German–Israeli ties in 2015 and 1965: the difficult special relationship

This article marks the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel. It is divided into two parts, assessing the status of this unique relationship in 2015 and in 1965, respectively. Angela Merkel's recent criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu's stance on the peace process with the Palestinians and the heavy protests that took place in Germany in the wake of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in summer 2014 have cast doubt on the strength of the bilateral partnership fifty years after the first exchange of ambassadors between the two countries. However, by examining the state of German–Israeli cooperation in a number of areas (security, commerce and knowledge exchange, among others), the first part of the article challenges popular interpretations of contemporary German–Israeli relations as being ‘at a nadir’. Fifty years ago, Chancellor Ludwig Erhard proposed to his Israeli counterpart Levi Eshkol the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries amid a severe political crisis in Bonn, following a visit of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht to Gamal Abdel Nasser. While much has changed since then, the second part of the article argues that looking at the momentous events of 1965 can provide useful reference points for understanding the current state of relations between Germany and Israel.     

Israel,Nigeria and the Biafra civil war, 1967–70

The Biafran secession of 1967 and ensuing civil war presented Israel with an acute dilemma. Israel sought to maintain correct relations with the Federal Government of Nigeria, which viewed as a hostile act any support rendered to the Biafran separatists. At the same time, the plight of the Igbos reminded many Israelis of the Holocaust. This article makes use of Israeli archival material to shed new light on how Israel shaped its policy towards the conflict. The Israeli public, press and parliament called for assistance to Biafra, evoking their country's deep moral obligation to help a people in distress. Israel aided Biafra, including, in a clandestine manner, the supply of weapons for which the secessionists pressed, in addition to humanitarian assistance. At the same time, Israel also sold arms to Nigeria, seeking to prevent a diplomatic rupture with the Lagos government that would have affected Israel's position in all of black Africa.     

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

This article explores the Israeli government's enthusiastic and substantial role in the production of Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960), the influential pro-Zionist film on the creation of Israel which was loosely based on the highly successful novel by Leon Uris. This involvement followed a decade of mostly unsuccessful Israeli government endeavors to encourage its many supporters in Hollywood to produce films in and about Israel: both for their potential economic rewards and for international propaganda. Utilizing archival sources in the United States, Britain, and especially Israel, this article charts Israeli efforts to encourage Hollywood productions in the 1950s and the extent to which Israeli officials provided encouragement and assistance to Exodus: first to the novel and then critically to the film. The article shows that the film producers took into account British and Arab observations too. However, the degree to which Exodus served Israeli propaganda themes is finally demonstrated by the eager efforts made by Zionist bodies and Israeli government officials to promote its international distribution.     

Gender Segregation,Effacement, and Suppression: Trends in the Status of Women in Israel

The aim of this article is to analyze the phenomenon of the exclusion of women from the public sphere in Israel. The article describes some of the causes of this phenomenon, its impact on Israeli society, and the difficulty in confronting it. Israeli women have made impressive gains on many fronts, but the exclusion of women from the public sphere as a result of the influence of the growing Ultra‐Orthodox minority, which imposes its norms on the general public, raises serious concerns. The exclusion of women manifests itself in several forms: gender segregation in public spaces, the effacement of women's images from the public sphere, and the suppression of women's voice. The infiltration of Orthodox Jewish fundamentalism into Israeli society may cause the regression of advancements previously made in women's rights in Israel. The article points to the limitations of the treatment of this phenomenon within a theory of multiculturalism, and suggests an alternative framework of discourse, which relies on concepts that are drawn from the literature on environmental ethics, public rights, and public ownership of space and resources.     

