‘The First Major Test’: The UN Secretary-General and the Palestine Problem, 1947–9

The Palestine problem was one of the first conflicts the newly formed United Nations (UN) was obliged to contend with. Secretary-General Trygve Lie played an active part in the proceedings, and his consistent support for the partition plan and Israeli UN membership has led to charges of Zionist sympathies and that his actions were based on this personal political bias. What explains the UN Secretary-General's actions in regard to the Palestine problem? This article argues that Palestine represented a threefold ‘test’ for the new world organisation: a test of its ability to solve regional conflicts; a test of its ability to bring about agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union; and a test of the Secretary-General's ability to protect and promote the UN. Due to the timing of the Palestine problem, as well as the attention it attracted from both the media and the general public, the UN's handling of the matter would have consequences for the organisation's standing in the world. In Secretary-General Lie's opinion, Palestine was ‘the first major test’ for the UN, and his perception of the high stakes inherent to the organisation's approach in Palestine provided the primary motivation for the Secretary-General's actions.     

Rooting diaspora, reviving nation: Zionist landscapes of Palestine–Israel

This paper explores the politics of landscape and nature within the process of nation-building. In it I examine how landscapes can operate in multiple, intersecting ways in the service of an ideological discourse and how the politics of nature, specifically trees, can contribute to the shaping of a new national space and subjectivity. Focusing on the multiple renditions of Palestine promulgated by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) , I discuss how landscapes can entangle diaspora and homeland, aesthetics and embodiment, antiquity and modernity, with both conceptual and material consequences. Drawing on histories of the JNF and on a selection of historic newspaper articles and children's literature, I explore the circulation of aesthetic renderings of Palestine and the performance of embodied landscapes during the children's tree-planting holiday, Tu B'Shvat. I argue that the centrality of trees to the JNF, and the imagery of roots, renewal, family and innocence that they conjure, legitimised Zionist colonisation and naturalised the Israeli nation state and body politic. I also demonstrate how JNF landscapes and afforestation work assisted in the demarcation of Israeli nation-space and therefore in the material dispossession of the Palestinians.     

Zwischen Arbeitslosigkeit und Berufsverbot: Die deutschsprachige Ärzte-Emigration nach Palästina 1933–1945

When the National-Socialists started their restrictive measures against Jewish civil servants and professionals in 1933, they caused a wave of emigration only to be surpassed by the one following the Anschluß of Austria and the ‘November pogrom’ in 1938. Due to their great number, jewish doctors were to become the main object of Nazi persecution in the professional group. Up until 1935 Palestine was their main destination of immigration. In 1935 the British Mandatory Government passed a numerus clausus which mainly cut down the licensing of newly arrived doctors. The article deals with the social problems caused by the mass immigration of a highly qualified professional group in Palestine and with the fight against the restrictive measures of the mandatory Government. A short retrospective glance is cast at the situation in Palestine before 1933. Finally an outlook is given at the impact of this immigration on the health system in Israel.     

Israeli historical geography and the Holocaust: reconsidering the research agenda

The case of the Israeli historical geography demonstrates how nationalism affects academic research agenda. As in many other cases of nation-building, Israeli geographers have played an important role in the manipulation of landscapes and places to form a modern Jewish Israeli national identity. Their role in the construction of national consciousness expanded following the development of a territorial national conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Despite the eighteen centuries of the pre-Zionist Diaspora, and the fact that more than a half of the Jews in the world live outside Israel, Israeli historical geographers almost totally neglect Diaspora lifestyles and spatialities and ignore the impact of the geographical imagination of Diaspora Jews on the (re)construction of Zionist territorial concepts and space. Following five decades of a Palestine/Israel-centered agenda, it is time for Israeli historical geographers to turn to the research of different spatial aspects of the Jewish Diaspora. This move should begin with the research of the spatial aspects of the concentration and annihilation of Jewish European communities during the Holocaust, and to more general spatial aspects of Nazism, as well as to the political and cultural geography of the Holocaust remembrance.     

