Israeli Public Discourse Research Articles

The Nakba in Israeli history education: Ethical judgments in an ongoing conflict

ABSTRACT The Nakba, which means “the catastrophe” in Arabic, is the most controversial historical topic in Israeli history education. Despite the Nakba’s significance to the history of Israel and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, until the last decade it has traditionally been excluded from Israeli public discourse and school curriculum. This article analyzes the different types of ethical judgments about the Nakba included in authorized curricula, teaching resources, and national exams currently used in the Israeli Jewish public education systems. Our data analysis reveals that the Nakba is explicitly mentioned in 40% of teaching materials used in Israeli Jewish schools, and the teaching materials include six types of implied ethical judgments. We developed a typology of three ethical justifications commonly utilized in the teaching materials: denial; acknowledging suffering, limited responsibility; and complex engagement. While some of the teaching materials promote critical engagement with the Nakba, others continue to deny its existence or minimize the negative consequences experienced by Palestinians. This research highlights how political beliefs influence the ethical judgments made in teaching materials and the importance of teaching about ethical judgments for helping students critically engage with and understand difficult histories.

Population growth as the elephant in the room: teachers’ perspectives and willingness to incorporate a controversial environmental sustainability issue in their teaching

Although population growth (PG) is acknowledged as a major factor that drives the global environmental crisis, this issue is rarely included in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) because of its controversiality. This mixed-methods study explores the perspectives of Israeli ESE and non-ESE teachers regarding PG as an environmental risk, their willingness to include PG in their teaching, the frequency and foci of including it, the reasons for including or disregarding it, and the factors that predict their inclusion of it. The findings reveal that the deep-rooted pronatalist culture in Israel and a national pronatalist agenda impact the education system. It was found that an academic background in ESE had limited impact on teachers’ perceptions concerning PG or on their willingness to discuss its controversiality in class. Teachers’ attitudes related to PG demonstrated socially, culturally, and politically oriented disavowal justification regarding the negative impacts of rapid PG. The absence of PG from school curricula and the Israeli public discourse have been reported as major reasons for disregarding it in schools. To encourage teachers to incorporate this controversial issue in their teaching, and successfully confront dominant pronatalist cultures, they need ongoing support. Stakeholders in the education system must bring the population debate into schools as part of human efforts to mitigate environmental degradation and as an opportunity to strengthen tolerance among students towards diverse opinions.

“Lessons from Northern Ireland” in Israeli Public Discourse: The Politics of Analogies in Conflicted Societies

The Northern Ireland 1998 Good Friday Agreement has generated a global industry of “lessons from Northern Ireland” to other conflict situations. While a lively polemical literature has been debating what exactly should these lessons be and whether they could be validly exported, this article adopts the prism of the “politics of comparison”: examining why and how certain actors appeal to analogies with other societies, and the causes and functions of such appeals. The article explores the case-study of the resonance of the Northern Ireland analogy in Israeli public discourse. It identifies and analyses four themes: the analogy with Northern Ireland is used as an argument for hope; as a source of peacemaking models; as self-justification, to deflect blame; and to legitimize narrow local interventions. The article contributes to literatures on the politics of comparisons, and political dynamics in the context of intractable conflicts.

Public legitimacy of healthcare resource allocation committees: lessons learned from assessing an Israeli case study

