Israeli National Identity Research Articles

The Burmese road to Israeli-style cooperative settlements: The Namsang project, 1956–63

This article deals with the Namsang project in Burma, run in the late 1950s and early 1960s to engage demobilised soldiers in establishing a series of cooperative villages modelled on Israeli settlements with Israeli technical and other assistance. The article explores the Burmese modernisation project in the context of the unification of the country and the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement. In its examination of the Namsang project, this article offers a microscopic view of the translation of planning practices to other contexts in general, but also asks some more specific questions, such as how Burmese and Israeli national identity, memory, and history defined the project agenda, what the planners’ ambitions were, and why the project failed.

Inside Outsiders: Comparing State Policies Towards Citizens of Palestinian and Kurdish Descent in Israel and Turkey

ABSTRACT This study compares state policies of Israel and Turkey regarding their citizens of Palestinian and Kurdish descent, respectively. It then explores the reasons for the differences and points at the consequences for Israel’s and Turkey’s democracy. Israel’s citizens of Palestinian descent and Turkey’s citizens of Kurdish descent have faced systematic discrimination. While Israel never considered assimilating its Palestinian citizens into mainstream Israeli national identity, considering Jewishness as its essential and indispensable element, Turkey engaged in assimilation policies vis-à-vis its Kurdish citizens, which met with limited success. While applying different methods in defining the boundaries of Israeli and Turkish ethnicity, both Israel and Turkey have refused to view members of these groups as equal citizens. Awarding full citizenship rights has been questioned on accounts of Jewish sovereignty-dilution fears in Israel and of Kurdish self-determination and partition in Turkey. Failing to distinguish their citizens from their trans-border ethnic kin groups and viewing them as part of a transnational community threatening Israeli and Turkish sovereignty, Israel’s citizens of Palestinian descent and Turkey’s citizens of Kurdish descent have been turned into ‘inside outsiders’. This has deprived them of fundamental constitutional rights and limited the prospects of democratic consolidation in both states.

The National, the Diasporic, and the Canonical: The Place of Diasporic Imagery in the Canon of Israeli National Art

This article explores Jerusalem-based art practice from the 1930s to the 1960s, focusing particularly on the German immigrant artists that dominated this field in that period. I describe the distinct aesthetics of this art and explain its role in the Zionist nation-building project. Although Jerusalem’s art scene participated significantly in creating a Jewish–Israeli national identity, it has been accorded little or no place in the canon of national art. Adopting a historiographic approach, I focus on the artist Mordecai Ardon and the activities of the New Bezalel School and the Jerusalem Artists Society. Examining texts and artworks associated with these institutions through the prism of migratory aesthetics, I claim that the art made by Jerusalem’s artists was rooted in their diasporic identities as East or Central European Jews, some German-born, others having settled in Germany as children or young adults. These diasporic identities were formed through their everyday lives as members of a Jewish diaspora in a host country—whether that be the Russian Empire, Poland, or Germany. Under their arrival in Palestine, however, the diasporic Jewish identities of these immigrants (many of whom were not initially Zionists) clashed with the Zionist–Jewish identity that was hegemonic in the nascent field of Israeli art. Ultimately, this friction would exclude the immigrants’ art from being inducted into the national art canon. This is misrepresentative, for, in reality, these artists greatly influenced the Zionist nation-building project. Despite participating in a number of key Zionist endeavours—whether that of establishing practical professions or cementing the young nation’s collective consciousness through graphic propaganda—they were marginalized in the artistic field. This exclusion, I claim, is rooted in the dynamics of canon formation in modern Western art, the canon of Israeli national art being one instance of these wider trends. Diasporic imagery could not be admitted into the Israeli canon because that canon was intrinsically connected with modern nationalism.

Israeli-Ness or Israeli-Less? How Israeli Women Artists from FSU Deal with the Place and Role of “Israeli-Ness” in the Era of Transnationalism

The Israeli art field has been negotiating with the definition of Israeli-ness since its beginnings and more even today, as “transnationalism” has become not only a lived daily experience among migrants or an ideological approach toward identity but also a challenge to the Zionist-Hebrew identity that is imposed on “repatriated” Jews. Young artists who reached Israel from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) as children in the 1990s not only retained their mother tongue but also developed a hyphenated first-generation immigrant identity and a transnational state of mind that have found artistic expression in projects and exhibitions in recent years, such as Odessa–Tel Aviv (2017), Dreamland Never Found (2017), Pravda (2018), and others. Nicolas Bourriaud’s botanical metaphor of the radicant, which insinuates successive or even “simultaneous en-rooting”, seems to be close to the 1.5-generation experience. Following the transnational perspective and the intersectional approach (the “inter” being of ethnicity, gender, and class), the article examines, among others, photographic works of three women artists: Angelika Sher (born 1969 in Vilnius, Lithuania), Vera Vladimirsky (born 1984 in Kharkiv, Ukraine), and Sarah Kaminker (born 1987 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine). All three reached Israel in the 1990s, attended Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and currently live and work in Tel Aviv or (in Kaminker’s case) Haifa. The Zionist-oriented Israeli-ness of the Israeli art field is questioned in their works. Regardless of the different and peculiar themes and approaches that characterize each of these artists, their oeuvres touch on the senses of radicantity, strangeness, and displacement and show that, in the globalization discourse and routine transnational moving around, anonymous, generic, or hybrid likenesses become characteristics of what is called “home,” “national identity,” or “promised land.” Therefore, it seems that under the influence of this young generation, the local field of art is moving toward a re-framing of its Israeli national identity.

