The well-known historian and political scientist Zeev Sternhell here advances a radically new interpretation of the founding of modern Israel. The founders claimed that they intended to create both a ...landed state for the Jewish people and a socialist society. However, according to Sternhell, socialism served the leaders of the influential labor movement more as a rhetorical resource for the legitimation of the national project of establishing a Jewish state than as a blueprint for a just society. In this thought-provoking book, Sternhell demonstrates how socialist principles were consistently subverted in practice by the nationalist goals to which socialist Zionism was committed.
The relations between memory and history have recently become a subject of contention, and the implications of that debate are particularly troubling for aesthetic, ethical, and political issues. ...Dominick LaCapra focuses on the interactions among history, memory, and ethicopolitical concerns as they emerge in the aftermath of the Shoah. Particularly notable are his analyses of Albert Camus's novella The Fall , Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah , and Art Spiegelman's comic book Maus . LaCapra also considers the Historians' Debate in the aftermath of German reunification and the role of psychoanalysis in historical understanding and critical theory. In six essays, LaCapra addresses a series of related questions. Are there experiences whose traumatic nature blocks understanding and disrupts memory while producing belated effects that have an impact on attempts to address the past? Do some events present moral and representational issues even for groups or individuals not directly involved in them? Do those more directly involved have special responsibilities to the past and the way it is remembered in the present? Can or should historiography define itself in a purely scholarly and professional way that distances it from public memory and its ethical implications? Does art itself have a special responsibility with respect to traumatic events that remain invested with value and emotion?
This is not... the nomination of a justice of the peace to some small county in some small state. This involves the very integrity and fabric of our country.—Senator Orrin G. Hatch The transcripts of ...the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Clarence Thomas are extraordinarily rich and suggestive. Much has been written about the hearings, but until now, no one has paid close attention to the actual language of the participants. Revisiting the words of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Jane Flax asks what we would learn about American politics if these hearings were, literally, our only text. Orrin Hatch's assertion was, indeed, perhaps more insightful than he realized. How does our legal and judicial system operate in the face of sexual issues? Can it ever transcend race and gender? Who was the real victim in these hearings—Hill, Thomas, the Senate, or the viewing public? Who in America has the power to make political meaning? Rather than attempting to establish fact or truth, The American Dream in Black and White looks at the political narrative by which our nation makes sense of itself. The senators' own anxieties about their publicly televised role were evident throughout these hearings. Given our conviction that we are a nation built on freedom and equality, says Flax, the Senate committee had no choice but to confirm Thomas, thereby validating the cherished belief that with virtue and hard work, even a barefoot boy from Pin Point, Georgia, can transform himself into a Supreme Court Justice. To have turned him down would have called into question the very legitimacy of our politics and law. To have sympathized with Anita Hill, seen as having brought filthy material into public view, was impossible. Demonstrating the powerful, public role of narrative, The American Dream in Black and White reveals the hearings as a dramatic challenge to the American political system—a system supposed to rise not only above gender and race, but also above any issue of sex, guilt, history, or personal identity. Anita Hill's and Clarence Thomas's conflicting accounts, Flax argues, are a measure of the stories we tell about ourselves. Drawing on feminist, political, and psychoanalytic theory, she shows how these transcripts reveal deep and serious fissures in the psychic fabric of contemporary Americans, black and white, male and female. Identity politics and abstract individualism reflect rather than repair these fissures, and the lingering discomfort with the hearings reflects the necessity of new political theories and practices.
Muslim Palestine Nusse, Andrea
1998, 20121012, 2012, 2012-10-12
eBook
The ideology of Islamic fundamentalists is of central importance in the modern world, but it is often distorted or misunderstood by the international media. This insightful study provides a detailed ...analysis of the Palestinian Hamas movement's world-view, and shows how the theoretical framework developed by thinkers such as Hassan al-Banna, Sayyis Qutb and al-Mawdudi is applied to a specific political, social and economic context. Nusse explains the fundamentalist position on recent events, such as the Gulf War, the Madrid peace negotiations and the Hebron massacre, and helps to dissipate myths surrounding modern fundamentalist movements and their overwhelming success as opposition movements in the modern world.
This book spans an entire epoch in the history of the contemporary Palestinian national movement, from the establishment of Israel in 1948, to the PLO-Israel accord of 1993. Contrary to the ...conventional view that national liberation movements proceed with state-building only after attaining independence, the case of the PLO shows that state-building may shape political institutionalization, even in the absence of an autonomous territorial, economic, and social base. This study traces the political, ideological, and organizational evolution of the PLO and its constituent of guerrilla groups. Taking the much-vaunted ‘armed struggle’ as its connecting there, it shows how conflict was used to mobilize the mass constituency, assert particular discourses of revolution and nationalism, construct statist institutions, and establish legitimacy of a new political class and bureaucratic elite. The book draws extensively on PLO archives, official publications, and internal documents of the various guerrilla groups, and over 400 interviews conducted by the author with the PLO rank-and-file.
Detailed historical reconstruction of the origins of Jewish political thought. By tracing the development of Socialist Zionism and Revisionism in the years prior to Israel's independence, the book ...demonstrates how the political, social and economic foundations of the future state of Israel were negotiated in this period and how these ideologies have endured and are reflected in Israeli diplomacy. In this respect, the comprehensive analysis is key to an understanding of the basis of Israeli international relations and the fragmentary nature of its politics. The book promises to become a standard reference for students of Zionist and Israeli politics, as well as those interested in the Middle East generally.
