Israel Studies Review

We are honored to introduce our inaugural issue as editors of the Israel Studies Review. For just over a decade, the journal was in the most competent hands of Yoram Peri and Paul Scham and their team at the University of Maryland. Under their leadership, the journal changed its name, transitioned to three issues per year, and enhanced its status as a leading scholarly journal in the area of Israel Studies, providing a scholarly platform to a diverse array of perspectives from multiple disciplines. Yoram and Paul themselves built on the foundations laid by Ilan Peleg, who transformed the journal from a newsletter to a full-fledged, peer-reviewed academic periodical. We are fully cognizant of the very big shoes we have to fill!

As in other countries, COVID-19 hit Israel like a bolt of lightning—unexpected, sudden, and powerful. And, like others, Israel was woefully unprepared for what would follow. The first cases came to light in the last week of February 2020, and by March and April the country was in full-scale crisis mode. In the end, almost one in ten people came down with the virus and more than 8,000 died, more than in any war that Israel has fought.

Surprisingly, although the Israeli government adopted unregulated, unorganized, inefficient, uncoordinated, and uninformed governance arrangements during the first wave of COVID-19, the public health outcome was successful, a paradox that this theoretically informed article seeks to explain. Drawing on insights from blame avoidance literature, it develops and applies an analytical framework that focuses on how allegations of policy underreaction in times of crisis pose a threat to elected executives’ reputations and how these politicians can derive opportunities for crisis exploitation from governance choices, especially at politically sensitive junctures. Based on a historical-institutional analysis combined with elite interviews, it finds that the implementation of one of the most aggressive policy alternatives on the policy menu at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis (i.e., a shutdown of society and the economy), and the subsequent consistent adoption of the aforementioned governance arrangements constituted a politically well-calibrated and effective short-term strategy for Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Recently there has been growing number of women running for national political positions. This study presents multimodal gender communicative-structures of female politicians. We analyzed 80 political interviews by all female politicians who ran for the 20th Knesset in Israel (n = 40). The findings revealed novel integrated structures that combine masculine-verbal and feminine-nonverbal communicative-patterns. Unexpectedly, the adaptation of the mixed multimodal communicative-structure was strongly correlated with power, particularly in terms of seniority. In contemporary political communication, the inclusion of feminine-nonverbal communicative-patterns is a manifestation of political strength rather than of weakness. However, female politicians from cultural minorities express masculine-verbal and nonverbal communication-patterns, constituting the traditional communication-pattern of female politicians, which assumes that the key to female politicians’ success is adopting masculine communicative-structure.

Ouzi Elyada, Hebrew Popular Journalism: Birth and Development in Ottoman Palestine (London: Routledge, 2019), 318 pp. Paperback, $50.00.

Yusri Khaizran and Muhammad Khlaile, Left to Its Fate: Arab Society in Israel under the Shadow of the “Arab Spring” (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2019), 226 pp. Paperback [Hebrew], NIS 50.