Israel Research Articles

Review: Promoting Democracy: The Force of Political Settlements in Uncertain Times, by Manal A. Jamal

Review: <i>Promoting Democracy: The Force of Political Settlements in Uncertain Times</i>, by Manal A. Jamal

Reading Dual Progression: A View from &lt;em&gt;The Hilltop&lt;/em&gt;

Reading Dual Progression: A View from &lt;em&gt;The Hilltop&lt;/em&gt;

Opinion on the Future of Personal Data Transfers from the EU/EEA to Israel &amp;amp; the Occupied Territories

The opinion seeks to contribute to discussions about the future of personal data flows between the European Union on the one hand and Israel and the Occupied Territories (OTs) on the other. In that context, it seeks to contribute to the review of the 2011 EU Adequacy Decision on Israel under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that is currently underway. The reason to focus on Israel and the OTs is twofold. Firstly, transfers of EU personal data to this region pose special challenges in the light of international law and the EU’s policy of “differentiation” between Israel and the OTs, which has been affirmed by rulings of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). Secondly, they warrant scrutiny because of Israel’s extensive surveillance activities that raise questions about potential access by Israeli state security agencies to EU citizens’ data. The July 2020 Schrems II judgment of the CJEU invalidated EU arrangements for data flows to the United States precisely because of such concerns – with clear implications in relation to other third countries including Israel. An Executive Summary is provided at the beginning of the opinion (pp. 5-7)

Terang di Tengah Kegelapan: Sebuah Analisis Sastra Rut 1

Terang di Tengah Kegelapan: Sebuah Analisis Sastra Rut 1. Rut 1 adalah episode yang penting dalam keseluruhan bangunan kisah Rut. Pasal ini memperkenalkan latar cerita dan permasalahannya, meningkatkan ketegangan cerita, serta menggerakkan cerita menuju resolusinya. Oleh sebab itu penting sekali untuk mempelajari pasal ini secara utuh dengan mempertimbangkan kesatuan dari unit-unit sastra yang membangun narasinya. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode kualitatif dengan pendekatan analisis sastra narasi atau sering disebut kritik narasi. Hasil penelitian ditemukan bahwa komitmen setia Rut kepada bangsa Israel, Allah Israel, dan Naomi menerangi kisah dalam pasal 1 yang dipenuhi dengan kegelapan.

A WOMAN IN MODERN ISRAEL: ATTEMPTING TO BUILD A SOCIAL PORTRAIT

This article aims to present a «collective» social portrait of a modern Israeli woman. The complexity of this task is determined by the fact that Israel is a country populated with people of a wide number of cultures, who in different years repatriated to their historical homeland. With the exception of Judaism, the views of these communities on many issues of the daily life differ significantly, and this creates an extremely difficult perception of the gender topic in this country. The female audience of Israeli society can be divided into two large groups: religious and secular, although within each of them there are also numerous strata, worthy of investigation. In this article, the authors focus on the priorities of each group, while paying primary attention to the description of a religious woman: her understanding of the canons of family life, spiritual ideas, fashion, etc. Focusing on these manifestations allows, to the very much extent, to imagine the «make-up» of the Israeli woman, so that through the prism of this perception to see the ideological and moral principles of this country. Analysing priorities of the religious part of the female population is fundamentally important for understanding the spiritual canons of Israeli life and its uniqueness when comparing the background of modern world processes of modernization and globalization, not to mention that this article is one of first enabling to have a look at the role of the Israeli woman in this society.