Walking the Middle of the Peace Road? The Emergence of JCall in France

On 3 May 2010, a ‘Call to reason’ (Appel à la raison) was presented to the European Parliament in Brussels by a number of prominent figures from European Jewish political and intellectual classes, launching JCall, which is supposedly the European version of the US J Street. JCall explicitly positions itself as pro-Israel on one hand but against the Israeli state's occupation and increased settlement of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, on the other hand. The ‘reason’ it calls for is thus a negotiated two-state settlement to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the organisation urges EU governments to apply pressure on both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to this end. This article looks at JCall within the French context, first in distinction to J Street in the USA, with which JCall shares a political position but not organisational links, and second in relation to the broader French political debate about Jewishness, Muslimness and the Middle East. Criticised by the right for its supposed disloyalty to Israel and even ‘anti-Semitism’, and by the left for its non-support of boycott, divestment and sanctions and its ongoing support of the Israeli state, JCall at first appears as somewhat middle-of-the-road in the French context. It also, from this writer's point of view, regrettably lacks a strong female presence or gendered perspective. It has, however, emerged as a serious political voice in the debate over the Middle East and could be less of a lightweight in the French political battles over Israel and Palestine than it may have first appeared.     

从外交部开放档案看20世纪50年代中以接触始末

中以关系是中国对外关系中比较特殊的一对双边关系。1950年以色列就承认了中国,但1992年中以才正式建立外交关系。这期间中以接触不多,大部分接触发生在20世纪50年代。从20世纪50年代中以之间接触的整个进程来看,在中以建交问题上,中方的态度变化是由热到冷,以方的态度则由最初的犹豫不决到坚决谋求与中国建交。     

Being an Israeli: Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel,fifteen years later

This article presents the results of a study conducted in 2006 among a representative sample of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, aged 18 and over, who arrived in Israel between 1990 and 2005. It examines the changes over time in their collective identity, focusing on the relative weight and meaning of the local, Israeli component of their identity, as compared to the Jewish and Russian components. Unlike studies conducted in other concentrations of Russian Jewish emigrés (in the United States, Canada, and Germany), which found that an increase in the intensity of the local component of their identity was held in check by the enduring strength of the Russian component, this study revealed that in Israel the local identity component grew much stronger while, correspondingly, the Russian component declined. In addition, significant similarities between the immigrants and the veteran population were found with regard to how they conceive of the Israeli narrative. These changes over time in the immigrants' identity, which were not observed in the first years of their integration into Israeli culture and society, require a reexamination of the generalizations that dominate the research literature and the professional relationship with this group, concerning its supposed social and cultural self-segregation and low potential for cultural change.     

Ethnicity,Citizenship, Planning and Gender: The case of Ethiopian immigrant women in Israel

This article analyses spatial expressions of the interrelationships between gender, ethnicity and citizenship among Ethiopian immigrant women in Israel. It assesses the impact of the approach informing the Israeli Government's 'Master Plans' for Ethiopian immigrants. Critiquing the procedural approach adopted in Israeli planning, it advocates a pluralist approach.     

Review Article: Technology and Culture during the First Climacteric

In 1953 Israel abandoned the ‘defensive–offensive’ military strategy that it had adopted four years earlier, in the wake of the First Arab–Israeli War, in favor of an ‘offensive–defensive’ military strategy that, to a large extent, persists until this day. This paper, which employs previously untapped Israeli official documents, personal interviews, memoirs, biographies, and secondary sources, casts new light on this critical juncture in the history of Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflict. The paper challenges existing works by showing when and how Israel's ‘offensive–defensive’ military strategy was adopted. More specifically, the authors argue that it was the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), especially its planning bodies - and not the Prime Minister and Defense Minister, David Ben Gurion, or the IDF's Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Dayan - that initiated this change, and that the new strategy met no objection when it was discussed and approved by the Israeli government. The authors also inquire about the possible implications of this change for Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflict, and ask how this case informs general debates regarding the origins of military strategies.     

