Covering topical issues concerning the nature of the Israeli state, this engaging work presents essays that combine a variety of comparative schemes, both internal to Jewish civilization and extending throughout the world, such as: modern Jewish society, politics and culture; historical consciousness in the 20th century; colonialism, anti-colonialism and postcolonial state-building.With its open-ended, comparative approach, Israel in History provides a useful means of correcting the biases found in so much scholarship on Israel, be it sympathetic or hostile. This book will appeal to scholars and students with research interests in many fields, including Israeli Studies, Middle East Studies, and Jewish Studies.

In the 100-year struggle for Palestine, history itself has been a battlefield, as Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs seek to challenge each other's claim to national identity. Whatever the outcome of the current phase in regional affairs, no real progress toward peace can occur before agreement is reached about the events that have shaped the present and will remain dominant influences over the future. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal have moved in this direction with this account of the origins and history of the Palestinian people.

For more than a half-century, Israel has been forced to defend its existence against international political disapproval, racist calumny, and violence visited upon its citizens by terrorists of many stripes. While nations have always been made to defend their moral, political, economic, or social actions, Israel has the unique plight of having to defend its very right to exist. Covering Israel’s struggle for existence from the British occupation and the UN’s partition of Palestine, to the dashed hopes of the Oslo Accords and the second intifada, Yaacov Lozowick trains an enlightening, forthright eye on Israel’s strengths and failures. A lifelong liberal and peace activist, he explores Israel’s national and regional political, social, and moral obligations as well as its right to secure its borders and repel attacks both philosophical and military. Combining rich historical perspective and passionate conviction, Right to Exist sets forth the agenda of a people and a nation, and elegantly articulates Israel’s entitlement to a peaceful coexistence with its surrounding Arab neighbors and a future of security and pride.

Explores how the concept of settler colonialism provides a clearer understanding of the Zionist movement's project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, displacing the Palestinian Arab population and marginalizing its cultural presence. Halper argues that the only way out of a colonial situation is decolonization: the dismantling of Zionist structures of domination and control and their replacement by a single democratic state, in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews forge a new civil society and a shared political community. To show how this can be done, Halper uses the 10-point program of the One Democratic State Campaign as a guide for thinking through the process of decolonization to its post-colonial conclusion. --From publisher description.

Jerusalem 1967: everyone is reeling from the aftermath of the 6-Day War. The Palestinians are stunned and cannot comprehend their losses, whilst the Israelis are waking up to a new political reality - and their new responsibilities.

These essays by a leading Israeli historian focus on Israeli decisions and the reasons behind the mass Arab exile from Palestine in 1948. Benny Morris addresses the transfer of Majdal's Arabs to Gaza in 1950, the initial absorption of the Palestinian refugees in Arab host countries in 1948-9, and why some Arabs remained in their villages. He then explores attitudes toward the Palestinian Arabs from the 1948 war to the differing perspectives of Israel's two main parties. By examining past and present Israeli historiography, Morris identifies and analyzes the major points of controversy between the "old" official Israeli histories and the "new" histories of the 1980s and beyond.

This account chronicles a chapter in modern Palestinian history - the revolt against Israeli occupation known as the Intifada - from inception to bitter defeat. It focuses on the daily lives of the Palestinians with whom the author became close during his time in the Middle East.

"Since the start of the occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel's domination of the Palestinians has deprived an entire population of any political status or protection. But even decades on, most people speak of this rule - both in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debates - as temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. In The One-State Condition, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir directly challenge this belief. Looking closely at the history and contemporary formation of the ruling apparatus - the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories - Azoulay and Ophir outline the one-state condition of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status. Israeli citizenship is shaped through the active denial of Palestinian citizenship and civil rights. Though many Israelis, on both political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, few ultimately admit that Israel is no democracy or question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself. Too frequently ignored are the lasting effects of the deceptive denial of the events of 1948 and 1967, and the ways in which the resulting occupation has reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Azoulay and Ophir show that acknowledgment of the one-state condition is not only a prerequisite for considering a one- or two-state solution; it is a prerequisite for advancing new ideas to move beyond the trap of this false dilemma."--Publisher's description

"Since the start of the occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel's domination of the Palestinians has deprived an entire population of any political status or protection. But even decades on, most people speak of this rule - both in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debates - as temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. In The One-State Condition, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir directly challenge this belief. Looking closely at the history and contemporary formation of the ruling apparatus - the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories - Azoulay and Ophir outline the one-state condition of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status. Israeli citizenship is shaped through the active denial of Palestinian citizenship and civil rights. Though many Israelis, on both political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, few ultimately admit that Israel is no democracy or question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself. Too frequently ignored are the lasting effects of the deceptive denial of the events of 1948 and 1967, and the ways in which the resulting occupation has reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Azoulay and Ophir show that acknowledgment of the one-state condition is not only a prerequisite for considering a one- or two-state solution; it is a prerequisite for advancing new ideas to move beyond the trap of this false dilemma."--Publisher's description

