to Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths in The Empire Writes Back: ‘to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression’. Between the view of the land of Palestine as a lawful possession of the Jews and that which sees Jewish presence as a settler or colonial one, a debate about reading the conflict and literary production tackling the conflict within theories of colonial and postcolonial studies arises. What makes reading the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and its literature and literary production within the paradigm of postcolonialism problematic is worth some further investigation. First, the preference and focus on the discursive practices of colonialism over the material practices has resulted in excluding the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict from the field of postcolonial studies by a number of critics like Ella Shohat and Joseph Massad, which is more elaborated on later. Second, the debate about the Zionist project as a settler colonial one could also problematize analysing the conflict within postcolonial theories. The first chapter explores the Israeli/ Palestinian and Arab writing of the conflict from a colonizer/colonized perspective. I mainly focus on the representation of violence as an essential element in a colonized society and the decolonization process, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s theory that violence is inevitable in any colonized community as the backbone of the analysis. For this purpose, I have chosen Syrian playwright Saad-Allah Wanous’s play Rape (1990), to compare with Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin’s play Murder (1997), since both plays represent violence as a vicious circle that does not lead anywhere in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, even though it is an everyday act that has become a way of life for both sides. Crucial terms in the field of postcolonial studies such as resistance/terrorism are examined. Some similarities between the ways the two playwrights write the conflict are also highlighted, which supports the idea that literature can always find shared ground between any two conflicting parties. In Chapters Two and Three I write about the history of the conflict as a chain of endless violent confrontations; violence in this case is on the national level when the two nations fight each other. Chapter Two addresses some of the landmark events in the history of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, mainly the Israeli War of Independence/Nakba as the same historical event seen from the two extremely different colonizer/colonized perspectives. The chapter also addresses what the Holocaust has to do with the two events and how the Holocaust was exploited by the Israeli state to silence any condemnation of the Israeli/Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine and later on to silence any international condemnation of the Israeli 1967 occupation of more Palestinian and Arab lands. To serve this purpose, the chapter examines Palestinian poet and playwright Burhan Al-Din Al-Aboushi’s play The Phantom of Andalusia (1949) and Palestinian playwright Amir Nizar Zuabi’s play I Am Yusuf and This Is My Brother (2010) compared to each other as two different Palestinian representations of the Nakba and compared to the Israeli narrative of the ‘War of Independence’ by Israeli playwright Motti Lerner in his play The Admission (2010). In addition to this, Joshua Sobol’s play Ghetto is examined as one of the classical Holocaust plays and compared to a contemporary play called Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea (2009) by Palestinian playwright Ahmed Masoud (co-written with Justin Butcher, author of The Madness of George Dubya) to draw the analogy between the living conditions of Jews in ghettoes to that of Palestinians in Gaza as part of the on-going Palestinian Nakba. Chapter Three examines another landmark of the history of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict: the Palestinian Intifada, an event which changed the nature of the conflict and showed that the Palestinians can act to decolonize their country. The Intifada, mainly described as ‘non-violent’, has led to huge impacts on the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians and how they see each other, both in reality and in theatre; however, again, the colonizer and colonized parties see it differently. The chapter examines these different perspectives by analysing the Israeli plays Masked (1990) by Ilan Hatzor and Coming Home (2002) by Motti Lerner, compared with The Stone Revolution (1997) by Egyptian playwright Alfred Farag and Al-Huksh (1992) by Palestinian playwright Adnan Tarabshi. The four plays present the Intifada as either a barbaric or a heroic act, depending on the political ideologies of the playwrights. I read the plays within the context of pro or anti-resistance propaganda. Chapter four is an attempt to read the concepts of diaspora, exile and homeland in both Jewish/Israeli and Palestinian experiences in the postcolonial paradigm. Concepts of exodus and diaspora are found in both Jewish and Palestinian history, but in two very different ways. Throughout the chapter I attempt to examine the similarities and/or differences between these notions in the two people’s memories through reading Yiddish playwright David Pinski’s The Last Jew (1905) in comparison with Palestinian playwright Ismail Al-Dabbagh’s play The Painful Events of the Life of Abu-Halima (2008), as two plays reflecting the notions of Jewish and Palestinian diaspora respectively. In addition to these works, the chapter examines Exile in Jerusalem (1989) by Israeli playwright Motti Lerner alongside In Spitting Distance (2008) by Palestinian actor and playwright Taher Najib. Exile, diaspora and homeland have occupied a significant space in postcolonial theories as outcomes of colonialism, and the aim of my chapter is to read Israeli and Palestinian plays discussing those themes from a postcolonial perspective, pointing out the differences and similarities between the Jewish and the Palestinian experiences of diaspora. It is very important to note that the choice of the plays is ultimately based on the thematic approach I tend to adopt in my presentation of the conflict. In other words, I have attempted to introduce the Israeli versus Arab/ Palestinian theatrical presentation of the same subject matter or the landmark events related to the conflict, again the materialist practices of colonialism regardless of the dates of the plays. This is not because their specific historical contexts are unimportant, but rather because the Israeli/Palestine conflict remains ongoing, in what could be seen as a historical deadlock. Finally, Chapter Five aims at examining the influence of the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict on Western theatre, showing how the West, as an outsider, sees and portrays the conflicted parties. I have chosen the following plays to examine the different approaches to the conflict: Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s An Arab Woman Speaks (1972), Arthur Milner’s Masada (2006) and Facts (2010), John Patrick Shanley’s Dirty Story (2003), Naomi Wallace’s The Fever Chart , Robin Soans’ The Arab Israeli Cook Book (2004), Alan Rickman and Catharine Viner’s My Name is Rachel Corrie (2003), David Hare’s Via Dolorosa (1998) and Wall (2009), Douglas Watkinson’s The Wall (2011), Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children (2009) and Richard Stirling’s Seven Other Children (2009) to examine the different approaches towards the conflict. Again, I approach this literature as postcolonial literature affected by imperialism and Israeli colonial aggression or as justifying and propagating the Zionist colonial project in Palestine or sometimes as both at the same time, depending on the author’s beliefs and ideologies.

