Jewish-Arab Conflict Research Articles

Annexation or Separation? The Municipal Status of the Jewish Neighborhoods of Jaffa 1940–1944

The 1936 disturbances in Palestine produced one of the most complex and sensitive problems on the local level, which exercised the British authorities until the end of the Mandate period. The demand of the residents of the Jewish neighborhoods of Jaffa to be annexed to Tel-Aviv, and separated from the Jaffa jurisdiction, was the core of the problem. From a local issue, annexation rapidly became a concern of the Yishuv as a whole, its institutions being unremittingly engaged in it as a Zionist/Yishuv struggle of the highest order. Clearly, in the time of the Arab revolt no solution was possible. The lull in the Jewish-Arab conflict following the close of that chapter allowed for the first time a dialogue among the parties to the annexation question in an attempt to resolve it. The article dissects the problem from the viewpoint of each of the three parties concerned from 1940 to 1944, a period that yielded a unique and significant breakthrough.

Words without Borders: The Multicultural Dialogue of Manfred Winkler’s Poetry

Born in the former Austro-Hungarian province of Bukowina, German-language writer, translator, painter, and sculptor Manfred Winkler (1922–2014) spent much of his lifetime and his long career crossing geographical, national, ideological, and linguistic borders. Perhaps best known as Paul Celan’s most important translator into Hebrew, he remains one of Israel’s most challenging contemporary poets due to his intercultural writing involving German. This article reflects and explores the incredible variety of Manfred Winkler’s border crossings and positions his writing in its various cultural contexts. It outlines the central themes and tendencies in the work of a writer who represents the darkness of war by orchestrating the memory of the Shoah and the events of the Jewish-Arab conflict with a sense of grief rather than from a position of judgment and in so doing delineates the fault lines and turning points of much of the twentieth century.

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Making pedagogical decisions to address challenges of joint Jewish–Bedouin environmental projects in Israel

This interpretive study identifies challenges of working with Bedouin and Jewish Israeli youth in two multicultural projects: education for sustainability and place-conscious education. It also describes the ways the adult project leaders addressed these challenges and their views on the effectiveness of their decisions. Participants comprised 16 Bedouin and Jewish educators. Data collection included interviews and observations of project meetings and staff meetings. Project leaders reported challenges related to (1) intergroup differences in environmental viewpoints, knowledge, and learning styles, (2) embedding issues of environmental justice in the multicultural discourse, and (3) Bedouin–Jewish interactions. To address these challenges, the leaders separated groups for some learning activities, directed discourses, adopted bilingual teaching strategies, and emphasized unique socio-cultural characteristics. Their level of satisfaction with most of their decisions is high. They avoided discussing the broader socio-political Arab–Jewish conflict. The findings highlight dilemmas that multicultural environmental projects pose and suggest the need to adopt critical pedagogy of place to address such dilemmas and challenges. The findings also emphasize the need to better prepare educators for environmental education in multicultural settings.

Academic Colleges in the Galilee: Platforms for Inter-Group Relations

This study examines the changes that took place in intergroup relations between Jewish and Arab students in three Israeli colleges in the northern Galilee, as reflected in common traits and behaviors resulting from their shared undergraduate studies. The study investigated whether and how the joint study experience influenced learning and affected intergroup relations for 461 students at different stages of their undergraduate studies. The students answered a four-part questionnaire on cooperative behavior, personality, and demographic traits, and one open question on personal feelings in the college. Results showed that year of studies was a significant factor in creating social ties with other groups, particularly during the third year when students from all groups were more willing to collaborate on study-based activities. A significant effect of object of evaluation (the group evaluated) was found, but not for most other variables and respondents. We conclude that the changes in social relationships are mainly functional. However, change in the attribution of personality traits may be a long-term process and may not be achievable under one academic roof. Possibly this difficulty stems from the Jewish-Arab conflict that hovers in the background and hinders any significant change in perception of character traits.

Sleeping on the enemy’s couch: Psychotherapy across ethnic boundaries in Israel.

