Israel Studies Review

You are now holding the first issue of Israel Studies Review—the official journal of the Association for Israel Studies (AIS)—in its new format, complete with new graphics, design, and content. Until now, it was known as the Israel Studies Forum, edited for ten years by Ilan Peleg, who transformed it from a newsletter for AIS members into a respected, refereed, professional journal. This year the journal is again taking a step forward. It reflects the academic development of the field, newly available technology (color, even!), and the progress and coming of age of the journal itself.

The 2010 Israeli Democracy Index raised a number of serious questions regarding the status and strength of Israeli democracy. We believe it is an appropriate topic to kick off our Forum, which presents essays representing a variety of points of view by eminent Israeli scholars.

Democracy is not just about free and fair elections. It requires at least some minimal substantial guarantees, such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, that formulate and enable free choice of autonomous and equal agents. These notions are well founded in Israeli constitutional law, but in recent years it seems that this basic understanding of the democratic process is weakening, especially as reflected in the actions of the Knesset. Several recent examples of Knesset legislation processes suggest that Israeli democratic culture is being eroded, as some of democracy’s fundamental notions are abandoned in favor of national-chauvinism and intolerance.

Is Israeli democracy in danger? One often hears nowadays that it is. It is worth recalling how often, and how confidently, this has been asserted in the past. Since May 1977, when the right-wing religious coalition first came to power, it has been claimed repeatedly that Israel’s democracy is deteriorating and some form of clerical fascism is emerging. In the aftermath of the 1977 election a member of the outgoing Labor government burned his papers, fearing what might happen if they fall into the new regime’s hands. These fears, then, were not confined to some radical fringe. In a somewhat less dramatic fashion I shared and voiced them too.

Israel’s democratic order is currently being assailed in a concerted effort to reformulate its priorities and redefine its identity. The civic nature of Israeli nationalism, as delineated by its founders, is being questioned by a growing neo-nationalist wave bent on displacing the universal and Jewish values of equality, justice, and tolerance ensconced in its declaration of independence with an ethnically driven worldview that links the connection between the land and the people with an exclusivist package, which denies diversity and denigrates pluralism.

The question of the nature of the Israeli regime is related to two different but connected inquiries. First, its proper classification under the categories of democracy/non-democracy, a question that is closely connected to our understanding of the nature and basic features of democracy. This question has received considerable scholarly attention in the past two decades. Beside its traditional classification as a liberal democracy (see, e.g., Yakobson and Rubinstein 2008), Smooha (1990, 1998) formulated the “ethnic democracy” model to account for Israel’s political structure, Rouhana (1997) classified Israel as “ethnic state” and its regime as “exclusive ethnic state,” Peled and Navot (2005) refer to the Israeli regime as a “majoritarian democracy,” while Yiftachel (1997, 2006) described it as an archetype for “ethnocracy.” I have also dealt with the classification of the Israeli regime on several previous occasions (Ghanem 1998, 2001, 2010; Ghanem, Rouhana, and Yiftachel 2000; Rouhana and Ghanem 1998).

Is Israeli democracy in danger? The short answer is yes! But which democracy is not in some sense or another fragile and in danger? In some democracies it is the rise of the extreme right and racism in reaction to Muslim minorities, in others the possibility of disastrous economic collapse, and in still others the nearing possibility of a civil war. In the case of Israel it is unreasonable to assess the future of democracy given the deep uncertainties about the prospects of a settlement with the Palestinians and of achieving definable agreed-upon borders in the foreseeable future, and Israel’s permanently grave state of security. In addition, no one can risk predicting the prospect and consequences of a war involving thousands of missiles over Israeli cities if the present deadlock of the peace process persists and eventually leads to an explosion.

As a state founded on Jewish immigration and the absorption of immigration, what are the ideological and political implications for Israel of a zero or negative migration balance? By closely examining data on immigration and emigration, trends with regard to the migration balance are established. This article pays particular attention to the ways in which Israelis from different political perspectives have portrayed the question of the migration balance and to the relationship between a declining migration balance and the re-emergence of the “demographic problem“ as a political, cultural, and psychological reality of enormous resonance for Jewish Israelis. Conclusions are drawn about the relationship between Israel's anxious re-engagement with the demographic problem and its responses to Iran's nuclear program, the unintended consequences of encouraging programs of “flexible aliyah,“ and the intense debate over the conversion of non-Jewish non-Arab Israelis.

This article examines Jewish civilian criminality during the 1948 War and the way it was handled by military forces. It demonstrates the dilemma the Haganah forces were confronted with in dealing with civilian criminality in the absence of a functioning civil court system, and the various measures taken against civilian profiteering and looting. In July 1948, the practice of trying civilians in military courts was terminated due to an appeal to the Israeli High Court of Justice by one of the looters. This article examines these issues, thus allowing a different periodization of the 1948 War, based on a legal rather than on a military perspective.

Changes in Israeli politics, diplomacy, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, changes in Israeli cultural texts dealing with the conflict, and changes in Israeli writing of fiction—all led to significant changes in how the Israeli-Arab conflict is portrayed in Israeli fiction written in the 1980s. Comprising fictional texts about the conflict, the novels and films examined in this article actually deal with the inability to tell the story. The conflict is portrayed as too deep-rooted and complicated, to the extent that it is impossible to recount it and construct a dialogue or to find common grounds for comprehending it. The texts almost always end up in death, no Jewish-Arab personal relation prevails, and most of the interactions are through the military. According to the texts examined here, these two societies appear to need the conflict in order to overcome bitter conflicts within themselves; and Arab-Palestinian Israeli citizens feel that they cannot live in Israel.

This article discusses the place of Hebrew and Jewish images and stereotypes in the works of the Israeli-Arab Hebrew writer Sayed Kashua. When describing his Arab protagonists, Kashua portrays both the stereotype of the oppressed Diaspora Jew, who is trying to blend in and hide his identity, and the stereotype of the Israeli Jew, the image that many of Kashua's protagonists aspire to imitate. The article argues that adopting those images and stereotypes has a dual function. On the one hand, it can be understood as an attempt to imitate and internalize the majority's gaze, creating a sense of brotherhood and familiarity with Jewish-Israeli readers. On the other hand, the same images and stereotypes can be understood as having a major subversive thrust that ridicules the Jewish-Israeli identity and its perception of the Israeli-Arab and criticizes the Israelization process among Palestinian citizens of Israel. This subversive dimension, typical of Kashua's sarcastic style, becomes sharper in his more recent works.

This article discusses the form in which the “I-We“ relationship is configured in Israel, in terms of its intersection with democracy. It argues that what is usually considered as a sine qua non for a robust democracy, namely, an agonistic tension between the “I,“ that is our individual uniqueness, privacy, and personal liberty, and the “We,“ that is our collective liberty and autonomy, is absent from Israeli society. Moreover, when we examine the distribution, consumption, use, and negotiation of power in the sphere of everyday life in Israel, we find that “the military,“ its discourse, and its practices suffuse precisely those spaces where the social fabric as well as identities are being shaped. The conclusion is that the Israeli society is actually drifting away from democracy in an increasingly oppressive erasure of personal identity claims, as well as of their discourse and praxis.

Shaul Bartal, The Palestinians from the Naqba to Feddayun, 1949–1956 (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2009).

Matti Steinberg, Facing Their Fate: Palestinian National Consciousness, 1967–2007 (Miskal: Yedioth Aharonoth, 2008).

Shaul Arieli and Michael Sfard, The Wall of Folly (Miskal: Yedioth Aharonoth, 2008).

Nava Sonnenschein, Dialogue-Challenging Identity: Jews Constructing Their Identity through Encounter with Palestinians (Haifa: Pardes, 2008).

Sarab Abu Rabia Queder and Naomi Weiner-Levy, eds., Palestinian Women in Israel: Identity Power Relations and Coping Strategies (Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute/Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2010).

Honaida Ghanim, Reinventing the Nation: Palestinian Intellectuals in Israel (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2009).

Ephraim Lavie, ed., Israel and the Arab Peace Initiative (Tel Aviv University: Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Studies, Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and Africa Studies and Daniel S. Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies, 2010).

Michael Milstein, Mukawama: The Challenge of Resistance to Israel’s National Security Concept (Tel Aviv University: Institute for National Security Studies, 2010).

Adam LeBor, City of Oranges: An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).

Daniel Monterescu and Dan Rabinowitz, eds., Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities: Historical Narratives, Spatial Dynamics, Gender Relations and Cultural Encounters in Palestinian-Israeli Towns (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Daphna Sharfman, Eli Nachmias, and Johnny Mansour, eds., The Secret of Coexistence: Jews and Arabs in Haifa during the British Mandate in Palestine, 1920–1948 (Charleston, SC: Booksurge, 2007).

Haim Yacobi, The Jewish-Arab City: Spatio-Politics in a Mixed Community (London: Routledge, 2009).

Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election Review by Kenneth Waltzer

Reuven Shapira, Transforming Kibbutz Research: Trust and Moral Leadership in the Rise and Decline of Democratic Cultures Review by Julia Chaitin

Baruch Gilead, ed., Documents of the Foreign Policy of Israel, vol. 11, January–October 1956

Nana Sagi ed., Documents of the Foreign Policy of Israel, vol. 12, The Sinai Campaign: The Political Struggle, October 1956–March 1957 Review by Motti Golani

David De Vries, Diamonds and War: State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine Review by Kenneth Stammerman