 

 

New Article: Ram, Israeli Sociology: Social Thought amidst Struggles and Conflicts

Ram, Uri. “Israeli Sociology: Social Thought amidst Struggles and Conflicts.” Irish Journal of Sociology 23.1 (2015): 98-117.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/IJS.23.1.6

 

Abstract

The basic challenge of Israeli sociology always has been, and continues to be to present days, the designation of its object of study; i. e.’Israeli society’. The history of Israeli sociology and its conception of ‘Israeli society’ may be discerned into the five following modules: 1. Proto-sociology. In the pre-state era, sociological thought thrived within the context of the socialist Zionism. The two prominent’ proto-sociologists’ were Arthur Ruppin and Martin Buber, who professed German communal perspectives. 2. Modernization sociology. The formative phase of sociology as a discipline was from 1950 to 1977. It was led by Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, who effected a transition from the German anti-modernist paradigm to an American modernization theory. 3. Critical sociology. The critical phase took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical sociology was manifested in elitism, pluralism, Marxism, feminism and colonization approaches. Simultaneously there emerged a robust branch of’ quantitative sociology’. 4. Post-modern sociology. The turn towards post-modernity started in the 1990s. The three noticeable post-modern perspectives are: post-structuralism, post-colonialism and post-Marxism. 5. Palestinian Arab sociology in Israel. Palestinian Arab sociology is emerging and coming to its own since the 1990s. It reflects integration as well as alienation.

New Article: Mengistu and Avraham, Ethiopian Immigrants in the Israeli National Press

Mengistu, Germaw and Eli Avraham. “‘Others Among Their Own People’: The Social Construction of Ethiopian Immigrants in the Israeli National Press.” Communication, Culture & Critique (early view, online first).

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cccr.12095/abstract

Abstract

The article examines the ways in which the national press includes or excludes the Ethiopian immigrants in the Jewish-Israeli collective, and the changes applicable to these inclusion and exclusion practices. The study uses qualitative and quantitative content analysis, with reference to postcolonial theory. The findings of the research show that Israeli journalism tended, on one hand, to include the immigrants within the ancient Jewish collective, while at the same time, treating them as being culturally ignorant. This research provides a complex definition of the boundaries of the others, while also shedding light on an important subject, namely the representation of Ethiopian immigrants in Israeli media, which has been neglected by social science researchers.

