Israel Research Articles

Contemporary Censorship Debates in Germany

During the past five years the cultural world in Germany has been shaken and divided by a series of controversies involving contemporary works of art charged with being anti-Semitic. Obviously, with the Holocaust continuing to occupy a major position in modern German consciousness and history, sensitivity to anti-Semitic expressions is particularly keen here. This sensitivity has been increased by a number of recent developments, including the growing visibility of far-right political groups, the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) protesting Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and the official politicization of these tensions by a parliamentary ruling in 2015 restricting the activities of the BDS. The conflict between legitimate criticism of policies of the Israeli state and legitimate censorship of ethnically offensive material has recently become increasingly bitter in Germany. This article discusses the dynamics of three of the most significant recent examples: the conflict involving Germany’s most prestigious arts festival, the Kassell documenta in 2020; the withdrawal in 2022 of the European Drama Award, the continent’s largest award, from British dramatist Caryl Churchill; and the withdrawal from the Munich stage of the most recent play by Wajdi Mouawad, who has been widely heralded in Germany as the most significant contemporary dramatist.

Migrating the state into corporate clouds

ABSTRACT This article examines the cloudification of the state by focusing on ‘Project Nimbus’ – a $1.2 billion tender offered by the Israeli government to move ‘the entire Israeli state’ into corporate clouds. As one of the biggest informational infrastructure projects Israel has known, Nimbus revolves around the construction or repurposing of six massive, resource-hungry corporate data centers and the ‘migration’ of the state into them. Accordingly, Nimbus potentially redraws the relationship between the state and big tech, as well as between the state and its citizens. Based on thematic analysis of various project-related sources, we highlight four main aspects of the ‘cloudification of the state.’ First, focusing on cloud ideology, we expose the neo-liberal logics behind the construction of the Nimbus data centers. Second, focusing on cloud epistemology, we show that the effort and organizational changes that come with the cloudification of the state translate into an acute dependence on the tech giants. Third, focusing on the DCaaSization of the state, we argue that with its reliance on DCaaS (‘data center as a service’), the state's ‘behind the scenes’ is fading into the tech giants’ backstage. Lastly, we argue that this cloudification translates into disseminating advanced AI-powered data processing tools alongside pronounced data-ist Silicon Valley ideologies. We conclude by arguing that the construction of the Nimbus data centers and the subsequent cloudification of the state enhance power and information asymmetries between the state and big tech and discuss the data-coloniality of this new cloudified power structure.

The Weaponization of Feminism in a Time of Genocide: A Response to Masha Gessen

In this essay, the author considers how the focus on mass rapes allegedly committed by Hamas on October 7 achieves coherency through race, leaving feminist politics mired in racial politics. The feminist truism that women are always raped in war is relied upon to confirm that mass rapes took place on October 7—a weaponization of feminism designed to shut down questions about evidence and the deliberate circulation of false narratives about rape, and, importantly, to legitimize Israeli state violence and genocide in Gaza. Masha Gessen’s July 2024 essay in the New Yorker on the weaponization of sexual violence in war provides an illustration of how an apparently feminist story about sexual violence in war travels along racist rails and gives birth to a storyline about civilized Europeans—in this case Jews—forced to use genocidal force to defend their homeland from marauding, brutal, and misogynist Arabs.

Shuki Friedman: Being a Nation State in the Twenty-First Century: Between State and Synagogue in Modern Israel

Shuki Friedman: Being a Nation State in the Twenty-First Century: Between State and Synagogue in Modern Israel

Settler Colonialism and Decolonization

Abstract This essay makes two arguments. First, it argues that the analytical frame of settler colonialism is very productive in order to understand, describe, and at times even predict certain future trends of the Israeli state and society, while putting aside questions of legitimation or justification. On the other hand, this analytical frame is underdetermined when it comes to offering possible solutions for the future of Palestine-Israel. From the mere fact that Israel is a settler colonial project no particular future normative solution could be deduced logically. Future situations are political, not logical, and as such they are subject to different kinds of considerations including ethical and practical ones. Furthermore, we bear certain responsibility for political decisions that we do not while making logical judgments, and this different must be kept.

