Israel & the Arab World

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Winter  2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

Dialogue, Conflict Resolution, and Change: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Israel, by Mohammed Abu-Nimer. (SUNY Series in Israeli Studies) 180 pages, bibliography, index. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999. $17.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-7914-4154-7

Relations between the Arab-Palestinian population of Israel and the dominant Jewish sector have been troubled and problematic throughout the history of the state. Inequalities in the standard of living and state-supported opportunities for housing, education, employment, and other social services have yielded ongoing complaints and dissatisfaction within the Arab community. Most of the Jewish sector had only a vague awareness of these issues because of residential segregation and separation in daily life. Thus, it came as a shock to Israelis (including many Arabs) when violent clashes between Arab citizens and Israeli police took place in and around Haifa in fall 2000. But was the violent expression of dissatisfaction truly unexpected? This book suggests not.

Abu-Nimer describes the workings of Arab-Jewish encounter groups—programs to bring together Jewish and Arab school-age youth, as well as teachers, for discussions and interpersonal contact. The book centers on an analysis of six organizations, sponsoring encounter groups either among students or teachers. The programs involve face-to-face contacts between Jewish and Arab-Palestinian Israelis under the guidance of trained leader/facilitators, both Arab and Jewish. The author bases his analysis on a year of fieldwork, including seventy-five interviews, observation of eight full encounter sessions, and fifteen years experience as facilitator and encounter group leader. The study itself, however, does not reflect systematic data analysis, but rather the overall impressions and conclusions of the research.

The official initiative for the programs came from the Jewish sector of the Education Ministry, in response to growing awareness that Jewish Israeli youth had negative images of Arab citizens. Despite the deliberately egalitarian and balanced structure of the programs, the study reveals significant gaps and differences between Jewish and Arab-Palestinian participants. These include: systematic variance between the stated goals of Jewish and Arab participants (Arab intervenors, students, and teachers stressed changing political attitudes and awareness of cultures, while Jewish participants were more concerned with interpersonal relations and individual, personal contacts); differing perceptions of the nature and content of the ‘conflict,’ and of possible solutions; and differing views of the outcome of the encounter group experience itself, and of criteria for its success.

The study was conducted in the early to mid-1990s, during or after the first Intifada. Abu-Nimer specifies how the peace process (after the 1993 Oslo accords), the Intifada, the Gulf War in 1991, and the ongoing Jewish immigration from the former Soviet Union affected the tone and contents of encounter groups over time. In a concluding chapter, he faces the difficult question of whether encounter groups foster change in political or interpersonal relations: “The Arab minority school system…and curriculum…are designed to maintain control over the Arab youth…[and] our case studies operate in this education system…they are obligated to its principles and assumptions” (p. 159). The author claims that the encounter groups do not contribute to conflict resolution—at best they help educate for coexistence, which may not be enough.
Russell A. Stone
American University


Jerusalem in History, edited by K. J. Asali. 320 pages, bibliography, index. Olive Branch Press, 2000. $18.95 (Paper) ISBN 1-56656-304-6

As director of Dickinson College’s summer program in Jerusalem, I have for several years been searching for a thorough yet concise history of the Holy City to complement F. E. Peter’s Jerusalem (Princeton, 1985), a much-celebrated anthology of primary texts on the subject. This led me to Jerusalem in History, in which Asali, before his untimely death in 1995, brought together a collection of nine self-standing essays, all written by scholars of strong repute, presenting the history from prehistoric times to the present day of what is certainly one of the world’s most revered and contested locales. The chronological range of this collection fulfills Asali’s intention of providing a “universal history,” “a general presentation of the history of Jerusalem in all periods” (p. ix). He saw this book as a preliminary step toward a “more comprehensive work” and as a corrective to many other treatments that, in his view, presented the Holy City through the lens of a tendentiously Israeli perspective (pp. ix-x).

Each of the essays draws together both textual and archeological data to provide a richly informative account of the various stages in the city’s development. Not all of them, however, are equally accessible. For example, George E. Mendenhall’s treatment of the period from the United Kingdom through the Maccabean period, though replete with biblical data, is still highly readable. Similarly, John Wilkinson’s discussion of the Roman and Byzantine periods, though thick with archeological data (supplemented by illustrations), will not put off the reader. On the other hand, Abdul Aziz Duri’s essay on Jerusalem in the early Islamic period, only sixteen pages in length but dependent on nearly two hundred footnotes, is too dense and detailed, even for someone with a fairly sophisticated knowledge of Islamic history. It should also be noted that Alexander Schoelch’s contribution, while certainly thorough in its treatment of the political and economic dynamics of nineteenth-century Jerusalem, does not give sufficient attention to the change in the city’s religious dynamics precipitated by the “incursion” of the Europeans.