Jews and Muslims in the Arab World highlights the effects of historical memory on the Arab-Israel conflict, demonstrating that both Jews and Arabs use stories of distant pasts to create their identities and shape their politics. Whether real or imagined, the past filtered through their collective memories has had and will continue to have enormous influence on how Jews and Arabs perceive themselves and each other. Jews and Muslims in the Arab World describes the ways in which the past is absorbed, internalized, and then processed among Jews and Arabs. The book stresses the importance of historical imagination on the current evolving political cultures, but does not claim that explanations from an ancient past shed light on every aspect of contemporary events.

"Having observed earlier periods of determined, persistent, creative and wise American diplomacy on the Arab-Israeli conflict, we are left to ponder whether that kind of American leadership and diplomatic wisdom can be recaptured. We also are left to wonder whether the supportive domestic environment in which previous administrations operated will recur, or whether Congressional and public support for Israel has limited administration options and thus changed the very nature of the American role in the peace process. Our overall conclusions in this volume represent a mix of process, politics, and substantive lessons learned, offered in the hope that a better understanding of the past can inform future policy."-from The Peace Puzzle Each phase of Arab-Israeli peacemaking has been inordinately difficult in its own right, and every critical juncture and decision point in the long process has been shaped by U.S. politics and the U.S. leaders of the moment. The Peace Puzzle tracks the American determination to articulate policy, develop strategy and tactics, and see through negotiations to agreements on an issue that has been of singular importance to U.S. interests for more than forty years. In 2006, the authors of The Peace Puzzle formed the Study Group on Arab-Israeli Peacemaking, a project supported by the United States Institute of Peace, to develop a set of "best practices" for American diplomacy. The Study Group conducted in-depth interviews with more than 120 policymakers, diplomats, academics, and civil society figures and developed performance assessments of the various U.S. administrations of the post-Cold War period. This book, an objective account of the role of the United States in attempting to achieve a lasting Arab-Israeli peace, is informed by the authors' access to key individuals and official archives.

"Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century takes in all the continuities and ruptures that led, via a complex route, from the founding revolution of October 1917 to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship and the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years."--Jacket.

Robert Eisenman's WAR TERRITORY NATION: Israel, the Arabs, and the Jewish People develops ideas conceived of while he was living in Israel's "Occupied Territories" after The Six-Day War for five years and in the U.S.A. thereafter after The Yom Kippur War. There are seven pieces in all, the last Cyprus: Aphrodite's Isle being rather an autobiographical story, but all overlap in the areas of History, Politics, Sociology, and Religion. Though each deals with somewhat different subject matter, all provide the same insights and understandings. Moreover, the reader will see that all are still absolutely valid today as almost nothing has changed, particularly the situation in the so-called "Occupied Territories," but also on Cyprus. Just as Theodore Herzl's Jewish State was conceived of as the solution to "The Jewish Question" and subtitled as such(unfortunately Hitler picked up the same language after that), so too "Why we Must Stop Being Jews and Become Hebrews Again" and "The Problem with Rabbinic Judaism" deal with the "Question" a hundred years later in the light of the new configuration of circumstances after the destruction of the mass of European Jewry and the Establishment of the State of Israel. However, just as Herzl was contemplating a physical transformation of the Jewish People, Eisenman is contemplating a Spiritual. "Arab Class Structure and the New Terrorism," "The Assassination of Feisal," and "The Nuclear Threat to Israel" deal with the ever-present Arab-Israeli Struggle and the Middle East generally. Cyprus: Aphrodite's Isle, while an autobiographical story as noted, portrays how the author was thrust into the midst of the struggle between the Greeks and the Turks there, but reflects the same general ethos and perception. The solutions being considered are radical but, with the memory of the Holocaust and the possible future destruction of the Jewish People in mind, it is hoped that such questions as the destruction of Israel, the Arab mindset, the relevance of Judaism to the Modern Jew, the future disappearance of Diaspora Jewry, and the use of nuclear weaponry in the Middle East in general are faced up to with honesty and fairly as in the end what is finally being contemplated is the future survival of the Jewish People and, with it, the associated survival of the State of Israel.