This paper discusses the impact of the Jewish-Arab conflict on overt and covert layers of therapeutic encounters that take place across boundaries between the two nationalities. We refer mainly to the prevalent case of Arab patients treated by Jewish therapists. We discuss the implications of intergroup tension, cultural differences, and status disparities on the therapeutic dynamics. Our focus is on the effect of these variables on the processes of transference and counter-transference, on perceptions and interpretations of behaviors, on sources of resistance, and on the inability of therapists to take the patients’ perspective. Side by side with the psychoanalytical approach, the article utilizes various social-psychological theories, mainly social identity theory, in deriving insights regarding tensions between the interpersonal/therapeutic dimension and the intergroup dimension. Recommendations for improving therapies in the discussed case are suggested.

The language of racism. Textual testimonies of Jewish-Arab hostility in the Israeli Academia

The persistent Jewish Arab conflict is present in every aspect of life in Israeli society and its echoes penetrate the everyday reality of higher educational institutions. Feelings of mutual hostility among Arab and Jewish students, faculty and administration are common experiences on Israeli campuses. This article analyzes two textual expressions of this mutual resentment which were circulated in 2011 in Tel Hai College, Israel. One of the texts was produced by Muslim Arab student association and the other by a Zionist Jewish organization. Both groups are present on every campus in Israel. Despite the significant difference of the political location occupied by each organization in the Israeli power structure, we argue that these texts share similar attitudes to the conflict and parallel operational strategies. The paper demonstrates the attempts by these texts to encourage the mutual hostility between Jews and Arabs by employing racist and violent discourse. The article tries to explain the silence of the college administration and faculty in the face of these racist acts, subsequently outlining a vision of a responsible academia which will banish any acts of racism.

Looking at their side of the conflict? Effects of single versus multiple perspective history teaching on Jewish and Arab adolescents’ attitude to out-group narratives and in-group responsibility

In the last decade, the issue of teaching the Palestinian perspective on the Jewish–Arab conflict in Israeli schools gave rise to considerable debate and competing curricula. A quasi-experimental study compared the effects of these competing approaches on learners’ attitudes to out-group narratives and perceived in-group responsibility (IR). A total of 176 Israeli Jewish and Arab participants were randomly allocated into teaching approaches differing in method of engagement with historical narratives (single authoritative narrative, empathetic dual narrative, and critical analysis of conflicting sources). Results revealed effects for teaching approach and majority–minority status. Engagement with a single authoritative narrative decreased interest in out-group perspectives while empathetic engagement with out-group and in-group perspectives increased it, though the effect was more pronounced for members of the Arab minority than for those of the Jewish majority. Among Jewish participants, an empathetic teaching approach led to a decrease in perceived IR while the critical approach led to the opposite outcome. The trends were inverted for Arab participants. Engagement with historical perspectives also moderated the impact of interest in out-group perspectives on acceptance of IR. Educational implications point to the harmful effects of enforcing a single narrative in conflicted societies and to the beneficial outcomes of multiple perspective teaching.

Kindergarten Study-Unit: Development and Nurturing Awareness of the Existence of the Arab ‘other’ and the Existence of the Jewish ‘other’ by Means of the Arts at the Preschool Level

In this paper, we describe an educational initiative which is a studyunit for kindergarten: “Development and nurturing awareness of the existence of the Arab ‘other’ and the existence of the Jewish ‘other’ by means of the arts at the preschool level”. The unit was written as part of my graduate studies for the M. Ed. degree at the Oranim College under the guidance of Prof. Moshe Itzhaki. It evolved from my need to affect change in matters that I am responsible for in the educational field where I work. In Israeli society, the Jewish-Arab conflict is prominent (Bar-Tal, 2007). There is discernible cultural withdrawal between Jewish society and Arab society, while the two separate education systems deepen the alienation between them from very early childhood. The lack of curricula about the “other” leaves the students in a void of ethnocentric ignorance that is filled by other entities which are supportive of the development of the conflict ethos (Yona, 2007). The proposed study unit exposes the children to the narrative of another cultural group that exists in the social reality in which they are raised. This is achieved using the arts and through intercultural meetings between Jewish children and Arab children. This initiative is implemented in my kindergarten since three years, thanks to a grant received from the Fund for Innovative Teaching and thanks to an Encouragement Award from the Oranim College. As part of the initiative children from various sectors meet together and interact in Hebrew and Arabic, learning about a different culture. This process leads to experiential and meaningful learning that has received support in both the Jewish and Arab communities.

