Zionist Discourse Research Articles

The Representation of Female Biblical Figures in Major Israeli Discourses

Israeli girls’ names that remained prevalent over lengthy periods were examined with the aim of determining their representation in social discourses as defined by Foucault (2002). Rare names occurring three to ten times per year from 1948 to 2015 were examined as well. Foucault defined four dichotomous axes that distinguish social discourses, with each axis characterized by social normativity at one end and original creativity at the other. The four dichotomous axes of discourse according to Foucault are ‘discursive event opposed to creation’, ‘discursive series opposed to unity’, ‘discursive regularity opposed to originality’ and, ‘condition of possibility opposed to signification’. The most prevalent girls’ names were considered as representation of the social normativity, while the rare names were considered as representations of social discourse contains original creativity. 19 prevalent names were found, 12 of which stayed on the most-popular-names list for 68 years, and seven of which appeared on the list for at least 40 years. Fifteen of these 19 names are the names of female figures from the Old Testament. Eight of the names are those of the most important women in the Bible – women who also have enjoyed the greatest degree of favor in Jewish tradition. Four other names are those of assertive women whose actions were viewed unfavorably in Jewish tradition. An analysis of these names in Foucauldian terms indicated that the most-popular-names list for girls constitutes part of three simultaneous social discourses in Israeli society across its component subgroups. These three discourses are: traditional Jewish discourse, Zionist discourse, and Israeli discourse. The latter discourse has not only featured names that appeared for many years on the popular-names list; it has also featured, in more than half the cases, names belonging to the rare-names lists – a phenomenon consistent with creativity, in Foucauldian terms.

An Arab Jew Reads the Quran: On Isaac Yahuda’s Hebrew Commentary on the Islamic Scripture

How did an Arab Jew read the Quran against the backdrop of contradictory ideologies and the rise of key movements, including nationalism, colonialism, and Zionism, in Mandate Palestine? Approaching Isaac Yahuda as an Arab Jew challenges the binary opposition between Arabs and Jews in Zionist discourse, a linkage perceived as inconceivable, and on the other hand, that linkage is asserted, contested, and tested in the context of nationalism. This article also challenges the advancement of Jewish singularity and superiority by exploring how Jewish writers interacted with the Islamic scripture in Mandatory Palestine rather than dismissing it. This article examines Hebrew interpretation of various passages from the Quran that produced an understanding of the Quran that advanced Zionist ideals, including the nationalization of contested religious sites and the consolidation of the indigeneity of Jews in the East. Isaac Yahuda’s Hebrew commentary on the Quran challenged his Arab Jewishness in such a divisive nationalist atmosphere in Mandate Palestine. His hybrid background and dynamic connections with both Jews and Arabs enabled him to navigate these turbulent times by invoking the Quran, demonstrating respect for it, and at the same time challenging the understanding of his contemporary Muslims while utilizing German Jewish scholarship on the origins of Islam.

“Judeo-Arabic” and the Separationist Thesis

Abstract This essay questions the axiomatic ontology of the “Judeo-Arabic language” as a cohesive unit separate from Arabic and its entanglement in the persistent ambivalence surrounding the conjoining of “the Jewish” and “the Arab.” In the wake of the partition of Palestine and the dislocation of Arab-Jews to Israel, classificatory categories, which can be traced to the nineteenth-century academic meeting ground of Semitic/Oriental and Hebraic/Judaic studies, came to be reinforced in the twentieth century within Zionist discourse. Largely shaped by foundational scholars of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, knowledge production about Arabic-speaking Jews was embedded in what the essay regards as “Judeo-Arabic Orientalism.” Entrenched in the politics of linguistic naming is a partitioning ethnonationalist imaginary of culture and belonging. The epistemic framework undergirding “Judeo-Arabic language” is emblematic of what the essay refers to as “the separationist thesis.” Revisiting a few key arguments, the essay traces the genealogy not of a language but rather of an idea of a language, highlighting the invention of a paradoxical formation—an Arabic that is at once non-Arabic.

