Israel and the Family of Nations

Yakobson, Alexander; Rubinstein, Amnon

doi:10.4324/9780203894026

Cited by 16 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…However, as Yakobson and Rubinstein have noted, Israel's immigration and integration policies render 'Israeli-Jewish national identity more civic and cultural and less ethnic… and religious'. 90 Again, Yakobson and Rubinstein, as other scholars mentioned in this article, do not refer to Ben Gurion as the founding father of this policy, but we doubt whether it could have come to exist without Ben Gurion having laid its foundations in the 1950s. Ben Gurion's insistence on these principles, which endure, albeit with several modifications, until this very day, was far from self-evident, and contributed significantly to the foundation of Israel as a Jewish nation-state, yet inclusive to non-Jewish.…”

Section: From the 1950s To The Presentmentioning

confidence: 74%

Integrating non-Jewish immigrants and the formation of Israel's ethnic–civic nationhood: from Ben Gurion to the present

Fisher

Shilon

2016

Middle Eastern Studies

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The character and values of communities and countries are reflected in the way they define their boundaries and by the means they provide for those who wish to join them. Thus, immigration policy based on primordial ethnic affinities points to a society which anchors its collective identity in the past, while a state with joining rules based on individual civic requirements reflects a more open and inclusive concept of nationalism. The immigration and naturalization policy of each state is determined at the time of its inception, and the definition of these boundaries infuses practical content into its vision. However, both the vision and its content may undergo modifications depending on historical circumstances. For example, US immigration policy, adopted after the Second World War, was based on neutral criteria of immigrant admission reflecting the fact that it is a country of immigrants whose civic identity lies on individual-liberal foundations. Similarly, at the beginning of the 2000s, Germany integrated civic principles into its ethnic naturalization laws to facilitate veteran immigrants' assimilation and naturalization. On the other hand, the ethnic citizenship laws in the Baltic states, which emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, endowing citizenship to descendants of nationals despite years of their living abroad, reflect the importance of ethno-historical foundations of national identity from these countries' perspective. 1 In this article, we intend to focus on the Israeli case and explain the link between its immigration and naturalization policy and its collective self-perception. We argue that Israel's policy was designed at the time of the state's establishment by David Ben Gurion, in an attempt to construct a national Jewish identity based on a creative interpretation of religious tradition, oriented also towards building a modern inclusive Jewish nation. In Israel, as in some other countries, changes in immigration policy have been made. However, in our view, in the Israeli case, these changes have not replaced the basic principles originally set by Ben Gurion; rather, they have actually confirmed the continued commitment to these fundamental principles.

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Section: From the 1950s To The Presentmentioning

confidence: 74%

Integrating non-Jewish immigrants and the formation of Israel's ethnic–civic nationhood: from Ben Gurion to the present

Fisher

Shilon

2016

Middle Eastern Studies

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“…47 Those who deny Israel's democratic character based on such accusations do so because they deny the right of the Jewish people in Israel to a state of their own. 48 Dowty also argues that full equality for all minorities, as a qualifying standard for democracy, is too high. Under such a threshold the United States might arguably be deemed undemocratic.…”

Section: Ethnic Relations In Israelmentioning

confidence: 97%

Israel's Societal Security Dilemma and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process

Olesker¹

2011

Nationalism and Ethnic Politics

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This article applies the concept of the societal security dilemma to ethnic relations in Israel. I argue that Jews and Arabs in Israel are locked in a regular societal security dilemma in which their identity security requirements are incompatible and that the peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority has only served to exacerbate that incompatibility. The article highlights the process of securitization of identities, which is generally missing from the discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ethnic relations in Israel.

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“…Liberal Zionists hold firm to the discourse of equality between “Arabs” and Jewish Israelis, as long as it maintains the Zionist exclusivity on Jewish collective rights in Israel (cf. Yakobson and Rubinstein 2008, 3). It is a circumscribed equality that attributes full subjectivity only to Jews and extends limited individual rights to Palestinians (Robinson 2013).…”

Section: Ethics Committees and Political Gatekeepingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Helsinki in Zion: Hospital ethics committees and political gatekeeping in Israel/Palestine

Shalev

2022

American Anthropologist

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This article looks at six months of the author's repeated attempts to obtain the approval of three Helsinki Committees (HCs, Israeli hospitals' research ethics committees) to conduct ethnographic research with Palestinian physicians in Israeli hospitals.While the research was eventually approved and carried out in two of these institutions, correspondence with HC representatives, as well as evidence of their informal moves with institutions' management, reflect their perceptions of the risks the study posed. In the Israeli hospital, acknowledging Palestinian political subjectivity challenges the definition of Israeli nationhood as exclusively Jewish and contaminates the allegedly politically neutral medical sphere. These committees exerted their power to serve their institutions and state ideology. This, I argue, should not be understood as anomalous instances of negligence. I show how the committees' censorship was attuned to the Declaration of Helsinki as their guiding text and Zionism as their underlying ideology. Embedded in the powerful regimes of ethics, bureaucracy, science, and health, ethics committees employ "unarmed power" that is beyond critique. They are well-oiled "anti-politics machines," rearticulating political concerns into a depoliticized moral discourse. As such, they not only limit academic inquiry but also redefine, in political terms, the realm of the moral.

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Israel and the Family of Nations

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Integrating non-Jewish immigrants and the formation of Israel's ethnic–civic nationhood: from Ben Gurion to the present

Integrating non-Jewish immigrants and the formation of Israel's ethnic–civic nationhood: from Ben Gurion to the present

Israel's Societal Security Dilemma and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process

Helsinki in Zion: Hospital ethics committees and political gatekeeping in Israel/Palestine

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