Contesting the nation: negotiating national narratives and the Jewish settlements

AbstractWhy and how does national identity reopen for contestation? Existing theories argue that institutional design, social ties or elite manipulation alter the saliency and nature of national identity. These theories view the ethno‐nation as homogenous and shaped vis‐à‐vis other groups. However, I argue that we should examine the re‐emergence of nationalism as an intra‐national struggle between groups with different saliency and understandings of national identity: new issues can raise the importance of national identity for some members of the group but not others. Moreover, members develop diverging understandings of fundamentals of national identity such as citizenship, borders and the role of religion. To support the theory, the paper utilises original not yet studied archival materials to show that struggle over Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories led to contestation of the saliency and meaning of Jewish Israeli national identity. Specifically, I analyse letters individuals sent to leading government officials in the early days of the settlements and show that settlement supporters tied the issue to Zionist ethos, injecting new content into Zionist identity. Meanwhile, national identity did not rise in importance or alter in meaning for settlement opposition. The method reveals individual understandings of national identity and points at broader societal divisions.

Joint Jewish and Muslim Holy Places, Religious Beliefs and Festivals in Jerusalem between the Late 19th Century and 1948

Whereas the conflict over Palestine’s’ holy places and their role in forming Israeli or Palestinian national identity is well studied, this article brings to the fore an absent perspective. It shows that in the first half of the 20th century Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem shared holy sites, religious beliefs and feasts. Jewish–Muslim encounters of that period went much beyond pre-modern practices of cohabitation, to the extent of developing joint local patriotism. On the other hand, religious and other holy sites were instrumental in the Jewish and Palestinian exclusive nation building process rather than an inclusive one, thus contributing to escalate the national conflict.

Beyond “Recognition”. The Polish Perspectives on Israeli and Palestinian National Identities: Preliminary Assumptions of Research

The paper aims to provide an overview of the main streams of perception of Israeli and Palestinian national identities by Polish authorities and society, as well as analyze their sources. The study covers the period of time when both of the national identities took shape, that is since the beginning of the mass Jewish migration to Palestine at the beginning of the XXth century until the present time. As the Jews have for a long time been an important part of Polish history and society, Poles have a strong perception of Jewish, and consequently also Israeli, identity. Polish Jews, who played a crucial role in establishing the Israeli state and shaping Israeli national identity, were treated by many Poles as “our Jews”. This perception was conditioned by internal factors, such as social relations, cultural proximity, historical memory or political views. In contrast, a perception of the Palestinian identity from the very beginning was conditioned externally, because it resulted from international political developments and a narrative imposed by foreign powers. Another special feature of the Polish perception of Israeli and Palestinian identity is the fact that public opinion very often differs significantly from the political position of state authorities.

When the private sphere hides from the public sphere: The power struggle between Israeli national identity and football fandom

On 13 May 2012 Israeli sports fans were deprived of one of the season’s most important soccer tournaments, after the scheduling of both legs of the UEFA Champion’s League semi-final matches overlapped with national days of remembrance. A week before, Israel’s sports channels refused to play the first leg of semi-final matches since one of the games coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Day. And, again, a week later, Israeli sports fans were confounded with the same issue, with Memorial Day coinciding with the soccer tournament’s second leg of semi-final games. It is well known that sports spectatorship is a transformative experience through which fans escape their humdrum lives, just as religious experiences help the faithful to transcend their everyday existence. In an era where alternative channels (television, Internet, etc.) are easy to find, we used in-depth interviews with sports fans to learn more about the dilemma of both public and private media expressions and watching and enjoying soccer matches while the Israeli nation is in agony. Findings reveal a whole different viewing experience whereas instead of group watching, cheering and eating together rituals, on a regular match day, an unaccompanied, quiet and even embarrassing experience was marked.