‘Why Were Our Yemenite Brothers Insulted?’: Love as Strong as Death as a Prequel to Mizrahi Presence in Israeli Theatre

The article traces the production and reception of Love as Strong as Death, a dramatization of the Song of Songs that was performed in Mandatory Palestine in the years 1940–42 by a group of Yemenite Jewish actors. We argue that the tensions between the actors’ amateur status and their image as embodying a long-lost Biblical heritage were emblematic of the inherent contradictions within the hegemonic Ashkenazi Zionist discourse and the Orientalist perception of the role of Yemenite Jews in it. By exploring both Yemenite and Ashkenazi voices in and around the production, we analyse how the stage, the theatre hall and the written press all served as contested sites regarding the participation of non-European Jews in Hebrew theatre and culture. In the paper's conclusion, we demonstrate how Love as Strong as Death anticipated later debates in Israeli theatre about the place of Mizrahi Jews on stage and in the auditorium.

Uprooted Memories

Abstract This article examines two documentaries on Iraqi Jews, Forget Baghdad and Remember Baghdad, that focus on the expulsion of Iraqi Jews from Iraq and their lives in Israel and Britain. The exile of Jews from Iraq heralded the end of a vibrant social and political space that Iraqi Jews shared with fellow Iraqis. This article argues that by focusing on questions of forgetting and remembering, the two documentaries foreground memory and nostalgia as sites to explore issues related to home, dislocation, and subjectivity at physical and symbolic levels. Moreover, the acts of remembrance in the films emerge as a dynamic terrain upon which political, generational, and class differences were inscribed and invoked. Iraqi Jews found themselves trapped within a binary framework of Arab nationalistic and Zionist discourses whereby Arabness and Jewishness emerged as an antithesis and denoted otherness, and their position within nation-states became unintelligible. The films, however, reconstruct, in different ways, the possibilities where Arabness, Jewishness, and Iraqiness could overlap, live side by side, and challenge national narratives. Reading the films alongside each other challenges any monolithic or essentialist narratives about an Iraqi Jewish experience by shedding light on the diversity of political projects among Iraqi Jews.

A New Look for the Jewish Past: Historicism, Authenticity, and Fantasy in E. M. Lilien’s Bible Art

In the multivolume Bücher der Bibel (1908–12), Jewish artist Ephraim Mose Lilien imagined a glorious Jewish past that resonated with Zionist discourses of spiritual and artistic revival. He visualized this past in part through appropriating iconography from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The significance of Lilien’s historicism must be understood in the context of a culture conflicted about the relationship between the Bible and the Middle Eastern past, at a time when an association between German imperial power and the ancient Middle East was ubiquitous in popular media and promoted at the highest levels of the state.

Guardians of Jewish tradition: from crisis to rehabilitation in the Shas party, 2019-21

ABSTRACT The big drama of Israel’s four closely spaced national elections in 2019–21 was accompanied by another, smaller, drama: the country’s plunge into political chaos gave the Shas party an opportunity for electoral, organisational, and political revitalisation. The four election campaigns transformed Shas from a Mizrahi-Haredi party in decline, barely able to pass the minimum vote threshold, into a stable party practicing a tightly focused politics – living proof that Haredi politicians were again occupying positions of power and influence. Not only did Shas do outstanding organisational and political work; it also demonstrated an impressive ability to align with the Israeli right’s core national-political agenda: the connection between security and tradition. The language of the Shas message evolved from one election campaign to another: what started as a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) discourse of cultural partnership with a religious-lite or masorti (traditionalist) public turned into a Zionist discourse of national partnership with a ‘right-lite’ voting public (Likud).

Revisiting Israel’s Mixed Cities Trope

This article offers a critical examination of the term mixed cities, concentrating mainly on its usage in Zionist and Israeli discourse. It posits that the term is uniquely reserved to denote Israel’s Jewish Arab urban spaces. Presented as bureaucratic and value-free, the term sharply contrasts with the anti-Arab reality of Israel’s mixed cities. The article traces the origin of the term to pre-State, Zionist discourse, which denounced Arab Jewish “mixing,” situating it between “pure” Zionist and “foreign” Palestinian Arab spaces. The article identifies four general forms of urban (anti-)mixing: pluralistic, racial, sovereign, and colonial. It locates Israel’s mixed cities within the latter two categories. Abandoning this ideologically charged trope and replacing it with Urban Studies concepts are proposed. The advantages of this perspective are demonstrated with a test-case analysis of Arab-Jewish cities in British Palestine (1918-1948) through the lens of Scott Bollens’s model for the study of ethno-national contested cities.

‘Zion, Memory and Hope of All Ages’: Nina Davis Salaman’s Romantic-Zionist Poetry

Abstract This article analyses the romantic-Zionist poetry of Nina Davis Salaman, contextualising it alongside other fin-de-siècle Zionist poets to argue that she too similarly adopted bibliocentric, prophetic, and diasporic perspectives, particularly themes associated with the medieval Andalusian poetry of Judah Halevi. In doing so, Salaman, much like other Anglo-Jewish women writers, defined her own subjectivity in the context of nostalgic, romanticising religious and nationalistic discourses. However, uniquely, Salaman’s poetry adopts not only the themes of medieval Andalusian verse yearning for Zion-Jerusalem and the land of Israel, but also, as she put it, its diasporic ‘clothing of metre and rhyme’. Indeed, Salaman’s romantic poetry is populated with intertextual links recalling the biblical Prophets and Halevi’s exilic poetry, which offer historical and scriptural substantiation to support contemporaneous Zionist discourses. Songs of Many Days draws equally on her underlying belief that ‘metre and rhyme’, including in her own poetry, are a feature of diasporic existence.

You Have a Home: National and Zionist Discourses in Israel’s LGBT Movement

You Have a Home: National and Zionist Discourses in Israel’s LGBT Movement

Mizrahi Jews and the Zionist settler colonial context: between inclusion and struggle

ABSTRACT This article intends to analyse the ‘in-between' category of Mizrahi Jews within Israeli society. The main objective is to draw attention to how Israel’s Mizrahi majority has been part of the Zionist settler colonial system itself while, at the same time, it has been greatly marginalised from the mainstream Zionist discourse led by white Ashkenazi Jews. Theoretically founded on the interconnection of three major approaches, namely settler colonialism, critical whiteness, and decolonial feminism, this contribution aims to question the current academic debate depicting asymmetric power relations founded on race, ethnic, gender and class discrimination inside Israeli society. Accordingly, Zionist settler colonialism needs to be critically analysed from a Mizrahi perspective, providing an additional element for understanding the relevance of connecting all the actors involved in the Zionist settler colonial project and reinforcing the discourse concerning settlers and indigenous people. Moreover, as the article discusses the wide cultural and political range of the Mizrahi Jews by questioning the viability of the Arab-Jew historical construct up to very recent times, it is also intended to further enhance the examination of an emerging field for studying Israel and Palestine within which several aspects and areas of inquiry remain unexplored.

Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment

Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment

Psychoanalysis as decolonial Judaism

In some recent work on decolonization, there has been an attempt to claim some Jewish writers of the twentieth century as participating in a rethinking of “barbarism” that aligns Jewish thought with the decolonial movement. This is problematic, especially because post-Shoah and Zionist discourses have positioned Jews normatively as part of European “civilization” opposed to barbarism. Nevertheless, the reclaiming of a radical Jewish tradition allied with other movements of the oppressed may provide resources for “barbaric thinking,” using “barbaric” here in the positive sense to mean that which confronts the hegemony of European colonial thought. The relative absence of psychoanalysis from this discussion is striking. Given the place of psychoanalysis both as a “colonial” discipline and as a contributor to critical and postcolonial thought, can it be seen in the positive tradition of Jewish barbarism? This article offers an account of Jewish barbaric possibilities and suggests ways in which psychoanalysis might connect with them.

“Or la-goyim”: From Diaspora theology to Zionist dogma

ABSTRACT The term “a light unto the nations” is a hallmark of modern Jewish identity but the subtle divergences in the meaning of the expression among its diverse proponents shed light on the continuities and differences among modern Jewish ideologies. David Ben-Gurion, in particular, regarded the calling to be “a light unto the nations” as a central mission of the State of Israel. Before the 1950s, however, almost all Zionists, including Ben-Gurion himself, repudiated the term because they associated it with diasporist ideology. This article explores its shifting meanings in Zionist discourse, with a special focus on Ben-Gurion’s rhetoric. It explains Ben-Gurion’s changing attitudes term and shows how his innovative uses of the term allowed him to navigate between modernity and traditional Judaism, between Zionism and its opponents, and between the various streams within the Zionist movement. It reminds us that the lexical continuity of figurative terms can mask conceptual fluctuation and enhances a picture of Zionism that acknowledges both its revolutionary novelty and its place in the long continuum of Jewish life.

Early Zionists and crusader castles: perceptions and interpretations of crusader material culture, late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries

ABSTRACTScholarship analyzing Zionist perceptions of historical remains in Palestine focuses mainly on biblical and Jewish remains. This article analyses responses to material culture which did not fit neatly into Zionist discourse. Crusader remains were a prominent and visible physical presence in the country’s cultural landscape, yet they related not to a glorious Jewish past but to a time considered traumatic in Jewish history. This article studies the popular perception and interpretation of these remains by Zionist immigrants and travellers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.