Self‐suasion: agents of Jewish conversion in Israel in search of religious sincerity

AbstractThe title of this essay is intended as ironic. The irony resides in the fact that while the agents of state‐run Jewish conversion in Israel are preoccupied with the sincerity of conversion candidates, they are also troubled by the sincerity of their own religious belief and conduct. This essay will explore ethnographically how these religiopolitical actors engage with semiotic and interactive strategies of self‐suasion in order to reconcile their Zionist and religious commitments with the moral toll that they pay for knowingly facilitating less‐than‐ideal conversions. The essay demonstrates that while these actors embody the Israeli state's national missionary impetus to convert newcomers, they rely on a variety of communicative practices that help them project the constructed sincerity of converts onto their own self‐suaded religious sincerity.

Being a Nation State in the Twenty-First Century: Between State and Synagogue in Modern Israel. By Shuki Friedman

Being a Nation State in the Twenty-First Century: Between State and Synagogue in Modern Israel. <i>By Shuki Friedman</i>

Hamas-Izrael War, Short Analysis of First Two Phases of War

At the end of 2023, Middle East faced new challenges. Among these new challenges, one of most important is the Hamas-Israel war. To understand the factors of Hamas operational success, and the strategic surprise attack on Israel from Gaza, on October 7, 2023, needs a thorough analysis to understand all its political, intelligence and operational failures aspects. In this article three issues related to new Gaza war will be addressed. Firstly, this article highlights the political background of the bloodiest attack in modern Israel's history happened on October 7, 2023. Secondly, this article seeks to answer the question, how was Hamas able to attack a country with operates one of the best intelligence organizations in the world by an extreme surprise? Finally, based upon the available data, this article analyzes the first and second phases of war.

On Love, the Palestinian Way: Kinship, Care and Abolition in Palestinian Feminist Praxis

This article centres the forms of kinship and care work that Palestinian women perform within and beyond the institution of the colonial prison in occupied territory through an analysis of letters expressing grief, care and radical hope as material expressions of an abolitionist feminist praxis of decolonial love. Women’s letter-writing practices offer a material expression of the sentient life forms that suture the social fabric of the Palestinian collective, regenerating our connections to each other and to our homeland. This analysis invites consideration of decolonial love as a liberatory method through which Palestinians call each other into intimate relation. It argues that attending to this underexplored feminist praxis enacted from within the space of genocidal duress holds the capacity to amplify a Palestinian sensorium that sharpens our capacity to enact revolutionary struggle against Israeli state violence and settler colonial criminality.

International Expert Statement on Israeli State Crime

International Expert Statement on Israeli State Crime

Historical Irony: The Israeli State Is Mostly Endangered by Its Religious Sector

Historical Irony: The Israeli State Is Mostly Endangered by Its Religious Sector

A Hermeneutic Approach to the Formation of a Secular Culture in Modern Israel

ABSTRACT The creation of the state of Israel was the outcome of the Zionist movement, which originated in Europe and was itself inspired by fundamental European ideas—Enlightenment, national self-determination, democracy and socialism. From its earliest days Zionism was primarily a secular movement that rejected the religious establishment and religious way of life of the Jews in the Diaspora. In many respects, however, the founders of the state and the principles on which they founded its institutions—the political, judicial, economic, social, and educational—were rooted in the ethical values and cultural practices of the Jewish tradition which they had apparently rejected. To explain this complex process of secularization of a very ancient religious and cultural tradition—which many see as an unresolved or unresolvable conflict between two opposing systems of thought—I draw on the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer and especially on his Truth and Method (1960). Culture, according to Gadamer, is a continuous flow of tradition within what he called “the horizon.” People, he argued, create and live within a given cultural tradition, but they are at the same time its interpreters, enlarging it by adopting elements from various cultures and ideologies, or “horizons.” From this hermeneutic perspective, the founders of modern Israel and their successors were the active interpreters of the Jewish tradition within the larger historical context of the European Enlightenment. I illustrate this process of cultural interpretation by focusing on the secularization of the Jewish holidays, specifically on the way the Kibbutz movement, a leading symbol of the new Israel, re-interpretated Jewish holidays like Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost) and Yom Kippur, and gave these religious festivals a secular-Israeli content. However, this dynamic pioneering stage of secularization may be said to have ended by the 1980s. From then on, the secular identity of Israeli society has been undergoing a variety of radical changes.

Monopoly on doubt: Post-mortem examinations in Israel, 1950s-1980s.