Perhaps the book’s most controversial essay is Michael C. Hudson’s on Jerusalem’s twentieth-century “transformation,” which he attributes primarily to Zionist agitation and to Israel’s propagandistic generation of “new facts” (p. 269). The results, in Hudson’s view, have been baleful, leading to the dangers of the current situation in which the status of Jerusalem remains unresolved. Hudson reviews a number of possibilities for resolution, noting that the “Jerusalem problem” must be addressed because “the dangers to the city are too serious to permit it to fester unattended” (p. 283).

Jerusalem in History provides a perspective on Jerusalem that often diverges from the official Israeli version. This viewpoint will vex some readers, but neither the scholars nor the ‘lay audience’ for whom this text is intended should dismiss it merely for that reason. Despite its unevenness on some levels, this collection is the work of authors for whom scholarly integrity, rather than political ideology, is undoubtedly the principal concern.
Theodore Pulcini
Dickinson College


The Albatross of Decisive Victory: War and Policy Between Egypt and Israel in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars, by George W. Gawrych. (Contributions to Military Studies, 188) Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. $65.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-313-313-024

The Albatross of Decisive Victory is a comprehensive study of Egyptian-Israeli political and military strategies and conduct from 1967 until 1973. This analysis builds on the author’s earlier journal articles as well as his contributions to the US Army’s Leavenworth Papers. As such, this study appears to be the culmination of years of research and the testing of the author’s ideas in other venues. In using this approach, Gawrych has generated a book that serves as an inspired capstone to his earlier efforts and includes a wealth of important details. The disadvantage of this method is that specialists may recognize substantial portions of this work’s material from the author’s earlier studies. Nevertheless, this study is important, and this material should be presented in a single accessible volume.

The main concerns of this book are the June 1967 War, the October 1973 War, and the military activities between these wars. In approaching these subjects, Gawrych has skillfully blended a strong knowledge of Middle Eastern politics with an in-depth understanding of modern warfare. The author’s general knowledge of combat operations is complemented throughout this study by a comprehensive understanding of Egyptian and Israeli strategy and tactics. Moreover, Gawrych has interviewed a number of key Egyptian and Israeli participants in these conflicts, and his questions for these personalities have been informed by a solid tactical, operational, and strategic knowledge. This primary research is supplemented by the author’s clear command of all major English language sources on these topics and the extensive use of Arabic language sources.

Gawrych’s most prominent focus is on Egypt. He displays an intimate understanding of both the Egyptian political and military systems, and his contribution to the English language literature on Egyptian military issues is often unique. Conversely, Gawrych’s ability to add to our understanding of Israeli military issues is somewhat less extraordinary due to an already strong existing literature in this field. Nevertheless, Egyptian strategy and behavior cannot be understood in isolation from Israel, and the author mercifully avoids the familiar problem of over-reliance on Israeli sources because they are more accessible to Western authors.

It might also be noted that this book will probably be most appreciated by those with a strong understanding of the conflicts under scrutiny, but it is hoped that others will read it as well. The conflicts analyzed within this study represent some of the most important events in Arab-Israeli history, and Gawrych makes valuable and unique contributions to our understanding of these events. Finally, The Albatross of Decisive Victory may be especially important because of the tendency of a variety of other authors to romanticize and misuse slanted military history to demonize opponents and justify the actions of a particular side. This trend is probably as old as war itself, but works such as the one under review make these abuses more difficult for those writing on the Middle East.
W. Andrew Terrill
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory


Israel: The First Hundred Years, Vol. 1: Israel’s Transition from Community to State, edited by Efraim Karsh. (Israeli History, Politics and Society) 253 pages, index. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000. $57.50 (Cloth) ISBN 0-7146-4963-5

Israel’s Transition from Community to State does not only adhere, without a modicum of self-criticism, to the Zionist mythology on Palestine—it propagates this ideology openly in its title. Israel was founded, accordingly, not in 1948 but in 1882. Karsh Israelizes the history of Palestine in the last one hundred years. Thus, the chronicles of places such as Nablus, Haifa, Jaffa, or Hebron in the period 1882 to 1948 are part of the history of Israel, or in effect are part of Israel. This act of historical fabrication is meant to eradicate the Palestinians out of Palestine’s history. To their credit, Israeli scholars, as is evident in the article of Ruth Kark and Joseph Glass, at least call the land Eretz Israel when referring to the pre-1948 era, that is, they consent to use an ecclesiastical term and not the political name imposed on part of the country by force and by the UN near the end of 1947. Naming is not an innocent act; it is an act of control and possession. Historians should at least be able to tell who was in control and who possessed Palestine until 1948, and how much of Palestine was in Israeli control and possession between 1948 and 1967.

This loyalty to one narrative without any reference to the critical research on the place’s history in the last twenty years reappears throughout the articles in this collection. It is vividly present in the editor’s introduction to the book. Such an absolute adherence to the ideological narrative requires a suitable beginning to the story of the conflict and there is no better departure point than the Zionist struggle against the British mandate somewhere in the late 1920s. In Karsh’s amazing fable, Zionism is a liberation movement, like any other anti-colonialist liberation movement. Moderate and mainstream Zionist scholars in Israel today admit openly that had it not been for the collaboration between British and Zionist colonialism, the Jewish state would not have become a reality. Needless to say, an alternative narrative beginning with the colonization of Palestine in the late nineteenth century is not even hinted at in this introduction.

The book has three parts, each one meant to give credence to the Israelization of Palestine’s history. The first is about Nationalism, opening with Anthony Smith who tries to transform the unique Zionist claim for Palestine after two-thousand years of absence into a known nationalist phenomenon. The second part is devoted to technical articles on the mandatory period, very informative and useful, although not very inspiring, and all dealing solely with the Jewish community and ignoring the indigenous population.

The last and most curious part is devoted to the 1948 war. Its three articles give the impression that the Arab side talked a lot and did very little, while the Jewish began a systematic expulsion of Palestinians. The picture sums up quite nicely the imbalance of power that produced the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 and resembles the picture depicted by ‘new historians’ of that war who Karsh accuses of fabricating history. But, of course, the aim here is different: the Arab rhetoric is presented as a violent act justifying the Jewish actions in 1948, and this in a book, the editor of which hopes will consolidate the peace process. Much more respect and recognition of the ‘Other’ side and its narrative will be needed if history books are to play a more constructive role in the general peace efforts. Israel’s Transition from Community to State is a bad example for how it should be done.
Ilan Pappe
Haifa University


Vietnam, Jews and the Middle East: The Unintended Consequences, by Judith A. Klinghoffer. 232 pages, notes, index. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. $45.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-312-21841-9

Students of Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy have tended both to focus on the Vietnam War and to compartmentalize that war as if it had scant relationship to other foreign policy problems and initiatives during the Johnson administration. Klinghoffer wants to rectify this tendency in this brief but densely detailed study. She argues convincingly that the Vietnam War and American policy in the Middle East were inextricably intertwined. Focusing on the run-up to the Six Days War and its consequences, the author contends that America’s growing involvement in Vietnam had several unintended consequences. Most crucially, the Soviet Union, believing the US was distracted by the war in Asia, encouraged Egypt and other militant anti-Israeli states to harden their line toward Israel, consequently leading to the Six Days War. Ultimately, both Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and the USSR concluded that a weakened US would not intervene militarily in the Middle East. Thus, Nasser acted in the spring of 1967 to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli access, a provocation that Israel considered an act of war.

Nevertheless, Egypt did not take into account Israel’s ability to act on her own. All the Israelis needed from Johnson was a green light to launch a pre-emptive strike (or at least assurances that the US would not interfere as it had in 1956). Johnson ultimately “decided to gamble on an Israeli victory” (p. 117), which Israel accomplished in a wildly successful pre-emptive strike. A further result was the end of American attempts to woo Nasser away from the Soviet Union. After 1967, American policy, with some variation, tilted toward Israel.

There were also connections between Vietnam, Israel, and American Jewish opinion. The growing anti-Vietnam War movement in American included a substantial number of Jewish voices, a fact which irked President Johnson no end. Prior to the Six Days War, he tried unsuccessfully to convince Israel to influence Jewish-Americans to quiet down (as well as to send at least token assistance to the South Vietnamese). After the war, many American Jews continued to oppose American policy in Vietnam, but many Jews also placed greater emphasis on American support of Israel than ending the war. In addition, in early 1968 Israeli leader Levi Eshkol, in a message to American Jews, indicated his belief that “the US is genuinely seeking a peaceful solution to [the Vietnam conflict]” (p. 197).