تفسير إقامة "إسرائيل" كدولة حسب نظرية دوائر البركة لبيت المقدس

Bayt al-Maqdis has witnessed the birth of three Abrahamic religions. The city is also unique for long being the place in which members of these religions have lived together as neighbours. However, it has always been a targeted territory in which Western powers desired power and domination over the region. The Crusaders’ period (1098-1187) and the ongoing Israeli occupation are dark pages in the history of the city and region. This is especially with respect to the establishment of the Zionist Israeli state in the Middle East, which has led to several, economic, cultural, and political conflicts affecting the region to this day. With reference to this uniqueness of Bayt al-Maqdis, this paper aims to interpret the occupation of Bayt al-Maqdis and the establishment of Israel as a state in the heart of the Muslim East, along with its multi-dimensional consequences, according to the Barakah Circle Theory of Islamicjerusalem introduced by Abd al-Fattah Muhammad El-Awaisi.

The Jewish past and the ‘birth’ of the Israeli nation state: the case of Ben-Gurion’s Independence Day speeches

The article focuses on David Ben-Gurion’s past image using a series of programmatic and widely distributed speeches he made during Israel’s first Independence Days (1948-1958). The article argues that while the founding of the state was defined as a turning point it was certainly not portrayed as a ‘beginning’, and that both the ancient sovereign and the exilic Jewish experience had a central place in Ben-Gurion’s relevant past. At the centre of discussion stand five main characteristics of the speeches: the continuation between the state and the Jewish ancient past; the central place of a secularized messianism as a bridge between the exilic past and the sovereign present; the attempt to portray a widely accepted shared past using consensus-based terminology; the simplification of the Zionist rebellion against the exile; and the fundamental differentiation between the Jewish symbolic past and the realistic Israeli present. These five elements are analysed against the background of other texts by Ben-Gurion and his image in the research. Finally, this case study is placed within a wider context which demonstrates the Israeli quest for a Jewish framework of meaning that would authenticate the new national myths and charge them with meaning.

A pragmatic analysis of descriptive, depictive and simulative reporting speech acts: Empirical evidence from a prosodic study on conversational Modern Israeli Hebrew

The aim of this paper is to investigate the act of reporting an utterance which was produced in a context other than the current interaction. The most common pragmatic approach to the act of reporting concentrates on the relations between the initial speech event and the way it is presented by the different forms of reported speech. Thus, direct and indirect reported speech are often referred to as depictive and descriptive acts respectively. The current paper goes beyond this distinction and considers the reporting act in its entirety as a speech act. Based on contextual sources and constraints allowing the reporting speaker to communicate his/her message in the current interaction, a three-way distinction is proposed between descriptive, depictive and simulative reporting acts, where the latter category refers to direct and indirect reported speech where the apparently reported utterance never took place as such. This three-way distinction is supported by an empirical investigation of F0-patterns in utterances containing reported speech in conversational Modern Israeli Hebrew, showing the influence of different degrees of syntactic and pragmatic continuity/discontinuity on the prosodic structure of utterances containing reported speech.

1988 – Palestinian Declaration of Independence: A Tale of Poetry and Statehood

In 2018 Palestine instituted proceedings against the United States of America before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an alleged breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR) after the US administration had relocated its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Palestine argues that Jerusalem is outside Israeli state territory and thus outside the ‘receiving state’ of the diplomatic mission. The US, however, had already stated in 2014, when Palestine acceded to the VCDR that Palestine did not qualify as a sovereign state and thus was not capable of acceding to the VCDR. Thus, the background to this dispute is the question of Palestinian statehood and the territorial boundaries of that state. 30 years prior to the start of the proceedings before the ICJ, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had declared the independence of Palestine. As part of a series on “100 Years in Review: 10 Stories of International law”, this article revisits the Declaration of independence of 1988 and analyzes whether a Palestinian state has emerged under international law. First, this article provides a brief historical background to the territorial dispute that eventually ushered in the Declaration of Independence. Secondly, it highlights the relevant passages of the Declaration of Independence. Thirdly, it addresses the relevant theoretical legal underpinnings of the Declaration of Independence (self-determination and statehood). Finally, the article addresses whether Palestine fulfilled the criteria of statehood in 1988 or at a later stage.