Form follows metaphors: a critical discourse analysis of the construction of the Israeli Supreme Court building in Jerusalem

This article examines critically the role of architecture in the construction of national identity, using the case of the Israeli Supreme Court building. Through critical discourse analysis of texts that accompanied the design and construction of this building, I propose to study the interrelations between the production of the architectural object and the practice of the construction of an Israeli national identity. The existing body of knowledge that supports this article claims that the creation of national identity is a socially constructed process, which involves a variety of practices including education, music, army service, as well as the design of the built environment. It is important to note that the realisation of such practices does not occur as a natural process, but rather as a result of power relations, embodied within the national sphere. Following this line of argument, the paper proposes a critical approach, which aims to move towards the politicisation of the term ‘sense of place’. In this context, concentrating on the Israeli Supreme Court building is not an arbitrary decision, since this institution is at the focus of the Israeli civil arena, and its building became a ‘land-mark’ and symbol of architectural quality. Following the texts written by the architects and critics, I would argue that this building reflects – and thus strengthens – the hegemonic interpretations of Israeli social and cultural reality. This interpretation is characterised by using selective historical and biblical references, in order to create through architecture an ‘iconographic bridge’ into an imagined collective past. However, this bridge reproduces the antinomies that frame Israeli space and transform it into ‘our place’, that is West versus East and Local versus Diaspora.

Is the Center Still Out There?

Jackie Feldman. Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Pp. xix + 307.Shaul Keiner. Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Pp. xxv + 261.Jewish educational tourism is one of the most important innovations in Jewish education in recent decades. Programs in which Jewish teens or young (emerging) adults are taken to a foreign countiy in a group together with a closed itineraiy and a guide and staff in order to achieve educational or identity goals have become veiy popular in the past two decades, with many claims of success. To this date 300,000 American young adults have participated in the Birthright tours of Israel. A similar number of Israeli teenagers have participated in trips to the death camps of Poland sponsored (in the mam) by the Israeli Ministiy of Education.The books under review here provide ethnographies of these two programs. Jackie Feldman's Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag concerns Israeli youth voyages to Poland, and Shaul Keiner's Tours That Bind concerns Birthright tours of Israel. In many ways the books are similar: each derives from doctoral research and is based on participant observation by the author. In addition to studying the respective programs as academic ethnographers, each author served on the staff of these programs. Both books contain extensive introductions detailing their authors' personal involvement and assessment of their experiences. Such an account is, of course, a requirement in contemporaiy ethnography, inasmuch as we became aware in the 1980s that ethnographic accounts are not recorded but rather constructed and that the ethnographer plays an active role in the construction of such ethnographic data. (I am not sure, however, that such a methodological requirement necessarily means that we have to learn exactly how many times and in what circumstances Keiner broke up and got back together again with his girlfriend/wife.) Both books provide historical, institutional, and educational background to the development of the tours. They also provide detailed ethnographic descriptions of the programs together with thoughtful analysis. Both authors are aware that the programs they study are employed to heighten forms of Jewish and Israeli identification favored by political establishments, and they are also aware that the programs are accused of furthering specific but less stated political agendas.Despite these resemblances, these two books consciously employ two veiy different research paradigms and, in the end, describe two veiy different experiences. For Feldman the Israeli youth voyages to Poland are pilgrimagey; for Keiner, Birthright trips are tourism. To one degree or another, each author is aware of the paradigm not chosen; Keiner, in fact, devotes extensive discussion to why he rejects the construction of Birthright as a pilgrimage - a discussion that is in dialogue with Feldman. It would seem, moreover, that the choice of these respective paradigms not only reflects the proclivities of the researchers but also points to characteristics of the respective programs themselves. As such it opens an aperture to a series of questions concerning contemporaiy Jewish life.Feldman's underlying and explicit assumption is that the trips to the death camps in Poland involve an encounter with transcendent meaning. This premise, he makes clear, derives from is own personal encounters with the death sites of the Holocaust, as the son of Holocaust survivors and from his observations of participants of the youth voyages to Poland. At the end of the preface he formulates this in metatheoretical terms:My attachment. . . leads me to eschew theories that would limit human freedom to isolated points of resistance between massive forces of hegemony. To suspect theories that would explain deeply felt experience solely in terms of relations of knowledge and power. …

The Dynamics of Israel's Democratic Tribalism

This article evaluates Israeli national identity and its core founding tenets of Zionism, democracy, and Judaism. For decades, demographic changes and associated cultural and ideological fluctuations have gradually pushed Israel into a national identity conflict, as multiple ethnic and sectarian identity groups have come to promote competing interpretations of the state’s purpose, political nature, and connection to territory. Continued demographic shifts, situated amid the sociopolitical dynamics of what this article will define as Israel’s “democratic tribalism,” will further test the compatibility of the constituent parts of Israeli national identity: the respective roles of Zionist ideology, democratic institutions, and the territory of the historic Jewish homeland.