Between ideology and practice,national conflict and anti‐imperialist struggle: the National Liberation League in Palestine

This paper focuses on the National Liberation League (NLL), a Palestinian Arab communist movement which operated in Palestine between the years 1943–1948. The paper examines its short‐lived history in light of the relevant three contexts in which it operated: the local Palestinian national context; the regional context of communist activity in the Middle East and the external‐internationalist context of the Soviet Union. The paper further discusses the activities of the NLL during the period of the 1948 War in Palestine, as well as in the first period of military rule, imposed on the Palestinian citizens of Israel. An analysis of the NLL during the late Mandatory period and the early years of the State of Israel allows a close examination of the ways by which concepts of identity, nationalism, class and ethnicity were conceptualised, debated and contested during times of a national conflict and anti‐imperial struggle and brings to the fore tensions between ideology and practice, nationalism and internationalism. The NLL offers an important opportunity to look into the complex matrix of communist movements that combine anti‐imperial struggles with struggles for national liberation in the context of a national conflict and to examine their dilemmas and what may seem as internal contradictions.     

Hotel design in British Mandate Palestine: Modernism and the Zionist vision

From the early 1920s through the 1930s, an important yet forgotten avant-garde architectural phenomenon developed in the Zionist community of British Mandate Palestine. In cities and resort regions across the country, several dozen modernist hotels were built for a new type of visitor: the Zionist tourist. Often the most architecturally significant structures in their locales and designed by leading local architects educated in some of Europe's most progressive schools, these hotels were conceived along ideological lines and represented a synthesis of social requirements, cutting-edge aesthetics, and utopian national ideals. They responded to a complex mixture of sentiments, including European standards of modern comfort and the longing to remake Palestine, the historical homeland of the Jewish people, for a newly liberated, progressive nation. This article focuses on Jerusalem's most ambitious modernist hotel, the Eden Hotel, to evaluate how the architecture of tourism became a political and aesthetic tool in the promotion of Zionist Palestine.     

Whispers from Below: Zionist Secret Diplomacy,Terrorism and British Security Inside and Out of Palestine, 1944–47

This article discusses the global aspect of Zionist terrorism against Britain during 1944–47, relying on recently declassified documents and Hebrew records. Britain struggled against a global terrorist campaign which attacked British targets in Palestine, Egypt and the wider Middle East, continental Europe and the United Kingdom. This article refutes claims by other authors that British rule in Palestine failed because of intelligence failure. Intelligence failure was limited, but so were successes. British intelligence produced reasonable assessments on Zionist politics, but could do little to prevent violence without the cooperation of the Jewish Agency. Success was driven by a combination of signals intelligence, secret agents, one key defector, interrogations and intelligence shared by the Jewish Agency. Failure resulted from a weak understanding of the Zionist underground and from lack of cooperation by Agency authorities. Normally Britain's junior partner, the Jewish Agency was, by 1945, struggling against British restrictions on Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. Its militia, Haganah, turned to cooperation with terrorists. British intelligence predicted that such developments could occur, but failed to identify them as they unfolded. Britain's dependence on Zionist security intelligence was a key vulnerability that never was addressed by policy-makers. The Jewish Agency leveraged its cooperation, applying it to prevent terrorism in Egypt and the United Kingdom, where violent incidents would harm the Zionist cause. It had little reason to prevent terrorism in the key battlegrounds of Palestine or Europe, and so terrorism harmed Britain's will to continue fighting. The root cause of Britain's failure was at the policy level. Despite known weaknesses, government never assessed its own will and ability to uphold restrictions on Zionist immigration, or to fight terrorism, as against the Yishuv's will and ability to struggle against Britain.     

Women’s Lives Beyond the Checkpoint in Palestine

This article brings women to the fore of a discussion of checkpoints in Palestine to understand better the ways that Palestinian women’s lives—even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints—are affected by Israeli security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork near Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, we examine women’s lives in the context of a gendered system of permits and the nearby checkpoint that makes men’s days of labour both long and exhausting, a fact that has profound effects on the family home in terms of restricted mobilities and the division of domestic labour. The article thus builds an account of checkpoints that: (1) situates women’s everyday lives in Palestine in the context of Israel’s military occupation; (2) extends the temporality of checkpoints beyond the checkpoint itself; and, therefore, (3) enables an understanding of the effects of borders beyond the immediate space of the border.     

Reframing Bi‐nationalism in Palestine‐Israel as a Process of Settler Decolonisation

This paper examines some of the emerging critical civil society debates in relation to the one‐state solution being the most appropriate geo‐political arrangement for the articulation of freedom, justice and equality in Palestine‐Israel. This is done with reference to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions’ 2012 statement in support of a bi‐national state and the ensuing critiques it attracted from Palestinian supporters of the one‐state position. Drawing on these debates which have largely revolved around Jewish Israeli rights to political self‐determination in Palestine‐Israel, this paper proposes that alternative versions of self‐determination as cultural rights for the established Hebrew‐speaking national community represent a more inclusive form of self‐determination in the eventuality of decolonisation.     