"In the War on Error, historian and political analyst Martin Kramer presents a series of case studies, some based on pathfinding research and others on provocative analysis, that correct misinformation clouding the public's understanding of the Middle East. He also offers a forensic exploration of how misinformation arises and becomes "fact". The book is divided into five theme: Orientalism and Middle Eastern studies, a prime casuality of the culture wars; Islamism, massively misrepresented by apologists; Arab politics, a generator of disappointing surprises; Israeli history, manipulated by reckless revisionists; and American Jews and Israel, the subject of irrational fantasies. Kramer shows how error permeates the debate over each of these themes, creating distorted images that cause policy failures. Kramer approaches questions in the spirit of a relentless fact-checker. Did Israeli troops massacre Palestinian Arabs in Lydda in July 1948? Was the bestseller Exodus hatched by an advertising executive? Did Martin Luther King, Jr., describe anti-Zionism as antisemitism? Did a major post-9/11 documentary film deliberately distort the history of Islam? Did Israel push the United States into the Iraq War? Kramer also questions paradigms - the "Arab Spring," the map of the Middle East, and linkage. Along the way, he amasses new evidence, exposes carelessness, and provides definitive answers." --

Egypt's indigenous Jewish population comprised Arabic-speaking Rabbanite and Karaite Jews, some of whom had been in the country since the early Islamic era. Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 took refuge in Egypt, and their numbers were augmented in the mid-nineteenth century by Sephardic immigrants. Originally welcomed elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, these Spanish Jews came to Egypt seeking economic opportunity in the era of Suez Canal construction and the cotton boom. The late nineteenth century brought Ashkenazi Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. The different groups formed a heterogeneous community of cosmopolitan hybrids, which was both an element of strength and a factor in its eventual demise. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry examines the history of the Egyptian Jewish community after 1948, focusing on three major areas: the life of the majority of the community, which remained in Egypt from the1948 Arab-Israeli War until the aftermath of the 1956 Suez/Sinai War; the dispersion and reestablishment of Egyptian Jewish communities in the United states, France, and Israel; and contested memories of Jewish life in Egypt since President Anwar al-Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Beinin argues that the experiences of Egyptian Jews cannot be adequately accounted for by either Egyptian nationalist or Zionist narratives. Fusing history, ethnography, literary analysis, and autobiography, Joel Beinin conducts an interdisciplinary investigation into identity, dispersion, and the retrieval of identity that is relevant for anyone interested in Egypt, the Jewish diaspora, or the formation of cultures and identities.

The three-volume Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is the first authoritative reference source to provide comprehensive, impartial coverage of one of the most torturous and prolonged conflicts of our time. Written by an international team of more than 100 experts, and subject to an exhaustive, bias-hunting editorial process, this even-handed work presents some 900 A-to-Z entries covering the history, issues, actors, events, institutions, and policies related to the ongoing conflict. --from publisher description.

Argues against the myth of Jews and Arabs living peacefully side by side before the advent of Zionism and the creation of Israel. The enmity of Arabs and Muslims dates from the time of Muhammad, and the inequality of Jews in Muslim societies is embedded in Islamic law. It is not only the Covenant of Omar which has determined the Jews' inferior status, but also local laws and customs of Islamic societies. The rise of Arab nationalism and the beginning of the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel exacerbated Arab-Jewish relations. Argues that, initially, the Nazis and the antisemites in other European countries favored the idea of Jewish mass emigration from Europe to Palestine; however, the Nazis abandoned this idea for the sake of an alliance with the Arab nationalists. During the Holocaust, the Land of Israel could have become a refuge for Jews, but this possibility was thwarted by British restrictions of Jewish immigration. Contends that Arab pressure on British authorities prevented the immigration of hundreds of thousands of European Jews to the Land of Israel. After the establishment of the State of Israel, Arab antisemitism reached a peak. In the present-day Arab and Muslim world, anti-Zionism, traditional Muslim anti-Judaism, modern antisemitism, and Holocaust denial (while extolling Hitler for the Holocaust) have merged together into one dangerous complex.

"Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat's work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time"--

"Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat's work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time"--

"Eli Avidar looks into the abyss that divides Israel from its Arab neighbors, in order to understand the inherent flaws, prevailing misunderstandings, and tragic mistakes that characterize the relations and bloodletting, and how, if at all possible, to bridge the differences. In doing so, he offers a new perspective about the reality of the Middle East and all the clichés that have transformed the Hebrew-Arab lexicon into a complex and hopeless minefield. His analysis raises the question of whether the ongoing violent conflict between Israel and its neighbors might also be the result of a serious short circuit in communications. Is it possible that Israel, which has invested efforts and resources in knowing its adversaries, never even bothered to properly understand their language and their culture? Is it possible that Israeli leaders, who made their way to the top through the military and were privileged to know the most deeply hidden intelligence secrets, never learned to send messages of peace and reconciliation that the other side could respect and understand? Spanning six decades, the book explains why the main diplomatic initiatives have so far failed to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and what needs to be done to break out of the vicious circle of ignorance and mutual suspicion that characterizes the conflict. Avidar uses his experience as diplomatic advisor to former foreign minister Ariel Sharon and as head of Israel's representative office in Qatar to reveal secret diplomatic meetings as well as the dynamics of the unique and complex diplomacy of the Middle East. He also tells about the activities of the 504 division of the Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Unit, in which he served as an operator of agents."--Publisher's description.