Israeli War Research Articles

Gaza and the Limits of Metropolitan Solidarity: Affiliation under Duress

This article explores what Gaza reveals about the extent, depth, and limits of contemporary metropolitan solidarity with Palestine. Focusing on Israel's recent wars on Gaza, I assess how these most explicit and spectacular manifestations of Israel's long-term policies there have been addressed in solidarity discourses and practices. Despite their apparent galvanizing powers, do such discourses and practices also act as sites of marginalization or occlusion? Where do we locate a Palestinian voice within them? My overarching objective in this inquiry is to reconsider solidarity from the standpoint of its beneficiaries, and to question the political, ethical, and cultural ramifications of such in context of the deep time of the Israel-Palestine conflict. In so doing, I freshly illuminate the limitations of solidarity in attending to Zionism as a schema of enforced ethno-nationalist differentiation that has undergirded and legitimated not just the Gaza wars but also the history of the conflict itself.

THE ROLE OF ORGANIZATION OF ISLAMIC COOPERATION AFTER 9/11 INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation based on the concept of the Ummah (Nation) in Quran. They established in 1969 due to Arab Israel wars and aggression on Al-Aqsa Mosque. OIC is the second largest International Organization representing 57 Muslim Countries and the spokesman for the 1.5 million Muslims, where they highlight their problems and develop cooperation and coordination. After 9/11, great change noticed when the war against International Terrorism began and indirectly Muslim Ummah targeted under the shadow of war for peace. In this situation, OIC could serve as an important platform to project an image of the Muslim World and its dynamics at the international level. In this paper discuss the post on 9/11 global politics and the role of OIC. And the OIC strategy with the member states promoting Islamic Unity and International Peace and Security. OIC reviewing the goals through human rights mechanism and support of moderation and modernisation. The research conducted that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation has failed in protecting the requisite demands for Peace and Security within the prevalent International dynamics.

God’s just Gaza war: futurity foreclosed through evangelical apocalypse as orthogonal promise of Eretz Israel

ABSTRACT After the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlement and intensifying with the 2008–2009 Israeli War on Gaza, the border town of Sderot and its surrounding landscape became, for American Christian Zionists, a pilgrimage landscape and therefore a sacred space as it was performed as an event site portending the apocalypse. Christian Zionists interpreted the war and the landscape it took place on as a mise-en-scène of hope: the hollowing out of Gaza in anticipation of Christ’s return. Christian Zionists read the future as history. To explain this, I employ Philip K. Dick’s conceptualization of ‘orthogonal time’. Time and space merge as always already existing prophetic kairos time manifests itself in prophetic space. Watching Operation Cast Lead from pilgrimage landscapes overlooking the Gaza Strip, I conducted a yearlong ethnography before/during/after the 2008/09 war on Gaza with American Christian Zionists. They justified the war through colonial imaginings of terra nullius in three ways: 1) by denying that Palestinians exist as a legitimate national identity; 2) by denying the Palestinians’ ability to reason; and 3) prophetic inevitability. Gaza is therefore interpreted as God’s land and the demise of Gazans – present and future – is not only anticipated and preempted, but will have (already) happened.

"A Violence of Smell": The Smell of War in Israeli War Fiction

"A Violence of Smell": The Smell of War in Israeli War Fiction

European-Israeli Military Relations during Israel Regional Wars (2006-2016)

The study aims to answer the question of the nature of European-Israeli military relations during the period of four wars, particularly in the Middle East region with Israel; one battle with the Lebanese Hezbollah, and three wars on the Gaza Strip. In this view, we partitioned the study into three principal parts: The first part focuses on the nature of European-Israeli relations and provides a historical synopsis by addressing three phases; the first phase from 1949 to 1967, i.e., from the establishment of the State of Israel to the Six-Day War; the second phase from 1967 to 1993, i.e., the period that preceded the peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians, the Oslo Accord; and the third phase from 1993 to 2006, which addresses the period preceding the Israeli war on Lebanon. The second part examines justifications for the military relations between Europe and Israel through a review of the Israeli concerns, the European concerns, and the two sides’ common concerns which stimulate the existence of military relations between them. The third part addresses the areas of armament and military exercises between the EU countries and Israel during the period (2006 – 2016). The study concludes by providing several findings, most prominently, that the European-Israeli military relations were not seriously affected during the Israel regional wars in the period (2006-2016).