This article examines the durability of high post-mortem examination rates in Israel between the 1950s-1980s. Previous studies overlooked the issue of medical authority and the social history of autopsy, focusing on policy, technological development, and conflict between science and religion. By contrast, our analysis brings together the medical interest in unlimited research of dead bodies and the power relations between doctors and subaltern groups in Israel. Based on the Israeli State Archives, the Hebrew University Archives, and the daily press, we argue that medical biopolitical aspirations and the public shaped the history of postmortem examinations in Israel. High rates were embedded in the medical construction of doubt regarding the cause of death that only physicians could resolve by autopsy. Civilian protests led to a temporary decrease in the 1960s, while political and medical intervention brought about a gradual resurgence in post-mortem rates in the 1980s.

Nomadizing the Bedouins: Displacement, Resistance, and Patronage in the Northern Naqab, 1951–52

In the fall of 1951, the Israeli military government of the Negev launched an operation to uproot over five thousand Palestinian Bedouin citizens from the relatively rainy northwest Naqab to its arid eastern side in order to take control of the fertile lands. The campaign formed part of a more comprehensive strategy aimed at inducing the Bedouins to leave the country “voluntarily.” While the operation had far-reaching consequences, it achieved only partial success, as the army was faced with resistance from the Bedouins, some of whose leaders still had powerful patrons within the Zionist movement since before the 1948 war. The hitherto unexamined story of the 1951 displacement campaign thus captures a particular historical moment in the aftermath of the war in which Bedouins’ patronage links were put to the test in the face of the military’s attempts to uproot them. It also demonstrates how the settler-colonial regime sought to take advantage of the contradictions of Indigenous society yet repeatedly found itself unable to fully capitalize on internal divisions among the Bedouins. Lastly, a study of the campaign undermines the prevalent image of a modernizing Israeli state promoting permanent settlement and confronted with obstinate nomadic Bedouins. Like other Palestinians, Bedouins insisted that they were rooted in the local landscape, while the settler-­colonial state sought to uproot them, combining violent “nomadization” with forced “sedentarization.”

Breakdown of Ty-1-Based Resistance to Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus in Tomato Plants at High Temperatures.

The global dissemination of the Israel (IL) and mild (Mld) strains of tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) (family Geminiviridae, genus Begomovirus) is a major threat to tomato production in many regions worldwide. The use of resistant hybrid cultivars bearing the dominant resistance genes Ty-1, Ty-3, and Ty-3a has become a common practice for controlling tomato yellow leaf curl disease (TYLCD) caused by TYLCV. However, TYLCD symptoms have been sporadically observed in resistant cultivars grown in seasons when temperatures are high. In this study, we used TYLCV-resistant cultivars with confirmed presence of Ty-1, which were determined using newly developed allele-specific markers based on polymorphisms within the locus. These Ty-1-bearing resistant tomato plants and susceptible plants were infected with TYLCV and grown at moderate or high temperatures. Under high-temperature conditions, the Ty-1-bearing tomato cultivar Momotaro Hope (MH) infected with TYLCV-IL had severe TYLCD symptoms, which were almost equivalent to those of the susceptible cultivar. However, MH plants infected with TYLCV-Mld were symptomless or had slight symptoms under the same temperature condition. The quantitative analysis of the TYLCV-IL viral DNA content revealed a correlation between symptom development and viral DNA accumulation. Furthermore, under high-temperature conditions, TYLCV-IL caused severe symptoms in multiple commercial tomato cultivars with different genetic backgrounds. Our study provided the scientific evidence for the experientially known phenomenon by tomato growers, and it is anticipated that global warming, associated with climate change, could potentially disrupt the management of TYLCV in tomato plants mediated by the Ty-1 gene.

ФОРМУВАННЯ СУЧАСНОГО ПРАВОВОГО ТЕРМІНОЛОГІЧНОГО АПАРАТУ В ІВРИТІ: СПОСОБИ ТА ВПЛИВ ІНШИХ ПРАВОВИХ СИСТЕМ

The article is dedicated to the peculiarities of the legal terminology formation, which took place in the process of the restoration of the Hebrew language and its becoming the official state language of the modern Israel. The legal system of Israel has been created during XX century, after near two-thousand-year period of its existence without own state, being limited to the small community’s common and religious law in different languages only. Thus, creation of the own state has demanded not only to adapt the legal institutes, but to develop new actual terminology in the new official state language. But the terminology complex of the Hebrew was based on the ancient language sources, so creation or adapting of the classic Hebrew words for the definition of the modern legal terms became a great scientific challenge. In the article we conclude, that new lexemes were not created in the process of the Israel legal terminology formation, but the old texts words were chosen, usually with some rethinking and reinterpretation of its meanings. This approach provides the possibility to avoid direct borrowing of the terms, which is a typical process in the reception of law in other states. Despite the fact that, in addition to the English Common Law, the formation of Israel’s legal system was influenced by the Ottoman and Romano-Germanic law, concepts from the English legal system were taken as the basis for the selection of many basic terms. The terms creation was not limited to formal denomination only. Often the process becomes more substantive, noticing the etymology, the content of the legal institute and the mechanisms of the practical law-enforcements. After this deep scientific work of the linguists and lawyers Hebrew terminology of the Israel legal system fully expresses the content and the scope of the concepts of the relevant legal institutes.

