Israeli Identity Research Articles

From Periphery to the Moderates: Israeli Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East

From Periphery to the Moderates: Israeli Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East

From Diaspora to Nationalism via Colonialism: The Jewish “Memory” Whitened, Israelized, Pinkwashed, and De-Queered

In this essay, I argue that the concept of queerness, defined as resisting static productions of knowledge and being, constitutes a threat to the monolithic narrative of Zionist Diasporic memory. As the Jewish memories were forced into one homogeneous linear narrative, the Israeli identity was whitewashed and branded; it differentiated itself from the Arabness of Mizrahi Jews, and served to suppress the histories of migrants and Palestinians alike in favor of absolute sovereignty and settler colonialism. This process, which I call de-queering memory, debilitates cross-temporal diasporic narratives, and celebrates a pinkwashed identity of white Jewishness.

Making up 'national trauma, in Israel: From collective identity to collective vulnerability.

We sketch a variety of institutional, discursive, professional, and personal 'vectors', dating back to the 1980s, in order to explain how 'national trauma' was able to go from a cultural into a professional category in Israeli mental health during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-2005). Our genealogy follows Ian Hacking's approach to transient mental illnesses, both illustrating its fertility and expanding its horizon. Thus, we also explore the dynamics that developed in the Israeli mental health community with the advent of 'national trauma': while the vast majority of Israeli psychologists and psychiatrists did not adopt the category, they embraced much of its underlying logic, establishing a link between Israeli identity and the mental harm said to be caused by Palestinian terror. Remarkably, the nexus of national identity and collective psychic vulnerability also prompted the cooperation of Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli mental health scholars seeking to explore the psychological effect that the minority status of Israeli Palestinians had on them during the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

Between the Backpack and the Tent: Home, Zionism, and a New Generation in Eshkol Nevo’s Novels Homesick and Neuland

The relationship between travel and home are given new life in the novels of Eshkol Nevo. Framing the contemporary reality in narratives that explore Zionism, travel, and social activism, Nevo offers a conception of the new generation of Israeli writers torn between an Israeli identity, with its increasingly inclusive and polyethnic state, and a Jewish identity with its diasporic roots.

Hebrew in English: The New Transnational Hebrew Literature

Although the historiography of Hebrew literature has often retrospectively portrayed its development as an Israeli phenomenon, recent scholarship has shown the ways in which Hebrew literature’s origins lie largely in the Diaspora. Two new books by Israeli writers written in English, Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid and Ayelet Tsabari’s The Best Place on Earth , return to the diasporic roots of Hebrew literature by deliberately placing themselves as a challenge to the Zionist narrative of literary historiography. This article elaborates the ways that these books use English to explore the transnational nature of Hebrew literature and participate in a larger literary conversation about globalization. Their linguistic experimentation is also tied to the thematic challenges they pose to foundational Israeli mythologies, like that of the New Hebrew Man, through an emphasis on marginal characters and themes. This literature, which I call “Hebrew in English,” stands as a critique of hegemonic constructions of Israeli identity, nationalism, and culture.

Tel Aviv Mizrah

Before immigrating to Israel, first-generation Iraqi Jews were deeply attached to their identity as Mizrahi Jews. Their mother tongue was Arabic and they had grown up in an oriental environment. Therefore, it was not easy for them to adopt the Euro-Israeli identity that the dominant Ashkenazi-European stratum in Israel compelled them to accept. Despite strong Westernizing tendencies in Israeli society, the first generation of Iraqi Jewish immigrants maintained strong links to the Iraqi customs and traditions they had acquired in Iraq, particularly with regard to the musical folklore and oriental cuisine. On the other hand, second-generation Iraqi Jews were more familiar with Israeli society than their parents; they grew up in Israel and learned Hebrew in Israeli schools along with Ashkenazi Jews and other ethnic groups. This paper establishes connections between the historical realities of Iraqi Jewish immigrants and the literary representation of their world in the trilogy Tel-Aviv Mizrah (Tel Aviv East) written in 2003 by the Iraqi Jewish author Shimon Ballas, through a comparison of Ballas's literary vision with the historical realities of Iraqi Jewish identity in Israel over the course of two generations.