BackgroundThe National Health Insurance Law enacted in 1995 stipulates a list of health services to which all Israeli residents are entitled. For the past 20 years, the list has been updated annually, as a function of a predetermined budget, according to recommendations from the Public National Advisory Committee (PNAC), which evaluates and prioritizes candidate technologies. We assessed the legitimacy of this resource-allocation process as reflected in Israeli public discourse and its congruence with the accountability for reasonableness (A4R) framework.MethodsA qualitative analysis of public discourse documents (articles in the print media, court rulings and parliamentary debates (N = 119) was conducted to assess the perceived legitimacy by the Israeli public of the PNAC. Further content analysis of these documents and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders (N = 70) revealed the mainstays and threats to its legitimacy. Based on these data sources, on governmental documents specifying PNAC's procedures, and on data from participant observations, we assessed its congruence with A4R’s four conditions: publicity, relevance, revision and appeals, regulation.ResultsThe PNAC enjoys ongoing support for its legitimacy in Israeli public discourse, which stem from its perceived professional focus and transparency. These strengths are consistent with the A4R’s emphasis on the publicity and the relevance conditions. The three major threats to PNAC's legitimacy pertain to: (1) the composition of the committee; (2) its operating procedures; (3) its guiding principles. These perceived shortcomings are also consistent with incongruencies between PNAC's work model and A4R. These findings thus further support the empirical validity of the A4R.ConclusionThe analysis of the fit between the PNAC and A4R points to refinements in all four conditions that could make the A4R a more precise evaluative framework. Concurrently, it highlights areas that the PNAC should improve to increase its legitimacy, such as incorporating cost-effectiveness analyses and including patient representatives in the decision-making process.Hebrew and Arabic abstracts for this article are available as an additional file.

The good Arab: conditional inclusion and settler colonial citizenship among Palestinian citizens of Israel in Jewish Tel Aviv

AbstractDominant majorities often use idealized categories to validate the ‘goodness’ and deservingness of minority citizens. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, this category is the ‘good Arab’. Since its origins in early Jewish settlement of Palestine, it has become a powerful and controversial metaphor in Israeli public discourse. As an experienced condition of limited inclusion, the ‘good Arab’ exemplifies the Palestinian dilemma of accessing socioeconomic opportunities in Jewish Israeli spaces that stigmatize and fend off their ethnonational identity. Combining a historical genealogy of the ‘good Arab’ with ethnographic research among Palestinians in Tel Aviv, this article shows how a historically evolved logic of settler colonial control and indigenous erasure continues to define liberal frameworks of conditional citizenship and inclusion. Theorized through the emerging concept of conditional inclusion, these insights open up new avenues for analysis and comparison in anthropological debates surrounding indigenous struggles, settler colonialism, urban inclusion, and citizenship.

‘You dribble faster than Messi and jump higher than Jordan’: The art of complimenting and praising in political discourse

Abstract Communicating admiration and appreciation in public discourse are two important tasks for political actors who wish to secure relationships and advance models for civic behavior. Our goal in this study is to understand how political actors signal their desire to please addressees and advance political sociability by way of manifesting positive judgment towards others. On the basis of 241 utterances praising and complimenting others’ words and deeds, we identify the topics, patterns, and functions of these speech acts and the processes and struggles they evoke in Israeli public discourse. We conclude by discussing the role of positive evaluations in demarcating the boundaries of proper conduct in political communities and the ways the distinctive logic of politics is integrated with specific cultural speaking styles in influencing how members of the Israeli political community signal their appreciation and affect for other members’ skills, performances, and personalities.

Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence

Feminist Studies 45, no. 2/3. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 541 Rabab Abdulhadi IsraeliSettler ColonialisminContext: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence The fifty-one-day Israeli military assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014 resulted in the deaths of 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children , as well as 11,231 injured and at least 500,000 displaced. This event destroyed infrastructure and the livelihoods of an already impoverished and vulnerable Palestinian population.1 As the Israeli military intensified its aerial and artillery bombardment, rhetoric employing sexualized , racist, Orientalist and Islamophobic tropes also intensified in Israeli public discourse. This included images on social media such as the portrayal of Gaza as a half-naked woman in a niqab with a caption calling on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to rape her. Public banners sponsored by the City Council of Or Yehuda declared, “Israel Defense Forces soldiers, Or Yehuda’s residents are with you! Pound ‘their mothers ’ and return safely to your own mother!” At the completion of their two-year military service, Israeli men printed T-shirts that depicted a bullseye pointing at a pregnant Palestinian munaqqaba (a woman wearing a niqab) with the caption, “1 shot, 2 kills,” implying that the Israeli soldier can kill both the woman and her unborn child. Such violent 1. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Occupied Palestinian Territory, “Key Figures on the 2014 Hostilities: Data Featured in the Report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict,” June 23, 2015, https://www.ochaopt.org/content /key-figures-2014-hostilities. 542 Rabab Abdulhadi Islamophobic discourse was not new to Israel nor exceptional among settler colonial regimes. However, the overt, public, and unapologetic audacity was new, especially when examined against Israel’s historically careful management of its public image, especially on the international stage.2 In this essay, I analyze this new climate of casually violent rhetoric , which includes Facebook and Twitter posts. This emerging discourse signals that the public space for oppositional expression in Israel has shrunk, turning it into even more of a police state—a reality that Indigenous Palestinians have experienced in both the past and present, but of which the majority of Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis are only recently becoming more aware.3 Since its inception in 1948, Israel has made the promotion of its image as an egalitarian and inclusive society a top national security priority . This task was historically assigned to the Israeli cabinet, Israel’s intelligence agencies—the Mossad and Shin Beit—as well as the Israeli military.4 More recently, Israel created the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and assigned experienced Mossad officials to the task.5 Furthermore, Israel’s Zionist supporters among US Republicans, Democrats, and the Christian right have raised tens of millions of dollars specifically to 2. David Reibstein, “Ido Aharoni: Why Brand Capital Is Part of National Security ,” Knowledge@Wharton Podcast, May 1, 2015, https://knowledge.wharton .upenn.edu/article/why-brand-capital-is-part-of-national-security. 3. By Indigenous, I refer to the totality of the Palestinian people, whether they became refugees after being expelled from their land by Zionist militias when Israel was founded in 1948 or they live under Israel’s colonial rule in the areas defined as such in 1948 and 1967. 4. Ali Abunimah, “Israel Using ‘Black Ops’ Against BDS, Says Veteran Analyst,” Electronic Intifada, September 5, 2016, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs /ali-abunimah/israel-using-black-ops-against-bds-says-veteran-analyst; Asa Winstanley, “Israel Reveals ‘Delegitimization Department’ to Spy on Boycott Activists,” Electronic Intifada, August 27, 2015, https://electronicin tifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/israel-reveals-delegitimization-department -spy-boycott-activists; Asa Winstanley, “Mossad Proxy Faked Violent Facebook Anti-Semitism,” Electronic Intifada, January 16, 2016, https://electronicintifada .net/blogs/asa-winstanley/mossad-proxy-faked-violent-facebook -anti-semitism; Jonathan Cook, “Did Banned Media Report Foretell of Gaza War Crimes?” Electronic Intifada, April 15, 2010, https://electronicintifada .net/content/did-banned-media-report-foretell-gaza-war-crimes/8788. 5. Itamar Eichner, “Government Creates Joint Program for Rapid BDS Response,” Ynetnews, December 29, 2017, https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L5063599 ,00.html. Rabab Abdulhadi 543 salvage Israel...

Critical reading of talkbacks discourse as separatist integration: on the Israeli 2004 Football Cup victory

The historic victory of the Arab Bnei Sakhnin Union Football Club in the 2004 Israeli State Cup finals triggered an active public discourse about the Arab sector’s position in Israeli football and in Israeli society in general. The study’s premise is that the victory of an Arab club in the Jewish state’s National Cup games and the events surrounding it outside the football pitch are thematically inseparable. Content analysis of talkbacks on the Ynet online news site revealed the Israeli public discourse about the difficulties and complexities involved in the integration of Arab citizens in a Jewish state.

Competing Etiologies of Trauma and the Mediation of Political Suffering: The Disengagement from the Gaza Strip and West Bank in Secular and Religious Therapeutic Narratives

AbstractThe forced evacuation of Jewish Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank in August 2005 (known as the Disengagement) was an extremely controversial political event in Israeli public discourse. This article seeks to explore how political differences in the public sphere were reflected in the professional narratives of mental health practitioners. Based on my field notes documenting the processes of the narration of the Disengagement within various professional settings of Israeli mental health experts, I compare the narratives produced by practitioners who hold different ideological positions vis‐à‐vis the settlement project. I contend that the political views of practitioners expressed in causal explanations of the Disengagement experience and in the modes of mediation of this experience in order to mobilize empathy with evacuated settlers. By focusing on the professional narration and mediation of the experience of a controversial group of sufferers (“the bad victims,” as they might be called), this research highlights the importance of the anthropological perspective on therapeutic empathy as a socially mediated reflection of the moral experience of health practitioners.

