Israeli Politics Research Articles

Israel’s Social Media Elections

Social media has become a major tool to disseminate information, opinions and news, used for political campaigning and offering new opportunities for individuals and politicians alike. The Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, has been particularly aggressive in his use of social media to gather political support. Considered as the great survivor of Israeli politics, that flourished in the atmosphere of social protests and emerged from the old political mechanism, he derives his power from social networks, using them as alternative media to the traditional networks. As the research demon-strates, social media has determined dramatic changes in the balance of po-litical power, and although the main channels of information remain the tra-ditional media, the exposure of the public to social media is accelerating with a wide unmediated public debate. With social media, newcomers in Israeli politics could also create a presence and rise to become renowned politi-cians. It is interesting however, that the veteran politician—Netanyahu—was able to take advantage of disseminate information over the Internet and be-come active on his Facebook page, including engaging Internet users in direct dialogue. The paper examines the use of social media by newcomers and veteran politicians in the last two elections and analyzes the way Netanyahu used social media to accomplish his political goals, including high involve-ment of the public and motivating record-high voter turnout to maintain his own reelection and the domination of the Israeli Parliament by the Likud Party.

Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine by Lital Levy

Reviewed by: Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine by Lital Levy Riki Traum Lital Levy, Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 360 pp. "Who will tell our story? We, who walk upon this night, driven out of place and myth. The myth that could not find a single one among us to testify that the crime had not taken place. If we are not we, then they are not they. But particulars are particulars—the thief's pretext." —Mahmoud Darwish1 Edward Said introduced the idea that postcolonial writers bear their past within them as "re-interpretable and re-deployable experiences in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory taken back from the colonialist."2 His words resonate decades later, in the works of Israeli and Palestinian writers and poets. In many ways, Lital Levy's Poetic Trespass, which studies the inseparable paths of Hebrew and Arabic, starts exactly where the silent native Palestinian or Jewish writer locates the appropriate linguistic "territory" and speaks. Poetic Trespass profoundly identifies linguistic liminality within Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli literature and its interrelation with Mizraḥi literature. It brings together historical moments in which the past is abruptly taken and consequently dies, and the future is yet to be born and is hence questionable. In this context, the nakba, for the Palestinians, and the immigration to Israel, for Jews, are two focal and vivid examples. For Levy, however, this liminal stage creates poetic possibilities that deserve special scholarly attention. Moreover, these experiences have become points of encounter where a literary text meets its other, and historical circumstances generate circles of linguistic identity, by their own merits and crucial impact. The attention that Levy draws to this hyperawareness of language to its Other and to itself, as well as the different representations of this hyperawareness, unveils a crucial aspect in the contemporary Israeli politics of identity. In this context, the book presents Mizraḥi writers and poets who resist the politics of identity by rendering their linguistic identity as an open and heterogenic space.3 Levy then examines different linguistic strategies and practices emerge amid displacement of ethnocentric domain and recreate poetic visions and possibilities. No-man's-land, [End Page 331] a saturated term that becomes a theme in the book, becomes a palpable metaphor of the book's zone of study and exploration; "The cultural space of in-betweenness, encompassing contact zone and no-man's-land" (12). Although Levy anchors the term in its scholarly context, she clearly uses it as a zone and form of resistance and subversion. Poetic Trespass studies the complex multi-layered dialogue between Hebrew and Arabic and the cultural functions and meanings of Arabic in Modern Hebrew literature. This no-man's-land can be seen as the "forsaken zone" between Hebrew and Arabic, where writers and poets wander between the two languages, but also create alternative standpoints and political stances. At the foundation of the book lies the presumption that the migration between Hebrew and Arabic opens new cultural-cum-political "redemptive" possibilities, beyond the narrowly national ones, "where writers transgress the boundaries of language and identity inscribed in sociopolitical codes of the state" (3). This poetic insight is refreshing in itself and requires the clarification of the book's two conceptual axes. The first axis is the "hyperlanguage" that Levy coins and describes as "excessively performative, self-aware literary language" (12). Hyperlanguage is the exact dialogized state between Hebrew and Arabic which anchors the literary works discussed in Poetic Trespass in a wider socio-political concept. It is employed at different levels of visibility, but it illuminates the creative state of mind of its writer, who links "the political and the metaphysical." The second axis is the literature of no-man's-land, the subject of the book, and a literature that emerges in the bilingual interaction between the two languages. No-man's-land, in Hebrew, in Arabic, and in their relationship, evokes simultaneously political and mental intersections while translating the unclaimed and abstract political zone into a palpable and visible literary space, now inhabited by the...