The Death of Blessed Memory: A Crisis in Secular Israeli Identity in Yaakov Shabtai’s “Departure”

Yaakov Shabtai’s “Departure” seems, at first glance, only to chronicle the illness and death of an unnamed grandmother living in Tel Aviv, as witnessed through the eyes of her grandson. The grandmother, an observant Jewish woman with socialist politics, liberal social views, and many friends, differs strikingly from her Israeli family. They are wholly secular Jews who disavow belief in religion. They observe yahrzeits, Jewish religious festivals, and holy days only as long as grandmother lives. They discontinue all Jewish observance the moment the grandmother dies, thus allegorizing a complete intergenerational break in Jewish identity. The story ends with the melancholic narrator realizing that he has no memory of the date of his grandmother’s death. This article contends that this seemingly simple narrative has profound historical and referential meanings. The story functions as an allegorical critique of escalating social and religious divisions in Israel, as well as the implications of the loss of Jewish religion on Jewish identity. “Departure” reveals that the process of dis-identification and post-Zionism begins with the family: symbolically with the figure of the grandmother, whose peaceful, sociable identity stands in peril of becoming removed from the possibilities of her mode of Jewish being influencing future generations.

The Relation between the Critical Period for Accent Acquisition, National Identity (Jewish/Israeli) Assimilation, and Language skills

This study examines the correlation between Jewish/Israeli identity, pronunciation levels, the critical learning age period, and accent. The sample pool consisted of fifty Russian immigrant students and ten native-born Israeli citizens who were administered a 3-part questionnaire composed of questions relating to linguistic ability, heaviness of accent, and sense of Israeli identity. Accent was assessed by oral tests in which the participants were asked to perform various verbal tasks”such as repeating pseudo-words, pronouncing words with phonetic omissions, vocabulary tests, and listening-comprehension tests. Israeli identity was evaluated by a 23-item identity questionnaire. The findings indicate that a heavy accent is linked to a weaker sense of Israeli identity, the critical-age period also playing a central function in influencing vocabulary retention and learning skills. These parameters corresponded to the age of arrival in the country. No correlation was obtained between heaviness of accent and linguistic learning skills.