Explaining the occupation: Israeli hasbara and the occupied territories in the aftermath of the June 1967 war

Israeli rule over the territories it occupied in the June 1967 war has been the subject of animated international debate in the past half century. This article explores the policy-making process behind Israel’s immediate postwar propaganda and public diplomacy, or “hasbara” in Hebrew, intended to put before foreign audiences the necessity and legitimacy of the occupation. Based on unpublished archival sources, this paper will delineate and analyze the Israeli government’s numerous difficulties in explaining the occupation, faced by media and other reports of Palestinian postwar hardship and resistance to Israeli rule, as well as the harsh measures enforcing Israeli military control and the beginning of Israeli settlement. It also demonstrates the problem of conflicting demands placed on the Israeli government by its domestic audience. It finally argues that the perceived dent to Israel’s image so often discussed by its government and public, has much to say generally about the limits of any propaganda and public diplomacy.     

Israel and the International Legal Arena

Israel considers the international legal arena as another battlefield where the country's legitimacy is challenged. Jerusalem's apprehension in regard to its international standing further increased in 2002 following the establishment of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Developments in the case against Prime Minster Ariel Sharon in Belgium between June 2001 and September 2003 strengthened the Israeli government's conviction that an anti-Israel agenda could percolate into the legal process. Similarly, the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion in regard to the “wall” (security fence), issued on 9 July 2004, reinforced Israel's distrust of the international legal arena. This article follows the anti-Israel offensive in the international legal arena and analyzes Israel's counter actions.     

‘What makes one an Israeli?’ Negotiating identities in everyday representations of ‘Israeliness’*

Abstract. This paper examines the construction of a sense of Israeli identity which is not deducible from the public political discourse. It analyses common verbal representations of ‘being an Israeli person’, namely, what people in contemporary Israeli culture repeatedly say about Israelis, and how they position themselves vis‐à‐vis the commonsensical agreements they exchange, assuming that the massive use of such clichés in certain contexts creates a discursive routine that has ‘a life of its own’, through which people constantly negotiate their self‐images and their sense of belonging. It investigates the ways these representations create solidarity or demarcation and how such current popular representations relate to canonical veteran images of Israeli identity, notably that of the pre‐state ‘Native Israeli’ (Sabra) archetype. The analysis is based on 295 anonymous open responses to the question ‘What makes one an Israeli?’ published weekly in the Weekend Supplement of Maariv, the second largest newspaper in Israel, between 1996 and 1998. The analysis has led to the following observations: (1) Instead of the most expected grand ideological (ethnic, national, religious, etc.) issues of conflict, the responses reveal a ‘pursuit of culturedness’, using an implied scale of mastering good manners and possessing a ‘genuine culture’ which form the dominant parameter of judging the ‘Israeli person’. (2) A tension between mainstream and marginalised groups is shaped by a ‘chase and flight’ dynamic of embracing and rejecting the mythological Sabra image (in asymmetry with these groups' assumed political stances), which image is believed to be a symbol of the once hegemonic veteran elite. (3) This tension paradoxically contributes to the persistence of the canonical image of the Sabra that is currently delegitimised by much intellectual discourse.     

“They Will Take the Country from Us”: Labor Zionism,the Origins and Legacy of the “Other” in Israeli Mass Media,and Hegemonic Narratives

After 1948, Israel's governing elites embarked on a rigorous program of state building and settling hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. In the process, the elites, primarily from the leading Mapai party, developed a process of othering Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, Arab citizens, and Orthodox Jews. They were physically segregated in their own schools and communities, and the elite culture described them as a threat against the European culture of Jewish immigrants from central Europe. The process targeted Mizrahi Jews before moving on to deplore the “demographic threat” of Orthodox Jews and resulted in the current normative hegemonic discourse in Israel that paints numerous groups as threatening the state. This article proposes a four‐part model for understanding “the other” in Israel: contemporary denial and nostalgia for a homogenous past, the view of Zionism as a civilizing mission, the application of separation of ethnic groups in planning, and demographic fear of the other. Altogether, they paint a picture of an Israel that has not come to grips with its past, and therefore continues the process of “othering” in its contemporary ethnocratic framework. Combining the analysis of geographic separation, and planning and media, it presents an innovative understanding of Israeli society.     

