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Shavit, “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel”

This month, Random House will publish My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit.  The publisher’s description follows. My Promised Land

Not since Thomas L. Friedman’s groundbreaking From Beirut to Jerusalem has a book captured the essence and the beating heart of the Middle East as keenly and dynamically as My Promised Land. Facing unprecedented internal and external pressures, Israel today is at a moment of existential crisis. Ari Shavit draws on interviews, historical documents, private diaries, and letters, as well as his own family’s story, illuminating the pivotal moments of the Zionist century to tell a riveting narrative that is larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and national, both deeply human and of profound historical dimension.

We meet Shavit’s great-grandfather, a British Zionist who in 1897 visited the Holy Land on a Thomas Cook tour and understood that it was the way of the future for his people; the idealist young farmer who bought land from his Arab neighbor in the 1920s to grow the Jaffa oranges that would create Palestine’s booming economy; the visionary youth group leader who, in the 1940s, transformed Masada from the neglected ruins of an extremist sect into a powerful symbol for Zionism; the Palestinian who as a young man in 1948 was driven with his family from his home during the expulsion from Lydda; the immigrant orphans of Europe’s Holocaust, who took on menial work and focused on raising their children to become the leaders of the new state; the pragmatic engineer who was instrumental in developing Israel’s nuclear program in the 1960s, in the only interview he ever gave; the zealous religious Zionists who started the settler movement in the 1970s; the dot-com entrepreneurs and young men and women behind Tel-Aviv’s booming club scene; and today’s architects of Israel’s foreign policy with Iran, whose nuclear threat looms ominously over the tiny country.

As it examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, My Promised Land asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can Israel survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is currently facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. The result is a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Christians in Israel Complain of Mistreatment

The Washington Post has a story this week about vandalism at a Protestant cemetery in Jerusalem. The vandals toppled stone crosses from graves and smashed them to pieces. The incident is the latest in a string of recent attacks on Christian sites in Israel:

The attack joins a list of high-profile Christian sites that have been vandalized within the past year. They include a Trappist monastery in Latrun, outside Jerusalem, where vandals burned a door and spray-painted “Jesus is a monkey” on the century-old building, a Baptist church in Jerusalem, and other monasteries. Clergymen often speak of being spat at by ultra-Orthodox religious students while walking around Jerusalem’s Old City wearing frocks and crosses.

As to this last fact, Armenian Apostolic priests from the Old City have told me they personally have been spat upon, usually during processions. As the Post report states, the culprits in these spitting incidents, and the suspects in the most recent attack on the cemetery, are students at ultra-orthodox yeshivas. Everyone agrees, according to the Post, that Jewish-Christian in Israel are better than they have been in the past, and that the Israeli police have started to do more to address attacks on Christians. But Christians complain that the attacks continue unabated.

You can read the whole piece here.

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Robinson, “Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State”

This September, Stanford University Press will publish Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State by Shira Robinson 0804788006(George Washington University).  The publisher’s description follows.

Following the 1948 war and the creation of the state of Israel, Palestinian Arabs comprised just fifteen percent of the population but held a much larger portion of its territory. Offered immediate suffrage rights and, in time, citizenship status, they nonetheless found their movement, employment, and civil rights restricted by a draconian military government put in place to facilitate the colonization of their lands. Citizen Strangers traces how Jewish leaders struggled to advance their historic settler project while forced by new international human rights norms to share political power with the very people they sought to uproot.

For the next two decades Palestinians held a paradoxical status in Israel, as citizens of a formally liberal state and subjects of a colonial regime. Neither the state campaign to reduce the size of the Palestinian population nor the formulation of citizenship as a tool of collective exclusion could resolve the government’s fundamental dilemma: how to bind indigenous Arab voters to the state while denying them access to its resources. More confounding was the tension between the opposing aspirations of Palestinian political activists. Was it the end of Jewish privilege they were after, or national independence along with the rest of their compatriots in exile? As Shira Robinson shows, these tensions in the state’s foundation—between privilege and equality, separatism and inclusion—continue to haunt Israeli society today.

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Pappé, “The Forgotten Palestinians”

This July, Yale University Press published The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, written by Ilan Pappé (Exeter University).  The 9780300184327publisher’s description follows.