On <em>Hasamba 3G</em>: Newer Kinds of Jews

On Hasamba 3G: Newer Kinds of JewsHasamba 3G. 201 0, 201 3. Created by Dror Nobelman and Ruti Zaid. Directed by Dani Sirkin. Produced by Eylon Ratzkovsky. Israel: HOT Channel 3.Hasamba 3G is a cable television series that ran for two seasons in Israel (HOT 3, 2010, 2013). The show is a televised sequel to an original children's book series also titled Hasamba (The Absolutely Absolute Secret Bunch) in Hebrew. The book series, written by former Palmach member Yigal Mossinson, ran from 1949 until author's death in 1994. The books tracked adventures of a group of Israeli teenagers-members of first generation-who fought hostile Palestinians and British Mandate forces in formative years of Yishuv and shortly after independence. The adventures of original group's children were recounted in a sequel book series about second generation of Hasamba. The televised sequel, Hasamba 3G, written by Dror Nobelman and Ruti Zaid, recounts adventures of grandchildren of members of original group, are still around to help newest recruits save nation.Hasamba 3G rewrites Zionist history and represents a new stage in nationalism. Zionism on show is seen not solely as a national movement influenced by core values of Enlightenment but as one that seeks to redefine Judaism itself. The relationship among nation, state, and religion presented on show reflects profound changes in Israeli society and a new vision for its future.Attitudes toward religion in most of Hasamba books and episodes of television series fluctuate. In book series, 1G young fighters were intended to represent best of and split from galuf-that is, Diaspora and its institutionalized and folk religion. The New Jews-secular, manly, and autochthonous-did not want anything to do with shtetl. Although most of so-called New Jews had received a traditional education and grown up in Orthodox families, they preferred to relate to Judaism as a culture and to Israel as a nation; they turned their backs on practices and religiosity. Thus Hasamba 1G, in accordance with this generation's doctrine, never cared much about religion.The second generation of Israelis grew up in an educational system that already did not teach Jewish bookcase, apart from Bible, which was presented as a quasi-mythical history book. Typically this generation knew little about Judaism. They were born secular Israelis; they grew up that way and took pride in this heritage. But from 1990s on, a subterranean stream of Hebrew writings began to reveal what Ruth Kartun-Blum called the burden of secularity1 and a secret yearning for numinous. This development, however, was not reflected in Hasamba 2G, which, after all, was written by first-generation Mossinson.The third generation oflsraelis, influenced by New Age and minority politics, became more open to religious precepts that only lurked in subconscious of their parents and grandparents. The show plays with five key concepts relating to and Israeli identity today: who is a Jew?; the land of our fathers; the chosen people; the holy man; and Judeo-Christianity. All five trace changes in Israeli culture with regard to religion and state.Who Is a Jew?When this question arose in early 1950s in Knesset (the Israeli parliament), it was widely debated, for it would determine could automatically become a citizen of newly established State of Israel. According to Israeli law of return, one is regarded a Jew if he/she was born to a mother or father, had a grandmother or grandfather, or had converted to Judaism.2 The Knesset was trying to interpret religious law in context of a secular polity. What it came up with was a half-breed law that mixed religion and nationalism; it acknowledges as Jews people who, according to law (Halakha), are not Jewish, because they were not born to a mother. …

Remaking the City: Archaeological Projects of Political Import in Jerusalem's Old City and in the Village of Silwan

Since the mid-90s, archaeology has been a powerful tool for changing landscape and narrative in the Old City of Jerusalem and the village of Silwan – the "Historic Basin of Jerusalem". As archaeological excavations relate directly to the appropriation of land and the interpretation of the past, they are intimately tied to the Israeli-Palestinian political conflict in Jerusalem.Archaeological excavations are tied to the political conflict in Jerusalem from two distinct aspects: one is the appropriation of land to be excavated, which can be interpreted as a means of control over a certain place or area. The second is the focus on the past, which can be seen as an instrument for appropriating the past to one particular group and its narrative.Located at the northern entrance to the Palestinian village of Silwan and just a few dozen meters from the Old City Walls and the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount, the Givati Parking Lot archaeological site is the future location of a tourist center known as the "Kedem Center”. The complex is expected to be joined with the "City of David" archaeological park and the Western Wall plaza via existing underground spaces and tunnels that will be dug out between them. If the current plans are carried out, the building will have a significant impact on the landscape between the Old City and Silwan, and on the way in which this area is perceived.In the area of the Old City and the village of Silwan are a number of ancient underground complexes that have been studied during the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. In recent years, new excavations have exposed these complexes and opened them for the public. The underground trails allow visitors to avoid the need to confront the present (mainly Palestinian Muslim) reality of Jerusalem. Instead, they create a visiting experience in a parallel, imagined, Jerusalem: the city of the Kingdom of Judah and the Second Temple period. In the Israeli narrative these are the most meaningful periods for the formation of Israeli identity and the connection of the Jewish people to the land.