Apostasy of a Prince: Hans Herzl and the Boundaries of Jewish Nationalism

When Hans Herzl, son of Theodor Herzl, converted to Christianity in 1924 and committed suicide in 1930, he challenged the boundaries of the Zionist movement. Zionist responses to Hans’s conversion and suicide reveal underlying and conflicting assumptions regarding the religious, cultural, and ethnic boundaries of Jewish nationalism, both in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as in future Israeli state policy. This article traces responses in the press and among leadership of the World Zionist Organization to Hans’s conversion, as well as subsequent reactions to his suicide. To some, Hans’s anomalous life threatened Jewish unity and the Zionist movement; to others, Hans deserved not only a biography but a meaningful place in Zionist discourse. These conflicting definitions and priorities of Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s resurface within the legal and bureaucratic institutions of Israeli statehood, particularly in the 1962 Supreme Court case Rufeisen v. Ministry of the Interior.

Apostasy of a Prince: Hans Herzl and the Boundaries of Jewish Nationalism

When Hans Herzl, son of Theodor Herzl, converted to Christianity in 1924 and committed suicide in 1930, he challenged the boundaries of the Zionist movement. Zionist responses to Hans's conversion and suicide reveal underlying and conflicting assumptions regarding the religious, cultural, and ethnic boundaries of Jewish nationalism, both in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as in future Israeli state policy. This article traces responses in the press and among leadership of the World Zionist Organization to Hans's conversion, as well as subsequent reactions to his suicide. To some, Hans's anomalous life threatened Jewish unity and the Zionist movement; to others, Hans deserved not only a biography but a meaningful place in Zionist discourse. These conflicting definitions and priorities of Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s resurface within the legal and bureaucratic institutions of Israeli statehood, particularly in the 1962 Supreme Court case Rufeisen v. Ministry of the Interior.

The social life of the Samson Saga in Israeli religious Zionist rabbinic discourse

This article will explore how different contemporary groups of Israeli religious Zionists read and relate to the Biblical tales of Samson. Using current religious Zionist discourse (Bible lessons, newspaper articles and written opinion pieces) authored or delivered by leading rabbinic figures, this article will demonstrate how contemporary interpretations of the ‘Samson Saga’ (Judges 13–16) are used as a medium through which contemporary religious Zionists in Israel and the West Bank contest the meanings of political sovereignty, violence and personal ethics. More broadly, this article will argue that a focus on how sacred texts are interpreted, debated and contested in social contexts (or the ‘social life’ of a text) can offer scholars a thicker and more nuanced window into the varied ways in which religious nationalists grapple with competing political visions and desires.

The place of Palestinians in tourist and Zionist discourses in the ‘City of David’, occupied East Jerusalem

ABSTRACTThe ‘City of David’ in Silwan is on the original site of Jerusalem. Located in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, it is both an illegal Israeli settlement in a Palestinian neighbourhood and a popular international tourist destination. This article examines how the site is narrated by tour operators and tourists through fieldwork, interviews and analysis of tourist comments on the TripAdvisor site. It argues that Israeli settlers have successfully harnessed tourist discourse in order to present their vision of a Jewish Jerusalem in which Palestinian existence is ignored or treated as a threat. The site allows tourists to connect to and experience a mythical biblical past, something which answers to tourist desires to have an authentic encounter with the destination culture. In the site’s narratives, the presence of Palestinians in the area is elided over through spatial and linguistic separation and by denying their legitimate presence. This indicates how the congruence between Zionist and tourist discourses discursively legitimises Israeli colonisation of Silwan.

Routinergency: Domestic securitization in contemporary Israel

The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish–Israeli and Arab–Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call ‘ routinergency’: the naturalization of security emergency as intrinsic to the flow of routine life. We demonstrate that while the privatization of domestic securitization affords reliable protection to every citizen, routinergency also excludes Arab–Palestinians from the ethnonational boundaries that still inform the constitution of collective identities in Israel. Yet, as embodied practice, routinergency also enables access to a universal form of citizenship in Israel, which is premised on socioeconomic criticism of Zionist discourse. We use the topological metaphor of a Mobius strip to discuss how mamad rooms accentuate the contemporary tension in Israel between these ethnonational and neoliberal vectors of citizenship.