New Article: Ginor & Remez,Veterans’ Memoirs as a Source for the USSR’s Intervention in the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Ginor, Isabella, and Gideon Remez. “Veterans’ Memoirs as a Source for the USSR’s Intervention in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Fluctuations in Their Appearance and Character With Political Change in Post-Soviet Russia.” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 29.2 (2016): 279-97.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13518046.2016.1168136

 

Abstract

Shortly before and after the USSR’s demise, a new literature emerged: memoirs by veterans of the Soviet Union’s massive military intervention in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1960s and ’70s. Resurgent Russian pride, coupled with condemnation of its corruption by Soviet crimes, permitted startling disclosures. Tools we developed to evaluate these sources found them remarkably reliable and necessitated a reassessment of existing historiography. The Putin administration marked a reversal. Russian nationalism now stressed continuity with the USSR’s great-power status. ‘Falsification of history against Russian interests’ was criminalized. Some veterans resorted to purported ‘fiction’, which if challenged could be disclaimed. But under even stricter scrutiny, these narratives generally proved to reflect the authors’ actual experience, providing significant pointers for further research.

 

 

 

New Article: Donaghy, Canada, the Middle East, and the Suez Crisis, 1950–1956

Donaghy, Greg. “The Politics of Accommodation: Canada, the Middle East, and the Suez Crisis, 1950–1956.” International Journal (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0020702016643261

 

Abstract

This paper re-examines Canada’s response to the Suez Crisis within the context of its overall approach to the Middle East in the early 1950s. It reminds contemporary readers that most Canadian policymakers, including Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester B. Pearson, viewed the distant and unfamiliar region with reserve, as one better left to the Great Powers to sort out. That view only changed in 1956, when the Suez Crisis, Anglo-American discord, and the possibility of nuclear war threatened Canadian strategic interests, transforming Canada into a small regional stakeholder.

 

 

 

Dissertation: Condron, The Nixon Administration between Cairo and Jerusalem

Condron, Aidan. The Nixon Administration between Cairo and Jerusalem, 1969-1974: Concepts, Strategies, and Implementation, PhD thesis. Aberystwyth, Wales: Aberystwyth University, 2015.
 
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2160/30577
 
Abstract

This thesis traces the origins of the Egypt-Israel peace process begun in the immediate aftermath of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. This American-brokered process led to the restoration of Egyptian land seized by Israeli in 1967 in exchange for a bilateral peace treaty, the first between Israel and an Arab state. Formal US-Egypt diplomatic relations were restored in 1974. By the time of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979, Egyptian defection from Soviet to American was complete, and Egypt had become estranged from the remainder of the Arab world, which refused to recognise, negotiate, or make peace with Israel. Recontextualising wartime and post-war strategic realignments with reference to developments during the first four and three-quarter years of the Nixon administration, from January 1969 – September 1973, this thesis sets presents a thoroughgoing revisionist account of the origins of this process. Tracing concepts and strategies implemented during and after the war in the antebellum period, the work demonstrates that the concepts implemented during the peace process were developed in negotiations involving Egypt, Israel, the Soviet Union, and the United States from early 1969, and forged into a coherent strategy by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat during the period from October 1970 – September 1973. Reversing the usual interpretation that Sadat conformed to an American grand design in the aftermath over the October War, this thesis demonstrates instead that the United States collaborated and colluded in implementing an Egyptian strategy for a new regional order, premised on peace between Egypt and Israel and partnerships both between Washington and Jerusalem and between Washington and Cairo.

 

 

 

New Article: Kolander, The 1967 Arab–Israeli War: Soviet Policy by Other Means?

Kolander, Kenny. “The 1967 Arab–Israeli War: Soviet Policy by Other Means?” Middle Eastern Studies (early view; online first).

ְְ 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2015.1084294

 

Abstract

This paper considers two aspects of historiography about the 1967 Arab–Israeli war – American and Soviet foreign policy in the region – to better appreciate the Soviet role in the outbreak of hostilities, as well as how the war concretized the USA–Israel ‘special relationship’ and weakened American–Arab relations. Relying especially on research from the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library and Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), this paper argues that Soviet officials had little interest in pursuing measures to prevent war during the prewar crisis because the situation promised to undermine American interests in the region.

 

 

 

New Article: Simpson, Superpower Involvement in the War of Attrition in 1970

Simpson, George L., Jr. “Cold War, Hot Summer: Superpower Involvement in the War of Attrition in 1970.” Journal of the Middle East and Africa 6.2 (2015): 103-23.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21520844.2015.1051884

 

Abstract

Using U.S. archival documents as well as insights gained from Israeli historians who made excellent use of Soviet sources, this article examines the diplomacy and military developments that occurred late in the Egyptian-Israeli War of Attrition. Understanding that Moscow was pursuing a more forward policy than Washington officials understood at the time, it becomes clear that Soviet military intervention began earlier than American and Israeli decision-makers then recognized or than historians have understood until recently. Likewise, the operational deployment of Russian air defense forces and fighter pilots challenged Israeli air superiority in the skies over the Suez Canal, which separated Egyptian and Israeli troops. While American diplomats were willing to help the Israelis with equipment and countermeasures to deal with the new threat, they put enormous pressure on Jerusalem not only to accept the ceasefire that ended the conflict but also to not respond militarily to Egyptian violations of the agreement. Thus, Israel found itself in a fundamentally more vulnerable position when the shooting stopped in August 1970.

 

 

New Article: Smola, Utopian Space and Time in Soviet Jewish Exodus Literature

Smola, Klavdia. “The Reinvention of the Promised Land: Utopian Space and Time in Soviet Jewish Exodus Literature.” East European Jewish Affairs 45.1 (2015): 79-108.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501674.2015.992711

 

Abstract

The Jewish underground movement in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1960s produced literature that became a part of the counterculture of Soviet dissent. For the first time in decades, Russian Jews identified, to a significant degree, as people of the galut (Jewish Diaspora). The battle for the return to Israel and the new Jewish renaissance in the intellectual sphere of the unofficial led to the emergence of new topographical concepts, which were inspired primarily by the Jewish cultural tradition. In fact, the exodus texts written in the 1960s–1980s represented a new, late Soviet shaping of Zionist prose. They relate to the symbol of the Promised Land as a fundamental projection of aspirations. Late Soviet Zionist texts share the traditional Jewish vision of Israel as an imagined topos of the original homeland that is both retrospective (with reference to the biblical promise of the land and the seizure of Canaan) and prospective (return and redemption). The Exodus story contained in Sefer Shemot becomes a leading poetic, philosophical and at times religiously charged metaphor of liberation and reunification. The re-strengthened collective memory of tradition required biblical symbols to be imbued with new semiotic power.

This paper will show that the historical dimension of the events dealt with in the literature often has strong mystical and mythological traits and displays messianic-apocalyptic hopes of salvation. However, alternative literary space and time models represented in the aliyah literature hereby betray their rootedness in the teleology of the communist regime. The powerful Israel utopia reflects both the eschatological time of the Soviet empire and its phantasms of paradise on earth. Late Soviet Zionism and totalitarian discourse are shown to be two space-time utopias.

 

 

New Article: Blanga, Egypt’s Relations with the US and Israel

Blanga, Yehuda U. “Nasser’s Dilemma: Egypt’s Relations with the United States and Israel, 1967–69.” Middle Eastern Studies 51.2 (2015): 301-26.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00263206.2014.942648

 

Abstract

The article examines the American political efforts to bring about an agreement between Israel and Egypt between 1967 and 1969 and analyses the reasons for their failure. But it does not focus exclusively on the Americans; it also outlines the alternatives for Egyptian action during the period in question and looks at the political and military steps taken by Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, vis-à-vis Israel and the United States. The main conclusion is that despite Egypt’s dependence on the Soviet Union for economic aid and the rebuilding of the decimated Egyptian army, Nasser knew that the only route to a political process to regain Sinai ran through the United States. His diplomatic efforts were all derived from this insight. At the same time, the Egyptian president’s attempts to exploit American pressure to his benefit, as he had done in 1957, was undercut by his overestimation of his bargaining chips, a mistake that was one factor in the collapse of the efforts to reach a diplomatic agreement in the region.

New Book: Siniver, The Yom Kippur War. Politics, Legacy, Diplomacy

Siniver, Asaf, ed. The Yom Kippur War. Politics, Legacy, Diplomacy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

 

URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-yom-kippur-war-9780199334810

The Yom Kippur War was a watershed moment in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the modern Middle East more broadly. It marked the beginning of a US-led peace process between Israel and her Arab neighbours; it introduced oil diplomacy as a new means of leverage in international politics; and it affected irreversibly the development of the European Community and the Palestinian struggle for independence. Moreover, the regional order which emerged at the end of the war remained largely unchallenged for nearly four decades, until the recent wave of democratic revolutions in the Arab world. The fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War provides a timely opportunity to reassess the major themes that emerged during the war and in its aftermath, and the contributors to this book provide the first comprehensive account of the domestic and international factors which informed the policies of Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, as well as external actors before, during and after the war. In addition to chapters on the superpowers, the EU and the Palestinians, the book also deals with the strategic themes of intelligence and political of the war on Israeli and Arab societies.

 

 

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

1. Introduction
Asaf Siniver

2. Dominant Themes in the October War Historiography: Blame and Historical Analogy
Carly Beckerman-Boys

3. Israel and the October War
Jacob Eriksson

4. The October War and Egypt’s Multiple Crossings
Yoram Meital

5. Syria and the October War: The Missed Opportunity
Eyal Zisser

6. US Foreign Policy and the Kissinger Stratagem
Asaf Siniver

7. The Soviet Union and the October War
Galia Golan

8. Jordan’s War that Never Was
Assaf David

9. Palestinian Politics in Transition: The Case of the October War
Philipp O. Amour

10. Faraway Causes, Immediate Effects: The War and European Consequences
Rory Miller

11. Oil and the October War
David Painter

12. Ashraf Marwan and Israel’s Intelligence Failure
Ahron Bregman

13. Evolving a Diplomatic Legacy from the War: The US, Egyptian and Israeli Triangle
Kenneth W. Stein

14. Clashing Narratives of the October War: Collective Memory and Group Perspective
Claudia De Martino

15. Gone But Not Forgotten? The Occasional Lessons of the October War
Clive Jones

ToC: Journal of Israeli History 33.2 (2014)