Klinghoffer concludes that events surrounding the Six Days War proved especially disastrous to the Soviet Union. It “split the left, militarized Israel, united Jews everywhere, and gave birth to Neoconservatism in the West and to the dissident movement in the East.” While she is undoubtedly overstating the case when she argues that this failure of Soviet policy “played a significant part in the eventual collapse of the USSR,” she is surely correct in emphasizing the connections between Vietnam and the Middle East (p. 2).

Although several irritating minor writing errors crop up, this is an important work. Klinghoffer takes seriously historian Brands’ call to see the Vietnam War as “a manifestation of a much broader phenomenon confronting the United States in the mid-1960s” as it faced multiple crises in an increasingly non-compartmentalized world.[58]
Anthony O. Edmonds
Ball State University

The Israeli Connection and American Jews, by David Mittelberg. 192 pages, bibliography, index. Westport, CT: Preager, 1998. $55.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-275-96421-3

The Israeli Connection and American Jews explores the impact of visits to Israel on shaping the ethnic identity of American Jews. Mittelberg suggests that the relation between American Jews, Israel, and Zionism is buttressed by a complex communal structure that views Israel as central to American Jewish life. Philanthropic support and political lobbying on behalf of the State of Israel are the best-known forms of this organized endeavor. Nevertheless, in spite of the declared centrality of Israel at the collective level, surveys indicate that Israel has become quite marginal to the lives of American Jews, especially the younger cohorts. As the community struggles with demographic decline brought about by the attenuation of Jewish identity, there have been a number of initiatives to bolster the American Jewish-Israeli connection, including the Birthright Israel program, which sends young American Jews on all-paid trips to Israel on the premise that such visits would bolster the Jewish identity of participants.

As Mittelberg notes, there are sound theoretical expectations for the belief that Israel can serve as an “agent of adult Jewish resocialization” (p. 127). Indeed, pilgrimage and travel to Israel have a long history, but there has never been an empirical effort to measure the impact of such trips on the identity of individual Jews. This study attempts to provide a rigorous empirical analysis, using data collected by the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey to construct three sets of measures. The first set measures the frequency and duration of trips to Israel, the second consists of socioeconomic and denomination profiles, and the third comprises indices of Jewish identification such a religious practices and communal affiliation.

Based on the use of bivariate and multivariate analysis, the study finds a modest positive correlation between a visit to Israel and measures of Jewish identification and continuity such as increased communal affiliation, increased Jewish practice, and a higher level of voluntary endogamy. A trip to Israel can be especially effective for a core Jewish population between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. At the same time, the visit is not a panacea for reversing the devolution of American Jewish identity. Mittelberg cautions that Israel cannot replace other factors in Jewish socialization and, equally importantly, the quality of the Israeli experience should be factored into the equation. Even the best-structured visit cannot totally control the images of Israel that American Jews may form. These images depend on the larger context of the Israeli political culture that has been increasingly tarnished by ongoing religious, ethnic, and cultural struggles.

By and large, Mittelberg succeeds in providing a theoretically solid and methodologically rigorous analysis of a complex set of relations between American Jewish identity and Israel. The Israeli Connection and American Jews is valuable reading for anybody interested in the formation of an ethnic identity for American Jews, as well as for the academic directors of Israel encounter programs.
Ofira Seliktar
Gratz College

Justice for All? Jews and Arabs in the Israeli Criminal Justice System, by Ayre Rattner and Gideon Fishman. 138 pages, appendix, bibliography, index. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998. $55.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-275-95908-2

As social scientists specializing in criminology, the authors examine “whether the Israel justice system dispenses justice equally, irrespective of social grouping” (p. vii) by focusing on Israel’s “most significant minority group; namely, the Arabs” (p. vii), whose status merited a three-year long research project with important empirical and analytical significance. The hypotheses of the book are that “the geopolitical situation has a significant impact on the way justice is dispensed” and that “varying degrees of discrimination are to be found in each stage of the judicial process” (pp. vii-viii).