Decadent pioneers: Land,space and gender in Zionist revisionist thought

Soviet Russia in the 1920s was the scene of intensified Zionist activity, fed by an economic and existential crisis among large segments of the Jewish population and tolerated to a surprising degree by the Soviet authorities. The article explores these factors and the “Soviet context” of Zionism, and documents the powerful influences they exerted on the young membership of the Zionist organizations. The author's interest goes beyond articulated ideological positions to include learned habits of work, political and cultural practices, and perceptions of the social and the personal. She analyzes the transplantation of these elements of political culture into Palestine by the 3,000-odd young Zionist immigrants who arrived between 1924 and 1931, cautioning that ideas and practices were borrowed selectively and modified by the reality of the Jewish settlement in Palestine.     

Border collapse and boundary maintenance: militarisation and the micro-geographies of violence in Israel–Palestine

Drawing upon subaltern geopolitics and feminist geography, this article explores how militarisation shapes micro-geographies of violence and occupation in Israel–Palestine. While accounts of spectacular and large-scale political violence dominate popular imaginaries and academic analyses in/of the region, a shift to the micro-scale foregrounds the relationship between power, politics and space at the level of everyday life. In the context of Israel–Palestine, micro-geographies have revealed dynamic strategies for ‘getting by’ or ‘dealing with’ the occupation, as practiced by Palestinian populations in the face of spatialised violence. However, this article considers how Jewish Israelis actively shape the spatial micro-politics of power within and along the borders of the Israeli state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem during 2010–2011, an analysis of everyday narratives illustrates how relations of violence, occupation and domination rely upon gendered dynamics of border collapse and boundary maintenance. Here, the borders between home front and battlefield break down at the same time as communal boundaries are reproduced, generating conditions of ‘total militarism’ wherein military interests and agendas are both actively and passively diffused. Through gendering the militarised micro-geographies of violence among Jewish Israelis, this article reveals how individuals construct, navigate and regulate the everyday spaces of occupation, detailing more precisely how macro political power endures.     

Arthur Koestler and his ties to Zionism and Jabotinsky

At the end of the nineteenth century, and more pronouncedly between the two World Wars, Jews in Eastern Europe created wide networks of credit cooperatives, which at their peak supported about a third of the non-Soviet Jewish population in Eastern Europe. The establishment and continuous management of these cooperatives were greatly assisted by the two major Jewish philanthropic organizations of the period, the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). These organizations acted as charitable institutions but also as third-sector organizations which aspired both to assist and to socially engineer East European Jewish society. In British Mandate Palestine a Zionist branch of the movement was established, which was, however, free from the influences of these philanthropic organizations. The article describes and analyzes this little-researched phenomenon while seeking to place it within the theoretical frameworks of philanthropy and transnationalism. It concludes with an observational comparison between the political context in which Jewish credit cooperatives were created, namely East European ethnic regimes, and the Israeli ethnic democracy.     

Politisch motivierte Emigration deutscher Ärzte

In 1933 the nazis had immediately started to reorganize the health service and the medical profession on the basis of eugenics and efficiency. For everybody who had been engaged in the institutions of social medicine or social hygiene in the Weimar Republic the inhibition of medical practice, misery, distress, persecution, imprisonment or at the best emigration had been the consequence of it, for political and mostly also for racial reasons. But for these physicians who had to flee from Nazi-Germany the situation in the immigration countries had not been a good one in most of the cases. Therefore it is only possible to speak - if you neglect the special situation of the psychiatrists in the U.S.A. - in particular cases of transfer of medical science into the immigration countries from Germany. Most of the immigrants stayed after the war in their new homelands. The loss of these progressive aspects of social hygiene caused by the emigration of these physicians 1933 and afterwards from Germany can be noticed in this field of medicine and public health service in Western Germany until now.     

