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| 1 |
ID:
185266
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| Summary/Abstract |
Forty years after its occurrence, the 1982 Lebanon war remains academically understudied with the received wisdom about the conflict largely based on political and journalistic accounts. According to these accounts, the war was a political ploy by Defence Minister Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin aimed at achieving far-reaching political goals rather than a defensive attempt to remove the terrorist threat to Israel’s northern areas. By placing the conflict within the context of Israeli history and the Arab-Israeli conflict, on the one hand, and the nature and characteristics of modern warfare, on the other, this article offers a more nuanced interpretation of the Lebanon War, showing that it was not fundamentally different from past military encounters.
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| 2 |
ID:
173846
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| Summary/Abstract |
On 22 July 1946, the Irgun Zvai Le’umi (National Military Organization), a Jewish terrorist organization opposed to Britain’s continued rule of Palestine, bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. The incident has always been controversial given the fact that the facility was not an ordinary hotel, but also the nerve center of British rule over that country — housing its military headquarters, intelligence stations, and government secretariat. Further, at the time it was claimed that warnings were issued to evacuate the hotel that British officials callously ignored. This article addresses three key three questions surrounding the bombing: Was the King David Hotel in fact a legitimate military target? Were warnings in fact given to evacuate the hotel? And, if so, why wasn’t the hotel evacuated? The answers, while critical in reaching an accurate accounting and factual understanding of a highly controversial event, interestingly also shed light on the efficacy and morality of terrorism as an instrument of national liberation and agent of political change.
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| 3 |
ID:
151683
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| Summary/Abstract |
While the establishment of the Elon Moreh locality in the second half of the 1970s constitutes an important milestone in the evolution of post-1967 Jewish settlement in the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria (or the West Bank as they have been known since their 1950 Jordanian annexation), the episode has been surprisingly neglected by the professional literature. This article seeks to fill that lacuna by exploring the factors and circumstances underlying this momentous event, as well as the political and legal struggles attending its occurrence. As such, it not only offers the first comprehensive historical account of this episode but also shed important fresh light on one of the more intractable aspects of the Israeli‒Palestinian conflict.
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| 4 |
ID:
190990
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| Summary/Abstract |
The tragic Altalena incident of June 1948, where prime minister and minister of defence David Ben-Gurion ordered the newly-formed Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to sink a ship laden with arms for one of Israel’s pre-state military underground groups, killing sixteen people and wounding many others, remains one of the most traumatic events in Israel’s history. This article re-examines the conduct of the key personalities involved in the incident and their attitude towards it in subsequent years.
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| 5 |
ID:
158161
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| Summary/Abstract |
During the 1960s, the Haaretz newspaper was a staunch supporter of the key political decisions made by Menachem Begin, thus playing a significant role in reinforcing his legitimacy and that of his Herut movement. On the one hand, this support was motivated by the desire to transform Israel’s socialist economy into a freer and less government-controlled market. On the other hand, it stemmed from the aspiration to democratise Israel’s political life. This symbiosis began to emerge in the early 1960s and was sustained over a lengthy period of time, thus underscoring the role played by Israeli bourgeois-liberal circles in the Zionist Right’s path to power.
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| 6 |
ID:
163290
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the Herut movement’s social and economic alternative to the ruling Mapai party, characterised by a liberal-individualistic outlook and a general vision of converting the centralised economy to an economy in which private initiative and competition dominate. On 17 May 1977 the Herut movement became the ruling party through its Likud electoral bloc, with economic reforms quickly following. These reforms encountered difficulties: the declared ‘economic turnabout’ harmed the strength of the economy. Inflation rates reaching several hundred per cent, frequent devaluations, and a loss of faith in the Israeli currency threatened stability. Nevertheless, from the social perspective, Herut did indeed succeed in bettering the conditions of its loyal voters in the development towns and distressed neighbourhoods.
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| 7 |
ID:
163293
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| Summary/Abstract |
The 1977 elections in Israel marked the first time since the country’s establishment in 1948 for a right-wing government to be elected. Immediately after this sea change, a ‘Democracy in Danger’ fearmongering discourse was instituted by representatives of academic, cultural, political and media elites. In fact, as this article shows, Likud’s ascendance served as a formative event of democratic transformation in the deepest sense of the word, strengthening and deepening Israel’s democratic identity that had hitherto been limited at most.
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| 8 |
ID:
154057
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article discusses the causes and processes that drove Menachem Begin and his Gahal party into the Israeli cabinet during the three-week waiting period preceding the June 1967 war (or Six Day War as it is commonly known). A close examination of Begin’s behaviour reveals a calculated political move aimed at exploiting deep processes within the Israeli political establishment in general, and its right-wing factions in particular. This sheds fresh light on a number of key events preceding the war, notably Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s surrender of the defence portfolio to Moshe Dayan, as well as on the deeper processes that led within a decade to the Likud’s (Gahal’s successor) rise to power, for the first time in Israel’s history.
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| 9 |
ID:
189417
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the wake of the October 1973 war, Moscow sought superpower collaboration that would ensure its participation in the nascent Arab-Israel peace process, but the direct Israeli-Egyptian negotiations that culminated in the September 1978 Camp David Accords foiled this plan. As a result, the Soviets launched a diplomatic offensive against the deal and tried to forge an Arab front to isolate Egypt, only to see Cairo and Jerusalem signing a fully fledged peace treaty in March 1979. Then came the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) and further shattered Moscow’s Middle Eastern stance as fears of Tehran’s hegemonic designs led to Egypt’s reincorporation into the Arab fold.
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| 10 |
ID:
186157
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article focuses on the campaign waged by Herut, a right-wing National-Liberal party and its leader, Menachem Begin, to abolish the Military Government imposed on the Arab citizens of Israel between the years 1948-1966. The article draws on multiple sources that have not yet been studied to analyze Herut’s struggle for the annulment of the Military Government, while placing it in a broad historical and political context. It shows that Herut derived certain political benefits by campaigning for the annulment of the Military Government. However, it also establishes that Herut paid a price for its campaign, suffering criticism from within the right-wing political camp and wrestling with allegations from the left-wing political camp. The analysis of Herut’s campaign for the annulment of the Military Government illuminates the liberal ideological foundations of the movement that has held sway in Israel for over four decades, affirming its commitment to liberal values, and the belief of its founding father, Begin, in civic equality between Jews and Arabs in Israel.
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| 11 |
ID:
172378
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| Summary/Abstract |
When Menachem Begin, Israeli prime minister and founder of the Likud party, formulated Israel’s claim to the West Bank, he did not utilise the classic terra nullius settler argument. Instead, his ideological claim was that the land was a terra morata, a territory which had been in a state of ‘extratemporal hiatus’, to borrow a term from Bakhtin. This was illustrated through his insistence on using the Biblical names Judea and Samaria to denote the West Bank. The Zionist claim to the land was thus not that it lacked a sovereign, but rather that the sovereign had returned. The Israeli occupation was thus construed as a resumption of history, while the Palestinians were placed outside history, negating their historical and contemporary claim to the land. This article analyses how Begin’s worldview played out by investigating the self-rule proposal for the Palestinians which he launched in 1977. This proposal (if implemented) would have postponed any claims of sovereignty over the territory indefinitely, while ensuring that the Palestinians gained no national autonomy. In essence, Palestinian self-rule was a sleight of hand. For Begin the West Bank (and Gaza) were eternally Jewish territories, and the Palestinians mere residents on the land. Unlike Israeli settlers, they were not considered to be of the land.
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| 12 |
ID:
177276
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| Summary/Abstract |
On 7 June 1981, Israeli warplanes attacked Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor and destroyed it. Surprised by the raid, the Reagan's administration was puzzled about how to react. Some officials supported punishing Israel, while others recognized the advantages of the attack though they could not say it publicly. Washington knew that its moderate Arab allies expected a firm reaction, especially as Israel used American airplanes in the attack, apparently violating the 1952 Agreement between the two countries. Under the lead of President Ronald Reagan, Washington opted for a mild reaction, practically indirectly recognizing Israel's right to destroy the atomic reactors of its Arab enemies.
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| 13 |
ID:
191899
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| Summary/Abstract |
On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with the aim of destroying the military infrastructure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was serving as a launching pad for terrorist infiltrations and Katyusha attacks into northern Israel. From its outset, the Israeli public considered the war an exceptional case and a deviation from the “proper” course of Israeli history. Allegedly, unlike other Israeli wars, the 1982 War did not relate to Israeli security concerns but instead to the political aims and whims of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon. Also, it is often described as an unjust war of choice, which Israel initiated while it was not facing an existential threat. The claim that the 1982 Lebanon War was exceptional and a deviation from original Israeli principles is the main interest of this article. To determine whether the Lebanon War was a breach of Israeli history or a deviation from Israeli foundational political-moral principles, one must analyze the core tenets of Israel’s security strategy to which it adhered in most of its battles. Using the security doctrine as a guide map reveals that the conflict was neither unique nor a deviation but rather a fulfillment of long-standing Israeli security principles.
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