“BUY LOCAL” OR “BUY JEWISH”? SEPARATIST CONSUMPTION IN INTERWAR PALESTINE

AbstractThe article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other “buy local” movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often “buy Jewish” campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab–Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used to attribute ethnic qualities to objects and define them as either “Jewish” or “foreign” are analyzed with particular attention to the conceptual contradictions in the definitions of a Jewish product, which were shaped by economic conflicts and the diverse political conceptions of Jewish identity. The study of separatist consumption sheds new light on the “dual society” thesis, revealing the deep grip of separatist approaches across multiple layers of the Jewish middle class in the Yishuv.

‘Look, Each Side Says Something Different’: the impact of competing history teaching approaches on Jewish and Arab adolescents’ discussions of the Jewish–Arab conflict

There is growing interest in the impact of Jewish and Arab historical narratives on intergroup relations and conflict. A randomized placement comparative study set out to examine it empirically. Conventional-Authoritative official narrative, Empathetic Dual narrative, and Critical-Disciplinary multiple-source teaching interventions were designed around the topic of the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. Seventy-five Jewish and 85 Arab Israeli adolescents were placed in each of the three different approaches to teaching history and in a control group. Following the learning intervention, participants from both communities were paired by condition, and discussed the causes and possible solution of the refugee problem. Dominance and agreement in discussion were analyzed, revealing a significant effect of teaching approach. Findings show discussions in Empathetic Dual narrative, and Critical-Disciplinary feature a lower degree of dominating discourse by the dominant group. Conventional-Authoritative approach featured lower frequency of agreement on solution for the problems caused by the conflict, compared to control and multiple perspective teaching approaches.

Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (review)

Reviewed by: Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine Louis Fishman Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine, by Michelle U. Campos. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 343 pp. During the last decade, scholars working on Palestinian history have opened new doors to our understanding of late Ottoman Palestine—more specifically, the pre-World War era and the subsequent transition from Ottoman to British rule. The recent works emerging on this period present realities which offer an innovative way to approaching the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and shine light on a period before Jews and Arabs were locked in violent competition. In Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth Century, Michelle U. Campos provides a study of Palestine's different religious communities, not as separate, but rather as united in their support of the Young Turk revolution and as Ottoman citizens. Ottoman Brothers rethinks intercommunal relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Ottoman Jerusalem and challenges preconceptions about the Jewish-Arab conflict in its early years. Campos believes scholars need to look beyond the conflict and focus on the phenomenon of what she terms "civic Ottomanism," a "grassroots imperial citizenship project that promoted a unified sociopolitical identity of an Ottoman people struggling over the new rights and obligations of revolutionary political membership" (3). This work in facts transcends Palestine and provides a model that will perhaps be useful in understanding the Empire's other multi-ethnic/religious cities, such as Izmir, Salonica, and the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. The author is particularly enlightening in demonstrating the ties between Muslims, Christians, and Jews by looking at such networks as the Freemasons and members of the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling party of the Young Turks. As she suggests, Freemasonry rapidly took hold in Ottoman Palestine's urban centers, with its membership almost equally divided among the three religious groups, a trend which was widespread throughout the Ottoman Empire. It was especially attractive to the Young Turks. Beyond these intellectual fraternities, Campos draws a captivating [End Page 190] picture of Jerusalem as a shared urban space. She focuses on how the municipality worked to create a modern city for all of its citizens, developing projects such as streetcars, running water, and proper sewage facilities. Furthermore, Jews worked together with Muslims and Christians, concluding business deals and creating economic networks. One point on which Ottoman Brothers leaves ample space for future research is the community she actually dedicates the bulk of her book to, the Jewish community. In her chapter on Ottomans of Mosaic Faith and elsewhere in the book, Campos poses important questions regarding the parameters of Zionism and divisions within the Jewish community, whether Sephardi, Ashkenazi, or Zionist/anti-Zionist, and how these groups perceived the future of their mutual spiritual homeland. It is this point, however, that I find problematic, since the division of the Jewish community into "Zionist" and "anti-Zionist" does not necessarily correlate with their perceptions of their roles as Ottoman citizens. In my view, more research is needed on Zionist Jews, such as the members of the Second Aliyah, who together with the local Jews of Palestine abandoned organized European Zionism for cultural Zionism. These included Gad Frumkin (who she briefly focuses on) and David Ben-Gurion, who formed the Hebrew Students Society in Istanbul following the 1908 Young Turk revolution. Furthermore, while many Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire may have expressed their opposition to Zionism, they still openly supported Jewish migration to their homeland. Likewise, questions concerning early Palestinian identity need to be further scrutinized, such as how the majority of the Arab population fit into the picture of "civic Ottomanism," as this seems only to have captured the attention of specific groups of urban intellectuals. Further, more light needs to be shed on the fact that parallel to this newfound brotherhood she presents between Muslims, Christian, and Jews, among the urban intelligentsia under discussion, new bonds were being created between Muslims and Christians together with the peasantry, with an exclusive sense of Palestinianism emerging that did not include the Jewish community. By the same token, the local Jewish community never...

