Book Review: Nahum Karlinsky, Ed. The Modern Israeli and Palestinian Diasporas: A Comparative Approach

The Modern Israeli and Palestinian Diasporas: A Comparative Approach

Karlinsky, Nahum, ed., The Modern Israeli and Palestinian Diasporas: A Comparative Approach (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024). 344pp., $55.00 (hardback). Gutkowski, Natalia, Struggling for Time: Environmental Governance and Agrarian Resistance in Israel/Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024), 336pp., US$120. Podeh, Elie, Villa in the Jungle (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2025), 466pp., 128NIS.

A comparative study of contemporary Israeli and Palestinian diasporas. Exilic and diasporic experience have become ubiquitous in recent decades. Jews, lacking a homeland, spread to various parts of the world, making the Jewish diaspora paradigmatic. But after the establishment of Israel in 1948, a different kind of diaspora emerged, as more than a tenth of Israeli citizens have chosen to leave their newly established state and resettle. Meanwhile, about half of all Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, now reside in exile, predominantly as a result of the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Recognizing that Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab societies coexist and are engaged in constant relations, Nahum Karlinsky has assembled an impressive array of contributors to explore these diasporas alongside one another and in dialogue with other diasporic communities. The collected essays cover such topics as Palestinian exiles and diasporas, the demographics of today’s Israeli diaspora, immigrant enterprises, transnationalism and development, the unique place of Israeli Jews in the United States, the literature of Palestinian transnationals, and the emergence of Berlin as a queer Israeli-Jewish immigrant enclave. The Modern Israeli and Palestinian Diasporas challenges and reimagines the very notion of a homeland.

Book Reviews 171 Politics and Society in Modern Israel: Myths and Reality, by Adam Garfinkle. , Armonk, NY: W. E. Sharpe, 1997. 32:2 pp. $24.95 (p). This is a very successful introduction t9 society, politics, and govemment in contemporary Israel. While it is carefully and accurately researched, its intended audience is not I the specialist on Israel or the modem Middle East, but the undergraduate student and attentive adult reader with a serious ititerest in learning about present-day Israel. The author is a journalist and scholar, executive editor ofthe National Interest, and director of the Middle East Council of the Fon;ign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. The author begins with a panoraJic survey of Jewish history, culminating in the , Zionist movement and the dramatic transition from Yishuv to the modem Jewish I commonwealth. He then traces the rapid evolution and expansion of Jewish society and I manifestations of the tensions that hav.e beset that society-between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Orthodox and secular, expansionists and moderates; and between Jews and Arabs within Israel, in the 1967 Occup~ed Territories and the Palestinian diaspora, and in the greater Arab world. He then analyzes and evaluates the current political economy, especially the persistence ofthe state-"1anaged and -guided economy. He follows with an excellent description of the main Israeli political and govemmental processes and institutions, contrasting them for the !benefit of American readers with comparable elements ofthe U.S. polity. This is foll9wed by an essay on the complexities ofIsrael's foreign policy and efforts of this sniall, beleaguered state to achieve security and I acceptance in an international environ¢ent that has been often less than friendly. In this context special attention is devoted to ithe critical relationship with the United States. The fmal chapter focuses, overop,imistically as it appears to this reviewer, on the emergence ofa peace settlement between Israel, the Palestinians, and the surrounding Arab states; and the implications of ihese developments for the "normalization" of Israeli life under conditions of relaxe,d tensions and unexpected material prosperity. Relations between Israelis and the Jew~sh diaspora, notably in Russia, Western Europe, and North America, command the aut~or's special concern. Projecting current trends, he concludes that assirnilationist procdses throughout the diaspora, especially in North America, will reduce the numbers and the political efficacy of diaspora Jewry and that I the next century will consequently shift the center of Jewish life and survival to Israel. Thus, the nineteenth-century Zionistidream of a revived and invigorated center of Jewish life in its ancient homeland will be realized during the twenty-first century, while the declining diaspora that su~tained Jewish survival for two millennia will , increasingly look to Israel for its cultUral inspiration and support. A standard expectation ofreviewers is that they will identify and dilate on a book's failures and shortcomings. I find litt~e to criticize in this remarkably compact, well balanced, carefully researched, and clearly written treatment of a very complex theme. Other scholars might have been less committed than this author to orthodox market 172 SHOFAR Spring 1998 Vol. 16, No.3 processes in their evaluation ofIsrael's economic policies and their consequences. More attention might have been paid to the role and status ofwomen; to higher education and cultural institutions, including their heavy debt to a devoted diaspora; to the implications of the new consumerist ethos in the emergent post-Zionist era; and to the recent transformation ofisrael's economy to one dominated by a dynamic high technology sector closely linked to American multinational firms. These, however, do not detract from the usefulness ofthis book as an introduction for serious non-specialist readers to Israeli society and government. Milton 1. Esman Department of Government Cornell University Why Syria Goes to War, by Fred Lawson. Ithaca and London: Cornell University . Press, 1996. 222 pp. $29.95. Lawson's argument is that domestic factors drive Syria's war making. I)War originates in crises of capital accumulation which cause economic decline and social conflict over the shrinking pie. 2) Spreading opposition threatens the survival of the regime which often splits over how to respond. 3) Regimes initiate aggressive foreign policies to ameliorate...