Journal of Israeli History 33.2 (2014): Table of Contents

 

Articles

Communists and the 1948 War: PCP, Maki, and the National Liberation League

Ilana Kaufman
pages 115-144

• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.946278

Mapam in the War of Independence: From the war front to the opposition back benches

Aviva Halamish
pages 145-168

• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.948277 

The Israeli left between culture and politics: Tzavta and Mapam, 1956–1973

Tal Elmaliach
pages 169-183

• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.946297

From Yekke to Zionist: Narrative strategies in life stories of Central European Jewish women immigrants to Mandate Palestine

Dorit Yosef
pages 185-208

• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.946300

“Operation Exodus”: Israeli government involvement in the production of Otto Preminger’s Film Exodus (1960)

Giora Goodman
pages 209-229

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.94630 

Book Reviews

1929: Shnat ha-efes ba-sikhsukh ha-yehudi-aravi [1929: Year zero of the Jewish-Arab conflict]

Motti Golani
pages 231-235

• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.946302 

 Menachem Begin: A Life

Colin Shindler
pages 235-238

• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.946303 

Representing Israel in Modern Egypt: Ideas, Intellectuals and Foreign Policy from Nasser to Mubarak

Uriya Shavit
pages 238-241

• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.946304 

Embodying Hebrew Culture: Aesthetics, Athletics, and Dance in the Jewish Community of Mandate Palestine

Shelly Zer-Zion
pages 241-244

• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.946305

Editorial Board

Editorial Board
page ebi

• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2014.957020

ToC: Israel Affairs, 19.4 (2013)

Israel Affairs: Volume 19, Issue 4, 2013

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fisa20/19/4

–

Articles

Anatomy of decline: Anglo-Soviet competition in the Middle East, 1956–67

Moshe Gat
pages 603-622

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829610

–

The impact of the cold war on the Thatcher government’s Middle East policy

Azriel Bermant
pages 623-639

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829607

–

Ending the Second Lebanon War: the interface between the political and military echelons in Israel

Shmuel Tzabag
pages 640-659

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829614

–

The ‘Annapolis Process’: a chronology of failure

Amira Schiff
pages 660-678

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829612

–

War and peace in Judaism and Islam

Moshe Cohen
pages 679-692

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829608

–

A reassessment of the 1967 Arab oil embargo

Joseph Mann
pages 693-703

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829611

–

Paradigmatic changes in perceptions of disciplinary and multidisciplinary teaching in Israeli higher education system: fad or challenge?

Nitza Davidovitch
pages 704-712

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829609

–

–

Election year economics and political budget cycle in Israel – myth or reality

Tal Shahor
pages 713-730

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829613

–

–

Review Essay

The politics of the Israeli Pantheon

Nissim Leon
pages 731-734

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829615

–

Book Reviews

60 years: Israel navy

David Rodman
pages 735-736

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829616

–

Legacy: a genetic history of the Jewish people

David Rodman
page 736

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829618

–

Mossad; Spies against Armageddon: inside Israel’s secret wars

David Rodman
pages 737-738

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829619

–

Moshe Dayan: Israel’s controversial hero

David Rodman
pages 738-739

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829620

–

Abdullah al-Tall, Arab Legion officer: Arab nationalism and opposition to the Hashemite regime

David Rodman
pages 739-740

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829621

–

Israel: the will to prevail

David Rodman
pages 740-741

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829622

–

The promise of Israel: why its seemingly greatest weakness is actually its greatest strength

David Rodman
pages 741-742

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829623

–

Judah in the Neo-Babylonian period: the archaeology of desolation

David Rodman
pages 742-743

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829624

–

Struggling over Israel’s soul: an IDF general speaks of his controversial moral decisions

David Rodman
pages 743-744

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829625

–

Asset test: how the United States benefits from its alliance with Israel

David Rodman
pages 744-746

DOI:10.1080/13537121.2013.829617

–

Editorial Board

Editorial Board

Cite: Friesel, Equating Zionism with Racism: The 1965 Precedent

Friesel, Ofra. “Equating Zionism with Racism: The 1965 Precedent.” American Jewish History 97.3 (2013): 235-58.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_jewish_history/v097/97.3.friesel.html

 

Abstract

In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted its notorious resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. The origins of that resolution can be traced back to the previous decade. Ironically, an early initiative to denounce Zionism as racial discrimination in a UN formal text was presented during the negotiations of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 1965 (CERD). The context was none other than the debate regarding incorporating a denunciation of anti-Semitism into the Convention. The present article explores the particular meeting of interests behind the effort to incorporate a denunciation of anti-Semitism into CERD. It is designed to elaborate on how this attempt was used to promote what to all intents and purposes appeared to be the precise opposite: equating Zionism with racism—and how the seeds of resolution 3379 were sown.