The purpose of this paper is to problematize the place of religious authority in politics and education. Specifically, this essay highlights the role of religious authority in establishing a moral order that values compliance and conformity at the expense of liberty and critique. In doing so, the essay reflects on Israeli politics and Islamic political thought. Pondering on both, the essay explains how the authority conferred through the use of religious language creates a condition of hyper-solidarity. Under (...) conditions of hyper-solidarity, religious authority becomes pervasive, permeating, and more entrenched and difficult to challenge. It becomes increasingly difficult to be critical, because to criticize is to forgo that hyper-solidarity, and to assume a position of exteriority. Therefore, obedience becomes a choice and a position taken in favor of stability, consistency, and continuity of the group. (shrink)

This article explores the properties of formulations in a corpus of Hebrew radio phone-ins by juxtaposing two theoretical frameworks: conversation analysis and dialogic syntax. This combination of frameworks is applied towards explaining an anomalous interaction in the collection – a caller’s marked, unexpected rejection of a formulation of gist produced by the radio phone-in’s host. Our analysis shows that whereas previous CA studies of formulations account for many instances throughout the corpus, understanding this particular formulation in CA terms does not (...) explain its drastic rejection by the caller. We therefore turn to an in-depth examination of strategies for lexical and syntactic resonance as a stance-taking device throughout the interaction. In so doing, we not only shed light on the anomalous interaction, but also offer an answer to a provocative question previously put forward by Haddington concerning which of the two – stances or actions – have more meaningful consequences for the description of the organization of interaction. In the particular interaction analyzed here, stances play the more significant role. We propose that the intersubjective stance-taking of participants may be viewed as a meta-action employed among participants as they move across actions, sequences, and activities in talk. (shrink)

Previous studies of Hebrew nu investigate this discourse marker in casual conversation. The current study explores nu on Israeli political phone-in radio programs and broadens our knowledge both about the functions and grammaticization processes of discourse markers and about some particularities of Israeli political talk radio. The comparison to casual talk reveals both qualitative and quantitative differences. In casual talk, the main function of nu is a sequential one – urging further development of an ongoing topic. In the (...) radiophonic data, the most common role of nu is as a keying token, functioning in the affective realm. Furthermore, the talk-radio data show a wider variety of keys constructed by nu – which range from joking to sheer contempt – clustering closer towards the latter, in contrast to the case of casual talk, manifesting mostly the joking key. Structurally, whereas sequential functions are generally accomplished by stand-alone nu, affective tokens are accompanied by same-speaker talk. The analysis sheds new light on how a sequential token might come to function in the affective realm. (shrink)

This article explores the modalities by which referring to past discursive performance of adversaries within a continuous polemical exchange is used in ad hominem attacks. Our starting point holds that in the context of lengthy debates, participants and third-party listeners share a rhetorical memory, which, dynamic and subjective as it may be, allows for the evaluation of participants’ characters based on their perceived discursive performances. By analysing opinion articles related to the Israeli political debate, this study shows how drawing (...) inference from adversaries’ prior statements and conduct is used to compromise their credibility as participants in the polemical exchange. It is found that, alongside supporting arguments from inconsistent commitment, previous discursive performance is mobilized to discredit speakers’ epistemic authority and their moral legitimacy. (shrink)

The body of research on civic education points to the importance of teachers creating open democratic environments, leading to what has been termed the political classroom. This yearlong study of an Israeli multicultural and bilingual high school civics course, in which students from different citizenship status participated, presents a case in which teachers were unsuccessful in achieving this goal, raising the question of what limited this class's potential to create an educational environment where democratic discourses could have taken place? (...) The main argument points to Israel's current disputative political environment that led to the enactment of four educational mechanisms that resulted in such a futile reality. These included: conflicting objectives, avoiding discussion of controversial issues, implementing traditional teaching practices, and overlooking language issues. The neo-liberal educational environment and a culture of fear and self-censorship were both identified as a common explanation to these, leading to an educational reality in which there was a detach between the lessons and the students’ transcultural lived political experiences. From a methodological perspective, the study illuminates the importance of focusing on such unsuccessful cases, examining their elements, and understanding what influences them. (shrink)

The Israeli settler movement plays a key role in Israeli politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict, yet very few empirical studies of the movement exist. This is the first in-depth examination of the contemporary Israeli settler movement from a structural perspective, and one of the few studies to focus on a longstanding, radical right-wing social movement in a non-western political context. A trailblazing systematic assessment of the role of the settler movement in Israeli politics (...) writ large, as well as in relation to Israel's policy towards the West Bank, this book analyzes the movement both as a whole and as a combination of its parts - institutions, networks, and individuals. Whether you are a student, researcher, or policymaker, this book offers a comprehensive and original theoretical framework alongside a rich empirical analysis which illuminates social movements in general, and the Israeli settler movement in particular. (shrink)

This article examines the Israeli women’s movement, Checkpoint Watch, as a case from which to argue that the strategic use of the politics of care can challenge existing social and political orders. The conscious decision of activists to direct the practice of care toward the ‘wrong’ subject – toward Palestinians rather than Israeli soldiers – challenges the dehumanisation of Palestinians in Israeli society. While the politics of care may call the political order into question, the (...) service of a behaviour that is considered essentialist may paradoxically reinforce the existing social order. I argue that the politics of care has the potential to challenge both the political and the social order, though not simultaneously. (shrink)

The present study examines the extent to which sociohistorical and political contexts influence the language attitudes of Israeli-Druze students to Hebrew as L2 and to Modern Standard Arabic in Arabic-speaking schools. It is a pioneer explorative research study that compares students’ attitudes toward diglossia and L2. Using the Foreign Languages Attitudes and Goals Survey, the attitudes of second, fifth, and ninth graders in two different Druze schools were assessed. The results indicate a positive attitude towards L2 Hebrew, not only (...) for instrumental purposes but also for integration into Israel’s multicultural society. The positive attitude to L2 Hebrew is greater in older students, while the attitude to MSA becomes more negative among older students. Their low motivation to learn cultural heritage MSA may contribute to an understanding of how to teach it better or differently, as well as how to encourage future generations to learn it. (shrink)

In 2015, the Israeli newspaperYedioth Ahronothbegan a campaign against Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Margot Wallström, who is considered a prominent critic of Israeli policy in Palestine. The campaign included various aspects of media bias on both the gender and the ethnopolitical levels and thus raised the question of a possible relationship between these two types of biases. Studies in relation to political communication and gender have traditionally focused on the media coverage of domestic male and female politicians. The present (...) study attempts to examine the gender media coverage of prominent international political actors. It performs a mixed content analysis of 529 news items from three Israeli online newspapers, reports, and articles, which cover world-renowned public figures (among them, Wallström). Each news item is coded into three gender-coverage frames. Additionally, a critical reading of the journalistic texts is conducted. The findings reveal that the combination of the two types of biases, the gender and the political, escalates the media sensation and stereotyping. (shrink)

This chapter examines the relationship between political re-burials and emergent nationalism in contemporary Israel. The re-burials include the bodily remains of important Zionist leaders and others who died in the Jewish Diaspora, and who were re-buried at the state's major ceremonial site, Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, as well as the bones of famed Jewish saints who were buried in Morocco and whose remains were later brought to Israel. Attention is also given to the conflicts between Israeli archaeologists and the (...) ultra-orthodox leadership regarding bones that are uncovered in archaeological research. The chapter concludes that the Israeli obsession with bones' is an expression of the current political-cultural struggles between different Israeli élite. (shrink)

The author portrays the reception of Janusz Korczak’s writings and ideas in Israel. She presents Israeli writers both Polish- and Israeli-born, considering their writings as consequence of extensive interest in universal values and universal figure suck as Janusz Korczak.

Preface The conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs has endured for a century. It centers on control of territory and, as common in such disputes, is characterized by conquest, destruction, and revenge, with all the animosity and sorrow that these actions bring. Because the land in question is terra sancta to three major religions, the conflict evokes powerful passions involving identity, honor, and the propriety of cultural claims. That its disputants employ sophisticated arguments and armaments, that they are (...) willing to combat not only each other but rival voices within their own ranks, and that decades of international diplomacy have failed to produce a satisfactory solution, render it "one of the most difficult political problems of our time, perhaps the most difficult of them all". Marked by a series of surprising achievements, deceptions and atrocities in which each side has underestimated the tenacity and resourcefulness of the other, it guarantees fascinating study. (shrink)

This article examines the Depo-Provera Affair—where Israeli doctors administered the contraceptive Depo-Provera to newly immigrated Ethiopian Jewish women—to argue that the Israeli settler colonial project depends on these forms of gendered anti-Black violence, through the management of Black African bodies. In 2013, then Israeli Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman admitted that they had administered Depo-Provera to Ethiopian immigrant women without their consent, after reproductive and civil rights activists in Israel called for an investigation after a drop in (...) the birthrate among Ethiopian women: close to 50 per cent within the previous decade. The demarcation of Blackness as a political tool necessary to advance Israeli modernity and the situating of Black bodies as antithetical to the state of Israel are not contradictory but rather illuminate Israel’s deployment of anti-Blackness through the racial and reproductive violence necessary to become part of the superior, European West. (shrink)

In histories of Orthodox Judaism, one often reads the story of a collision between tradition and modernity. Orthodoxy, according to this logic, is a fortress of the old world, which, upon encounter...