Imagined homeland: landscape painting in Palestine in the 1920s*

Abstract. This essay examines the proposition that landscape representations both reflect and endorse national ideology. By studying in detail selected landscape paintings by Jewish artists in pre‐State Israel some of the assumptions linking landscape and nationalism will be revisited. In particular, I shall challenge received notions in Israeli art historiography that interpret the numerous landscape paintings of the 1920s as directly expressing the identification with Zionism – the Jewish national movement. Analysis of the subject repertoire reveals that artists usually ignored images of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. They preferred instead to depict oriental countryside or ancient cities in an emblematic idealistic manner supported by stylistic borrowings from contemporary French painting. The country in these paintings is more an idea than a reality. Yet they evoke neither the biblical past nor a Zionist futuristic vision, but rather an oriental Arcadia of an unspecified time.     

Mamlakhtiyut,Capitalism and Socialism during the 1950s in Israel

The debate over mamlakhtiyut (Zionist republicanism) in the early years of the State of Israel concerned the centrality of the state in the shaping of Israeli society. This article considers whether and to what extent this debate can be seen as a struggle over the possibilities of a “left-wing mamlakhtiyut,” aimed at an egalitarian politics, society and economy, as opposed to a “mamlakhtiyut,” based on structural stratification in the distribution of real political, social and economic power. It concludes that although in the short and medium term Israeli mamlakhtiyut was egalitarian in its socioeconomic policies, its political and educational policies fostered structural inequality in Israeli society.     

“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.     

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.     

Securing Zion? Policing in British Palestine, 1917–39

The British period in Palestine (1917–48) was fundamentally shaped by the commitment to promote the Jewish National Home (JNH) as originally stated in the Balfour Declaration (1917). The extent that that commitment shaped public-security policy in Palestine is examined in this article. While the need to reduce costs and the desire for a civilian (rather than military) force also shaped policy, the government's JNH policy was the key determinant in public-security policy in Palestine. It meant the police was specifically configured to protect the Jewish population and there were always a disproportionate number of British personnel in the force. This became more pronounced as British rule progressed. Following deadly riots in 1929, the number of British police was tripled; with the inception of the Arab Revolt (1936–39) that number more than quadrupled. Moreover, during the Arab Revolt the British increasingly relied on members of the Jewish community to assist with their protection. The majority of these Jewish forces were supposedly for defensive purposes; regardless, they were all members of the semi-secret underground Jewish army, Haganah. The British were well aware of this and tacitly approved. In doing so, the British made a significant contribution to the Zionist project.     

OpenStreetMap in Israel and Palestine – ‘Game changer’ or reproducer of contested cartographies?

In Israel and Palestine, map-making practices were always entangled with contradictive spatial identities and imbalanced power resources. Although an Israeli narrative has largely dominated the ‘cartographic battlefield’, the latest chapter of this story has not been written yet: collaborative forms of web 2.0 cartographies have restructured power relations in mapping practices and challenged traditional monopolies on map and spatial data production. Thus, we can expect web 2.0 cartographies to be a ‘game changer’ for cartography in Palestine and Israel. In this paper, I review this assumption with the popular example of OpenStreetMap (OSM). Following a mixed methods approach, I comparatively analyze the genesis of OSM in Israel and Palestine. Although nationalist motives do not play a significant role on either side, it turns out that the project is dominated by Israeli and international mappers, whereas Palestinians have hardly contributed to OSM. As a result, social fragmentations and imbalances between Israel and Palestine are largely reproduced through OSM data. Discussing the low involvement of Palestinians, I argue that OSM's ground truth paradigm might be a watershed for participation. Presumably, the project's data are less meaningful in some local contexts than in others. Moreover, the seemingly apolitical approach to map only ‘facts on the ground’ reaffirms present spatio-social order and thus the power relations behind it. Within a Palestinian narrative, however, many aspects of the factual material space might appear not as neutral physical objects but as results of suppression, in which case, any ‘accurate’ spatial representation, such as OSM, becomes objectionable.     

From the particularistic to the universalistic: national narratives in Israel’s mainstream press, 1967–97

The aim of this article is to study the development of the Jewish‐Zionist national idea as expressed in the national narrative as it appeared in Israel’s mainstream press during the years 1967–97, against the background of five critical events in the Israeli collective experience as well as in the wake of the Holocaust Memorial Days. This development is studied as a case of the immanent tension between nationalism’s universalistic message and its particularistic application. The Jewish‐Zionist narrative in Israel is found to be ‘shifting’ from its particularistic towards its more universalistic pole. This development is discussed as a transition from a ‘purely national’ to a ‘post‐national’ narrative, and is positioned in its local and global contexts.