Israel Studies Review

The Israeli television series Fauda tells the story of an undercover unit pursuing a notorious terrorist to avenge terror attacks that he masterminded and to prevent his future attacks. The series bolsters Israeli collectivity by re-enacting past traumas and capitalizing on the fear of traumas yet to come, but it also dismantles national unity by portraying other ways for individuals to develop relationships with the collectives to which they belong and by attempting to find alternative temporalities to ‘traumatic time’ that returns to haunt the present from the future. While the plot aims to reinforce national identity by overcoming situations of imminent disaster, the televisual language creates another time based on overlaps between the various narrative threads of both Israeli and Palestinian identities, thus opening up new opportunities for co-existence and another relationship between the singular and the plural.

In March 1994, a protest led by the late Rabbi Uzi Meshulam burst onto the Israeli scene when the Rabbi and his followers barricaded themselves for 47 days in the town of Yehud. They demanded that a government committee be set up to investigate the disappearance of Yemenite children, who, the Rabbi charged, had been snatched from their parents in immigrant camps during the early years of Israeli statehood. In this article I present how the dualistic yet non-violent anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic ideology, which Meshulam had adopted, led to a violent confrontation between the Rabbi’s followers and the Israeli police. Despite the high profile of this clash at that time, very little was reported about the Rabbi’s worldview and beliefs. This article is intended to fill that gap.

With the ever-growing significance of international law both domestically and internationally, courts mediate much of the give and take between the international system and the national political arenas, thus acting in settings where global and local are mixed. Such a pivotal position, I argue, lends courts the ability to maximize a twofold utility, which is inextricably linked. First, on the international level, judicial institutions play an increasingly important role and form what is essentially a transnational epistemic community. Second, on the domestic level, courts capitalize on this pivotal position to become increasingly central in the decision-making process, forming alliances with other domestic players and thereby securing the implementation of judicial rulings. A case study of decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court concerning the security fence Israel built around the Occupied Territories is offered as an empirical test for the Court-Pivot Dual Utility Model that I present in this article.

About a quarter of Israeli Jews are secular-believers. They identify themselves as secular but also believe in some kind of divinity (whether or not they use the term ‘God’). As opposed to the ‘secularization thesis’, which perceives such combination of secularism and faith as a contradiction in terms, the current post-secular paradigm sees such hybridity as a deep manifestation of the complex relations between the secular and the religious in postmodern culture. This study offers, for the first time, a deep sociological look at Jewish-Israeli secular-believer women, based on 31 in-depth interviews. It discusses the interviewees’ perceptions of secularity, religion, and Judaism, revealing the complexity and characteristic ambivalence of their identity, while reflecting on similarities and differences between secular-believers and traditionalist (masorti) Israeli Jews.

This article examines the reasons why countries change their educational policies, using Israel as a case study. Employing quantitative and qualitative methods, I show that political constraints can cause governments to modify their educational policies without professional pedagogical discourse. Using the example of the ultra-Orthodox ethnic political party Shas, I demonstrate how—thanks to the political power that the party had gained, as well as the weakening of nationalist values—it succeeded in establishing a network of party schools with state funding despite the fact that some of these schools teach neither the state’s values nor the core curriculum determined by the Ministry of Education.

This article examines Devorah Omer’s first two historical children’s novels, Ben-Yehuda’s Eldest Son and Sarah, Heroine of NILI (both published in 1967), as a case study for the ideological role played by historical fiction for children and youth in 1960s Israel. A comparison of the novels with the historical sources on which Omer relied reveals how the selection of the figures of Sarah Aaronsohn and Itamar Ben-Avi allowed her to create a narrative that crossed the political divide while presenting the difficulties experienced by children and women in their encounters with the national myth. Omer’s novels thus play a dual role: they preserve the Zionist narrative and shape a collective memory consistent with the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state, while also raising issues that call into question the national narrative’s hegemonic status.

This article analyzes the influence of Jewish immigrants on the nascent advertising industry in British Mandatory Palestine. Until a mass wave of immigrants arrived in 1933–1939, local advertising was rather small and undeveloped. Among these immigrants—many of whom arrived from Central Europe, chiefly, Germany (also known as the ‘Fifth’ or ‘German’ Aliyah)—were advertising agents and graphic designers who set up the foundations of professional advertising agencies in Palestine. These new immigrants infused local society with messages championing Western European lifestyles, portraying comfort and aesthetics as ideals to strive for, values that were, in fact, contradictory to the work ethic and socialist ethos of the Yishuv at the time. The lasting mark left by this German Aliyah on the local advertising industry, and later on the State of Israel, can be observed in two main spheres: the structural-functional sphere of the industry and the content-visual sphere of the industry’s creative products.