Sport and Transnational Indigenous Solidarity From Turtle Island to Palestine? Examining Iroquois Nationals’ 2018 Trip to Israel

The Iroquois Nationals’ participation in the 2018 World Lacrosse Championship was welcomed by the hosting Israeli state despite the call for boycott from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and pro-Palestinian groups’ appeal for Indigenous solidarity. This paper discusses the historical/geopolitical contexts of this event and examines the responses from multiple parties, including the team representatives, pro-Israel groups, and Indigenous media/activists. By bringing together literature in Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, Palestinian studies, and critical sport studies, it highlights the challenges for transnational solidarity in the sport industry as well as the urgency for deepening an internationalist anticolonial/anti-imperialist political consciousness among athletes and sport organizations, Indigenous or non-Indigenous alike.

Settling History in Silwan: State Emblems and Public Secrets in Occupied East Jerusalem

ABSTRACT: This paper brings together two aspects of state formations that are rarely considered in unison, emblems and public secrets, and examines the semiotic processes that relate them. It considers these processes in tours given by a prominent organization, called El-Ad, that works to settle Jewish-Israelis in occupied East Jerusalem, and in particular in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. El-Ad claims that it has returned the Israeli state to Silwan, and seeks to substantiate this through a variety of practices used on tours of the biblical archaeological site known as the City of David. While the City of David site is associated with the biblical narratives of King David and the first Jewish kingdom, I show how El-Ad selectively reveals the secret history of its settlement on tour as well. To do so, I describe the discursive marking of this secret history, and, in particular, I review how the director of El-Ad, David Be'eri, retold to tour guides the organization's foundational narrative in the genre of an intelligence operation. I end by discussing how El-Ad tours of the City of David archaeological site narrate this secret history of settlement, as a means to normalize the occupation. Drawing on theories of the state, secrets and entextualizing practices, I argue that state emblems are key to understanding the masking effects of statecraft.

‘Good Jew, Bad Jew’

Abstract In Good Jew, Bad Jew Steven Friedman argues that the meaning of anti-Semitism favoured by the Israeli government and its allies prioritises loyalty to the Israeli state over identification with the Jewish people. On this view, ‘good Jews’ are those who support the Israeli state, and ‘bad Jews’ are those who criticise Zionism. This framing reflects a discursive transition over decades linked to the desire to make Israel part of Europe politically and culturally. Not only has the Zionist version of anti-Semitism inverted traditional notions of Jewishness but it has transformed ‘Jewishness’ from the ‘other’ to whiteness, to an ally of white supremacists. This racial embrace goes hand in glove with the brutal practice of colonial violence evident in Gaza. Friedman makes his case drawing on the work African scholars such as Biko, Fanon and Mamdani, Southern scholars such as Ashis Nandy, as well as established scholars of the North.

Titling in the Ruins

Palestinian Authority (PA) land titling began in 2005 as a means of creating property and sovereignty. Titling projects are extending government control over Palestinians, but they cannot secure their lands from Israeli state and private power. This article is an ethnography of Palestinian land titling, focusing on the specific problems that fraudulent land transfers to Israeli settlers create for such property-making efforts. It argues that for Palestinian administrators and surveyors, the certainty of Israeli colonization reduces progress to a challenge of speed and gives rise to short-term fixes that defer insoluble legal and political problems. The result is a form of nonsovereign property that encourages land markets now and offers the possibility of securing land rights later. The disjuncture between the future that land titling promises and the present it creates is entrenching private ownership in the West Bank and, as land speculation threatens to erode Palestinian control over territory, inciting debate about its limits. Land titling is creating a new political temporality in the ruins of state-building, one that illuminates how legacies of colonial law and contemporary practices of land speculation shape loss, hope, and contestation in Palestine and across the global South.