For more than 60 years, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have lived as Israeli citizens within the borders of the nation formed at the end of the 1948 conflict. Occupying a precarious middle ground between the Jewish citizens of Israel and the dispossessed Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli Palestinians have developed an exceedingly complex relationship with the land they call home; however, in the innumerable discussions of the Israel-Palestine problem, their experiences are often overlooked and forgotten.

In this book, historian Ilan Pappé examines how Israeli Palestinians have fared under Jewish rule and what their lives tell us about both Israel’s attitude toward minorities and Palestinians’ attitudes toward the Jewish state. Drawing upon significant archival and interview material, Pappé analyzes the Israeli state’s policy towards its Palestinian citizens, finding discrimination in matters of housing, education, and civil rights. Rigorously researched yet highly readable, The Forgotten Palestinians brings a new and much-needed perspective to the Israel-Palestine debate.

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Ariel, “An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews”

9780814770689_FullIn June, New York University Press published An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews by Yaakov Ariel (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). The publisher’s description follows.

It is generally accepted that Jews and evangelical Christians have little in common. Yet special alliances developed between the two groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Evangelicals viewed Jews as both the rightful heirs of Israel and as a group who failed to recognize their true savior. Consequently, they set out to influence the course of Jewish life by attempting to evangelize Jews and to facilitate their return to Palestine. Their double-edged perception caused unprecedented political, cultural, and theological meeting points that have revolutionized Christian-Jewish relationships. An Unusual Relationship explores the beliefs and political agendas that evangelicals have created in order to affect the future of the Jews. Additionally, it analyses Jewish opinions and reactions to those efforts, as well as those of other religious groups, such as Arab Christians.

This volume offers a fascinating, comprehensive analysis of the roots, manifestations, and consequences of evangelical interest in the Jews, and the alternatives they provide to conventional historical Christian-Jewish interactions. It also provides a compelling understanding of Middle Eastern politics through a new lens.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 3 Comments

End-Times Politics

Uri Ariel

Walter Russell Mead had an interesting post this past weekend about Israeli cabinet minister Uri Ariel’s call for rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. Ariel (left) has a reputation as a provocateur, and it’s hard to take his demand at face value. Rebuilding the Temple would require demolition of two famous Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, both dating from the Arab conquest. One can’t imagine any responsible Israeli government undertaking such an operation, for reasons that are obvious. In real-world political terms, one should probably understand Ariel’s comments as a a bit of rhetoric meant to encourage the settler movement and discomfit their adversaries.

As Mead points out, however, hundreds of millions of people around the world will not see Ariel’s demand in real-world political terms. They will see it in end-times political terms. According to the “end-times theology” endorsed by many Evangelicals in the US and abroad, the Apocalypse awaits the re-establishment of the Jewish state and reconstruction of the Temple. This theology explains much Evangelical support for Israel in the US and elsewhere. Here’s Mead:

Any sign that the Temple issue is moving to the fore in Israeli politics today will engage the attention of evangelical and Pentecostal Protestants around the world. In Africa, Brazil, the United States and many other places, this news, combined with the stories about unrest in the Arab world, will be read as a sign that the End Times are approaching and that God is at work.

This is all familiar to students of contemporary Christianity. But Mead points out that there are Muslim end-times theologies too:

In Islam as in Christianity, many strains of apocalyptic thinking see the End Times as an era of apostasy and rebellion against God, of the forces of evil assembling themselves for one last battle against God and true religion. The fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the bitter war between Sunnis and Shiites that now embraces the entire Fertile Crescent, and what will be seen by many as evidence that Israel is preparing to restore the Temple on a site holy to Islam: these developments will further strengthen apocalyptic, End Times thinking in the Muslim world.

In other words, although Ariel’s demand may not count for much in Israeli politics, it will reinforce the end-times theologies of hundreds of millions of Christians and Muslims around the world. And that could be very significant. Let’s say only ten percent of people who believe in end-times theologies take Ariel seriously. That amounts to tens of millions of people. These tens of millions are not likely to support compromise in the Middle East. Quite the opposite: they are likely to push their governments to take hard-line positions in the conflict. Even apart from the Arab-Israeli conflict, the belief that Armageddon is near may intensify hostilities and make peaceful coexistence less likely elsewhere–between Christians and Muslims in Africa, for example. What seems an insignificant, provocative remark by a fairly obscure politician may have ramifications far beyond Israel’s borders.

