Palestine…It Is Something Colonial

World War I marked the beginning of a significant role of American Jewry in global affairs. Both the emergence of the United States as the new world power and the financial status of the Jewish American community contributed to a considerable participation of American Jews in the councils of world Jewry. The war and its aftermath brought fundamental changes to the Zionist movement, which offered the pragmatic approach to the actual problems of Diaspora Jews. There appeared both the necessity and possibility for uniting all the American Zionist factions into a powerful organization with an efficient party apparatus and prominent leadership which revitalized the Zionist movement and made it responsive to its main aim, i.e., the establishment of the Jewish Homeland in Palestine. Louis D. Brandeis’s leadership marked a turning point in the history of American Zionism through a combination of his potent personality with a coherent ideology that reflected the American conditions. All those developments helped create the most powerful American Zionist organization in the world, with the sole aim to effectually implement the idea of a home for the Jewish people. The Americanization of Zionism, based on practical work in building up Palestine, was a direct reason for a bitter conflict between Brandeis and Weizmann, the leader of European Zionism, that is between fostering Jewish settlement in Palestine through a systematic and methodical economic process on the one hand, and through implementing a synthesis of socio-ethical and cultural values that Zionism in Weizmann’s view should represent, on the other. The article discusses the circumstances which triggered the American Zionist movement to assume power, prestige, and large following; it also analyzes the reasons for an orchestrated and determined diplomatic action on the part of both the Zionist Organization of America and the World Zionist Organization to articulate and achieve their direct aim first through the Balfour Declaration and then through the San Remo Conference decision of entrusting the Mandate over Palestine to Great Britain. They both proved to have been the indispensable prerequisites for the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine.

On 6 November 1944, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East in Cairo, Lord Moyne, was assassinated by two members of a Jewish group called Lehi. The assassins confessed, citing Lord Moyne's anti-Semitism and his policy towards the Zionists as their motives. However, Lord Moyne was not anti-Semitic, and he did not support Zionism. While he supported the 1939 White Paper that limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, he changed his position in 1944 to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The British were heavily involved in the assassination investigation and trial. They assisted the Egyptian police investigation, lobbied for a trial in a military court, and promoted death sentences for both defendants. They also tried to prevent the accused from speaking in the court, fearing the effect that would have on Egyptian and international public opinion. Many Egyptians viewed the assassins as heroes who fought against British imperialism. They wanted the assassins to be released from the central prison in Cairo. During the Second World War, Churchill's involvement in Palestine diminished. Ultimately, the assassination had little effect on British policy in the Middle East.

For most of the twentieth century, the attitudes and policies of the US army were consistently anti-Zionist. From World War I into the 1950s, army anti-Zionism was inextricably interrelated with a mutually reinforcing anti-Semitism that ranged from political and ethnic bias to extremist versions of biological racial and conspiratorial thinking. Army officers perceived Zionist objectives in the Middle East as detrimental to America's national interest regarding wartime security and geopolitical stability in a crucial region, as well as concerning oil resources and communist containment. In supporting Zionism and later Israel, America Jews revealed their suspected disloyalty. Although anti-Semitic concepts gradually disappeared from official army analyses, striking continuities remained in the army's anti-Zionist position. Until the end of the Cold War, the army rejected the “special relationship” argument based upon shared values or Israel as a military asset. The image of the cowardly, weak Jew incapable of establishing and defending a Jewish state in Palestine had been replaced by that of a militarily superior, potentially aggressive Israel destabilizing a strategic area.

The meaning of the terms “left” and “right” in 1945-9 regarding Israel were quite different than what they came to mean in global politics during the Cold War. The conclusion recalls that “Israel’s Moment” was the brief two years of 1947-9 marked by a conjuncture of liberal and left-leaning sentiment in the United States and France, and Western Europe with support for the Zionist project by the Soviet Union and the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In these two years and in the four years following World War II and the Holocaust, the United States State Department, Pentagon, and the CIA shared the views of the British government that a Jewish state in Palestine would endanger Western access to Arab oil, foster Arab antagonism to the Britain and the United States, and would facilitate expansion of Soviet and communist influence in the Jewish state and thus in the Middle East. By contrast, those who supported the Zionist project did so with the language of antiracism, anticolonialism, and antifascism. As important as President Harry Truman’s support for the new state of Israel was, the diplomatic and military support from the Soviet bloc for that goal was far more persistent and emphatic than was often thought to be the case during the decades of the Cold War.