 

New Book: Kizel, The New Mizrahi Narrative in Israel (in Hebrew)

קיזל, אריה. הנרטיב המזרחי החדש בישראל. תל אביב: רסלינג, 2014.

The hyphenated narrative – the new Mizrahi narrative that stands at the center of a radical Mizrahi discourse – goes against the Zionism’s negation of an Oriental and Arab identity and posits itself as an alternative of an inntellectual and assertive identity. Arie Kizel’s book examines the rise and consolidation of the Mizrahi narrative which serves as a milestone in the struggle of conflicting narratives as an expression of various identities to express themselves as independent and hybrid among locations of Israeliness.

The author carefully examines the postcolonial and anti-Zionist origins of the Mizrahi narritve and the intellectual assault it launches against the very legitimacy of Zionism, as well as the morality of the political solution it created. This new narrative stance acknowledges the historical difficulties of its subversion, which is presented as emancipatory and especially as ethical. Its foundations relate to the victimized Palestinian narrative, and in its radical version seeks to collaborate with it in order create a new space that will favor Arabism – culturally, linguistically and even politically. This framework is expected to dismantle Zionist colonialism in relation to the regime of truth, the discourse of knowledge and the dominant power, along with rising voices and other narratives as part of a meeting point between anti-Zionism and postmodernism.

Using a three-stage narrative model the author examines the Mizrahi narrative’s attempt to challenge the limits of Israeli discourse, to dissociate from the hegemonic Zionist program, and to present a narrative plan that would allow the construction of a multicultural, anti-colonial model, and rehabilitate the space of Mizrahi-Arab identity. The author lays out the voices of opposition to the proposed narrative and analyzes the causes of the victimization stage it has reached and in which it is trapped, in a capitalist social reality created by Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israelis and their joint children.

 

Conference program: MESA, Washington, DC (22-25 Nov, 2014)

Israel Studies events at the annual conference of MESA, Washington, DC, November 22-25. For full program click here (PDF).

 

AIS–Association for Israel Studies Reception

Saturday, 11/22

Reception, 8:30-10:30pm, McKinley (M)

 

(3681) Settler-Colonialism and the Study of Zionism: Erasure, Transfer and Assimilation

Sunday, November 23, 11am-1pm

Organized by Arnon Degani

Sponsored by Palestinian American Research Center (PARC)

Chair: Gabriel Piterberg, UCLA

 

Discussant: Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne Inst for Social Research

Susan Slyomovics, UCLA–“The Object of Memory” and Settler Colonialism Studies 16 Years Later

Honaida Ghanim, Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies–Judaization and De-Indigenization: Settler-Colonialism in East Jerusalem

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Mada Al-Carmel–The Zionist Left and Settler-Colonialism in Marj Ibn ‘Amer: Land, Population and Property

Arnon Degani, UCLA–Non-Statist and Bi-Nationalist Zionism as Settler-Colonial Agendas

 

(3756) Rule of Experts?: Revolutions, Doctrines, and Interventions in the Middle East

Sunday, November 23, 2m-4pm

Organized by Osamah Khalil

 

Seth Anziska, Columbia University–Israel, the United States and the 1982 War in Lebanon

 

(3925) World War One and Its Aftermath

Sunday, November 23, 2m-4pm

Chair: Weston F Cook, Jr, UNC Pembroke

 

Roberto Mazza, Western Illinois U–Cemal Pasha, Zionism and the Alleged Expulsion of the Jews from Jaffa in April 1917

 

(3792) Israel Studies in the Arab World

Sunday, November 23, 4:30m-6:30pm

Organized by Johannes Becke

Discussant: Elie Podeh, Hebrew U of Jersusalem

 

Hassan A. Barari, U Jordan–Israelism: Arab Scholarship on Israel, a Critical Assessment

Mostafa Hussein, Brandeis U–Israel Studies in the Arab World Between Two Dictums: ‘Whosoever Learns People’s Language Avoids Their Plot’ and ‘Know Your Enemy’

Johannes Becke, U Oxford–Hebrew in Beirut: Studying Israel in the Last Arab Frontline State

Hebatalla Taha, U Oxford–The Politics of ‘Normalisation’: The Israeli Academic Centre in Cairo

Amr Yossef, American U Cairo–Egyptian Israelists: The View from Israel

 