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinians have constituted a nation living as refugees in exile, as civilians under military occupation, or as members of a global Palestinian diaspora. Without a state and a sovereign government, redressing claims of grave violations of international human rights against the Israeli government that both dispossesses and dominates them is an arduous challenge. However, in the alternative to bringing claims in an Israeli court, Palestinians can also bring forth claims in U.S. courts pursuant to the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA). The ATCA is an eighteenth-century statute made actionable in the present day by a Second Circuit Court decision that held that the statute grants subject matter jurisdiction in federal courts for violations of international customary law. While U.S. federal courts have, through the ATCA, become formally available for redressing violations of international human rights, Palestinians have found no judicial recourse in these courts almost without exception. As defendants, Palestinians have no defenses available to them; as claimants, their claims do not withstand judicial scrutiny. The uniformity of judicial outcomes involving Palestinian plaintiffs and defendants is a function of their politicization, meaning their adjudication according to foreign policy interests irrespective of the legal questions at hand. As such, the politicization of cases involving the Arab-Israeli conflict and critical of Israeli occupation policies is indicative of the interlocking relationship between law and politics and is demonstrated by 1) undue deference to the Executive Branch; 2) legislative and executive endorsement of lawsuits against Palestinians; and 3) the supplanting of legal considerations for political ones in the application of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act as well as the political question doctrine.

Abstract: This paper aims to talk about the Talmud being the most important scripture for Jews, even more, important than the Torah. The author conducted a library study with a descriptive comparative approach to obtaining the Book of the Talmud not only became a source in the establishment of religious law but also became an ideology and principles, and a direction for the policy-making of the State and the Jewish government of Israel. More than that, Talmud became the view of the life of jews in general. That's also why the Jewish State of Israel is referred to as a racist, chauvinistic, theocratic, conservative, and highly dogmatic State. To understand the seemingly arrogant, stubborn, uncompromising State of Israel, one needs to understand the content of the Talmud's teachings, which the Jews believe to be the essential scripture among their scriptures. The Jews have made the Rabbis their own God in various aspects of life. Although Zionist Jews have turned secular, the Talmud continues to color the policies carried out by most Jews, especially Zionists.