Iran–US relations – strained at the best of times since the 1979 Iranian revolution – have never been worse than during the past six years, due to the much more intense interaction between the two ...

On the Limits of Contemporary Jewish Theology Response to Martin Kavka

Evaluating U.S. foreign policy one year after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is a risky venture, particularly when writing the analysis four months before the actual anniversary. Currently the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominates the news: Will recent fighting in the region diminish prospects for negotiating a peace accord that recognizes both an Israeli and a Palestinian state? Does the deployment of U.S. and British unarmed civilians to the West Bank to oversee the Palestinian imprisonment of six detained terrorists foreshadow a larger U.S. military presence in the area? Does “the best chance for peace in Palestine, and for stability throughout the entire Middle East, [go] through Baghdad,” as the Wall Street Journal recently wrote?1 In the next few months, Middle East politics, from oil prices to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Saddam Hussein's repressive regime in Iraq, will almost certainly continue to dominate the news and serve as focal points of U.S. foreign policy. Whether U.S. actions will need to expand from diplomacy to military intervention will likely be the hotly debated question, though events might prompt earlier action. Although the attacks of September 11th harshly illustrated how events can redefine the policy agenda, we nevertheless can make some predictions about the direction of U.S. foreign policy in the post-9/11 world.

Cet article decrit la confrontation entre deux systemes educatifs formel et informel: le systeme colonial anglais et le systeme National sioniste, entre 1917 et 1951 en Israel

Why was there such a far-reaching consensus concerning the utopian goal of national homogeneity in the first half of the twentieth century? Ethnic cleansing is analyzed here as a result of the formation of democratic nation-states, the international order based on them, and European modernity in general. Almost all mass-scale population removals were rationally and precisely organized and carried out in cold blood, with revenge, hatred and other strong emotions playing only a minor role. This book not only considers the majority of population removals which occurred in Eastern Europe, but is also an encompassing, comparative study including Western Europe, interrogating the motivations of Western statesmen and their involvement in large-scale population removals. It also reaches beyond the European continent and considers the reverberations of colonial rule and ethnic cleansing in the former British colonies.

In The Lives of Jessie Sampter, Sarah Imhoff tells the story of an individual full of contradictions. Jessie Sampter (1883–1938) was best known for her Course in Zionism (1915), an American primer for understanding support of a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1919, Sampter packed a trousseau, declared herself “married to Palestine,” and immigrated there. Yet Sampter’s own life and body hardly matched typical Zionist ideals. Although she identified with Judaism, Sampter took up and experimented with spiritual practices from various religions. While Zionism celebrated the strong and healthy body, she spoke of herself as “crippled” from polio and plagued by sickness her whole life. While Zionism applauded reproductive women’s bodies, Sampter never married or bore children; in fact, she wrote of homoerotic longings and had same-sex relationships. By charting how Sampter’s life did not neatly line up with her own religious and political ideals, Imhoff highlights the complicated and at times conflicting connections between the body, queerness, disability, religion, and nationalism.

During the period from 1943 to 1948, the American Jewish grassroots movement organized to pressure Congress and President Truman in support of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This effort was led by Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, who worked to promote the Zionist vision of a Jewish state as proclaimed in the Balfour Declaration and endorsed by the San Remo Conference. The activities of the Jewish lobby during this period were numerous and varied. They worked to establish the American Jewish Conference, which operated in the U.S. and abroad to promote the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Additionally, members used their influence in Congress and the media to push for support of the Zionist cause. Through these efforts, the Jewish lobby was able to exert significant pressure on Truman and other decision makers, ultimately leading to the creation of the State of Israel. President Truman found himself caught between the hammer and the anvil of the competing interests of Arabs and Jews, as well as conflicting views within his own administration. Despite these challenges, Truman ultimately played a crucial role in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