(3886) Social Media, the Digital Archive, and Scholarly Futures

Sunday, November 23, 4:30m-6:30pm

Organized by Ted Swedenburg

Chair/Discussant: Elliott Colla, Georgetown U

 

Rebecca L. Stein, Duke U–The Perpetrator’s Archive: Israel’s Occupation on YouTube

 

 

(4006) Special Session

Abandoned Yet Central: Gaza and the Resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Sunday, November 23, 4:30m-6:30pm

Organized by Sara Roy

Chair: Sara Roy, Harvard University

 

Chris Gunness, UNRWA, Office of the Commissioner General, Jerusalem

Paul Aaron, Political Analyst and Consultant, Gaza Community Mental Health Program

Bill Corcoran, American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA)

Ilana Feldman, George Washington University

Brian Barber, University of Tennessee

Susan Akram, Boston University School of Law

 

This session will present an overview of the past summer’s violent clashes between Israeli and Hamas forces and the ensuing destruction in Gaza. Representatives from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) will provide an “on-the-ground” analysis of the destruction and human toll of the 50-day war. Scholars will further place the recent violence in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and examine the prerequisites for a sustainable resolution of the conflict.

 

 

 

(3737) Religious Inclusivity and Civilizational Identity: Expanding Iranian Identities Along Religious, Ethnic, and Gender Lines

Monday, November 24, 8:30am-10:30am

Organized by Lior Sternfeld

Chair/Discussant: Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, U Toronto

 

Lior Sternfeld, U Texas Austin–Iran is My Homeland, Jerusalem is My Qiblah: Iranian Jews Between Zionist and Iranian Identities

 

(3643) Israel, the United States and a Changing Middle East

Monday, November 24, 11am-1pm

Organized by Robert O. Freedman

Sponsored by Association for Israel Studies

Chair/Discussant: Robert O. Freedman, Johns Hopkins U

 

Eyal Zisser, Tel Aviv U–Israel and the Arab World – Who’s First – Syria, Egypt or Lebanon?

Ilan Peleg, Lafayette Col–Israel, Netanyahu & the Palestinians: Is the Third Term the Charm?!

Rami Ginat, Bar Ilan U–The Israeli-Egyptian-American Strategic Triangle: A Reassessment in Light of the Arab Uprising

Joshua Teitelbaum, Bar-Ilan U–Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council: New Opportunities for Cooperation?

Uzi Rabi, Tel Aviv U–Iran and Israel: Post 2013 Elections

 

 

(3697) Bridging the Rupture of 1948: The “Decolonization” and Erasure of Mandate Palestine

Monday, November 24, 2:30pm-4:30pm

Organized by Jeffrey D. Reger and Leena Dallasheh

Sponsored by Palestinian American Research Center (PARC)

Chair: Zachary Lockman, New York U

Discussant: Shira Robinson, George Washington U

 

Jeffrey D. Reger, Georgetown U–Uprooting Palestine: Olive Groves, Mass Dispossession, and Peasant Resistance, 1945-1955

Hilary Falb Kalisman, UC Berkeley–Learning Exile: Palestinian Students and Educators Abroad, 1940-1958

Leena Dallasheh, Rice U–Defying the Rupture, Affirming Presence: Palestinians in Nazareth Surviving 1948

Rephael Stern, Princeton U–Israel’s Postcolonial Predicament and Its Contradicting Jurisdictional Claims in 1948

 

 

(3917) Perilous Peacemaking: Israeli-Palestinian Relations Since Oslo

Monday, November 24, 5pm-7pm

Chair: Timothy Schorn, U South Dakota

 

Elie Podeh, Hebrew U Jerusalem–Missed Opportunities in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Case of the Arab Peace Initiative (2002-2014)

Maia Carter Hallward, Kennesaw State U–Choosing to Negotiate Under Sub-Optimal Conditions: The 2013 Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations

Gabriele Mombelli, U Florence–The Palestinian National Authority Security Sector: An Operational Overview

Karam Dana, U Washington–Twenty Years after Oslo: What Do Palestinians Think?

Andrew Barwig, Department of State–“New Blood” in Israel’s Knesset: Elite Circulation and Parliamentary Resilience

 

 

 

(3867) Urbanism and the Politics of the Mandate Period, Local versus Imperial Interests

Tuesday, November 25, 11am-1pm

Organized by Harrison Guthorn

Chair: Elizabeth F. Thompson, U Virginia

 

Noah Hysler Rubin, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design–Planning Palestine: British and Zionist Plans for Tiberius and Nathanya

 

(3893) Public Opinion in the Middle East

Tuesday, November 25, 11am-1pm

Organized by Yael Zeira

 

Devorah Manekin, Arizona State U–Carrots and Sticks: Policy Instruments and Public Opinion in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

 

(3919) Palestinian Resistance: Spaces and Standpoints

Tuesday, November 25, 11am-1pm

Chair: Timothy Schorn, U South Dakota

 

Timothy Seidel, American U–Narrating Nonviolence: Postcolonial Interrogations of Resistance in Palestine

Maya Rosenfeld, Hebrew U Jerusalem–The Movement of Palestinian Political Prisoners and the Struggle Against the Israeli Occupation: A Historical Perspective

Sharri Plonski, SOAS U London–Transcending Bounded Space: The Struggle for Land and Space by the Palestinian Citizens of Israel

Julie Norman, McGill U–Prisoners Dilemma?: Prison-Based Resistance and the Diffusion of Activism in Palestine

Maryam Griffin, UC Santa Barbara–Movement as/and Non-Movement in Palestine

 

(3949) Transnational Cultural Production

Tuesday, November 25, 1:30pm-3:30pm

Chair: Zeynep Seviner, U Washington

 

Isra Ali, Rutgers, State U of New Jersey–Adaptation: Cultural Alliances and Television Production in Israel and the United States

Robert Lang, U Hartford–Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir: Whose Trauma?

New Article: Aharoni, The Gender–Culture Double Bind in Israeli–Palestinian Peace Negotiations

Aharoni, Sarai B. “The Gender–Culture Double Bind in Israeli–Palestinian Peace Negotiations: A Narrative Approach.” Security Dialogue 45.4 (2014): 373-90.

 

URL: http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/45/4/373.abstract

 

Abstract

This article investigates structural conditions for women’s inclusion/exclusion in peace negotiations by focusing on the linkage between acts of gender stereotyping and cultural framing. Through a narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with Israeli negotiators and administrators who participated in official negotiations during the Oslo peace process, I link two recent claims about how gender may affect negotiators’ understandings of strategic exchange: the gendered devaluation effect and the gender–culture double bind hypothesis. Building upon postcolonial feminist critique, I argue that narratives about women and cultural difference (a) demonstrate and engage with Israeli essentialist and Orientalist discourses about Arab culture and masculinity; (b) manifest how ideas about strategic dialogue and negotiations are gendered; and (c) convey how policymakers and negotiators may use cultural claims to rationalize women’s exclusion from diplomatic and strategic dialogue. Furthermore, the study implies that dominant framings of Israeli–Palestinian negotiations as a binary East–West encounter need to be replaced by a more nuanced conceptualization of cultural identity that captures contextual aspects of difference, including the existence of military power and masculine dominance.

Dissertation: Amihay, The Imagetext Turn in the Hebrew Novel

Amihay, Ofra. Migrating Images: The Imagetext Turn in the Hebrew Novel. New York University, 2014.

 

URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1518939613

 

Abstract

This dissertation examines the effect of twentieth-century “new media” models on literature, in the form of the late twentieth-century wave of literary works in which visual images play a central poetic role. Demarcating this body of works as an independent cultural turn, I label this “the imagetext turn” thus following two groundbreaking terms coined by W. J. T. Mitchell, “the pictorial turn” and “imagetext.” Based on philosophical discussions regarding the egalitarianism behind text and image hybrids (Benjamin, Rancière, Mitchell), and theories of the democratic nature of the novel (Auerbach, Lukács, Bakhtin) and photography (Sontag, Barthes, Azoulay), I focus on the marriage of novels and photographs. The case study for this exploration is three contemporary Israeli novelists: Yoel Hoffmann, Ronit Matalon, and Michal Govrin. Following a survey of the approach towards the visual image in Modern Hebrew literature, I identify their works as comprising the “imagetext turn” in Hebrew literature while marking their importance within a general literary development, primarily through a comparison to W. G. Sebald’s novels. My study of Hoffmann analyzes the web of Others in his novels through the photographic mechanism of the negative, suggesting the juxtaposition of text and photographs in How Do You Do Dolores echoes the Other behind text, place, and language in all his work. In my analysis of Matalon I discuss the double role photographs play in Matalon’s pursuit of postcolonial ideas in The One Facing Us, operating both as “portable roots” and as “poetic immigrants,” thus offering a subversive reading of reality that undermines nostalgia. Finally I show how through an intricate combination of narrative and visual images Govrin creates in Snapshots a literary representation of both the ideals and the blind spots of the 1990s left-wing movement of secular return to Jewish sources in Israel.