The politics of being insulted

Scholars of politeness admit that being insulted may be the result of the hearer’s assumptions about the other’s behavior and may not necessarily relate to the actual words or intentions of the speaker. Thus, it is surprising to find only a few accounts of how people are doing “being insulted” or of how, in public discourse, responses to insults are strategically employed for various ends. In this paper, I analyze the meta-pragmatics of “hurt feelings” in order to understand how speakers do things with emotions and the role of hurt feelings in political democratic discourse. By examining instances in which public figures have stated their feelings of insult in Israeli public discourse (1997–2012), I show both how hurt feelings are strategically employed to protest against politically unacceptable acts, and how public actors sometimes explicitly refuse to be insulted, shifting the meaning of what is perceived as an insult by side-participants into a compliment. I conclude by discussing the consequences of manifesting hurt feelings in political discourse.

“ARAB ANTI-SEMITISM DEBATE”: THE BIRTH OF NEW ANTI-SEMITISM IN PUBLIC AND ACADEMIC DISCOURSE IN ISRAEL

This paper aims to identify the emergence of the concept “new anti-Semitism” in both public discourse and academic research in Israel. Our main argument is that the new anti-Semitism has emerged in tandem with changing values within Israeli society, primarily the adoption of a mythic-traditional perspective. This historical review focuses on description of a key event: United Nations Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. We argue that increasing adherence to Jewish tradition goes hand in hand with the assimilation of Jewish myths regarding anti-Semitism. Scholarly discourse about new anti-Semitism is presented through critical study of Shmuel Almog's anthology Sin'at Yisrael ledoroteiha (A History of Hatred of Israel). This study is the first to be published that discusses an updated view of anti-Semitism in Israeli public discourse and academic research, emphasizing how the State of Israel has become its object.

Deep Securitization and Israel's “Demographic Demon”

Securitization theory's core contention—the social construction of security as a “speech–act”—is perceptive and productive, yet insufficiently attentive to societies engulfed in profound existential uncertainty about their own survival. Such societies are immersed in what I call “deep securitization,” whereby widespread public discourses explicitly frame threats as probable, protracted, and endangering the very existence of the nation/state. Under deep securitization, to politicize is to securitize, sectors intensely intertwine, political legitimacy's object is the polity/identity itself, and securitization steps are typically nonbinary and nonlinear. Empirically, if some securitizations are deeper than others, Israel's is one of the deepest. In this study, I examine this exceptionally apt, though little-examined, case for securitization theory. Israeli public discourse abounds with “existential threats,” invariably depicting the Jewish people and polity as endangered. The article analyzes the securitization of demography and its linkage to geography and democracy in the Israeli-Jewish discourse and praxis.

Lawyers in Warfare: Who Needs Them?

In recent years, governmental lawyers, in Israel (and in other placed around the world) have become increasingly involved in issues relating to warfare. This manifested itself in both the greater use of legal counsel in real time and in the growth of retroactive enforcement (investigations and prosecutions). The purpose of this short article is to respond briefly to some of the main criticism of this phenomenon, as it is raised in Israeli public discourse.

Wife, Lover, Woman: The Image of Hansi Brand in Israeli Public Discourse

Wife, Lover, Woman: The Image of Hansi Brand in Israeli Public Discourse

A Jewish State? Controversial Conversions and the Dispute Over Israel’s Jewish Character

The purpose of this article is to outline the ideological and theological controversy over the issue of conversion to Judaism in Israel that has remained on the agenda of the Israeli public discourse since its founding (1948). Through an analysis of the viewpoints of three central political and religious leaders on this issue, this article aims to demonstrate that beyond fierce political debate, the disagreement lies within what each leader views as adequate interpretations of Jewish history and religion in the modern State of Israel. This comprehensive dispute illustrates that the three sides cast the meaning of Israel’s basic character differently—as either a Jewish secular nation-state, a Jewish religious state, or rather a combination of the two. Thus, the controversy over conversion highlights the fact that Israel has not yet succeeded in forming a consensual conception of its definition as a “Jewish state.”

The Conflict of Conscience and Law in a Jewish State

Jewish philosophers in the State of Israel have been forced by reality to think about questions in political theory that in the past lacked practical relevance. The question of the morality of obedience (or disobedience) to the laws is a topic that is present in the classical sources. It is a frequently discussed topic in Israeli public discourse, especially when it comes to the question of the duty to serve in the army. The article examines the concept of conscience in the wider context of the ethics of Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Although Leibowitz was reluctant to attribute any positive characteristics to the conscience in his theoretical works, he openly supported the activity of the left-wing refusal movements in Israel. The article tries to explain the apparent contradiction between Leibowitzian theory and practice. The article also mentions the works of two Israeli thinkers Daniel Statman and Avi Sagi, who are sensitive to the interplay between Jewish sources and western political concepts. They try to construct a new Jewish definition of conscience and to open the way to the development of other related political and ethical concepts.

The “National Left” in Israeli public discourse

In 2000 the leftist camp in Israel experienced a crisis of meaning and identity. This was the result of the failure of the 2000 Camp David Talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The atmosphere that emerged amongst the Israeli left was one of despair and disillusion, a void of meaning. Recently, however, a new Zionist “national left” discourse emerged, which refutes the idea of peace and reconstructs the ideology of the Israeli left. This paper engages critically with this discourse by deploying a discourse analytical approach, as it draws on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of hegemony as well as semantic analysis, specifically the use of “semantic fields” and “semantic networks”. This paper looks at a variety of public texts, which are exemplary of the “national left” discourse in Israel.

“MASTERY REGAINED”—ISRAELI JEWISH SOVEREIGNTY AND SPACE IN THE ISRAELI NOVEL 1967–1973

This article identifies key characteristics of sovereign Israeli Jewish identity and its relationship with space in Israeli novels and novellas published between 1967 and 1973, in the context of the complicated dialogue between these texts and Israeli public discourse. Interacting with their contemporary public discourse, the canonical novels and novellas of the period—Michael Sheli [My Michael] by Amos Oz (1968), Nemalim [Ants] by Yitzhak Orpaz (1968), and Hapardes [The Orchard] by Benjamin Tammuz (1972), create an Israeli space in which a Jewish sovereign is surrounded and threatened by an Arab enemy, and as a precondition to his survival, must renew his sovereignty and declare a state of emergency to confirm it. As opposed to the besieged space constructed in contemporary discourse and in these canonical novels, David Shahar's novels of the period construct a fluid space in which contrasting identities can shift and replace each other with no existential threat.

Memory, Land, and Identity: Visions of the Past and the Land in the Jewish Spiritual Renewal in Israel

This study focuses on the creative reconstruction of Jewish history via a spiritual New Age perspective. Using the case of the Jewish Spiritual Renewal (JSR) narrative of the past and the land, this article aims to shed light on some of the cultural transformations which are taking place in contemporary Israeli public discourse, especially the reconfiguration of the association between Jewish history, contemporary spirituality, and the land. The JSR narrative recovers, reinterprets and remolds Jewish history in order to legitimize the claim for a spiritual renewal of the present. By offering new perspectives on the Jewish past and history, the JSR attempts to validate its post-modern and spiritual version of Judaism as an original, uncorrupted form of Jewish thought and practice. The comparison of the JSR narrative with the classical Zionist and Canaanite narrative reveals that the JSR spiritual narrative replaces particularistic and nationalistic values regarding the land with universal and global values concerning nature and the environment, in order to create a universal Jewish spirituality that caters to the identity needs of contemporary non-Orthodox Jewish Israelis.

Overcoming the Trauma of the Holocaust

Overcoming the Trauma of the Holocaust