This article is concerned with how the idea of anachronism can interfere with our thinking about social justice, peace, and human liberation. In the case of Israel/Palestine the idea of anachronism is deployed among liberals, progressives and radical theorists, and activists seeking peace and social justice who express animosity toward religiously motivated settlers and their settlement project. One of the ways in which they differentiate themselves from these settlers is by suggesting that settler actions belong to the past. They also (...) pity Palestinians conceived of as stuck in an oppressive system of settler colonialism that also belongs to the past, preventing them from moving forward. Both perceptions of anachronism limit the ways we can think about human liberation and peace. This article sheds light on a conundrum about who or what belongs to the past, and how thinking in such terms can contribute to the production of a particular moral collective and to the production of enmity. Both perceptions of anachronism frame history as a kind of progress in which peoples or groups might be ranked according to their levels of civilizational attainment, an idea we abandoned long ago as an analytical tool, but seem to have retained as a matter of practical political sympathy and judgment. This temporal conditioning can interfere with the thinking of even some of the most progressive social theorists, and mimics a colonial impulse. (shrink)

Terrorism is politically motivated violence directed against noncombatants. It is no doubt as ancient as organized warfare itself, emerging as soon as one society, pitted against another in the quest for land, resources, and dominance, was moved by a desire for vengeance, or, found advantages in operations against ‘soft’ targets. While terrorist violence has been present in the conflict between Jews and Arabs over Palestine for over eighty years, the prevalence of the rhetoric of ‘terror’ to describe Arab violence against (...) Israeli and Western targets, is a more recent phenomenon. This rhetoric has fostered the popular perception that Arab terrorism is the central problem in the Middle East crisis, and that once solved, progress can be made on other issues. Nothing could be more illusory. The Western obsession with Arab terrorism not only overlooks the fact that terrorist activity has been reciprocal, but, more generally, that attempts to remove an effect without touching its causes are utterly futile. Terrorism between Arabs and Israelis is the product of deep divisions, entrenched strategies, and fundamental grievances, and it will not disappear so long as both sides cling to their present political ambitions and convictions. No informed discussion can ignore its historical and political context. At the same time, terrorism is the most noticeable and tragic aspect of a bitter struggle, and any serious attempt to grasp the goals, methods, and passions of either party must realize that it has been central in giving the conflict the shape it has. (shrink)

The Pale God examines the relationship between secularism and religious tradition. It begins with a description of the secular options as expressed by Israeli intellectuals, and describes how these options have led to a dead end. A new option must be sought, and one of the key sources for this option is the works of Spinoza. The author explains that unlike Nietzsche, who discussed "the death of God," Spinoza tried to undermine the authority of religious virtuosos and establish the (...) image of a rational "Pale God." Such changes could channel religious tradition to the basic principles of secular political rule. The author demonstrates that the secular option is inherent in Israeli society, fits the type of secularism that Zionism instilled in the Jewish people, and complements the traditional trends deeply rooted in that society. (shrink)

Previous cross-cultural research has not undertaken in situ analysis of conversational style between groups in severe political conflict. The present study is a quantitative and ethnographic study of conversational interruptions in one Israeli-Palestinian `dialogue' event which took place during the Palestinian Uprising. Findings indicate that the previously documented divergent cultural styles of the two groups underwent a process of change. Specifically, the Israeli dugri interruptive style dominated interactions between Israelis and between Israelis and Palestinians. However, fewer interruptions were (...) found in the intergroup interaction. Conversely, the Palestinian musayra style of non-interruptions was more significant in the intragroup Palestinian-Palestinian interaction than in interaction with Israelis, where Palestinian interruptions dominated. The political context of events and the erosion of the musayra style are suggested as factors that explain results. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