Subject: Comparative literature; Middle Eastern literature; Judaic studies

Classification: 0295: Comparative literature; 0315: Middle Eastern literature; 0751: Judaic studies

Identifier / keyword: Language, literature and linguistics, Social sciences, Hebrew literature, Govrin, Michal, Photography, Matalon, Ronit, Sebald, W. G., Hoffmann, Yoel

Number of pages: 308

Publication year: 2014

Degree date: 2014

School code: 0146

Source: DAI-A 75/07(E), Jan 2015

Place of publication: Ann Arbor

Country of publication: United States

ISBN: 9781303805424

Advisor: Feldman, Yael

Committee member: Hirsch, Marianne; Mann, Barbara E.; Engel, David; Kaplan, Marion

University/institution: New York University

Department: Hebrew and Judaic Studies

University location: United States — New York

Degree: Ph.D.

Source type: Dissertations & Theses

Language: English

Document type: Dissertation/Thesis

Dissertation/thesis number: 3614848

ProQuest document ID: 1518939613

ToC: Holy Land Studies 13.1 (2014)

1  Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli Genocide of Palestine

Haifa Rashed, Dr Damien Short and Professor John Docker

25  Liberating Methodologies and Nakba Studies: Palestinian History and Memory from below as Sites of Lifelong Learning

Professor Nur Masalha 

71  Pedagogy under Siege in Palestine: Insights from Paulo Freire

Najwa Silwadi and Professor Peter Mayo

89  Resisting Colonialism through Nature: An Ecopostcolonial Reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s Selected Poems

Dr Hamoud Yahya Ahmed and and Dr Ruzy Suliza Hashim

Book Reviews

• 109 Palestinian Cultural Production
  Anna Ball, Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). xvi+ 223 pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-88862-2. Hardback

  Professor Bart Moore-Gilbert

• 111 Challenges to Zionism: Christian Perspectives
  Carole Monica Burnett (ed.), Zionism Through Christian Lenses: Ecumenical Perspectives on the Promised Land (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2013). 201 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1610977715. Paperback

  Dr Mark Braverman

• 114 Philosophical Reflections on Zionism and Jewish Thought
  Eyal Chowers, The Political Philosophy of Zionism: Trading Jewish Words for a Hebraic Land (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 274 pp. ISBN: 9781107005945. Hardback

  Professor Oren Ben-Dor

• 117  Instrumentalising the Bible
  Nur Masalha, The Zionist Bible: Biblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory (London: Acumen, 2013). 295 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1844656578. Hardback

  Ramona Wadi

  Books Received

• 121 Citation

New Article: Rosmer, Israel’s Middle Eastern Jewish Intellectuals

Rosmer, Tilde. “Israel’s Middle Eastern Jewish Intellectuals: Identity and Discourse.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 41.1 (2014): 62-78.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13530194.2014.878507

 

Abstract

The intellectual movement HaKeshet HaDemokratit HaMizrahit (The Eastern Democratic Rainbow) was established in 1996 by second and third generation Middle Eastern and North African Jewish immigrants who are faculty members, graduate students, actors, artists, educators, businessmen and women, and media workers. These self-identified Mizrahi Israeli intellectuals aimed to initiate new debates in Israeli society with their criticism of Zionist narrative and policies by applying post-colonial theory to expose the construction of social categorisation among Jewish Israelis. In their discursive contribution they addressed several issues of historical and contemporary inequality between groups of Israeli citizens. By examining the motivation behind this intellectual activism, the present article asks what the Mizrahi identity means to people labelled as Mizrahim and why it is important.

New Article: Yacobi and Pullan, Jerusalem’s Colonial Space Revisited

Yacobi, Haim and Wendy Pullan. “The Geopolitics of Neighbourhood: Jerusalem’s Colonial Space Revisited.” Geopolitics, published online, May 9, 2014.

