Ghosts of Oslo: Disjointed Time and Anticipation in the Contemporary Israeli Novel

How can ‘small’ and politically peripheral states have a significant impact on issues dominated by big states? For example, how did Norway come to play such an important role in fostering negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1990s? This article seeks to answer these questions by analyzing Norway's relationship with Israel and the PLO from 1948 until 1993, as well as Norway's role during the negotiations that led to the signing of the first Oslo Accord. Seen through the theoretical framework of small-state mediation, Norway's lack of influence might have helped convince the parties to open dialogue, but it also implied an inability to provide a level playing field for just negotiations.

Periphery: Israel's Search for Middle East Allies

Periphery: Israel's Search for Middle East Allies

A History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Faith, Awareness, and Revolution in the Middle East

The Threat of BDS

This article argues that Barbara Harlow revised her critical commitments in the early 1990s as she sought to intervene at that political conjuncture. While retaining her established engagement with cultural production documenting the persistence of imperial violence and resistances to it, Harlow’s position pivoted to meet the changing global conditions, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first US war in Iraq (Desert Storm), the Oslo Accords, the end of apartheid and negotiations in the North of Ireland and Central America. These major events, which came to be associated with the New World Order, signalled the eclipsing of the revolutionary modes of resistance that appeared in the 1960s and produced not only new cultural responses to neo-imperialism, but also a distinct critical perspective, which Harlow elaborated as she addressed the contextual constraints of that political conjuncture.

Mahmoud Darwish: Literature and the Politics of Palestinian Identity

Review of Marda Dunsky's 'Stories from Palestine: Narratives of Resilience'. Excerpt: "I have been visiting Israel and Palestine since the early 1980s. It has been an up and down emotional journey. There was the buoyancy after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, and there seemed to be definite grounds for hope for the future. Since then, it has been a challenge to summon the will to express any optimism as the possibilities for any sustainable peace have been eroded."

Many scholars consider ‘identity’ and ‘identity politics’ to be among the most important means for cultural minority groups to challenge a discriminatory reality. Others caution that these processes might result in the polarisation of differences, potentially fuelling hatred, harsh conflict, exclusion and even violence. The tension between these two views is presented in this article through an examination of the way young Ethiopian Jews whose parents immigrated to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s have developed their own particular identity precisely in the course of and as a result of the encounter with Israeli society and its mechanisms of exclusion, discrimination, and control. The state declared a policy of assimilation, but in practice relegated the new arrivals to a status of inferiority and marginality. As a result, young Ethiopian Jews reconstructed a new, complex and hybrid Israeli identity, in which blackness is one important element. This unique identity is presented in the paper as a crucial response by the youths to a discriminatory reality of cultural racism. However, the essay also raises doubts concerning their success in minimising their subjugation and in ‘de‐racialising’ Israel.

Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, by Ella Shohat. New Edition. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010. 377 pp. ?65.00. Ella Shohat's book, first published in 1989, is considered one of the best and most comprehensive books ever written on Israeli cinema and has been reprinted several times. Thousands of students in Israel and all over the world have used it as a textbook, and we may assume that thousands more will continue to do so. The new 2010 edition has updated the original five chapters and added a Postscript. Shohat's Israeli Cinema was ahead of its time. Its uniqueness lay in its inclusion of a long list of films made in Israel from the late nineteenth century- the early period of Zionist pioneering in the land of Israel-Palestine under the Ottoman Empire and later the British Mandate-through the early years of the State of Israel (founded 1948), to recent films. The title states that it connects three elements-East, West and the politics of representation, which on the surface are disparate. However, a deeper look shows that history, film, and ideology have always been tied to one another from the earliest days of film. We have seen obvious connections in German expressionist films following World War One, in French cinema which attempted to address reality through a surrealistic lens, and the most outstanding of all, Soviet cinema by Eisenstein and Pudovkin. In the United States as well, the Hollywood film industry had a capitalist-racist-ideological orientation intertwined with America's own history. Fiction has long been the major tool used in filmmakers' work to express nationalistic social emotions and thoughts, political ideas and outlooks. In this context, we can also include Israeli cinema as a comprehensive name given to Jewish cinema made prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, financed by agencies of the World Zionist Organization, and on to contemporary Israeli films. According to Shohat, the common denominator in Israeli films was the ideological hard core that lay at the center of Zionist society, which from the very beginning excluded foreigners. Shohat includes Palestinians, Arabs, and Jews who immigrated from Arab countries in her definition of foreigners, thus linking the fate of Jews with contemporary Palestinian Arabs, and considers them both victims of Zionism. Her ideology is reflected in her impressive analysis of the films on a case-by-case basis. She points an accusing finger at Zionism for using film as propaganda to express Zionist emotions and for taking a colonialist and racist attitude towards Jews as being different from the mainly Ashkenazi pioneers of predominately European origin. Shohat wrote her original book as an antithesis to a Zionism that did not recognize Israeli-Palestinian partnership for the new state. Her book was written before the 1990s when the Oslo Accords and peace talks began and before research trends in Israel began to focus on Mizrahim, and before Mizrahim started seeking their place in Israel's socio-political-cultural space through various social movements. It is important to read this book in the context of the period in which it was written, keeping in mind, however, that since then, water has flowed down the Jordan. Thanks to studies by Shohat and a persistent group of scholars, much new research was published which led to visible social and cultural change in Israel. The studies that came in their wake respond to claims of discrimination and show that there have been rapid and deep changes in the socioeconomic, social status, and culture of Jews and Arab Israelis over the past 20-30 years. For example, in contrast to the past, Israel's middle class is now mostly if not entirely made up of Jews. Today, a great many of the members of Israel's ruling party and leading public personalities are of origin. Since the 1980s there has also been a religious political party of Pure Mizrahi Israelis. …