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.

The De-politicization of Israeli Political Cartoons

This article treats the topic of political cartooning and the evolution of a genre during the early years of Israeli statehood. It focuses particularly on the work of two prominent cartoon artists, Friedel Stern and Kariel Gardosh (Dosh), who made their careers in Israel in the 1950s and ’60s and whose politically charged images have been sanitized over time. It looks at how attitudes towards certain imagery have changed so that political commentary that was seen as relevant and acute during early statehood eventually lost its political edge through historical handling and revision. These two cartoonists provided strong visual symbols of early Israeli national identity, which invariably had political motivations, and yet their legacy as political commentators during a crucial period in Israeli political history is often overlooked.

A Land and Its Dolls: Israeli Souvenirs and National Identity, Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, May–September, 2011; Catalog edited by Shelly Shenhav-Keller and Haim Grossman. Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2011.

A Land and Its Dolls: Israeli Souvenirs and National Identity, Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, May–September, 2011; Catalog edited by Shelly Shenhav-Keller and Haim Grossman. Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2011.

Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity by Jackie Feldman

Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity by <i>Jackie Feldman</i>

Heritage, Nationalism and the Shifting Symbolism of the Wailing Wall*

The article analyzes the transformation of the Wailing Wall area after 1967. The Wall has been considered within an architectural and planning perspective presenting the urban transformations made to underline its ‘eternal’ centrality. The role of the Wall in shaping Israeli national identity has been discussed through the lenses of the recent heritage studies theories. It is argued that Israel needed physical, tangible symbols to sustain its claims on the city and that the reconstruction of the whole area defined as “Jewish Quarter”, and particularly the creation of the large Plaza in front of the Wailing Wall, were meant to give the State of Israel an “incontrovertible” proof of its historic rights on the city.

Israeli identity formation and the Arab—Israeli conflict in election platforms, 1969—2006

This study focuses on the relationship between national identity and intractable conflict. Abdelal’s definition of collective identity that refers to the level of agreement regarding the purposes, practices, relational comparisons with other entities, and narratives that define collective identity was adapted to national identity during intractable conflict and was later applied to Israel’s national identity. A review of the Israeli 1969—2006 election platforms shows that in the 1980s and 1990s significant changes occurred in Israel’s national identity. The most significant changes included: changes regarding the territorial purpose of Israeli identity; changes in practices on who may become an Israeli citizen; changes of perception of the relationship between Israel and the Arabs; and a growing Israeli acceptance of Palestinian identity. Since 2000, following the failure of the Israeli—Palestinian peace process, some components of Israeli national identity have reverted to their original form. The study indicates that the Arab—Israeli conflict triggered changes in Israel’s national identity, but the conflict also seemed affected by changes in that identity. The article connects the changes in Israeli national identity to specific mechanisms and conditions of conflict resolution and reconciliation.

Bnei Sakhnin through the documentary looking glass: telling the story of Arab football in a Jewish state

Hapoel Bnei Sakhnin Football Club made history when it became the first Israeli club representing an Arab town to win the Israeli State Cup in May 2004. As part of a wider study, this essay looks at the documentary films produced in its aftermath. Analysis of these films shows how this unusual story highlights deeply embedded attitudes of the Jewish majority in Israel towards the Arab minority. It further highlights the fact that Israeli football is intertwined with national aspects since Jewish-Arab tensions are never far removed from the long-running and wider Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Israeli national identity is never far removed from a religious (Jewish) identity. Moreover, it shows how a moment of unity between majority and minority quickly fell back to the deep separation of the Israeli national collective. All three documentaries, in varying ways, nevertheless express hope there might still be a chance of a brighter future for Israeli society.

Oriental Jewry and the Holocaust: A Tri-Generational Perspective

This article deals with one of the most dominant elements in Israeli national identity—the Shoah. The paper asks how the Mizrahim in Israel related to it, since for most of them it was a remote historical chapter. The answer is given through an analysis of three generations of Mizrahim—those who lived during the Second World War and immigrated to Israel during its formative years; their children, most of whom were born in the Jewish State and educated in the Israeli educational system; and their grand children. The first generation viewed the destruction of the European Jews with profound compassion, but felt that the Shoah was a chapter in the history of the European Jews. Their children attempted to connect, facing, to a large extent, resentment and alienation. Their grand-children already have the Shoah burnt in their souls—being an integral part of their self-definition as Israelis.

Judges in a Borderless State: Politics versus the Law in the State of IsraelProfessor Gideon Doron teaches in the Political Science Department, Tel Aviv University.

Judges in a Borderless State: Politics versus the Law in the State of IsraelProfessor Gideon Doron teaches in the Political Science Department, Tel Aviv University.