Nationalizing Judaism: Zionism as a Theological Ideology by David Ohana

Reviewed by: Nationalizing Judaism: Zionism as a Theological Ideology by David Ohana Aviel Roshwald (bio) Nationalizing Judaism: Zionism as a Theological Ideology By David Ohana. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. 214 pp. There is no better way to set the scene for a review of this book than with a synopsis of its final chapter (coauthored with Michael Feige), an evocative and illuminating interpretive depiction of David Ben-Gurion's December 1973 funeral. Its key aspects having been planned and scripted by Ben-Gurion himself, the funeral was both intentionally and unintentionally symbolic of many of the key ideological and political issues, challenges, and dilemmas faced by the Zionist project and the Israeli state twenty-five years after independence and just a few weeks after the end of the traumatic Yom Kippur War. The burial location was not in Jerusalem but on the edge of the southern desert, at the site of the study and research center that Israel's first prime minister had created adjacent to his chosen place of residence, Kibbutz Sde Boker. The choice of residence and gravesite alike reflected Ben-Gurion's wish to inspire a new generation of Israeli youths to turn their backs on the comforts of urban living and take up the task of settling the Negev and "making the desert bloom." For Ben-Gurion, there was no contradiction between the assertion of the state's central role in the organization of Jewish national life—the principle of mamlakhtiyut (sovereigntism or statism), which he, more than any other of the late Yishuv's and early state's leaders, had been responsible for articulating and institutionalizing—and Israelis' continued commitment to personal engagement in the settlement and cultivation of the land. Yet even as the graves of David and Paula Ben-Gurion became sites of dutiful pilgrimage for dignitaries and ordinary citizens alike, it was the knitted-kippahwearing members of the national religious movement's offshoot Gush Emunim, not the secular kibbutzniks of Labor Zionism, who were to [End Page 205] take the lead in building new settlements and bedroom communities— and not in the Negev Desert but on the occupied West Bank. Israel was to remain, in some sense, in a state of permanent revolution, but its course was to take a very different ideological direction from that envisaged by its founding father. Or was it so different? Is the explicitly and avowedly religious and messianic nationalism of the disciples of the Rabbis Kook (father and son) who came to dominate the settler wing of the national religious movement marked by underlying continuities with or fundamental differences from what Ohana terms the "Promethean messianism" and secular "political theology" predominant among Israel's founding generation? That is the question overhanging all of the essays included in this collection. As is evident from the very first chapter (coauthored with Ari Barell), Ohana retains great admiration for the daring scope and ambition of Ben-Gurion's plans, first seriously laid out during the Second World War, for the integration of technical expertise, political power, and the pioneering ethos of a mobilized nation to create the infrastructure and political capacity for the intake of an anticipated massive inflow of refugees from Europe (the "Million Plan"). (A version of this plan ended up being implemented in the early 1950s in the context of the flight of Jews from Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa.) This was, as Ohana sees it, a form of political utopianism that was married to a firm, modernist belief in the transformative potential of twentieth-century science and technology. Yet clearly, in the light of Israel's political trajectory over the half century since the 1967 war, Ohana cannot help but wonder whether any form of political theology or "Promethean messianism" is not liable to lend itself to the revival of religious forms of political messianism divorced from a capacity for rational analysis and incapable of a realistic understanding of the bounds of the politically possible (let alone the ethically justifiable). Each of these essays wrestles with these questions through the lens of a prominent Israeli political or intellectual leader's works, or through the analysis of the evolving depiction...

NEW PAGE IN U.S.-ISRAEL RELATIONS. D. TRUMP: EXPECTATIONS, HOPES AND FEARS

The U.S.-Israel relationship has never existed in a vacuum; it has always been part of a broader regional strategy. Israel hoped the 45th president of the United States has ostensibly ended an eight- year deterioration of the U.S.-Israel relationship. He committed himself to pro-Israeli positions, which was welcomed in Jerusalem. However, Trump’s precise policy vis-à-vis Israel is likewise difficult to define. He made problematic statements regarding the issue of foreign aid to US allies, and declared that he would be neutral regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel is still facing more questions than answers. Some are rooted in the uncertainty relating to the new US administration and the implications of that change for Israel’s strategic environment, but many are linked to the Israeli penchant for avoiding decisions that it must make for itself. In the international arena, it is important to rebuild Israel’s status by relying not only on the Trump administration. Some Israeli politicians believe that Trump’s unquestioning support means trouble for Israel. The Trumportunity is by no means a guarantee. The opportunity here is just that, an opportunity.

How Netanyahu’s New Media Policy is Influencing Israeli, American and Global Politics

How Netanyahu’s New Media Policy is Influencing Israeli, American and Global Politics

The Talmud and its relationship to Zionist racism and Israeli politics (study and analysis)

This study focused on clarifying and analyzing the relationship between the book of the Talmud and Zionist racism, which was established in order to build a national home for the Jews in Palestine by expelling the Arab population from Palestine and replacing them with Jews, with the support of the colonial countries. This research also shows the convergence between secular Zionist thought as claimed by the founders The Zionist movement and between fanatic Talmudic Jewish religious thought that calls for the elimination of Arabs, and discrimination between Jews and others by always giving preference to Jews.

The Threat of BDS

The Threat of BDS

Response to Ian Lustick’s ‘The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences’

Response to Ian Lustick’s ‘The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences’

Comment on Ian Lustick’s ‘The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences’

Comment on Ian Lustick’s ‘The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences’

The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences

The collective memory of the Holocaust among Israeli Jews has featured competition among four related but distinct constructions: Zionist Proof-text; Wasting Asset; Object Lesson for safeguarding human rights; and Template for Jewish life. This paper will analyze this competition and the implications of the apparent victory of the Template. While there is a sequence to the changing prominence of these different versions of the Holocaust, each version has enjoyed periods of relative success since World War II. In recent decades, however, the Holocaust as a Template for Jewish Life has emerged as ascendant. Throughout, competition among the four constructions was driven by parochial and temporary political interests and by the unintended consequences of dissatisfactions associated with any one of them. My analysis will trace this competition and those consequences, using them to explain the extreme and highly particular features of current Israeli Jewish collective memory of the Holocaust. The paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of the hegemonic status of this version of the Holocaust for appreciating Israel’s contemporary political predicament.

Pierre Birnbaum. Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist.

Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist is another volume in the Yale University Press “Jewish Lives” series, which publishes concise biographies of Jewish figures who left an imprint upon art, literature, the economy, and presumably also politics. However, excluding some ancient biblical figures and some contemporary Israeli politicians, there are few Jews who could be considered major political figures. Pierre Birnbaum has now written a passionate biography of Léon Blum, best known for his short-lived position as prime minister of the so-called Popular Front in France on the eve of World War II. The book reflects Birnbaum’s deep admiration for the man, and while reading it one gradually learns the reasons for this admiration and comes to share in it. Blum appears here as an eminently honest person, an idealist always ready to fight for justice, a socialist who chose to focus upon the individual, and a Jew openly upholding his identity and standing up for his brethren in times of trial. Birnbaum also describes how he was a true-believing Zionist, while always remaining a patriotic Frenchman fully assimilated into French culture and society.

Collective Trauma From the Lab to the Real World: The Effects of the Holocaust on Contemporary Israeli Political Cognitions

This research tested whether chronic or contextually activated Holocaust exposure is associated with more extreme political attitudes among Israeli Jews. Study 1 (N = 57), and Study 2 (N = 61) found that Holocaust primes increased support for aggressive policies against a current adversary and decreased support for political compromise via an amplified sense of identification with Zionist ideology. These effects, however, were obtained only under an exclusive but not an inclusive framing of the Holocaust. Study 3 (N = 152) replicated these findings in a field study conducted around Holocaust Remembrance Day and showed that the link between Holocaust exposure, ideological identification, and militancy also occurs in real‐life settings. Study 4 (N = 867) demonstrated in a nationally representative survey that Holocaust survivors and their descendants exhibited amplified existential threat responses to contemporary political violence, which were associated with militancy and opposition to peaceful compromises. Together, these studies illustrate the Holocaustization of Israeli political cognitions 70 years later.

Imagining Different Communities: A Comparative Examination of Diaspora and Israeli News and Political Commentary

Imagining Different Communities: A Comparative Examination of Diaspora and Israeli News and Political Commentary

Back to the Land

Back to the Land

Gendering security: The substantive representation of women in the Israeli parliament

The study focuses on the links between gender and national security in the legislative arena in Israel, considering whether men and women legislators prioritize security differently, alongside other thematic policy areas. The centrality of national security issues in Israeli politics makes it a good case study for these questions, as it enhances existing gendered stereotypes. The article examines two competing hypotheses. The first suggests that Israeli female legislators will mostly refrain from addressing national security policy issues, focusing instead on softer policy issues, such as gender equality, education, health, and welfare. The second suggests the opposite, claiming that women legislators in Israel will align themselves with their male counterparts’ set of priorities, focusing heavily on issues related to national security. The study finds support mostly for the former: Israeli female legislators are especially active in policy areas relating to women’s issues and children/family and are less active in regard to national security, a policy area heavily dominated by male legislators.