Dr. Andre De Vries: The Father of Israeli Urolithiasis Research

The Middle East has become known as the “Stone Belt” region due to its high prevalence of urinary stones.1 This phenomenon is well documented in even the early civilizations of Medieval Persia,2 Egypt, and Mesopotamia.1 In 1917, during World War I, Palestine came under British legal rule until the founding of the Israeli state in 1948. Researchers described urolithiasis in Jerusalem in 19303 and again in 1936.4 However, this subject was hardly investigated until the end of the 1950s, until internal physician Dr.

Mapping Palestine/Israel through Interactive Documentary

Available on publicly accessible websites, interactive documentaries are typically free to use, allowing audiences to navigate through amounts of information too large for standard film or television documentaries. Media literacy, however, is needed to understand the ways that interactive documentaries reveal or conceal their power to narrate. Examining ARTE France’s Gaza Sderot (2008–9), Zochrot’s iNakba (2014), and Dorit Naaman’s Jerusalem, We Are Here (2016), this article discusses documentaries that prompt audiences to reflect upon asymmetries in the power to forget history and the responsibility to remember it by mapping Palestinian geographies that have been rendered invisible. Since media ecologies are increasingly militarized, particularly in Palestine/Israel, interactive documentaries like iNakba and Jerusalem, We Are Here can disrupt Israeli state branding as technologically innovative while minimizing risk of surveillance by avoiding the use of location-aware technologies that transform interaction into tracking.

Evidence of a T/V distinction in European Hebrew

Abstract This article presents research on the system of T/V distinction in Hebrew from the 16th to the 20th century. As the article is the first attempt to describe the phenomenon, it aims to give a general overview of the T/V distinction in European Hebrew, introducing new language data, and posing new questions. One book served as terminus a quo for the whole article: Course of the Russian Language by Zalkind (Epstein, Zalkind. 1869. Учебная книга Русскаго Языка. מסלת הלמוד או ספר ללמד לשון רוסיא עם העתקה אל לשון עברי [Course of the Russian language. Path of learning or book to study the language of Russia with translation into Hebrew]. Warsaw: Schriftgisser), written in Hebrew, contains approximately 100 pages of everyday dialogues in both Hebrew and Russian. The question of whether the Hebrew language of the 19th century was a dead or living language is still a matter of debate. In that regard, the course book provides valuable material that does not fit into the framework of the general idea of the history of the Hebrew language. Basic elements of conversational politeness are the focus of the analysis. The system, in which V-forms of address are expressed by a third-person singular, is reconstructed from the conversations in the Epstein’s book and traced back to the 16th century in a wide range of various Hebrew sources. The T/V distinction in Hebrew is also compared to the similar phenomena in Polish and German. Originating before the 16th century, the T/V distinction disappeared in modern Israeli Hebrew. However, it is still in use in some specific communication situations, which can be regarded as residues of earlier forms of traditional speech practices.

Forme e pratiche del pluralismo religioso nello Stato di Israele. L’eredità ottomana e la tutela dei rapporti familiari

SOMMARIO: 1. Israele, uno Stato ‘ebraico’ e multiculturale? - 2. Il sistema degli statuti personali e la tutela delle relazioni familiari - 3. Matrimoni, divorzi e Corti religiose - 4. Pluralismo, multiconfessionismo e dinamiche demografiche. Prime conclusioni e prospettive di ricerca. Forms and practices of the religious pluralism in the State of Israel. The Ottoman inheritance and the protection of family relationships. ABSTRACT: The essay aims to explore, also in a historical perspective, the general characteristics, peculiarities and limits of the differentiated protection of family relationships in force in the legal system of (State of Israel), still based on the millet system. It allows the application of the personal statutes of the various ethnic-religious communities (Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Christian) present on the territory, not only to regulate the legal institutions typical of family law - especially marriage and divorce -, but also for the resolution of disputes on the matter that are devolved to the jurisdiction of the religious Courts of several religions. In examining the effectiveness and functionality of this model of religious and cultural pluralism, the study highlights the delicate problems of relevance and coexistence of the different religious normative complexes in the Israeli state system.

