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The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse the significance of the incidence of female principals in the urban sector of Eretz Israel, against the background of growing Jewish society, through the prism of which we can view the development of modern Hebrew education during the waning Ottoman rule.

In addition to the archival material, contemporary newspapers provided an important source, as did memoirs of prominent people that, to some extent, filled in the “gaps”, more on the running of the schools and less on the activities of the four principals.

A survey of the archival material reveals that the four women share biographical elements, their talents, personalities and education obtained abroad, style of school leadership and organization, not to mention their moral contribution to the education of girls in Eretz Israel.

One may point to other fields in which women began to play a more prominent role, based on European training and experience. For instance, in medicine and a modern approach to midwifery, From 1900, modern trained female doctors, nurses and midwives began to be employed in hospitals and private practices around the country, helping to radically reduce childbirth fatalities and allowing women to consult a woman practitioner where before they had been unwilling to expose themselves to men. Although a direct link between the earlier presence of female educational administrators and the entry of women doctors may be difficult to establish, the atmosphere had certainly begun to change.

From that period on, during the British Mandate, and after the creation of the State of Israel, immense changes have been instituted. One can view the seeds of these changes as, at least in part, having been planted by the pioneering work of our four women. There were far reaching developments in the conception of female management from the time of the Ottoman rule through the period of the British Mandate.

This research shines a light on a forgotten world and pursues a phenomenon not yet revealed in Zionist historiography − the running of girls’ schools by women in the Jewish community, under the dying Ottoman regime. The study allows us a deeper insight into the historical educational processes that fashioned the profession of head teachers, via pioneering female principals. Female administration in a patriarchal society, with a hegemonic male orientation that placed man at the centre and woman as secondary, faced these problems, obstacles and opposition. Women who were appointed to run schools had to justify their position by imitating the “masculine” style of management and to carry out their work − both pedagogical and administrative − without organizational, social or emotional support. They suffered opposition, internal (their male teaching staff) and external (from patrons and the religious community) and the need to respond to their criticism.

Intractable conflicts are characterized as protracted, irreconcilable, violent, of zero‐sum nature, total, and central. They are demanding, stressful, exhausting, and costly both in human and material terms. Societies involved in this type of conflict develop appropriate psychological conditions which enable them to cope successfully with the conflictual situation. The present paper proposes the following societal beliefs which are conducive to the development of these psychological conditions: beliefs about the justness of one's own goals, beliefs about security, beliefs of delegitimizing the opponent, beliefs of positive self‐image, beliefs about patriotism, beliefs about unity and beliefs about peace. These beliefs constitute a kind of ideology which supports the continuation of the conflict. The paper analyzes as an example one such intractable conflict, namely the one between Israel and Arabs, concentrating on the Israeli society. Specifically, it demonstrates the reflection of the discussed societal beliefs in the Israeli school textbooks. Finally, implications of the presented framework for peaceful conflict resolution are discussed.

This article deals with the contribution of visual presentation to education for national identity, an issue not examined sufficiently by recent theories of nationalism. Studies of nationalism mention education only in general terms, as an instrument of socialisation on the macro level of the national system, and do not consider specific ‘micro’ educational tools. One such tool is the use of visual presentation, notably in textbooks. To demonstrate the use of visual images in promoting nationalism, this study focuses on Zionist geography textbooks at the time of the British Mandate (1918‐1948) in what Israelis refer to as Eretz Israel (pre‐state Israel), exploited by the Jewish Yishuv (Jewish community) to rally pupils to contribute to ‘the state in the making’.