A ‘Historical Commitment’? Identity and Ideology in Israel's Attitude to the Refugee Convention 1951–4

The paper examines and debunks the conventional wisdom that Israeli foreign policy incorporates a ‘historical commitment’ to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Particular Jewish interests and universal values, it is argued, led the newfound Jewish state to initiate the Convention, participate in its formulation, and promote its acceptance; Israel was, additionally, among the first states to sign and ratify the Convention. Against the backdrop of present-day discourse and competing perspectives on the Jewish motif in Israel's foreign policy, the paper traces the process of Israel's ratification of the Refugee Convention. Israel's attitude to the Convention, it finds, was characterised by delay, disinterest, indifference, even hostility. Moreover, neither particular interests nor universal values satisfactorily explain Israel's attitude. Rather, this attitude was the outcome of competing visions of Israel's identity and ideological interpretations of Jewish nationalism. Ideologically, the Convention validated yet at the same time also undermined Israel's particular identity as the state of refuge of the Jewish people and its ideological raison d’être in the world system. This ambivalence allowed Israeli diplomats to construct a logic of exemption under which the particularity of Israel's very existence as the state of refuge of the Jewish people represented complete performance of its universal obligations under the Convention.

The Intersubjective and Social Unconscious are Inseparable

Culture within the analytic group is intersubjective. The matrix includes intense interpersonal events. The drama taking place within the group may be defined as intersubjective. The drama occurring in the multi-dimensional complex of society as a whole may be defined as the social unconscious. The connection between these two dramas is unbreakable. In this article I describe a traumatic event that occurred in the here and now of the group, an event which revived past traumas of patients and conductor alike. The events belong to the wide social context. In the second part of the article I expand upon some aspects of my Jewish and Israeli identity. I describe some childhood memories connected to the Holocaust, and I refer to the way that these memories influence my interventions in my role as a group analyst.

Homecoming as a dead end: place and displacement in the new Israeli documentary film

This article analyzes three recently produced documentaries that critically contemplate accepted Israeli self-perceptions, The Flat (2011), Blood Relation (2009), and Fragments (2011). The different themes of these films notwithstanding, they share a similar narrative structure and key visual metaphors in order to probe the boundaries of Zionist identity in a similar way. The films’ use of place – and transitions in-between places – as indication for identity crisis appropriates familiar Zionist clichés and undermines the ideological premises they propagate. While genuinely expressing critical voices, however, these films also display the evaporation of criticism from the Israeli identity discourse. By the end of these films, protest transforms into a melancholic nostalgia, which leads the filmmakers both to oppose existing norms and to abstain from offering alternatives for them.

Between Others and Brothers

Some fifteen years ago, the Israel Museum exhibition “To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel” featured a photograph by the Israeli artist Meir Gal entitled “Nine Out of Four Hundred: The West and the Rest.” At the center of the photograph was Gal, holding the nine pages that dealt with the history of Jews in the Middle East in a textbook of Jewish history used in Israel's education system. As Gal viscerally argued, “these books helped establish a consciousness that the history of the Jewish people took place in Eastern Europe and that Mizrahim have no history worthy of remembering.” More damningly, he wrote that “the advent of Zionism and the establishment of the Israeli State drove a wedge between Mizrahim and their origins, and replaced their Jewish-Arab identity with a new Israeli identity based on European ideals as well as hatred of the Arab world.”

Opposed or Intertwined? Religious and Secular Conceptions of National Identity in Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The State of Israel seems to be caught in a protracted conflict – not only with the Palestinians, but also between secular and religious variants of national identity. Moreover, both conflicts intersect: While the secular population is held to be the liberal, peaceful part of Israeli society which is ready for a compromise with the Palestinians, the religious nationalists are identified with hawkish policies and the settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories. This common perception reflects the secularist assumption that religion and politics can be analytically distinguished and should be factually separated for the sake of democracy, pluralism and peace. Yet such an approach neglects the dense interrelations and overlaps between religious and secular nationalism throughout the history of the Jewish state. A different analytical perspective which treats these seemingly opposing conceptions of national identity as closely intertwined reveals how they have concurred in promoting and legitimizing the overriding raison d’état of the Jewish state as well as the occupation and settlement of the Palestinian territories.

Ethno‐religious Fundamentalism and Theo‐ethnocratic Politics in Israel

AbstractThis article addresses the transition of a fundamentalist confrontational religious ideology into an assertive, religio‐nationalist ideology by the case of the ethno‐Ultra‐Orthodox (haredi) Shas party in Israel. Alongside the haredi proclivity towards insularity, we also detect, in recent decades, two new trends within the haredi mainstream. First, we see increasing numbers of haredim (Ultra‐Orthodox Jews) integrating into different frameworks that are situated outside of the haredi enclave: the job market, the army, welfare and charity organizations, and more. A second trend, which I will elaborate upon here, is a fundamentalist religious interpretation of elements of Israeli national identity. This trend seeks to view Jewish law, in its orthodox interpretation, as a source for the conservation and maintenance of Jewish identity in Israel: firstly, through the turning of haredism into a dominant factor in the religio‐communal arena in Israel; and secondly, through assuming responsibility for demarcating the boundaries of the Jewish collective.

Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities ed. by Dalia Ofer, Françoise S. Ouzan, and Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz (review)

Reviewed by: Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities ed. by Dalia Ofer, Françoise S. Ouzan, and Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz Beth Cohen Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities Edited by Dalia Ofer, Françoise S. Ouzan, and Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. 306pp. As scholars recognize the importance of the postwar era and the aftermath of the Holocaust, the canon of the genocide’s literature has expanded in the twenty-first century to include the period after 1945. Studies of the displaced person camps and reception of survivors in Europe, Israel, and abroad are now respected topics of scholarly analysis. With the publication of Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities, editors Dalia Ofer, Françoise Ouzan, and Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz contribute a welcome and nuanced volume on survivors’ lives after the Holocaust to this growing area of Holocaust studies. Holocaust Survivors begins with an overview by Zeev Mankowitz in which he asks the reader to consider the Hebrew term She’erit Hapletah as “Saving Remnant” rather than the commonly accepted “Surviving Remnant.” The former suggests survivor agency and renewal, an interpretation that echoes throughout the book. Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz’s, “The Identity of Women in the She’erit Hapletah” follows, which raises the question of gender and survivors’ postwar choices. After these two essays, the collection is organized loosely around geography, with three chapters situated in Europe followed by four chapters on Israel and one each on the United States, Buenos Aires, and Australia. The final chapter explores the demographics of the worldwide survivor population. While the individual essays are generally thought provoking and well researched, it is the sum total that offers a sweep of survivor experience and provides the framework for a rich comparative analysis. Over the course of the collection certain themes emerge and recur that connect the individual studies. One, for example, is gender, which is not surprising given Baumel-Schwartz’s and Ofer’s previous work. This is the starting point for Baumel-Schwartz’s “The Identity of Women in the She’erit Hapletah: Personal and Gendered Identity as Determinants in Rehabilitation, Immigration, and Resettlement,” where she explores the lives of three women, all avowed Zionists during the war, and scrutinizes the role gender played in the postwar choice of two to remain in Europe. Micha Balf’s contribution, “Holocaust Survivors on Kibbutzim: Resettling Unsettled Memories,” looks at collective and individual memory in three kibbutzim, noting the role of women in creating more personal connections to memory, for example, memorial stones in their kibbutz cemeteries with [End Page 146] family names. While not the main thrust of her chapter, Ofer also notes the role of gender in the work that female adolescents on kibbutzim eschewed. The subject of postwar silence and commemoration is key to Balf’s work as well as Hana Jablonka’s “Holocaust Survivors in Israel: Time for an Initial Taking of Stock,” in which she challenges the conventional wisdom that survivors in Israel chose to remain silent after the war. Balf also acknowledges the role that myth making played in early commemorations. He quotes kibbutz lore that recalls Antek Zuckerman’s insistence as a surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and founding member of Kibbutz Lochamei Ha-gheta’ot (“Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz”) that the revolt be the focus of the annual Holocaust commemoration, even though the majority of members were not ghetto survivors and did not necessarily share his feelings. Both Balf and Yablonka note the linking of Holocaust commemorations to displays by the fledgling state’s military that encouraged Holocaust memory as part of a new Israeli identity. In “New Roots for the Uprooted: Holocaust Survivors as Farmers in America,” Françoise Ouzan also points out that survivors held early memorial programs in their US farming communities. Although the authors cast a wide net, four of the contributors explore the experience of survivors in Israel. On the one hand, this feels somewhat unbalanced; on the other, it gives the reader a deeper understanding of the complexity of survivors’ resettlement in Eretz Yisrael. Yablonka, for example, argues that survivors shaped national culture while Ofer’s “Mending the Body, Mending the Soul” highlights the importance of the Zionist...