Testing the social exclusivity of marriage thesis in the context of high familism: do social involvement and support vary by marital status in Israel?

Studies have suggested that in individualistic societies, marriage constitutes an exclusive institution associated with reduced social involvement. This article tests this claim in a society that has experienced increased individualisation but has nevertheless remained highly familial. Analyses based on data from the Israel Social Survey show that married respondents were less involved with friends but more involved with family than their single counterparts. Results further revealed important differences by gender and between Jews and Israeli-Palestinians. No difference by marital status in involvement with kin was found for Israeli-Palestinian women, who also reported the lowest level of involvement with friends. The difference in involvement with friends was more pronounced among Israeli-Palestinians than Jews. Overall, findings indicate that Israeli society provides an interesting case that deviates from both the individualistic and collectivist models. Consistent with the new institutional approach to marriage, this article highlights the limitations of the exclusivity of marriage thesis.

Evaluation of regulated deficit irrigation strategies for oil olives: A case study for two modern Israeli cultivars

Profits from olive oil production are expected to benefit from regulated deficit irrigation (RDI) regimes designed to optimize yield and oil quality with minimal inputs of water. We evaluated a number of potential strategies for implementing RDI including choosing phenological periods for reduced irrigation, use of midday stem water potential (SWP) for scheduling, considering fruit load, and irrigation to reach optimal fruit water content at harvest. We base our discussion on the potentials and challenges of practical commercial RDI regimes on results from a 6-year orchard experiment on two olive oil cultivars used in intensive orchards ('Barnea' and 'Askal') in Israel, focusing on attempts for long-tern optimization of yield and oil quality. Results showed a general trend of increased water productivity as a function of reduced irrigation but since yields tended to be reduced when irrigation was decreased, there was not a clear benefit of RDI over sustained deficit irrigation. The exception to this was a treatment based on SWP where water application was reduced by some 40% compared to irrigation regimes bringing highest yields, and a non-significant accumulated yield reduction of less than 15% after 6 years in both cultivars. Oil quality, measured in terms of free fatty acids and polyphenol content, was often improved when irrigation was decreased, with no dependence on the seasonal timing of deficit amounts and increased tree water stress.

Legitimation crises, public inquiries and boundary construction: the Or Commission and the Green Line paradox

ABSTRACT This article examines the Or Commission of Inquiry and the discursive invention of the ‘October 2000 disturbances’ by offering a reconceptualisation of the Green Line function in the context of the Israeli state ideology (mamlachtiut). The commission presents an interesting case of a State Commission of Inquiry working under unprecedented lack of public and political legitimacy and of government support. By applying a sociopolitical perspective, the article analyzes the Or Commission not simply as a neutral administrative instrument but as a political actor that sought to enhance its legitimacy and influence public opinion and decision-makers by deviating considerably from its official mandate.

The role of the Bedouin in the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–1939

This article focuses on the Bedouins’ part in the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine – during the time of the British mandate; what motivated some clans/tribes to join a given side, and why others chose to remain neutral – and it also refers to the later implications of these different choices. The article briefly overviews the social and political developments that led to the Revolt, explains the unique status of the Bedouin within the Arabic-speaking population in the area, and describes the internal diversity among Bedouin groups and the different alliances they made with the British Mandatory authorities and with other segments of the population. The article refers to the development and extension of Arab nationalism, its impact on political developments in the area, and the violent outbursts of 1936–1939 resulting from the above-mentioned factors. Rather than presenting an overview of the Arab Revolt and its general historical impact, it focuses on the involvement of the Bedouin in certain incidents or Events, and explains the reasons why some Bedouin groups chose to join a specific side, while other Bedouin groups chose to refrain, an aspect that has not been investigated in depth until now. It explains the diversity among the Bedouin and the reasons why they have no set political views and behavioral patterns; as a result, each Bedouin group/tribe adopted a policy that suited its particular interests. This article lists and describes the Events in which specific Bedouin groups were involved, in their historical order, and provides information regarding the militia groups founded or joined by the Bedouin: their areas of operation, the details of their commanding officers, tribal affiliation and alliances, relations between specific Bedouin tribes and other segments of the population: the Arabs in Palestine (both the urban and rural sectors), the Christian population, the Jewish population and the British authorities, and how these relationships affected the actions and political views of various Bedouin groups. In retrospect, it seems that ties and alliances formed between the various Bedouin groups and other components of the population during the era of the Ottoman regime affected the political position adopted by these groups at the time, positions that later determined the civil status of the Bedouin in modern Israel.

Эмигранты-субботники из Астраханской губернии в исторической памяти современного Израиля и России: восприятие и интерпретация

В статье определены особенности восприятия и интерпретации наследия эмигрантов-субботников из Астраханской губернии в исторической памяти наших современников, проживающих в Израиле и России. Применены идеографический, сравнительно-исторический и ретроспективный методы, а также метод опроса. Материалами явились статьи православных миссионеров XIX в., современные научные исследования, записи и комментарии в сетевых дневниках и результаты проведенного автором интернет-опроса. Реконструирована биография одного из пионеров движения халуцим, Йоава Дубровина, выявлены различные аспекты восприятия его личности нашими современниками, охарактеризована степень известности И. Дубровина в современном Израиле и среди членов еврейской общины Астрахани, определено его значение в создании образа первопроходцев и в современном культурном наследии страны. Автор заключает, что имя Дубровина и других иудействующих не известно большинству респондентов, однако отмечен интерес к «халуцим с русским лицом». The aim of the article is to determine the peculiarities of the perception and interpretation of the heritage of the Subbotnik emigrants from Astrakhan Province in the historical memory of our contemporaries living in Israel and Russia. The author used the ideographic (descriptive-narrative), comparative-historical, and retrospective methods, as well as the survey method in the study. The materials were articles by 19th-century Orthodox missionaries; research by historians, religious scholars, and culturologists; the content of online blogs on the livejournal.com platform; and the results of an Internet survey that the author conducted. The author examines the factual record of the emergence and data on the settlement of sectarians in Astrakhan Province and analyzes the attitude of provincial officials and eparchy missionaries towards them. She does a detailed analysis of the manifestations of religious identity among the Judaizers, pointing out the generally calm attitude of the latter towards the professed teaching. The author also determines the circumstances of the spread of eschatological and émigré aspirations among them in the 1880s against the background of the nascent Zionist movement and notes the emergence of individuals who were active conductors of these ideas. In modern Israeli culture, the carriers of such sentiments (“grassroot Zionism”) appear to be outstanding people who stand out from among their contemporaries by the very fact of their involvement in Judaism. The author reconstructs the biography of one of such people, Yoav Dubrovin. He became one of the first participants in the movement of Halutzim, pioneers of the development and settlement of the future territory of the State of Israel. Already in old age, he emigrated to the Promised Land with his family. The author describes the difficulties the migrants encountered, which led to the death of many family members, as well as to the subsequent resettlement of the remaining Dubrovins to a new place of residence. At present, a museum is located in the former estate of the Dubrovins. The author reveals the various aspects of the perception of Dubrovin by today’s contemporaries, characterizes the degree of his popularity in modern Israel and among members of the Jewish community of Astrakhan, determines his role in creating the image of pioneers and in the modern cultural heritage of Israel. The author concludes that the majority of the respondents do not know the names of Dubrovin and of other Judaizers, but they show interest in “Halutzim with a Russian face”.