Contemporary politics is faced, on the one hand, with political stagnation and lack of a progressive vision on the side of formal, institutional politics, and, on the other, with various social movements that venture to challenge modern understandings of representation, participation,and democracy. Interestingly, both institutional and anti-institutional sides of this antagonism tend to accuse each other of "nihilism", namely, of mere oppositional destructiveness and failure to offer a constructive, positive alternative to the status quo. Nihilism seems, then, all (...) engulfing. In order to better understand this political situation and ourselves within it,The Politics of Nihilism proposes a thorough theoretical examination of the concept of nihilism and its historical development followed by critical studies of Israeli politics and culture. The authors show that, rather than a mark of mutual opposition and despair, nihilism is a fruitful category for tracing and exploring the limits of political critique, rendering them less rigid and opening up a space of potentiality for thought, action, and creation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores specific forms that neoliberal discourse and culture in academia today take in the field of Israeli Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The article applies various textual and contextual interrogation strategies to the language, narratives and the unsaid in interviews with leading scholars in the field, in order to construe what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘political unconscious,’ particularly that arising from the use of market as a conceptual metaphor. Contextualising this field of discourse within neoliberal academia, I (...) deconstruct the work ‘demand’ and ‘interest’ do, and highlight the dialectical dynamics of experts’ dependence on audience. I argue that, in this field, the economic discourse shelters Zionist logics, presuppositions and praxis, such as recruitment logics and fundraising practices that effectively address Jewish and Zionist students and donors. (shrink)

Zionism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in response to a rise in anti-Semitism in Europe and to the crisis of modern Jewish identity. This novel, national revolution aimed to unite a scattered community, defined mainly by shared texts and literary tradition, into a vibrant political entity destined for the Holy Land. However, Zionism was about much more than a national political ideology and practice. By tracing its origins in the context of a European history of ideas and (...) by considering the writings of key Jewish and Hebrew writers and thinkers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book offers an entirely new philosophical perspective on Zionism as a unique movement based on intellectual boldness and belief in human action. In counter-distinction to the studies of history and ideology that dominate the field, this book also offers a new way of reflecting upon contemporary Israeli politics. (shrink)

The study focuses on the links between gender and national security in the legislative arena in Israel, considering whether men and women legislators prioritize security differently, alongside other thematic policy areas. The centrality of national security issues in Israeli politics makes it a good case study for these questions, as it enhances existing gendered stereotypes. The article examines two competing hypotheses. The first suggests that Israeli female legislators will mostly refrain from addressing national security policy issues, focusing (...) instead on softer policy issues, such as gender equality, education, health, and welfare. The second suggests the opposite, claiming that women legislators in Israel will align themselves with their male counterparts’ set of priorities, focusing heavily on issues related to national security. The study finds support mostly for the former: Israeli female legislators are especially active in policy areas relating to women’s issues and children/family and are less active in regard to national security, a policy area heavily dominated by male legislators. (shrink)

BackgroundFollowing the increased presence of the Right-to-Die Movement, improved end-of-life options, and the political and legal status of aid-in-dying around the globe, suicide tourism has become a promising alternative for individuals who wish to end their lives. Yet, little is known about this from the perspective of those who engage in the phenomenon.MethodsThis study applied the qualitative research approach, following the grounded theory tradition. It includes 11 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Israeli members of the Swiss non-profit Dignitas who contemplated (...) traveling to Switzerland for aid-in-dying.ResultsSeven themes emerged from the data analysis, including health and functioning; feelings regarding survivorship and existence; interacting with the health sector; attitudes regarding death and dying; suicide; choosing death; and choosing suicide tourism. A significant portion of the participants had experienced suicidal thoughts and had even previously attempted suicide, some more than once. Most of them referred to chronic illnesses, functional disability, and social isolation. They understand suffering within the subjective dimension, namely only by the person who is actually subjected to the disease, ailments, and disability. Participants regarded aid-in-dying in Switzerland as positive thanks to its guaranteed outcome: "beautiful death", compared to "disadvantaged dying" which places a burden on the participants' loved ones throughout the prolonged dying. Most of them do not necessarily want to have their loved ones beside them when they die, and they see no significant meaning in dying in a foreign country to which they have no emotional or civil attachment.ConclusionThe desirable approval or tragic refusal by Dignitas to participants' requests for suicide tourism enhances the paradox between the perception of aid-in-dying as a mechanism for fulfilling controlled death and its bureaucratic and materialistic characteristics specifically reflected in a paid, formalized approach to aid-in-dying that cultivate dependency and collaboration. (shrink)

Much of John Rawls' later work is concerned with the appli cation of his philosophical conceptions to the reality of liberal-democratic polities. I suggest that given the modern democratic reality of ethno national pluralism, Rawls' political conception of justice is insufficient to ensure democratic stability. Democratic states manage to contain ethnic pluralism while remaining compatible with liberal principles by promoting a corporate national identity. The key, I argue, lies in the particular member ship criteria devised and implemented by the state. (...) Hence, the promotion of a corporate national identity negates state neutrality, but not necessarily political liberalism. Key Words: Israel • Israeli Arabs • national identity • pluralism • Rawls. (shrink)

The present article focuses on the case of the 2012 hunger-strike of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. We analyze the ethical dilemma involved in the way the Israeli medical community reacted to these hunger-strikes and the question of force feeding within the context of the fundamental dual-loyalty structure inherent in the Israeli Prison Services—system. We argue that the liberal perspective that focuses the discussion on the dilemma between the principle of individual autonomy and the sanctity of life (...) tends to be oblivious to the asymmetrical relation of power that characterizes the prison system and to the socio-political context in which hunger-strikes take place. Emphasizing hunger-strikes as political acts implies that health practitioners’ conducts cannot be analyzed only through the prism of clinical medical ethics. It requires a public health ethics’ approach, an approach that understands health in the context of the complex relationship between society, state, organizations, communities and individuals. The authors are both academics and volunteers in Physicians for Human Rights—Israel thus our analysis is based both on sociological and public health ethics principles and on the continuous work and advocacy for the right to health of prisoners. (shrink)

Military activities with the framework of the IDF [Israel Defense Force] is carried out by citizens in a variety of positions. In addition to the ordinary positions of career officers and NCOs, the IDF consists of conscripted men and women as well as reservists. Some of the latter serve under an ordinary command to serve for a certain relatively short period. Other reservists, including pilots and special forces officers have served since they volunteered to serve. Facing the political clash between (...) the government, who have been viewed as trying to change the democratic nature of the state, and the popular opposition, who have tried to protect the judiciary and other elements of democracy, many officers who belong to the latter reservist group have suspended their voluntary service or even retired. Their decision has raised the obvious issue of whether such decisions can be justified, morally, ethically, and democratically. This is the topic of the present paper. (shrink)

The Impacts of Lasting Occupation examines the effects that Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories have had on Israeli society. The consequences of occupation are evident in all aspects of Israeli life, including its political, social, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological spheres.

This article examines the Israeli government’s role in supporting living conditions conducive to health in the occupied Palestinian territories. Limiting the discussion to public health, the authors argue that—whether justified in its overall political policy—the Israeli government and people are legally and ethically obligated to care for the well-being of the Palestinian people. The authors first review the current situation in the OPT and compare health statistics with Israel. Next, the authors make three arguments as to why the (...) Israeli government and citizens should assist the Palestinian people: moral responsibility, legal responsibility and solidarity. Based on these, the authors make the case for Israel’s moral duty to ensure that Palestinian people living in the OPT achieve equitable levels of health as compared to Israeli citizens, while minimizing restrictions on Palestinian self-determination. The authors urge the Israeli government and citizens to improve Palestinian’s daily living conditions, tackle inequitable distribution of power and allow international support in these efforts. Hospital Admission must therefore be open to every patient that needs it, irrespective of whether he has money or not, whether he be Jew or heathen. (shrink)

The authors suggest that social movements research should recognize more the potential of the protesting body as an agent of social and political change. This contention is based on studying the relations among the body, gender, and knowledge in social protest by comparing two Israeli-Jewish leftist protest movements, a woman-only movement and a mixed-gender one, which protested against the Israeli Occupation in the early 1990s. The comparison reveals reversed patterns of body/knowledge relations, each connoting a different meaning and (...) outcome of the social protest. In the mixed movement, the body served as an instrument in carrying out the political knowledge and thus was left unmarked. In Women in Black, on the other hand, the body was the message, as it produced and articulated political ideology, simultaneously challenging the national security legacy and the gender order in Israel. (shrink)

This chapter aims to present a theoretical survey of political representation of future generations. The chapter focuses on two main normative justifications of representation of future generations. The first appeals to intergenerational justice and the second to democratic legitimacy. Then, the chapter addresses possible objections to the representation of future generations. These objections are: first, we should prevent the inflation of representation; second, representation of future people is not really political representation; third, representation of future people is unnecessary. The next (...) part discusses theoretical proposals to represent future generations in existing institutions. An appendix provides an overview of past and present real-world experiments, including the Finnish Committee for the Future, the Israeli Knesset Commissioner for Future Generations (2001–2006) and the Hungarian Ombudsman for Future Generations. (shrink)

