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Through life stories and the unique lens of military combat service, this study analyzes how Israeli Jewish women construct their relationship to the Jewish nation-state.
Abstract
Purpose
Through life stories and the unique lens of military combat service, this study analyzes how Israeli Jewish women construct their relationship to the Jewish nation-state.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative study establishes a theoretical relationship between gender and the nation, including concepts such as the nation-state, the public/private divide, Jewish womanhood, and militarization in Israel. It utilizes in-depth semi-structured life story interviews with 17 Israeli Jewish women, who served in combat roles in the Israeli military.
Findings
These women demonstrate ambivalent and gendered narratives of sacrifice and success and of loyalty and resistance as they transgress and comply with the idea of the national Jewish home. They reveal a strong desire for national belonging that can be seen as an attempt to challenge the gendered public/private divide and secure their status as qualified citizens.
Social implications
Women’s integration in the military is a political issue in Israel where liberal and radical feminists, religious, bureaucratic, and other civil groups are pushing for contrasting demands. I engage in this debate by emphasizing the voices of women soldiers.
Originality/value
Instead of focusing on subjugation and marginalization owing to the unsolvable conundrum of partial military inclusion leading to (partial) political and societal exclusion, I offer an analysis of military combat service as a meaning-making practice providing a new understanding of Israeli women’s relationship to the Jewish nation-state.
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In the epigraph of the paper, Aristotle reminds us that confusion and inconsistency arise when people attach more than one meaning to any particular term (“name”). It seems that…
Abstract
In the epigraph of the paper, Aristotle reminds us that confusion and inconsistency arise when people attach more than one meaning to any particular term (“name”). It seems that Aristotle could not have better described the situation with the connotation of Jewishness in the contemporary world.
The July 19 law’s limiting of the right of national self-determination in Israel to the Jewish people has angered the Arab minority and provoked international criticism, including…
Details
DOI: 10.1108/OXAN-DB236805
ISSN: 2633-304X
Keywords
Geographic
Topical
Shahar Gindi, Yitzhak Gilat and Rachel Sagee
Minority teachers is a growing phenomenon that is encouraged as part of a quest to diversify teaching staff. Among minority teachers, there exists a group of boundary-crossing…
Abstract
Purpose
Minority teachers is a growing phenomenon that is encouraged as part of a quest to diversify teaching staff. Among minority teachers, there exists a group of boundary-crossing teachers whose “otherness” contrasts with the different student population and/or staffroom composition. The study aims to examine parent, teacher and student attitudes toward teachers crossing two types of “borders” that are central to Israeli society: the Jewish-Arab rift and the religious-secular rift.
Design/methodology/approach
A representative sample of 182 Jewish Israeli parents, 201 Jewish Israeli students grades 10–12 and 101 Jewish Israeli teachers completed questionnaires regarding their attitudes toward boundary-crossing teachers.
Findings
The overall attitudes toward cross-boundary teaching were positive. Attitudes were found to be associated with political affiliation, religiosity and age. The more left-wing participants were, the less religious and older the more they supported boundary-crossing teaching. Students were significantly less supportive of teachers crossing the Jewish-Arab divide compared with adults. The attitudes toward boundary-crossing ultra-orthodox teachers in a secular school showed a distinct pattern, as it received support from all divides of the research participants.
Social implications
The findings point to the vicious cycle of segregation in Israeli society whereby the lack of contact between Jews and Arabs leads to intergroup anxiety which in turns leads to less support in further contact through boundary-crossing teaching, especially among high school students.
Originality/value
The minority teachers’ literature often refers to the need to diversify the teaching staff or examines teachers and their relations with students. This study if the first to examine how other stakeholders’ view the idea of minority teachers.
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Mohanad Mustafa and As'ad Ghanem
This article aims to analyse the Israeli negotiation strategy in reference to the theoretical frameworks of reconciliation and settlement. It focuses on the Israeli‐Palestinian…
Abstract
Purpose
This article aims to analyse the Israeli negotiation strategy in reference to the theoretical frameworks of reconciliation and settlement. It focuses on the Israeli‐Palestinian negotiation experience over the past three years, or since Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister of the Israeli Government in 2009.
Design/methodology/approach
Theoretical literature provides two hypothetical frameworks for resolution of conflicts: a political settlement; and reconciliation between parties to the conflict. This article argues that Israel's vision of conflict resolution effectively attempts to integrate both hypothetical frameworks by proposing a political settlement for Palestinians in return for obtaining reconciliation from them. To analyse this strategy, this article explores the Israeli political discourse over the past three years, as well as Israel's vision of the conflict resolution as is manifest in this discourse.
Findings
The article argument is based on the indication that willingness of a party to reach a settlement is met with reconciliation from the other party to the conflict. A party's insistence on offering a settlement and attaining reconciliation is associated with power relations between both parties. To maintain its powerful position, the stronger party usually demands reconciliation from the weaker party, at the same time presenting a settlement that implies a political, not moral, recognition of the weaker party with a view to dispossess it from its moral logic in the conflict.
Originality/value
An assessment of the Israeli political discourse over the past three years indicates that Israel is implementing a compound negotiation strategy to resolve the conflict. The strategy entails settlement and reconciliation components. Israel wishes to deal with Palestinians through a political settlement. On the other hand, Israel wants the Palestinians to deal with it through the reconciliation process.
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ISRAEL: Jewish and democratic ideals will clash more
Details
DOI: 10.1108/OXAN-ES236235
ISSN: 2633-304X
Keywords
Geographic
Topical
The election on November 1 is a contest between one bloc aligned with former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and another opposed to him. Opinion polls indicate that neither will…
Details
DOI: 10.1108/OXAN-DB272904
ISSN: 2633-304X
Keywords
Geographic
Topical
PALESTINIANS/ISRAEL: Leaders will ignore solidarity
Details
DOI: 10.1108/OXAN-ES238897
ISSN: 2633-304X
Keywords
Geographic
Topical
How are social groups unmade? Current theories identify the symbolic power of the state as a primary factor in the creation of social groups. Drawing on Gramsci's The Southern…
Abstract
How are social groups unmade? Current theories identify the symbolic power of the state as a primary factor in the creation of social groups. Drawing on Gramsci's The Southern Question, this chapter extends state-centered theories by exploring policies that are critical but under-theorized factors in group formation. These include the concession of material benefits as well as the use of coercive means. Further, while current theories focus on how social groups are made, a Gramscian perspective draws attention to how the state intervenes to prevent or neutralize group-making projects from below. This chapter explores a case of a decrease in national group solidarity. Specifically, this study explains how in the 1990s the Israeli state weakened national group formation among Palestinians by adopting two spatially distinct but coordinated strategies. First, the rearrangement of the military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank through the establishment of an authority of self-rule (the Palestinian Authority) demobilized and divided Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories, especially along class-cum-moral lines. Second, state practices and discourses centered on citizenship rights shifted the center of political activism among Palestinian citizens of Israel toward citizenship issues. I argue that these two routes, which I call the indirect rule route and the civil society route, were complementary components of a broader attempt to neutralize Palestinian collective mobilization around nationhood. Despite recent changes and contestations, these two strategies of rule continue to affect group formation and to create distinct experiences of politics among Palestinians under Israeli rule. Analysis of the Palestinian–Israeli case shows that the state can unmake groups through the distribution of interrelated policies that are specific to certain categories of people and places. Understanding the conditions under which certain policies of inclusion or exclusion affect group formation requires going beyond the analytic primacy currently given to the symbolic power of the state.