Britain Arms Trade in The Middle East During the Arab Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973: A Comparative Historical Review

Britain Arms Trade in The Middle East During the Arab Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973: A Comparative Historical Review

The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security

The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security

The Israel-Lebanon conflict in war cinema: an organisational and comparative analysis

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the organisational aspects of combat as represented in Israeli films about the Lebanon Wars. It analyzes four prominent films that relate to Israel’s engagement in Lebanon from the 1982 war to its operations in the southern security strip. The analysis is augmented by comparison to prominent Israeli war films on the 1973 Yom-Kippur War. These films reflect a common and coherent Military Habitus that originates in the organisational principals that define ‘Israeli National Way of War.’ This analysis offers an alternative viewpoint to interpretations that view war cinema as manifestations of broader national narratives.

Sustainability of the UN Nation-Building Measures in Post-Mandate Countries


 
 
 The first UN peacekeeping mission was authorized in 1948, during the first Arab- Israeli War. Since then, the peacekeeping missions have been established in many countries, with varying mandates. The existing literature on the subject focuses primarily on the changing nature of the UN missions, over the past 70 years. Moreover, there is considerable literature on the factors that pertain to the gaining of a peacekeeping mandate and how the UN resources are utilized to complete the overall objectives. However, the literature is quite limited in the evaluation criteria and frameworks for peacekeeping and nation-building. Furthermore, the minimal existing literature focuses on evaluating the present-time effectiveness of UN missions, based on their mandated objectives. This paper, therefore, aims to address a prevailing gap in the literature by focusing on evaluating the sustainability of the UN missions. The Diehl and Druckman‘s Framework of peace operations evaluation is used to measure the sustainability of the UN nation-building missions. The cases of UN missions in Liberia (UNMIL), El Salvador (ONUSAL), and Timor-Leste (UNMIT) are considered for this purpose. These countries provide some resemblance with their assigned UN mandate, yet differences exist in their cultures, historical backgrounds, and economic situation. This paper concludes by providing retrospective lessons and potential areas of improvements for future UN missions.
 
 

The ‘Juffair dilemma’: Arab nationalism, alignment and ‘national-popular collective will’ in Bahrain

This paper challenges ‘the myth’ of the demise of Arab nationalism after the Arab–Israeli War in 1967 that appears in the scholarship of international relations of the Middle East (IRME). I argue instead that Arab nationalism plays a constitutive role in ideologically linking the issue of Bahrain’s post-colonial state sovereignty and foreign policy on alignment, showing its political salience after 1967 in what I call ‘the Juffair dilemma’: the Al Khalifa regime’s dilemma in aligning with the US after Bahrain’s formal independence. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s ‘national-popular collective will’ to re-conceptualise Arab nationalism, the paper further argues that the impact of Arab nationalism on Bahrain’s alignment was revealed through a political struggle between the Al Khalifa regime and the Bahraini New Arab Left, corresponding to wider regional and international anti-imperialist movements in the context of the Cold War. This struggle manifested Arab nationalism as a non-collective will, in which ideological disconnections existed between ‘the people’ and the regime, in Bahrain. It then created the context where the issue of alignment was related to the contestation of sovereignty and the Palestinian question, which was the source of the Al Khalifa regime’s dilemma in making alignment with the US.

The Bedouins in the Palestinian–Zionist struggle at the beginning of the British Mandate: 1920–1929

AbstractThis article presents the causal factors behind the Arab riots of the 1920s and the reasons some of the Bedouin tribes joined that struggle. It provides an overview of the “Events,” as Zionist historiographers termed the riots—the developing conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews, the methods and resources used by both parties, as well as the responses of the British authorities—from the local, national, and regional perspectives, especially in the political arena. It investigates the political stances that emerged among the local Bedouin tribes regarding the Zionist–Palestinian struggle and the reasons for the diversity of stances: while some tribes took an active part in the events on the Palestinian side, others remained neutral and a few tribes even chose to ally with the Jews, or at least warn them of forthcoming attacks. These different stances consolidated during this period, affecting the events and outcomes of the Great Palestinian revolt that took place in 1936–1939, as well as the conduct of these groups during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

Patients behind the front lines: the exchange of mentally-ill patients in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

The British Mandate in Palestine ended abruptly in 1948. The British departure engendered a complex situation which affected all areas of life, and the country's health system was no exception. Gradual transition of the infrastructure was almost impossible owing to the ineffectiveness of the committee appointed by the United Nations. The situation was further complicated by the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War. We relate for the first time the story of 75 Jewish patients who were left in a former British mental hospital in Bethlehem - deep behind the front lines. Despite the hostilities, there were complex negotiations about relocating those patients. This episode sheds light on the Jewish and Arab relationship as it pertained to mental institutions during and immediately after the British Mandate.

The Jew and the tank: Habit and habitus towards a theodicy of war

Histories of the Arab–Israeli War of 1967 have advanced a curious commonplace. As they have sought to account for the decisive factors in what they treat as a decisive war, soldiers and interpreters of their arguments have tacitly resorted to what Adolf Loos once referred to as a ‘principle of cladding’, or bekleidungsprinzip, in order to explain the successes of Israel’s armored corps. The bekleidungsprinzip is not a military principle but a dictum of fashion, according to which the renunciation of individual affect in dress is presumed to coincide with the emergence of the qualitative advantages of the modern. With little or no explanation to substantiate the relation between dress and success in armored warfare, histories of this war have instead explained that the causes of a decisive victory may have to be found in the relation between uniforms and technical uniformity. This presupposition possesses an intellectual history, in the course of which war intellectuals repeatedly sought to reconcile what they themselves posed as a contradiction between agency and structure by identifying a proper relation between habit and habitus. Elaborated in a series of doctrinal debates concerning the proper relation of the Jew to the tank in the Israel Defense Forces – and in subsequent interpretations of those disputes – the bekleidung argument is more than a mere curiosity of military history. It points, instead, to a theodicy of conflict according to which a reification of this history’s false premises presents itself to view in repeated images of their transcendence.

Consociation for Israel-Palestine

Palestinians do not have much. Even the 22% of the land of historic Palestine that was set aside for Palestinians after Nakba, or the Israeli War of Independence, is under military occupation. This...

Nightmare Poem

Nightmare Poem Joy Arbor (bio) I am startled awake, Grandpa, by your sudden barking in perfect Berliner German, and I am one of your soldiers fresh from the camps standing in formation, your accent turning blood to ice. You resume in Hebrew as we train in the baking sun for a country we can call our own, only the unspeakable holding me up. And then I am you, Grandpa, looking at your men, bone-thin and shadowed with untold sufferings, folded, bleeding into antimatter. What life was in the camps. And then we are both soldiers on a tank, deployed, in an Arab village, fighting a long battle. And after the other army withdraws, I burst through the door of a house, fire in my veins, lightning flash screaming starts and stops. Some villagers hiding give themselves up, we pull out the men, tie their hands together, and shoot them, dumping their bodies in a basin by the village spring. What are we thinking? In a few days the water will taste rotten. But right now I know the four girls ordered to carry water for soldiers are in those empty houses. I wait outside one while it's happening. I don't know where you've gone. And now my son, not even crawling the last you saw him, is grown and firing a gun at a woman with a baby and she's me and in the space between fire and impact, I wake up and my son is still a boy racing cars on the carpet and you are still dead and still all this has never ended. [End Page 190] Joy Arbor A human rights advocate and the granddaughter of a captain in Israel's War for Independence, Joy Arbor joined the Compassionate Listening Project's citizen delegation to Israel and the West Bank in order to listen to people from a variety of perspectives. Poems about her experiences have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Lunch Ticket, and Scoundrel Time, among others. She is also the author of the chapbook, Where Are You From, Originally? (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and the winner of an Academy of American Poet's Prize. She lives with her husband and son in the Thumb of Michigan and blogs occasionally about genocide and racism at https://joyarbor.net/blog/. Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture ed. by Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien

Reviewed by: Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture ed. by Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien David M. Reimers Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien, eds. Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018. Pp. 280. Hardcover $65, paper & ebook $34.95. ISBN 9780815635611, 9780815635796, 9780815654261. Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien have brought together twelve pieces focusing on the relationship of Irish and Jews. A recent outpouring of essays about Jews in Ireland prompted the authors to note that Ireland and Israel (Jews) share, in part, a common history. Both nations were dominated by others (read English and Western powers as well as Arabs for Jews, and English for the Irish) during their long history. Not until the twentieth history did Ireland achieve independence; Israel followed in 1948. After becoming new nations both countries found little peace. For Ireland it was first a civil war, then "the troubles" after World War II. For Israel it was considerably different: four wars with their Arab neighbors have been followed by West Bank settlements that are the center of contention today. Ireland of course borders Northern Ireland, but this conflict is considerably less violent than the Israeli wars against the Arabs surrounding Palestine. For Israel no easy solution is in sight. Indeed, in many ways Israel lives as an armed nation, looking to the United States for its main support. For Ireland the present situation is less dire but it is not clear what the future holds for Ireland with Brexit looming: it is uncertain what the impact on the border will be if Great Britain withdraws from the Common Market. It is important to keep in mind the major differences between the two nations as well as the fact they share a common history. The history outlined above forms a background for this volume of essays, with the focus being almost entirely on Ireland. Israeli or Jewish voices are generally missing; it would have been interesting if more of them had been included, but the center of the book is Ireland and the voice of the Irish. It is not possible to deal with all twelve essays in a review; the exclusion of an essay in this review is not a reflection of quality. The editors surely had a difficult task limiting the number to twelve. They first include a brief history of Jews in Ireland, providing necessary background. The size of the Jewish population at any one time is important, but the Jewish population in Ireland has never been large. Still, some Irish writers were focused on Jews. For example, one of the more interesting essays was Trisha Oakley Kessler's piece on Jewish refugee factories in the 1930s, even though their numbers were not large. These refugees were driven to Ireland by the rise of Nazi [End Page 125] Germany; Kessler describes the desperate plight of Jews who sought a new home in Ireland and other nations. A question emerges: was Ireland like so many countries that were unwilling to accept more refugees? The essays in Part I deal with antisemitism in part, and to understand this bigotry it is crucial to know how many Jews were in Ireland, where they settled, how they made a living and their relationship with the Irish at various times. According to the traditional histories there was little such bigotry in early Irish history, but religious references were acute in the early days. In view of Christianity's role in Western antisemitism I wonder if the Catholic Church was really so free of antisemitism in Ireland. This issue needs more study and research. According to essayist R. M. Douglas, antisemitism grew strongly after 1900. It does appear that Ireland shares much of Western Europe's prejudice regardless of the fact that the Jewish population was small. Or in Douglas's words, "the Irish were not so different after all." (31) Peter Hession adds to the debates in his excellent essay on Jews in Ireland from 1880 to 1914. To complicate matters, Natalie Wynn discusses the lack of clear standards and definitions in the discussions of Irish antisemitism. Several essays in Part II compare aspects of the...

Gazze Şeridi ile Dayanışma Konusunda Türk Dış Politikası 2006-2016: Analitik Bir Çalışma

تتناول هذه الدراسة مرحلة حساسة مرت بها العلاقات التركية الإسرائيلية، وذلك على ضوء تأييد الحكومة التركية الجديدة بقيادة رجب طيب أردوغان للشعب الفلسطيني والتنديد المستمر بالسياسات الإسرائيلية التعسفية، الأمر الذي أثار قلق الإسرائيليين من جانب وعزز لديهم الشعور بأن بقاء حزب العدالة والتنمية في الحكم يعني بأن مرحلة "شهر العسل" التي مرت بها العلاقة ما بين البلدين قد انتهت بلا رجعة. هذه العلاقة أخذت منحى جديد بعد عام 2006 نتيجة الحروب التي الإسرائيلية على قطاع غزة، مما أدى الى انزلاق العلاقة ما بين البلدين نحو منحدر عميق، كانت أهم افرازاتها المشادة الكلامية التي جرت في منتدى دافوس الاقتصادي، إضافة الى التصعيد الإعلامي ما بين البلدين، وحادثة إذلال السفير التركي فيما عُرف بحادثة "الكرسي المنخفض"، ومن ثم الاعتداء الإسرائيلي على سفينة "مافي مرمرة" وأسطول الحرية. وفي محاولة لفهم تطور الأحداث وكيفية تعامل صناع القرار في الحكومة التركية ازائها، سيتم اللجوء في هذه الدراسة الى النظرية الواقعية في دراسة العلاقات الدولية، والقائمة على فهم المصلحة القومية التي تسعى الدول للحفاظ عليها، الى جانب فهم توازن القوة.

1948's Forgotten Soldiers?: The Shifting Reception of American Volunteers in Israel's War of Independence

1948's Forgotten Soldiers?: The Shifting Reception of American Volunteers in Israel's War of Independence

Broken worlds in broken words: empty discourse on war in Israeli literature

ABSTRACTThis article addresses an unstudied literary discourse pattern in Israeli literature, which it terms an ‘empty discourse’ on Israeli wars, suggesting that they have become a simultaneously absent and present theme in Israeli literature. The analysis is based on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, which serves to explain the mutual influence between the reality of war and war literature. Based on the literary analysis presented, the article suggests a wider typology for examining this issue in contemporary Israeli literature published after the 2006 Lebanon War.

Terror films: The socio-cultural reconstruction of trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema

Ben-Moshe Yael, Ebbrecht-Hartmann Tobias, Terror films: The socio-cultural reconstruction of trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema. “Images” vol. XXV, no. 34. Poznań 2019. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 69–86. ISSN 1731-450X. DOI 10.14746/i.2019.34.05.
 The public discourse in Israel regarding events such as the Holocaust, war, or terror attacks mostly failed to embrace the trauma caused by such events, and to integrate their effects in the collective memory. According to trauma theoreticians, the location of trauma in the discourse is related to the character of trauma as a non-narratable memory, since personal trauma exist in the void, thus marking a missing memory. This paper explores the notion of trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema as it was reconstructed during and after the Second Intifada (2000–2008). The paper focuses on feature films reflecting on experiences of terrorist violence, among them Avanim (2004), Distortion (2004), Frozen Days (2006), The Bubble (2006), 7 Minutes in Heaven (2009). These films embrace parallel elements structuring a worldview, in the private as well as the collective sphere, thus shaping the surroundings as a mirror of the self and the subjective traumatic experience as a reflection of a complex social reality.A particular focus of our analysis will also be on aesthetic strategies that cinematically express rupture and distortion of terrorist violence and trauma, especially moments of suddenness and disruption in contrast to duration and circular repetition, elements of a specific temporality of trauma that also shaped the narration and style of recent Israeli war films, such as Waltz with Bashir (2008) or Beaufort (2007).