“The Nation's Living Room”: Negotiating solidarity on an Israeli talk show in the 1990s

The article explores the changing meaning and salience of the ethos of solidarity in Israeli discourse in the 1990s, as reflected on the popular talk show Live, Hosted by Dan Shilon (1991–2000). Examination of the show's format and genre, textual analysis of its cast and topical agendas, and a quantitative analysis of micro-discursive patterns attest to the globalization, individualization, and commercialization of Israeli society and media and to the erosion of the traditionally central ethos of solidarity. Live somewhat resisted this erosion by constructing idealized images of solidarity, demonstrating popular television's role as a site for cultural negotiation.     

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

On the night of March 5, 1955, Meir Har-Zion set out with three friends to avenge the murder of his sister and her boyfriend in the Judean Desert (in Jordanian territory), about two months earlier. They murdered five innocent Jordanian Bedouins and crossed back into Israel. Upon their return, they were placed under arrest and held until the end of March. This article examines the changes in Israeli perceptions of Har-Zion's reprisal act over the course of thirty years, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, in order to shed light on the ways in which collective memory is molded in Israel as well as on the changes in Israeli society's attitude toward the issue of revenge and retaliation, from understanding and even admiration to condemnation and delegitimization.     

Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

Unfastening Israel's Future from the Occupation: Israeli Plans for Partial Annexation of West Bank Territory

Israeli plans to partially annex West Bank territory have mainly been perceived as frustrating the two-state solution, and as putting Palestine/Israel on a path leading to the one-state alternative. This paper analyses partial annexation plans without assuming that the future of Palestine/Israel would necessarily abide by either statist resolution. It argues that by ostensibly distancing Israel's hold of the West Bank from an identifiable configuration of a belligerent occupation, partial annexation is offered to Jewish Israelis as a path for detaching the futurity of the two nations, and as a trajectory for normalising the Israeli state, without having to make what much of this public would see as painful concessions. It further explores settlers’ objections to such plans, claiming that even a partial incorporation of West Bank territory into formal Israel is expected to erode the exclusivity of Jewish domination which Israel has been upholding in its settler-colonial frontier.     

Olei Hagardom: Between official and popular memory

This article examines the interaction between official memory and popular memory through the case study of Olei Hagardom – Jewish underground fighters executed by the British in Mandatory Palestine. Studies of collective memory usually maintain that the ruling elite, with its control of state resources, dominates collective memory formation. However, the case of Olei Hargardom demonstrates the potentially limited power of institutional commemoration and exclusion in a democratic society. David Ben-Gurion and his government's attempt to exclude these right-wing heroes from the national pantheon had limited impact. Menachem Begin's persistent, partisan political efforts to include them were only partially successful. Ultimately, Olei Hargardom became entrenched in Israeli collective memory as a result of apolitical literary works, popular culture, and the establishment of a site of memory by spontaneous, grassroots efforts.     

Israel and Post‐Mubarak Egypt: Perils of Historical Analogy

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has perceived the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 as a replica of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Drawing on the apparent similarities between the two revolutions—both made against dictators who reigned over secular, Western‐oriented regimes advocating coexistence with Israel, and both having Islamists as the best‐organized opposition force—Netanyahu appears to have concluded that the outcome for Israel would be the same: the advent of an aggressive Islamist regime in Cairo that would initiate a larger conflict. Based on this historical analogy, the Netanyahu government has adopted policies that are meant to help Israel defend against the potential deterioration in relations with Egypt. However, looking at Iran 1979 to draw on lessons about Egypt 2011 is misleading and does not take into account the significant differences that would rather lead Egypt to preserve the peace. This article analyzes Netanyahu's employment of this historical analogy and examines other appropriate lessons that Israel could draw from Iran's Islamic revolution, and proposes that Israel should instead engage the Egyptian revolution and reach a peace deal with the Palestinians so that it avoids misperception and maintains the Egyptian–Israeli peace.