The Structure of Political Divisions Among American Jews

This paper examines the current structural basis of political divisions among American Jews. Theoretically, the paper is situated in the well-established scholarly tradition of understanding political behavior as rooted in social structural location, with accompanying variations in political cohesion and political division across social groups. Empirically, the paper utilizes data from the Pew Research Center’s 2013 Survey of US Jews to measure and analyze how social divisions based on religion, immigrant status, age, education, income, gender, marital status, region and race are translated into political divisions with respect to both US and Israeli politics. The findings show that religious divisions among American Jews yield the most significant and consistent political divisions across the US and Israeli political measures. Other social cleavages among American Jews also produce political divisions, but to a smaller and less consistent extent than religion.

Israeli Psychotherapy, Politics and Activism: Is There a Way Out of the Trap?

This article examines psychotherapy in context—political, social, cultural and historical. It does so by taking a close look at the Israeli psychotherapeutic community and how it changed over the years. Through this narrative and analysis the author wishes to illustrate how social-political context and professional practices plug into each other. It will be demonstrated how at difficult times when their country faces internal and external hardship and threats, Israeli psychologists have tended to withdraw and, whether unwittingly or not, affirm and support the status quo. This is paradoxical: when mostly needed psychotherapists may become silent and socially or politically passive. A possible way out of this trap, through a change in psychotherapists’ professional position and views, will be discussed. In addition, a politically sensitive alternative will be presented, one that may enable psychotherapists to maintain an independent praxis, which models a proactive and optimistic stance while serving society as agents of personal, social and political change.

The Bibi Sitter and the Hipster: the new comical political discourse

The article focuses on the emergence of a new comical political discourse in the 2015 Knesset elections, in which humour was adopted as a major campaign strategy and senior Israeli politicians took upon themselves the role of comedians in ad clips. The development of such discourse is presented as the culmination of an ongoing process of transformation of the political discourse in Israel since 1977. The process was inspired by the American political and media scenes, as well as by changes in Israel’s media map. Social media played a central role in the new comical discourse, as it was heavily used both for the viral dissemination of the clips and for creating engagement. But even as the affectivity of the videos was apparent in terms of the creation on ‘media buzz’, exposure and web engagement, there is still no proof to its influence on the elections outcome. Furthermore, it raises questions about the ability of the Israeli citizenry to rationally discus crucial issues and to form opinion on them.

Old (Molotov) cocktails in new bottles? “Price-tag” and settler violence in Israel and the West Bank

ABSTRACTIn the early morning of July 31, 2015, masked attackers threw firebombs into two Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Duma, south of Nablus, killing three Palestinian civilians. Contrary to claims by Israeli and Palestinian politicians, this attack was neither an isolated anomaly nor just another incident of settler violence. Instead, it was the latest attack in an important but largely unknown phenomenon called “price-tag,” in which a loosely connected group of young Israelis called “hilltop youth” burn Palestinian mosques and destroy property in hundreds of attacks accompanied by threatening graffiti that references Israeli settlers, outposts, and anti-Arab slogans. Using an original dataset of price-tag incidents and interviews with key actors, we demonstrate that the perpetrators, targets, and strategies of price-tag are different than previous patterns of settler violence. Whereas previous settlers saw the Israeli state as legitimate and largely decided to cooperate with it, the hilltop youth have decided to confront it by using price-tag attacks to deter settlement withdrawals and chain-gang the state into a conflict with the Palestinians. This analysis of the strategic logic of price-tag reveals its potential to shift the political landscape within and between Israelis and Palestinians.

Signs of change in media representation of women in Israeli politics: Leading and peripheral women contenders

The study seeks to examine gender portrayal of Israeli women politicians, and specifically that of candidates for Israel’s parliament on televised news and in print in the elections of 2013. The study is based on an interpretive analysis of all news items wherein the women candidates are mentioned during the month preceding the elections. This study joins recent studies that point to a change in how women politicians are portrayed in the media. Leading contenders succeed in influencing their coverage, and commensurately usually enjoy nonstereotypically gendered portrayal. Moreover, they occasionally seek to make use of hegemonic cultural norms to benefit what they perceive as structuring their positive gendered portrayal. In contrast, the coverage of peripheral contenders suffers from traditional patterns of sidelining. It emerges that peripheral contenders who gain relatively high exposure are portrayed as exceptional based either on their extraordinary other-ness or on the newsworthiness of their campaigns.