Retelling Hasidism for the Twenty-First Century

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...

This article seeks to examine three works of fiction: Nava Semel's Isra Isle (2005), Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007), and Philip Jose Farmer's Jesus on Mars (1979). All three of these works imagine a Jewish state other than Israel. These works speak specifically to two fundamental questions that informed Zionist thought—that of safety and that of identity. While each novel implies skepticism toward contemporary Israel, the utopias presented, too, fail to guarantee security for the Jewish people or a solution to the “Jewish question” of cohesive identity. Each novel acknowledges the centrality of a return to Zion in Jewish culture and beliefs, suggesting that, even if Israel itself falls short of its mythic potential, the promise of a return ensures that no alternative Jewish homeland will ever provide an adequate final home.

Since its post-war resumption in 1946, British television has presented a remarkable range of factual and fictional Holocaust perpetrators. This essay considers some of the earliest of those images, moving backwards from the early 1960s to the 1950s. It focuses on the output of the BBC and the content and impact of the 1952 drama The Prisoner. Set in contemporary Israel, this play provoked outrage among British Jewry for its depiction of an Israeli government minister who was also a Nazi sympathiser and Jewish perpetrator. This controversy is explored using production files, newspaper reports and the surviving script of the play.

Reviewed by: The Israeli Peace Movement: A Shattered Dream Benjamin Gidron The Israeli Peace Movement: A Shattered Dream, by Tamar S. Hermann. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009. 310 pp. $85.00. The long and protracted conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians had almost a full decade of hope during the 1990s. It started with the election of Yitzhak Rabin to the post of Prime Minister in 1992, it continued with the 1993 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the PLO, to be followed by a smear campaign of the Right which led to Rabin's assassination in November 1995, and it ended abruptly with the failure of the Camp David talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and the outbreak of the Al-Aksa Intifada in 2000. Despite the murder of Prime Minister Rabin, this decade raised a lot of expectations that, in a similar manner to the long Northern Irish and South African conflicts, which experienced breakthroughs that led to their resolution in the 1990s, a similar process could and would take place around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well. The breakthrough of the Oslo Agreements (exactly like the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and the move towards democratic elections in South Africa) did not happen by a stroke of a pen; it was preceded by a concerted effort of a whole array of citizens' groups and organizations that [End Page 180] advocated a negotiated rather than a military solution to the conflict. This is the focus of Hermann's book, which not only analyzes such groups and their roles before the Oslo Accord but takes a much longer view of the Israeli Peace Movement, from the Pre-State era till the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Hermann characterizes the Israeli peace movement as "peripheral" and analyzes the reasons for such a depiction—both contextual-societal reasons and internal reasons. But she argues that despite that fact, "the movement has been a significant factor in influencing the climate of opinion in Israel by persistently putting forward some unconventional and much-contested alternative readings of the conflict, thereby cultivating the ground for the transformation from armed conflict to peace negotiations" (p. 7). As has already been shown in other studies on that subject, the role of preparing the public for the transformation from an armed conflict to the stage of negotiation is probably the most important role of non-governmental citizens' peace groups and organizations. In the height of the conflict, when the country's leadership and media used inflammatory rhetoric to characterize the "enemy" and advocated a strategy of violence to deal with it, a different characterization was heard and a different strategy proposed to deal with the conflict. This was a slowly widening crack that later served as a legitimization of the negotiations. It gave a human face to the "enemy" and actually showed that the other side also wanted to end the conflict and that negotiations were possible. Is this all the Israeli Peace Movement, composed of dozens of groups and organizations, did? Was it not a major factor to push the government towards negotiations? Even if it was, it is not possible to prove it; politicians involved in transformations tend to take the credit for such breakthroughs for themselves and are reluctant to admit that they were "pushed" by outsiders to take those bold steps. But even if the politicians are right and they were not "pushed" by citizens' groups, the role of preparing the public opinion for negotiations should not be belittled. Meeting with representatives of the "enemy," discovering willingness on the other side to negotiate, creating dialog groups or joint planning groups of Israelis and Palestinians, preparing to solve together common problems such as the environment or water—all this shows the public that peace is not only possible but a much preferred option. Without their activity the move from armed conflict to negotiations would be too abrupt and hard to accept by the population. The role of these organizations is often forgotten, and the book is partly meant to compensate for this "collective amnesia." A second focus of the book is...