El conflicto entre árabes e israelíes hunde sus raíces en la aparición del nacionalismo. Antes del nacionalismo, las comunidades se definían por otros criterios, especialmente el religioso. La comunidad judía asentada en Palestina vivió en razonable armonía con sus vecinos árabes durante siglos. Cuando un sector de los judíos europeos elaboró un nacionalismo propio, el sionismo, y emprendió la tarea de construir un Estado judío en Palestina, esta convivencia quedó alterada. A su vez, la mayoría árabe planteó diversos proyectos nacionales, aunque la penetración del nacionalismo en esta comunidad fue más tardía y débil.

The activity of the Jewish party «Mizrachi» in the 20s and the 30s of the 20th century, aimed at developing private Jewish schooling with Hebrew as the medium of instruction, is analyzed. In interwar Poland, Jewish students were deprived of the opportunity to receive primary education in public schools in the mother tongue as the medium of instruction, as government officials only partially implemented the Little Treaty of Versailles of 1919. The development of Jewish schooling was also complicated by the Polonization policy, the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of Poland's Jews. Polish-speaking «szabasówka», who implemented a nationwide program of educating Jewish students in the spirit of loyalty to the government, facilitated their assimilation. That part of the Jewish community, which perceived these schools as an assimilation factor, actively participated in expanding the network of private Jewish schools with Yiddish or Hebrew mediums of instruction. An important part in the development of such religious and national educational institutions took the Mizrachi party, whose program principles combined the Jewish religious tradition with activities aimed at forming a Jewish state in Palestine. The author examines the activities of the Jewish cultural and educational societies «Jabne» and «Micyjon tejce Tora», which were cared for by «Mizrachi». The societies took part in establishing preschools, primary and secondary schools, teachers' seminaries, evening courses, public universities, reading clubs, libraries, and more. Both Judaic and secular subjects were taught in these educational institutions. Paying due attention to the teaching of Hebrew, Jewish literature, and Jewish history in schools helped preserve Jewish students' national identity. Keywords «Mizrachi» political party, Poland, cultural and educational societies, religious and national schools, Hebrew, Yiddish.

The many-faced hero. The evolution of the Zionist myth of Sabra in the contemporaryIsraeli war films The concept of the New Jew was one of the most important founding myths of Zionism. During the construction of a Jewish state in Palestine, the New Jew was hailed Sabra (with reference to the kind of prickly pear popular in this region). In the twentieth century, the figure of Sabra became an important element of the identity and culture of Israelis. The main purpose of this article is to show the evolution of the mythical narrative typical for the cinematic incarnations of Sabra, which in recent decades has taken place in Israeli war films.

The period when the Peel Commission's proposals were under active consideration proved pivotal for the complex relationship between Zionism and British governments which had seemingly started with such mutual goodwill in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration. The proposal twenty years later to create a Jewish state in Palestine through the mechanism of partition and its repudiation the following year were to test that relationship to its utmost, beginning a process of alienation which was to grow ever more acrimonious as the British Mandate endured its final decade. Central to understanding the crisis of 1937-8 is the position of Chaim Weizmann, who had been Zionism's most inspiring personality from 1917 and for whom faith in British good intentions had been a 'Rock of Gibraltar'. This paper attempts to examine the ways in which the Peel Commission's proposals tested both his powers of leadership and the reality of his long-standing belief that the aims of Zionism could be achieved through British patronage. In 1937, Weizmann could survey a career marked by achievements which assured him a unique place in modern Jewish history. In the two decades since his talent for diplomacy had helped secure and shape the Balfour Declaration, as President of the World Zionist Organization he had presided over the fortunes of the ill-defined Jewish National Home in Palestine. In 1929, his stature was recognized by his election to the presidency of an enlarged Jewish Agency, which, it was hoped, would enlist the support of non-Zionist and Zionist Jews alike. From 1933, provoked by the institutionalizing of anti-semitism in Germany, Poland and Rumania, the number of Jews settling in Palestine, sluggish for most of the 1920s, increased so dramatically that by 1936 they were estimated to number 370,483,