This article explores the role of history and historical memory in the formation of early Zionist/Israeli national security doctrine. To that end, it makes three moves. First, it explores a series of public addresses made by Zalman Rubashov (Shazar) in 1942–1943. A key public intellectual in the Jewish community of preindependent Palestine (the Yishuv), Rubashov means to help his listeners make sense of, and respond collectively to, the unfolding destruction of European Jewry. Second, it draws cautious parallels between those public intellectual pronouncements and the postwar work of Friedrich Meinecke, a prominent German historian and public intellectual and a sometime teacher of Rubashov. In both cases, I suggest, history does more than make sense of a moment of political transition: It seeks to reframe the self-understandings of citizens and their collective political relations. Third, drawing on a recent memoir by Noam Chayut, a prominent Israeli antioccupation activist, I explore how those self-understandings can be lost when the historical claims upon which they are predicated lose their sense of immediacy, naturalness, or coherence.

Autonomy, unity, identity: these three themes and ideals have been pursued by nationalist thinkers everywhere since Rousseau and Herder (Hutchinson & Smith, 1994). Zionism, founded in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century,¹ is a particular case of a national movement, putting into practice the idea of a political community located within the boundaries of a single nation-state. Yet, at the same time, the Jewish nation-building process, which began in Palestine in 1881 and achieved its aim of independence in the spring of 1948, with the establishment of the State of Israel under the political leadership of the Labor movement, was unusual in its complexity and marked, from its inception, by dramatic struggles over the distribution of power.

This paper aims to explore, for the first time over a long period of time, the autobiographical memory of Israeli veterans of the 1948 War, pertaining to the 1948 Palestinian exodus that led to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. Does this memory include the Zionist narrative (i.e. willing flight of the Palestinian refugees) or a critical narrative (i.e. willing flight and expulsion)? One of the primary sources to influence the collective memory of conflicts is the autobiographical memory. This memory is also one of the primary sources for research of the past. Thus, autobiographical memory is of importance.

Methodologically, this is done through an analysis of all 1948 veterans’ memoirs published between 1949 and 2004. Interviews were also conducted with various veterans, to understand the dynamics of their memoir publication.

Empirical findings suggest that during the first period (1949-1968), this memory was exclusively Zionist; during the second (1969-1978), it became slightly critical; and during the third (1979-2004), the critical tendency became more prevalent. Onward, the nine empirical causes for the presentation of exodus the way it was presented are discussed. Theoretical findings relate, inter alia, to the importance of micro factors in shaping the autobiographical memory, assembles seven such theoretical factors, suggests that these factors can influence in two ways (promoting collective memory change or inhibiting it), and that their impact can change over time.

Taken together, the paper contributes empirical and theoretical findings that are based on a solid and wide scope research.

Taking an intersectional approach, this chapter makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to the study of mothers’ movements in the context of social welfare cutbacks in Israel. I argue that the political use of the maternal identity provides an important cultural resource to women’s social movements, yet all women cannot access this advantage equally. By adding an intersectional perspective to the literature on women’s movements and media debates, this empirical study shows that the ability of different groups of women to politically mobilize their maternal identity in the news is impacted by their class and racial backgrounds. I focus on Israel as an ambiguous case that reflects both the political relevance of maternal identity as mobilized by different political actors, as well as the intersectional dynamics of marginalization of women’s movements within contentious media debates about austerity policies. Using critical discourse analysis, I analyzed 268 newspaper articles that discuss the Israeli Single Mothers’ Movement, a welfare rights movement of low-income women of color (Mizrahi). I find two competing frames converging across the newspapers analyzed: the first draws on a nationalist discourse of the “mother of the nation” to present a positive image of a heroic “mothers’ movement”; the second draws on racist and sexist images to negatively frame activists as a “Mizrahi movement” of undeserving poor mothers. I show how the contested construction of the Single Mothers’ Movement in the news media is directly connected to hegemonic Israeli discourse on motherhood and ethnicity, and demonstrate how this shapes the movement’s public image and its political and feminist value.

It is by now a foregone conclusion that the Talmudic sages possessed a remarkable knowledge and understanding of highly sophisticated economic laws and practices. In fact, as far back as 1911, the eminent economist and scholar, Werner Sombart, had expressed his deep admiration for their high degree of economic sophistication and keen insight when he wrote: