Israel
Israeli Women, Palestinian Women
Deborah S. Bernstein, ed., Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel (SUNY, 1992).
Barbara Swirski and Marilyn P. Safir, eds., Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel (Pergamon, 1991).
Elise G. Young, Keepers of the History: Women and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Teachers College Press, 1992).
Philippa Strum, The Women Are Marching: The Second Sex and the Palestinian Revolution (Lawrence Hill, 1992).
Orayb Aref Najjar, with Kitty Warnock, Portraits of Palestinian Women (Utah, 1992).
Friedman, Zealots for Zion
Robert I. Friedman, Zealots for Zion (Random House, 1992).
Palestinians and Israeli leftists shared high hopes at the time of Yitzhak Rabin’s inauguration, but optimism quickly began to fade. Robert Friedman’s new book, published shortly after Rabin took office, participates in that early, post-Likud expectancy. Zealots for Zion examines the settler movement in Israel from its inception after the 1967 war through the fall of the Shamir government. This discussion is bracketed, in opening and closing chapters, by the author’s anticipation of a change in settlement policy under Rabin.
Teddy Kollek and the Native Question
On Saturday night, June 10, 1967, Israeli authorities informed more than 100 families living in the Moroccan Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City that they had three hours to evacuate their homes, where some had lived for generations. As Teddy Kollek, mayor of the western half of the city since 1965, recalled in his 1978 autobiography:
Israel Stonewalls US Aid Investigation
An Israeli general and a General Electric official diverted more than $40 million in US military aid to Israel from 1984 to 1990 for unauthorized military projects, according to an ongoing investigation by the House Commerce and Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
Presenting his panel’s preliminary findings at a July 23, 1992, hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) asserted that Brig. Gen. Rami Dotan conspired with Harold Katz, a dual citizen of Israel and the US, and Herbert Steindler, a senior General Electric official, to launder about $40 million in US military assistance funds, earmarked for Israel, through General Electric.
Money, Media and Policy Consensus
Although the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) was established only in 1985, by the time the Bush administration came to office in January 1989 it had become the non-governmental organization with the greatest influence over US Middle East policy. WINEP built its success on ample funding; an extensive network of relations with the media, policymakers and academics; and dogged focus on its central policy objective — keeping the strategic relationship with Israel at the center of US Middle East policy, a goal that resonates with the anti-Arab and Islamophobic premises of the conventional wisdom on Middle East affairs.
Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation
Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (California, 1990).
The era of the nation-state has increasingly put into question pastoral nomadism as a way of life and as a distinctive cultural identity. In Saudi Arabia, Bedouin pastoralists have become ranchers who transport their herds to pasture in Toyota pickups. Jordanian Bedouin preserve their identity by soldiering for the Hashemite monarchy. The Bedouin may be central to the nationalist ideologies of states like Libya, but the free herders and warriors of the desert, always something of an idealization, belong to an ever more remote mythical past.
Sprinzak, Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right
Ehud Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right (Oxford, 1991).
Most of the sociopolitical and historical research on Israel to date has oddly concentrated on the so-called left-wing sections of this polity. Even when recently some researchers (like Shapiro, Heller or Shavit) deal with the “right,” they concentrate on this or that portion of it. Ehud Sprinzak’s volume, even though it expressly concerns the “radical right,” shifts the question under analysis to the “right” as a sociopolitical phenomenon. From this point of view it is an important contribution to the study of Israeli political culture.
How Israel Gets Its Credit Rating
A “C” rating from the US government credit evaluators, coming after Washington has held up the $10 billion loan guarantee for more than four months, must come as something of a shock for Israel. Only last September Jacob Frenkel, governor of the Bank of Israel, told the Financial Times that a “good borrower like Israel” needed the loan guarantees to “go to the marketplace with an implicit vote of confidence in the economy, its prospects, and in the economic strategy that it has.”
How to Stop Shamir
Naomi Chazan is chair of the Truman Institute at Hebrew University, and author of Irridentism and International Policy (Lynne Rienner, 1991). Salim Tamari and Joel Beinin spoke with her in Jerusalem on December 30, 1991.
What are the likely effects of the settlers’ move into Silwan on the peace negotiations?
Bush Locks Horns with Shamir
On January 21, six days into the US air war against Iraq, Israeli Finance Minister Yitzhak Modai took advantage of Washington’s praise for Israel’s “restraint” in the face of 11 Scud missile attacks to drop a bombshell of his own. Before the assembled Jerusalem press corps, he advised visiting Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger that Israel would require an additional $13 billion dollars from the US at the conclusion of the war, $3 billion as “compensation” for the bombing and $10 billion in loan guarantees for the anticipated immigration of Soviet Jews.
Mossad Books
Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Every Spy a Prince (Houghton Mifflin, 1990).
Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy, By Way of Deception (St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
Promoting their book around the US last fall, Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv touted it as the first critical study of Israel’s intelligence establishment — an antidote to the “cheerleading” books about Israeli intelligence that typify the genre. That is precisely what makes Every Spy a Prince so insidious. Its critical demeanor gives the book an aura of intellectual depth and honesty, beguiling the reader to accept the bold claim of its subtitle: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community.
Editor’s Bookshelf
Egypt has been central to providing an Arab cover for the US-led military expedition to the Persian Gulf, in addition to Saudi Arabia. As of December 1990, Egypt’s 15-20,000 troops constituted the third largest force confronting Iraq, after the United States and Saudi Arabia itself. Joint military exercises during the 1980s prepared the way for this US-Egyptian military cooperation, whose value is more symbolic than substantial. In The United States and Egypt: An Essay on Policy for the 1990s (Brookings, 1990), William Quandt surveys the development of the US-Egyptian relationship since the early 1970s, examines the strains it may experience in the 1990s and offers some recommendations to policymakers responsible for managing them.
Washington Watch
Supercomputers
Some chips in the bargaining between Washington and Tel Aviv prior to the Gulf crisis were two-year-old Israeli requests to buy supercomputers — mainframes that perform scientific and mathematical calculations with great speed, enabling scientists to accomplish rapidly tasks such as simulating nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches.