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14650045.2013.857657

 

Abstract

This article will focus on an ongoing process of Jerusalem’s contested urban space during the last decade namely the immigration of Palestinians, mostly Israeli citizens, to “satellite neighbourhoods”, i.e. Jerusalem’s colonial neighbourhoods that were constructed after 1967. Theoretically, this paper attempts to discuss neighbourhood planning in contested cities within the framework of geopolitics. In more details, we will focus on the relevance of geopolitics to the study of neighbourhood planning, by which we mean not merely a discussion of international relations and conflict or of the roles of military acts and wars in producing space. Rather, geopolitics refers to the emergence of discourses and forces connected with the technologies of control, patterns of internal migrations by individuals and communities, and the flow of cultures and capital.

New Article: Cohen, Mizrahi Subalternity and the State of Israel

Cohen, Kfir. “Mizrahi Subalternity and the State of Israel. Towards a New Understanding of Mizrahi Literature.” Interventions 16.3 (2014): 380-404.

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369801X.2013.816075

Abstract

This essay proposes a new approach to Mizrahi literature by re-examining the socioconceptual relation between Mizrahi subalternity and the state of Israel. Examining the recent post-Zionist/postcolonial criticism, I argue that its literary categories and social analysis conceive of the Mizrahi only through the medium and form of the state and only in so far as its ‘culture’ procures it with an alternative content for Israeli Eurocentric nationalism. Such a ‘statist’ and national articulation of the Mizrahi, critical as it might be, confuses the conditions of Mizrahi cultural identity and legitimate speech whose site is civil society with the conditions of subalternity produced in the Israeli social formation as a whole, and thus ends up misconceiving the Mizrahi subaltern and its literary appearance. Since Mizrahi subalternity emerges in social and discursive fields that cannot be rendered in such a ‘statist’ language, it thus holds alternative knowledge and forms that both reveal the conceptual limits of the post-Zionist stance and allow for a new interpretive approach to Mizrahi literature. However, since canonical Mizrahi literature – as with most recent Mizrahi criticism – has always imagined the Mizrahi in statist terms, I argue that this alternative language and knowledge does not exist as such in Mizrahi literature, but only in a displaced form as its unconscious. To provide an example for such a new interpretation and approach, I offer a reading of Shimon Ballas’s The Transit Camp.

ToC: Journal of Israeli History 33.1 (2014)

Articles

Towards a de-Occidentalist perspective on Israel: The case of the occupation

Johannes Becke
pages 1-23

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.886831
A Zionist torn between two worlds: Aharon Eisenberg’s correspondence after the Young Turk Revolution

Yuval Ben-Bassat
pages 25-39

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.886824
Oral testimonies, archival sources, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War: A close look at the occupation of a Galilean village

Kobi Peled
pages 41-61

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.886833

Meir Har-Zion’s act of reprisal: Reality and memory

Efrat Seckbach
pages 63-84

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.886834
The failure to formulate a national science policy: Israel’s Scientific Council, 1948–1959

Ari Barell
pages 85-107

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.886835
Book Reviews

Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema

Yaron Peleg
pages 109-111

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.886836

Zionist Arabesques: Modern Landscapes, Non-Modern Texts

Arieh Saposnik
pages 111-113

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.886845

 

New Article: Boano and Leclair-Paquet, Agamben’s Potentialities in the West Bank

Boano, Camillo and Benjamin Leclair-Paquet. “Potential, Freedom and Space: Reflections on Agamben’s Potentialities in the West Bank.” Space and Polity (online first).

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13562576.2013.880010

DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2013.880010

 

Abstract

A special kind of infrastructure has emerged around the West Bank, which lays bare Israel’s capacity to spatialise its colonial power and to constantly solidify its presence. Reading these spatial devices through Agamben’s work, this paper proposes a reflective attempt to read this site of contemporary occupation through a “resistant” lens as a novel take on Agamben’s spatial topology and political aesthetics. The paper offers preliminary remarks on the search for alternative theoretical construction of Agamben “potentialities”. The paper allow speculations on the heterotopian nature of Israeli produced infrastructures, perceived at once as actualised potentials in space, and spaces of potential.