Rattner and Fishman investigate how “Arabs fare in the legal system in comparison to Jews” by examining the processes of police closure of criminal files, conviction, and sentencing (p. 22). In a state with no formal constitution, ordinary law, as enacted by majority vote in the parliament, gains superior legal status. This situation allows political pressures and tensions in society to be translated into legal ones, prejudicing the status of all minority groups. A preliminary literature survey reveals that a significant majority of the Arab respondents believe that there is discrimination against them, whereas the majority of Jewish respondents think that there is no discrimination against Arabs in Israel. The survey also provides “evidence that public stereotyping of Arabs is negative and may affect law enforcement policy” (p. 31).

Nevertheless, the statistical data collected by the researchers show disproportionate conviction and imprisonment of Arabs as compared to Jews. However, the researchers downplay these statistics as indicators of discrimination and attribute differences to the general socio-economic position of the Arab population as a group (p. 20). The chapter on “Palestinian Offenders and Israeli Justice” analyzes Palestinian offenses within the borders of Israel in all areas other than security, thereby eliminating the most interesting and controversial category in the sample. The authors concur in a common belief that the legal system is a mirror of society, while wondering whether, in the Israeli case, the national mood is not also a reflection of the legal system. Interpretation of the data may be compromised by the fact that Rattner and Fishman describe themselves from the outset as “ardent Zionists who believe in Israel as a Jewish homeland,” (p. vii), rather than, for example, a state representing all its citizens. This acknowledged bias burdens the entire research project, and apologetic statements often appear to mitigate serious systematic injustices against ‘the Arabs’ or ‘the Palestinians.’ 

Justice for All? pays immutable homage to the Zionist master narrative of Israel’s genealogy and nation building, and the peculiarity of its challenges and societal tissue. Moreover, the authors uncritically accept the official categorization of Palestinians in Israel as ‘the Arab minority,’ restricting the term ‘Palestinian’ to residents of the West Bank and Gaza, all the while asserting that this questionable distinction does not affect the methodology or the findings of the research. The Arab-Israeli conflict and the internal tension between Israel’s two main national groups (the Jews and ‘the Arabs’) are usually cited as the pretext ‘explaining,’ if not justifying, institutionalized discrimination in courts of law as well as in society at large (pp. viii-3, 120-21). In a striking example, the authors credit Israel with restraint during the Palestinian Intifada because “the Israeli army refrained from shooting live bullets” (p. 19) (rationalizing their use of violence as war action!). Such accounts are not reassuring about the objectivity and credibility of the research, whose conclusions are therefore less convincing to social scientists, to say the least.
Samir Awad
Columbia University


Israel’s Place in the Middle East: A Pluralist Perspective, by Nissim Rejwan. 216 pages, notes, index. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. $49.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8130-1601-0

Rejwan’s thesis aims to square a Middle Eastern circle: “viewed from the perspective of history, culture, demography and temperament...Israel can rightly be considered a normal Middle Eastern state” (p. 5). The rationale for this thesis is advanced in Part One, “The Jews and their Neighbors,” which compresses into one-hundred pages the history of Christian-Jewish relations in Europe and the course of Arab-Jewish relations from their beginnings in the pre-Islamic period. The inevitably telegraphic account will benefit non-specialized readers or introductory classes in comparative history. 

Part Two, “Israel as a Middle Eastern Country,” consists of three chapters. The first aims to prove that Israel is neither an alien creation, nor an intrusion, in the Arab world. To this end, Rejwan employs a two-fold strategy: he first highlights the undoubtedly remarkable Judeo-Arabic symbiosis and then circumvents most of the misdeeds of the European Zionists since their landing in Palestine. Hence, the chapter becomes as polemic as the texts it counter-argues. The second chapter in Part Two, “Ideology, Politics and Culture,” addresses themes in the post-1948 Israeli domestic scene, of which the most crucial is the rift between the largely upper-class Ashkenazi Jews of European descent and the largely working-class Jews of Middle Eastern/Arab descent. 

Rejwan’s elaboration on Israel’s ethno-class divide is superior to the accounts that were offered by the uncritical sociologists whose prolonged grip over the field has been loosened during the last decade. Unlike them, Rejwan is neither interested in providing academic rationalizations on behalf of the Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli state to explain away the inferior socioeconomic position of non-Europeans in Israel, nor does Rejwan blame the victims for their subordination. Yet, precisely because of these accomplishments it is unfortunate that in describing non-European Jewish Israelis Rejwan utilizes archaic designations such as Orientals or Sephardic Jews while escaping the more appropriate term: Mizrahim. Furthermore, his discussion provides little new information to those who studied the work of scholars such as Eliyahu Eliachar, Abraham Shama, Raphael Shapiro, Ilan Halevi, Shlomo Swirski, Ella Habiba Shohat, G. N. Giladi, Sami Shalom Chetrit, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Oren Yiftachel, or Henriet Dahan-Kalev (none of whom are cited by Rejwan).