Tourist spending and productivity of economy in OECD countries – research on perspectives of sustainable tourism

Tourism represents the sector of services which is developing the most considerably and dynamically. However, its development is influenced by: trends in globalization, process of demographic aging, economic parameters, geographical conditions of a country, consumers, and other aspects. The following aspects contribute to its development: new destinations, markets, innovative activities in service sector, and also technological development. Tourism plays a significant economic role in a process of sustainable regional development, where it helps to develop low-growth regions. Monitoring and quantification of tourism outputs is a very complicated process. There also absents a quality database, which complicates a quantification of sector’s efficiency and a creation of national and international benchmarking indicators that inform of sustainable tourism level. These aspects demand a realization of multi-dimensional analyses, which would examine causal relations between tourism factors and economic parameters of a country. The study’s motivation was driven by all of the above-mentioned facts. It aims at researching an influence of tourism spending on OECD countries’ productivity. Consequently, it evaluates their potential of the sector’s sustainability. Multiple analytical procedures, which were determined by database availability, were performed in order to achieve the, research aim. The following analyses were performed besides the descriptive statistics: variance analysis of researched variables between individual years and OECD countries, context analysis, regression and cluster analyses. There were analysed 5 variables that characterize individual types of tourist spending: Business Tourism Spending, Domestic Tourism Spending, Leisure Tourism Spending, Outbound Travel & Tourism Expenditure , Visitor Exports (Foreign Spending) and one variable that characterizes productivity during 2010 – 2018 for all OECD countries. Spending variables were standardized per 1,000 inhabitants of a given country and productivity was measured by GDP per capita, while both groups of variables were provided in USD (fair value). The analyses’ results provided interesting findings. The regression models’ outputs confirmed an influence of tourist spending on a country’s productivity. All variables that indicate spending are significant. The cluster analysis’s results allowed a selection of countries into four groups. There is two huge clusters and other two clusters represent only one countries in specific cluster. Luxemburg and Iceland give us different values than countries in other clusters. The countries with higher rank are as follows: Australia (AUS), Austria (AUT), Belgium (BEL), Canada (CAN), Germany (DEU), Denmark (DNK), Finland (FIN), France (FRA), Unites Kingdom (GBR), Switzerland (CHE), Ireland (IRL), Italy (ITA), Netherland (NLD), Norway (NOR), New Zealand (NZL), Sweden (SWE), United States (USA), Island (ISL) and Luxembourg (LUX). On the other hand, the countries with lower rank are as follows: Czech Republic CZE, Spain (ESP), Estonia (EST), Greece (GRC), Hungary (HUN), Chile (CHL), Israel (ISR), Japan (JPN), Korea (KOR), Lithuania (LTU), Latvia (LVA), Mexico (MEX), Poland (POL), Portugal (PRT), Slovak Republic (SVK), Slovenia (SVN) and Turkey (TUR). These findings provide a space for a deeper research of effect between determinants of tourism development and economic indicators, while they enable to reveal a space for a growth of countries’ productivity that would provide a sustainability in tourism sector.

Psychosocial approaches and discursive gaps in intersex healthcare: findings from an Israeli–German action research study

In the past several decades, conflicting discourses have coexisted in the field of intersex studies, including the pathologising discourse of the biomedical disciplines and the affirmative, subjective psychosocial discourse of people born with intersex bodies and their advocates. Intersex activists call for a positive discourse on intersex bodies and a humanistic healthcare approach that accepts and protects intersex bodily autonomy to replace continuing harmful, traumatic treatments aimed at normalising variations of sex characteristics (VSC). Our awareness of the biomedical discursive dominance prompted us to initiate Inter-Care and Awareness, an intercultural German–Israeli action research project. This paper introduces the project and explores intercultural approaches to psychosocial intersex care using an action research framework. We describe how the project’s goals, processes and outcomes created educational material on intersex which uses positive language, explores intersex in the Jewish tradition, improves the support offered to parents of intersex children, and examines cross-cultural differences that arose in the encounters between the Israeli and German participants. The analysis points to sociocultural themes that reflect intersex people’s current status in Israel and Germany. Implications regarding the implementation of similar projects in other countries are discussed.