Consuming Palestine: Palestine and Palestinians in Israeli food culture

This article sets out to study the role that Palestine and the Arab-Palestinians have had on Israeli national identity through the examination of Israeli food culture. Food culture played an important part not only in the emancipation of European Zionist-Jews who immigrated to Palestine before 1948 but also in the creation of the Israeli national identity, including its collective memory, national psyche and desired political aspirations. However, it is impossible to understand Israeli food culture, and Israeli identity and popular culture, without taking into account the environment in which and the people among whom it developed. In that respect, and as argued hereafter, for political and ideological reasons the Palestinian direct contribution to Israeli food culture, and by extension national identity, has been expunged or overlooked. Early Zionist encounter with the Arab-Palestinian people and their culture contained a mixture of romanticisation, admiration and imitation. However, with the Zionist aim of substituting the Arab-Palestinian people by creating a separate political and economic society, the process of encounter changed to replacement, appropriation and deliberate forgetting and rewriting of the past. In relation to Israeli food culture, the Arab-Palestinian food element was marginalised, blurred and reinterpreted as belonging to the Zionist settlers, or as being brought to Israel by the Mizrahi-Jews. In other words, Israeli food culture ‘needed’ the Arab-Palestinian culture as a source of imitation and localisation, but at the same time desired its de-Palestinianisation, together with the general idea of a separate Jewish state.

Ethno-national Identity and the New Age World View in Israel

This article focuses on the concept of identity by juxtaposing New Age philosophy and nationalism in the Israeli context. Based on my qualitative research, I deconstruct the Israeli New Age discourse on ethno-national identity and expose two approaches within this discourse. The more common one is the belief held by most Israelis, according to which ethno-national identity is a fundamental component of one's self. A second and much less prevalent view resembles New Age ideology outside Israel and conceives of ethno-national identities as a false social concept that separate people rather than unite them. My findings highlight the limits of New Age ideology as an alternative to the hegemonic culture in Israel. The difficulty that Israeli New Agers find in divorcing hegemonic conceptualizations demonstrates the centrality and power of ethno-national identity in Israel.

Druze linguistic landscape in Israel: indexicality of new ethnolinguistic identity boundaries

The Druze community in Israel is a distinct religious community currently undergoing important ethnolinguistic shifts. The government's implementation of an official policy has led to the deconstruction and reshaping of the Druze political and national identity to one that differs substantially from that of the Palestinian minority in Israel. In this study, I argue that the visibility, vitality and appreciation of Hebrew in the Druze linguistic landscape are indicative of new ethnolinguistic boundaries of the Druze identity in Israel. The fact that the Druze in Israel are dispersed throughout the Galilee and Mount Carmel area and experience varying levels of language contact as well as divergent economic relations with their Palestinian–Israeli and Jewish–Israeli neighbours, suggests that one cannot expect uniformity in the Druze linguistic markets or the processes of social, cultural and linguistic identification. This study will show that Hebrew has become a dominant component of the linguistic repertoire and social identity of the Druze in the Mount Carmel area since it has become the first choice of communication as the linguistic landscape indicates.