Political identification with Palestinian nationalism in Argentina has been used by a variety of parties on the left as a symbolic and transgressive tool to shape and re-situate ideological positions. The ‘Question of Palestine’ and the relationship of the Palestinian diaspora to the Israeli state can be read through the political literature of the left as a mirror of its own shifting engagement with imperialism, the Cold War, neo-liberalism, and social exclusion. This article explores the Argentine left's exchange with and mediated understandings of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Arab League, the Organization of Arab States, and Zionism, in order to reveal the motivations behind pro-Palestine transnational solidarity campaigns. It argues for the strategic relevance of South-South transnational solidarity mobilization to the emergence of Argentina's ‘new left.’

Reviewed by: Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory Tareq Y. Ismael (bio) Ahmad H. Sa’diLila Abu Lughod, eds.Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. 356 pp. ISBN: 978-0-231-13579-5, $75.00. Published in 2007, just antedating the sixtieth anniversary of the Israeli state, this book is a timely and wide-ranging collection of essays concerning the Palestinian catastrophe—Nakba—and subsequent questions of Palestinian identity and existence. The mass-expulsion and the uprooting of 600,000 Palestinians (80 percent) in 1948 left a nation in exile, in continuous statelessness and refugee squalor. Hence, the rules that came to govern the lives of the Palestinian refugees are necessarily different from those of formal state citizens, and equally different are the tools necessary to record the modern history of the Palestinian people. In this book’s treatment of the Palestinian refugees, it juxtaposes the standard (Israeli) narrative of the cataclysmic events of 1948—afterwards the “Western” narrative—with the oral and recorded histories of the Palestinian Diaspora, and hence a direct contrast to the Israeli history of the victors. Ever since the violent beginnings of Israel in 1948, outlets of western media have propagated the Israeli standard narrative of a “return from exile, after millennia, with people with memory of suffering redeemed in . . . their own modern nation-state” (286). This projection of a mythical past onto a contemporary state project, wherein the name of the Palestinians—let alone their tragedy—is expunged from the history, has become the standard narrative that western peoples have internalized as established fact. Hence, over five decades, Israel and its supporters have rejected any moral/ legal culpability for the Palestinian Nakba, weaving this historical blackhole into the national myth of the Israeli state. The displaced Palestinian nation has been, comparably speaking, unable to present a counter-narrative to the Israeli national myth, since much of Palestinian history was contained in the realm of oral memory. Until recent developments in ethno-history and the oral tradition disciplines that depend on such memories, Palestinian oral history has been reflexively dismissed as unreliable when weighed against the presumptive strength [End Page 751] of standard scholarship, particularly where embodied in pro-Israeli sectors in academia and think-tank advocacy. For the last fifty years or so, there has been a spatter of Palestinian voices within the historical/academic mainstream (e.g., the late Edward Said), but it has had little impact upon the intellectual and moral centers of the western world—particularly when, as Ben Gurion put it, the formation of the Israeli state was “Western Civilization’s gesture of repentance for the Holocaust” (298), a sentiment that now describes the western (especially American) orientation towards Israel and its inconvenient Palestinian victims. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod’s Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory is “neither a collection of personal reflections and testimonials nor is it a history proper; . . . it is a sustained examination of . . . the Palestinian social and cultural memory” (6–7) whose foundation is the resilient recording of the events before and after Nakba. The Nakba is the historical watershed in Palestinian collective memory, similar to, and no less morally severe, than the Jewish Diaspora. While the Nakba, for the Palestinians, marks the abrupt dispossession of national life and uprooting from national place, much like the Jewish Diaspora, it ushered in subsequent suffering for the Palestinian people, such as the 1967 war, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the destruction of Palestinian life and property in refugee camps, the massacres in Sabra and Shatillah, and more recently the Israeli economic blockade of 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. The avowed goal of the book, according to the editors, is “to examine this painful site—Nakba—of memory in light of the larger comparative literature on memory, history and trauma” (4). A discerning reader of this book will notice its subtle perspective on the inseparability of memory, self, place, and identity, which is certainly true for the Palestinian people. As Paul Connerton observes, memory, as a process of recollection, calls back unique events, not as isolated episodes, but as parts of a...