Between ‘the Arab’ and ‘the Religious Rightist’: ‘significant others’ in the construction of Jewish-Israeli national identity

Abstract

In this article I study the development of Jewish-Israeli national identity by focusing on its ‘significant others’ as they appear in Israeli national secular mainstream press commentaries on seven critical events in contemporary Israel's history. I describe the transformations of the Jewish-Israeli identity as shifts between two ‘significant others’ (as this term is formulated by Anna Triandafyllidou), an internal one and external one, in an ongoing process of collective self-identification conducted while coping with crises of varying political nature.