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Sanctions, Censure and Punitive Censorship: Some Targeted Hebrew Translations of Arabic Literature from 1961-1992

Translations of Arabic literature into Hebrew have been marginally present in Israeli Jewish culture for the last 62 years. Their production and reception have been affected by the ongoing political Jewish-Arab conflict which depicts the Arab as a threatening enemy and inferior to the Jew. This depiction has often led to fear and apprehension of Arabic literary works. The present paper focuses on several cases where Hebrew translations of Arabic prose and poetry were publicly condemned as a potential threat to the stability of Israeli Jewish sociopolitical creeds and state security. The various sanctions imposed on the texts and their writers (though not on their translators!) by Israeli authorities, the Israeli Hebrew press and public opinion are described and explained. These sanctions were subsequently lifted after Israeli Jewish writers rose up against censure and censorship by raising their voices in protest.

Najib ‘Azuri’s Le reveil de la nation arabe: A Reception History

Scholars have situated Najib ‘Azuri’s famous book Le reveil de la nation arabe (1905) primarily within the context of two major historiographical debates: the origins of Arab nationalism and the beginnings of an Arab-Jewish conflict in twentieth-century Palestine. Both these interpretations have not only largely failed to take ‘Azuri’s social and political context into account but have also relied on highly selective readings of the text itself. In tracing the reception of ‘Azuri’s work, this article seeks to shed light on the trajectory of Western scholarship about the Middle East over the past fifty years. It also attempts to take a closer look at the text of Le reveil and suggest some of the ways the book could be used not as a source for the perennial foci of the Middle East’s recent political history but as a snapshot of the concerns of a mobile, Western-facing, Levantine Arab Christian intellectual elite during the final decades of Ottoman rule.

Ottoman brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in early twentieth-century Palestine

In its last decade, the Ottoman Empire underwent a period of dynamic reform, and the 1908 revolution transformed the empire's 20 million subjects into citizens overnight. Questions quickly emerged about what it meant to be Ottoman, what bound the empire together, what role religion and ethnicity would play in politics, and what liberty, reform, and enfranchisement would look like. Ottoman Brothers explores the development of Ottoman collective identity, tracing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews became imperial citizens together. In Palestine, even against the backdrop of the emergence of the Zionist movement and Arab nationalism, Jews and Arabs cooperated in local development and local institutions as they embraced imperial citizenship. As Michelle Campos reveals, the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine was not immanent, but rather it erupted in tension with the promises and shortcomings of civic Ottomanism.

Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies (review)

Reviewed by: Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies Zachary Lockman Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies, by Baruch Kimmerling. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 431 pp. $55.00. In the 1980s a diverse group of young Israeli scholars who eventually came to be called the "new historians" began to publish work that, drawing on recently opened archives in Israel and elsewhere and putting to good use the graduate training they had received in universities outside Israel, effectively challenged [End Page 179] many key elements of the much-mythologized narrative of Zionist and Israeli history that until then had been hegemonic in Israeli scholarly circles and among the Israeli-Jewish public. They were joined in this endeavor by non-Israeli historians (including a growing number of Palestinians) as well as by scholars from a range of other disciplines and fields, among them sociologists and specialists in cultural and literary studies. The cumulative outcome of this evolving project of sociohistorical critique and research over the past two decades or so has been not only the demolition of the old Zionist narrative but the elaboration of a much more complex, nuanced, empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated, historically grounded, and (perhaps most important) non-nationalist understanding of Zionist and Israeli history. This understanding has among other things been characterized (or so I would argue) by an explicit or implicit recognition that neither the character and trajectory of the Zionist project in Palestine nor the development and contours of Israeli society can be adequately understood unless one takes into account how both were profoundly shaped by their interactions (including of course conflict) with indigenous Arab society in Palestine. Baruch Kimmerling played a key role in launching this critical trend. Born in Romania in 1939, Kimmerling immigrated to Israel with his family in 1952 and, despite having to contend with the cerebral palsy he had contracted in childhood, went on to complete a doctorate in sociology at the Hebrew University, where he subsequently spent most of his academic career; he died in 2007. As a young academic Kimmerling grew increasingly dissatisfied with the dominance of modernization theory in academic Israeli sociology and with his former teachers' and mentors' lack of interest in exploring how the ongoing Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine had helped shape Israeli society. As he notes in the autobiographical preface to Clash of Identities, his first two books—Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics and Zionism and Economy—did not draw much attention when they appeared in 1983. But they were in fact ground-breaking for their use of the paradigm of the "frontier" to analyze Zionist land acquisition, land use and economic policies and practices in Palestine, and their sociopolitical consequences for Israeli society. More broadly, these two books helped open up important new avenues for research by showing how much one could learn by not treating Israeli society as utterly sui generis or as simply the product of the dynamics of Diaspora Jewish history. Instead, Kimmerling productively compared Israel with other places in which the societies established by settlers of European origin were deeply marked by their complex encounters and interactions with indigenous peoples and societies, including North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, and South Africa. In many [End Page 180] respects, then, Kimmerling's early work helped clear the ground for much of the critical scholarship that would follow, and his own later research would prove equally important in advancing Israeli sociology. Clash of Identities brings together a selection of the very wide-ranging work that Kimmerling published between 1983 and 2005, and in so doing it demonstrates the great breadth and depth of his contribution to his field. Chapters address the formation of Jewish society in Palestine, the development of a Palestinian national identity, contestation about Jewish identity in Israel, militarism in Israel, the impact of conflicting conceptions of national security, peace and citizenship on Israeli politics, society and culture, and much else. Along the way, but especially in the Oslo and post-Oslo years, Kimmer-ling frequently drew on his academic expertise to intervene in, and illuminate, political debates in Israeli-Jewish society, in the hope...

Gandhi's Views on the Resolution of the Conflict in Palestine: A Note

This historical analysis of Mahatma Gandhi's views on the Jewish–Arab conflict in Palestine at the time of the British Mandate distinguishes four phases. The initial involvement is Gandhi's intervention in support of the Caliph's temporal rule in Palestine. The second deals with a secret offer of mediation addressed to the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. The third is his highly controversial letter to ‘The Jews‘. In the last phase, Gandhi chose to remain silent, but is alleged to have stated that the Jews had a good case and a prior claim, a statement that seems at variance with previous attitudes. The question is raised as to how far Gandhi's views were consistent. They are explained by the evolving political context in India, as well as in Palestine, the two being intertwined in an ever tightening knot. Gandhi's commitments are revisited and clarified in the light of new research.

The Dispute in Mapai over “Self-Restraint” and “Purity of Arms” During the Arab Revolt

Two of the basic terms used in defining the principles, thought, and action of the Jewish side in the Jewish-Arab conflict are havlagah (self-restraint) and tohar ha-neshek (purity of arms). They became catchwords replete with ideological and political meaning in the Zionist movement in general and especially in the Labor movement during the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. This article intends to locate the precise historical context within which these terms emerged and to outline the political and ideological dispute associated with them.