A concept of co-evolution is argued to complement Integrated Water Resource Management's gap in administrative integration. Co-evolution's complement to Integrated Water Resource Management is explored through issues surrounding joint water management arrangements between the Israelis and Palestinians in the late 1990s and early 21st century. How co-evolution contributes to such a water management approach highlights how we might think about what it means to encourage innovation. Conclusions of the article suggest co-evolution provides the language and description for the changing interactions (...) and political environment and therefore provides a sharper conceptualization for administrative integration. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the potential second “career” of the banality of evil thesis in the profoundly different context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Considering the continual violence between the sides, the urgent problem in this context is not only how to understand evil committed in the past, but how to frame it in a way congenial for the social psychology and politics of reconciliation between the antagonistic parties.

Herbert Marcuse visited Israel in late December 1971 . Summing up his political conclusions at the end of his visit, he published an article in the English-language Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post under the title “Israel is Strong Enough to Concede.”1 A Hebrew translation of that article appeared concurrently in the Israeli daily Haaretz under the title “My Opinions on the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Israel Must Accept the Existence of a Palestinian State.”2 A few days prior to the (...) publication of his article in the Israeli press, Marcuse met with journalists and other guests…. (shrink)

This paper is based on review of the publications of the Islamic Movement and interviews with its leadership and activists. It argues that the Movement’s resistance to the 1948, 1967 and diasporic dismemberment of Palestine has constituted a critical challenge to Israeli policies, and contributed to reframing the internal Israeli political discourse. That is what led to its being banned by the state. The Islamic Movement was established in the 1970s. It remains, despite its split in 1996 into (...) Northern and Southern branches, a key player in Palestinian minority affairs at the political level, and at the social level through service provision to the marginalized Arab communities, especially in East Jerusalem. In 2015, the Israeli cabinet declared the Northern branch illegal and withdrew its status as a recognized organization. The findings of this paper show that this measure is directly linked to the Movement’s effectiveness in resisting the dispossession of the Palestinians, in advocating their right of return and other human rights, in providing leadership in the struggle over East Jerusalem, and in the organization and delivery of humanitarian services. (shrink)

Howard Caygill systematically explores for the first time the relationship between Levinas' thought and the political. From Levinas' early writings in the face of National Socialism to controversial political statements on Israeli and French politics, Caygill analyses themes such as the deconstruction of metaphysics, embodiment, the face and alterity. He also examines Levinas' engagement with his contemporaries Heidegger and Bataille, and the implications of his rethinking of the political for an understanding of the Holocaust.

The framework of the Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict has evolved over the last half century through an instrumentalization of violence by the parties concerned. Two alternating "structures of violence" have emerged to define this instrumentality: the one Israeli, the other Palestinian. I call these structures of violence "alternating" rather than merely "reciprocating" because the one not only feeds off the other and actually practices on the other that which is merely fancied and projected as the other's intention but also because (...) they have inverse periodicities: The "Great Revolt" of 1936-1939 introduced the principle of "armed struggle" into the practice and lore of a fractured and often factional antiBritish and anti-Zionist insurgency. It was effectively countered by British might coupled with an essentially defensive Jewish posture of consensus and "restraint". By contrast the current Palestinian "Uprising" has the Arab side preaching restraint if not always nonviolence, through a pluralistic consensus on the immediate national ends such practice aims to achieve. Against this is an avowed Israeli policy of "the iron fist" that for the first time since independence has broken the general Zionist consensus with regard not only to the utility and morality of violent means but also to national goals. (shrink)

This study explores how religious women become legitimate actors in the public sphere and analyzes their agency—its meanings, capacities, and transformative aims. It presents a novel case study of Israeli Modern-Orthodox Agunah activists who engage in highly politicized collective feminist resistance as religious actors working for religious ends. Embedded in and activated by Orthodoxy, they advocate women’s rights to divorce, voicing a moral critique of tradition and its agents precisely because they are devoutly devoted to them. Such political agency (...) is innovatively conceptualized as “devoted resistance”: critique within relationship, enabled by cultural schema, and comprising both interpretive skills and “relational-autonomy” capacities. This study contends that understanding agency within religious grammars reveals its underlying logics, highlighting how structures shape the meanings and realization of women’s varied “agentive capacities.” It challenges current dichotomies like feminism/religion, resistance/submission, and autonomy/dependence. Overall, the author argues for a nuanced, culturally specific, capacity-based, relational approach to analyzing religious women’s agency. (shrink)