Posted on by JCPW

Cohen, “Divine Service? Judaism and Israel’s Armed Forces”

Divine Service_PPC.QXD_radicalism unveiledThis July, Ashgate will publish Divine Service? Judaism and Israel’s Armed Forces by Stuart A. Cohen (Ashkelon Academic College, Israel). The publisher’s description follows.

Religion now plays an increasingly prominent role in the discourse on international security. Within that context, attention largely focuses on the impact exerted by teachings rooted in Christianity and Islam. By comparison, the linkages between Judaism and the resort to armed force are invariably overlooked. This book offers a corrective. Comprising a series of essays written over the past two decades by one of Israel’s most distinguished military sociologists, its point of departure is that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, quite apart from revolutionizing Jewish political activity, also triggered a transformation in Jewish military perceptions and conduct. Soldiering, which for almost two millennia was almost entirely foreign to Jewish thought and practice, has by virtue of universal conscription (for women as well as men) become a rite of passage to citizenship in the Jewish state. For practicing orthodox Jews in Israel that change generates dilemmas that are intellectual as well as behavioural, and has necessitated both doctrinal and institutional adaptations. At the same time, the responses thus evoked are forcing Israel’s decision-makers to reconsider the traditional role of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) as their country’s most evocative symbol of national unity.

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Barzilai on Law, Politics, and the Adjudication of Religious Issues

Gad Barzilai (University of Washington – Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies) has posted Law is Politics. The abstract follows.

In his essay, “Law or Politics: Israeli Constitutional Adjudication as a Case Study,” Gideon Sapir is coping with some problems concerning adjudication of religious issues. He presumes that there is a certain dichotomy that differentiates “law” from “politics,” since the first deals with norms and the second with regulating and balancing political branches. Sapir’s article, in my opinion, proves that law is politics in a sense that law generates and embodies political and socioeconomic interests, identities, and consciousness. I argue below that politics cannot be differentiated from law, and therefore cannot respond to Sapir’s aspiration to de-politicize adjudication and to monitor and hamper the effects of personal backgrounds and worldviews on judicial rulings. I analyze some of Sapir’s findings and arguments from a critical perspective that law is politics.

The subject matter of religious justices in supreme courts are particularly relevant in countries where almost no institutional and constitutional separation between state and religion prevails. In countries like Israel that have not separated state from religion, and have used religion as part of state nationality and legal ideology, the background of the justices and their basic worldviews will most often be a reflection and articulation of interactions between religion, state power foci, and state ideology. The Israeli Jewish political elite has used Orthodox religion to legitimize the state, and hence has used the non-separation of nationality and religion embedded in Zionism, for political purposes.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Lecture: “Who is a Jew?” (Feb. 19)

Fordham’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyers’ Work will host a lecture, “‘Who is a Jew’: Israeli Law versus the Press,” on February 19. The speaker, Professor  Yifat Holzman-Gazit, will discuss a 2005 Israeli High Court decision on the validity of non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism performed outside Israel. Details are here.

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Amara, Abu-Saad & Yiftachel (eds.), “Indigenous (In)Justice”

Next month, Harvard University Press will publish Indigenous (In)Justice: Human Rights Law and Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab/Negev edited by Ahmad Amara (PhD Candidate, NYU), Ismael Abu-Saad (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Oren Yiftachel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev).  The publisher’s description follows.Indigenous (In)Justice

The indigenous Bedouin Arab population in the Naqab/Negev desert in Israel has experienced a history of displacement, intense political conflict, and cultural disruption, along with recent rapid modernization, forced urbanization, and migration. This volume of essays highlights international, national, and comparative law perspectives and explores the legal and human rights dimensions of land, planning, and housing issues, as well as the economic, social, and cultural rights of indigenous peoples. Within this context, the essays examine the various dimensions of the “negotiations” between the Bedouin Arab population and the State of Israel.

Indigenous (In)Justice locates the discussion of the Naqab/Negev question within the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict and within key international debates among legal scholars and human rights advocates, including the application of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the formalization of traditional property rights, and the utility of restorative and reparative justice approaches. Leading international scholars and professionals, including the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, are among the contributors to this volume.