Israel Studies Review

We write this only two weeks after the 2015 Israeli elections, as newly reelected Prime Minister Netanyahu is starting to put together his new government. Although reams of journalistic prose have already provided all sorts of analyses, many more months of research are needed before significant academic papers analyzing the election campaign and outcomes will be published. Thus, we offer some preliminary observations on the election and its larger significance.

This article describes and analyzes the image of Mapai, Israel's ruling political party during its first decades, as an undemocratic 'Bolshevist party'. This perception is based on certain associations between socialist-Zionist collectivism and the totalitarian political culture of Soviet communism. The article reviews the public-political background regarding this image in Israeli political discourse and scholarship and then examines the reasons for its ready acceptance. Finally, it is argued that this Bolshevist image has functioned as a rhetorical tool that has allowed public leaders and scholars who had been involved with the Zionist labor movement to distance themselves from it.

This article explores themes in the political education and indoctrination of soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1948 War. It argues that the army command attempted to advance the notion that a form of militarism rooted in Judaism was the only way to win the war. Education officers explained to soldiers that 'the Jewish tradition' sanctioned the eradication of the invading armies and indifference to the fate of Palestinians. The article also traces the influence of Abba Kovner's lurid propaganda on the rest of the IDF's education apparatus. Kovner, the education officer of the Givati Brigade, believed that hate propaganda made killing the enemy easier, and his views were shared by many other education officers who saw his work as a road-map for the entire military. Nevertheless, there were some officers who opposed his work out of fear for the consequences that it would have on the future of Israeli society.

This article examines the reconstruction of a virtual Israeli male fraternity in Israel's only men's lifestyle magazine, Blazer. Modeled after the global 'new lad' magazine format, the Blazer text engages its readers by forging a homosocial joking relationship. Focusing on a satire dedicated to Israel's Independence Day, this study delineates a series of parodic discursive practices employed by the narrators to deconstruct and appropriate traditional Zionist myths on which Israel was founded. The Blazer text thus mobilizes a key cultural trope known as the anti-freier frame (to avoid being a 'sucker'), implemented as a set of manipulations to outsmart the system. The Blazer text rearticulates the relationship between self and society based on a local version of the 'yuppie' value system. We argue that while this frame appears to reject collectivist values, it serves as a critical lens for connecting yuppie masculinity with its Sabra predecessor, thereby consolidating a modified form of national solidarity.

In this article we examine the representation of combat soldiers in Israel through their media image. Using two major national Israeli newspapers, we follow the presentation of the Israeli combat soldier over three decades. Our findings indicate that the combat soldier begins as a hegemonic masculine figure in the 1980s, shifts to a more vulnerable, frightened child in the 1990s, and attains a more complex framing in the 2000s. While this most recent representation returns to a hegemonic masculine one, it includes additional, 'softer' components. We find that the transformation in the image of the Israeli soldier reflects changes within Israeli society in general during the period covered and is also indicative of global changes in masculinity to a certain extent. We conclude by analyzing two possible explanations: the perception of the threat and changes in the perception of masculine identity.

Focusing on Israeli works of fiction and cinema that deal with the kibbutz, this article explores the various options for writing its history: as a linear chronology that displays the historical progression of events through the presentation of particular, isolated time segments within the kibbutz's evolvement, or as a sort of kaleidoscope that looks at periods, moments, and events that shaped the kibbutz's history. Some recent works, such as Ran Tal's film Children of the Sun and the books Between Friends by Amos Oz and Home by Assaf Inbari, examine periods, moments, and events within the kibbutz's development through their relation with the past, present, and future. Searching for fragments of the past within the present, they attempt to locate traces of the socialist truth so that, in their aftermath and from their remnants, a new truth—a new human relationship—can emerge.

Architecture and landscape constitute key aspects of fictional realistic drama in film and television. In fictional films whose plots take place on Israeli kibbutzim, on-site cinematography is a central means of achieving a realistic and dramatic portrayal of the communal settlement and its social space. In this article, we investigate five productions filmed on location at Kibbutz Yakum. We argue that these filmic representations of architecture and landscape reify the image of the kibbutz as an introverted society that denies individuals their privacy and upholds the centrality and presence of community. By comparing the actual sites with their presentation in films, we show that the physical space of the kibbutz was filmed selectively in a manner that immortalizes its communal, 'classical' image, which in reality no longer exists. The kibbutz's transformation from a communal to a privatized society is purposely veiled in these films, preserving the kibbutz's established image.

Kookism by Gideon Aran

Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises by Motti Inbari

The Triumph of Israel's Radical Right by Ami Pedahzur

The Political Psychology of Israeli Prime Ministers: When Hard-Liners Opt for Peace by Yael S. Aronoff Joel Migdal

Paths to Middle-Class Mobility among Second-Generation Moroccan Immigrant Women in Israel by Beverly Mizrachi Shani Bar-On

Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty by Erica Weiss Ruth Linn and Renana Gal

Mo(ve)ments of Resistance: Politics, Economy and Society in Israel/Palestine 1931–2013 by Lev Luis Grinberg As'ad Ghanem

Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East by Abdel Monem Said Aly, Shai Feldman, and Khalil Shikaki Paul L. Scham

The Challenge of Ethnic Democracy: The State and Minority Groups in Israel, Poland and Northern Ireland by Yoav Peled Ian S. Lustick

Israeli Feminist Scholarship: Gender, Zionism, and Difference by Esther Fuchs (ed.) Pnina Peri