Toward A New Israel

This book represents an original interpretation of the state of Israel, a Jewish political renaissance in the modern era. It probes the meaning of Zionism in the historical context and examines critically the founding of the state, its underlying principle themes, and political orientation. At root, the analysis focuses on the secular ideological basis of Israel and the rejection, in 1948, of any search for an authentic projection of the new state as a philosophical continuation of Judaism. The book is organized primarily around the Jewish-Arab completion and conflict in the land of Israel, while the deeper philosophical and ideological topics provide a framework and context for Israel's collective political identity.

This book explains the institutionalization of nearly unconditional American support of Israel during the Reagan administration, and its persistence in the first Bush administration in terms of the competition of belief systems in American society and politics. Michael Thomas explains policy changes over time and provides insights into what circumstances might lead to lasting changes in policy. The volume identifies the important domestic, social, religious and political elements that have vied for primacy on policy towards Israel, and using case studies, such as the 1981 AWACS sale and the 1991 loan guarantees, argues that policy debates have been struggles to embed and enforce beliefs about Israel and about Arabs. It also establishes a framework for better understanding the influences and constraints on American policy towards Israel. An epilogue applies the lessons learned to the current Bush administration. American Policy toward Israel will be of interest to students of US foreign policy, Middle Eastern politics and international relations.

This book examines trends in American public opinion about Israel in over 75 years, from 1944 to 2019. Analyzing data from hundreds of surveys in jargon-free writing, the authors show that public support for Israel has seen a dramatic shift toward increased division between partisan and select demographic groups, elaborating on the implications that this important change may have for the countries’ special relationship. Scholars and students of American foreign policy, public opinion, Middle East politics and international relations, as well as policy analysts, policymakers, journalists and anyone interested in American policy toward Israel, will want to read this book. Special Features An Online Appendix including all surveys used throughout the book. A Roper Center-approved Data Tool that allows readers to create their own figures based on data used in the book: https://www.idc.ac.il/en/schools/government/research/apoi/pages/data-tool.aspx

Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel presents twenty-two original essays offering a critical survey of the anthropology of Israel inspired by Alex Weingrod, emeritus professor and pioneering scholar of Israeli anthropology. In the late 1950s Weingrod’s groundbreaking ethnographic research of Israel’s underpopulated south complicated the dominant social science discourse and government policy of the day by focusing on the ironies inherent in the project of Israeli nation building and on the process of migration prompted by social change. Drawing from Weingrod’s perspective, this collection considers the gaps, ruptures, and juxtapositions in Israeli society and the cultural categories undergirding and subverting these divisions. Organized into four parts, the volume examines our understanding of Israel as a place of difference, the disruptions and integrations of diaspora, the various permutations of Judaism, and the role of symbol in the national landscape and in Middle Eastern studies considered from a comparative perspective. These essays illuminate the key issues pervading, motivating, and frustrating Israel’s complex ethnoscape.

The results of the June 1992 Israeli elections indicate that Israel is on the verge of a dramatic political reversal. After fifteen years of right-wing Likud government, the Labor party is back in power. In The New Israelis, Yossi Melman, an award-winning Israeli journalist and author explores the character of his fellow countrymen and women to reveal the agents of change in Israeli society. The new Israelis are undergoing a period of confusion and vulnerability, and the Persian Gulf War struck them a devastating psychological blow. By forcing Israel to stand defenseless before its enemies, the war unleashed hidden and unprecedented conflicts within the Israeli people about their relationship to their own nation. Never before has the very identity of Israel been so challenged as it is today. The Israeli people are torn between a modern secularism and a historical religious tendency that is manifested in both a new and powerful fundamentalism and a widespread obsession with mystical cults. The kibbutz movement and many of the cornerstones of Israel's western socialist democracy are eroding; the emerging free market economy, compulsive consumerism, and the indiscriminate imitation of popular western culture have shaken the Zionist heritage. The traditional patterns of social justice and faith in the righteousness of Israel's defensive wars have been eroded by a combination of corruption and a recognition that the facts of Israel's history do not correspond to its mythology. The persistence of the Palestinian dilemma and the state's continuing role as occupier have haunted Israeli life. After a half-century of fighting wars, Israelis are finally weary. Knowing his country and the dilemmasit faces, Yossi Melman looks at Israeli history and contemporary life in a new way: He is both critical of and sympathetic toward the paradoxes of Israeli life. In The New Israelis he offers a dramatic and intimate view of how the Israeli people are facing their changing nation and what that portends for the future of Israel, the Jewish diaspora and the rest of the world.

This edited collection brings together a group of rhetoricians seeking to develop productive ways to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict,while avoiding the discursive impasses that so often derail attempts to exchange points of view.

This book examines trends in American public opinion about Israel in over 75 years, from 1944 to 2019. Analyzing data from hundreds of surveys in jargon-free writing, the authors show that public support for Israel has seen a dramatic shift toward increased division between partisan and select demographic groups, elaborating on the implications that this important change may have for the countries’ special relationship. Scholars and students of American foreign policy, public opinion, Middle East politics and international relations, as well as policy analysts, policymakers, journalists and anyone interested in American policy toward Israel, will want to read this book. Special Features An Online Appendix including all surveys used throughout the book. A Roper Center-approved Data Tool that allows readers to create their own figures based on data used in the book: https://www.idc.ac.il/en/schools/government/research/apoi/pages/data-tool.aspx

The official establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 constituted the realization of the Zionist vision, but military victory left in its wake internal and external survival issues that would threaten this historic achievement for decades to come. The refusal of the international community to recognize the political, geographic, and demographic results of the War of Independence presented Israel with a permanent regional security threat, while isolating and alienating it in the international arena. One of the most formidable problems Israeli foreign policy faced was the stance of the Christian world toward the new state. Attitudes ranged from hostility and categorical non-recognition by the Catholic Church, through Protestant ambivalence, to Evangelical support. Cross on the Star of David presents the first scholarly analysis, based on newly declassified documents, of Israeli policymaking on this issue. Uri Bialer focuses on the impact that modes of thinking rooted in the historical tradition of Jewish-Christian interactions had on Israeli policymakers and concludes that they were not innocent of the perceptions and biases that influenced the Christian world's behavior toward Israel. The result is a fine-grained, original interpretation of an important dimension of Israeli foreign policy from the founding of the State to the 1967 War.