The best element in the book’s concluding chapter, “A Postnationalist Middle East,” is the author’s intimate familiarity with both the Arab and Israeli domestic scenes. It surveys some of the more troubling aspects within Jewish and Arab nationalisms and their democratic prospects.

The governing objective of Israel’s Place in the Middle East is to affirm Israel’s normalcy in the Middle East. In so doing, Rejwan overrates the explanatory status of culture, temperament, or demography and undervalues the role of interests and policies. This trend is best exemplified in the little attention that Rejwan pays to the profoundly dissimilar historical relationships of the Jewish and Arab national movements/states to Western powers. The question of Israel’s normalcy in the region should perhaps be tested against Israel’s interests, policies, and strategic geopolitical alliances rather than against its culture, temperament, or demography.
Moshe Behar
Columbia University 


Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky. (Pluto Middle Eastern Studies) 176 pages, bibliography, notes, index. London: Pluto Press, 1999. $18.99 (Paper) ISBN 0-7453-1276-4

Shahak and Mezvinsky’s Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel is refreshing in its critique of Jewish fundamentalism and therefore serves as a welcome addition to the literature in the field. In academic terms, however, it suffers from several flaws, mainly due to its selective use of sources as well as the eagerness of the authors to make a political statement.

Their main aim is to provide a thorough assessment of fundamentalism in Israel. They describe in some detail the origins, ideologies, practices, and the overall impact of fundamentalism upon society. They emphasize mostly the messianic tendency due to their belief that this tendency is the most influential and dangerous. The authors define Jewish fundamentalism as generally opposing human freedoms, especially the freedom of expression. With regard to foreign policy, the fundamentalists have continuously opposed any withdrawal from territories occupied by Israel since 1967. Moreover, Jewish fundamentalists have advocated the most discriminatory policies against Palestinians. In essence, the authors’ contention is that Jewish fundamentalism is intrinsically hostile to democracy because it opposes equality for all citizens, and therefore it poses a considerable threat to democracy in Israel. Though well presented, most of these arguments have already been discussed in earlier works.[59]

Another argument made by the authors is that modern Jewish fundamentalism is tightly connected to earlier versions of the fundamentalist phenomenon. Therefore, they try to trace the history and background of fundamentalist manifestations. They also seek to put the Jewish fundamentalist phenomena in a wider perspective. In their words:

What occurred in Jewish fundamentalism is not dissimilar to what occurred in other forms of fundamentalism. Some innovations have been made, largely to disguise true intent. The predominant wish ideologically is to return to the supposedly “good times” when everything was seen and kept in proper order. In the case of the Jewish variety of fundamentalism, the idea is to use modern methods to achieve the power to re-establish the traditional way of life in an effectual manner.

Once again, this is an interesting statement that could have been made much more convincing by using some comparison to other fundamentalist or extremist movements (even contemporary ones).

Thus, though it is well written, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel leaves the reader wondering. On the one hand, it tells the story of the Zionist-Religious as well as Ultra-Orthodox social and political camps in great detail, so that the reader will understand the dangers emerging from this growing fundamentalist camp. On the other, the absence of a clear theoretical framework, or even consistent historical description, lessens the book’s importance. It is also somewhat puzzling that the authors strongly attack English academic literature on Israeli politics. The most important works about Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, including some critical works, have been written in English.[60] Hence, the authors’ decision not to use reliable academic sources and to base most of their arguments on Hebrew newspapers is not totally convincing.
Ami Pedahzur
University of Haifa, Mount Carmel
[58] H. W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power (Oxford University Press, 1997).
[59] Especially Ehud Sprinzak’s The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right (Oxford University Press, 1991).
[60] See, for example, the comprehensive works of Sprinzak, Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right; Yoav Peled, “Towards a Redefinition of Jewish Nationalism in Israel? The Enigma of Shas,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21.4 (1998): 703-27; Peled, “Ethnic Exclusionism in the Periphery—The Case of Oriental Jews in Israel’s Development Towns, Ethnic and Racial Studies 13.3 (1990): 345-67; and others.