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This book surveys discourse and opinion in the United States toward the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1991. Contrary to popular myth, it demonstrates that U.S. support for Israel is not based on the pro-Israel lobby, but rather is deeply rooted in American political culture. That support has increased since 9/11. However, the bulk of this increase has been among Republicans, conservatives, evangelicals, and Orthodox Jews. Meanwhile, among Democrats, liberals, the Mainline Protestant Church, and non-Orthodox Jews, criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians has become more vociferous. This book works to explain this paradox.
A provocative look at the inner world of Orthodox Jewish men who attend partnership synagogues
This even-handed and thorough text explores Israeli government and politics. First tracing the history and development of the state, Mahler then examines the social, religious, economic, and cultural contexts within which Israeli politics takes place. The book explains the operation of political institutions and behavior in Israeli domestic politics, as well as Israel's foreign policy setting and apparatus, the Palestinian conflict and the question of Jerusalem, and the Middle East peace process overall. This clear and concise text provides an invaluable starting point for all readers needing a cogent introduction to Israel today.
Allied nations often stop each other from going to war. Some countries even form alliances with the specific intent of restraining another power and thereby preventing war. Furthermore, restraint often becomes an issue in existing alliances as one ally wants to start a war, launch a military intervention, or pursue some other risky military policy while the other ally balks. In Warring Friends, Jeremy Pressman draws on and critiques realist, normative, and institutionalist understandings of how alliance decisions are made. Alliance restraint often has a role to play both in the genesis of alliances and in their continuation. As this book demonstrates, an external power can apply the brakes t...
This book examines Israel’s civil-military relations (CMR) in order to explore alternatives to orthodox Western models of security sector reform (SSR) in post-conflict societies. This book argues that the guidelines of SSR have always tended to draw on theoretical work in the field of CMR and focus too heavily on Western, liberal democratic models of governance. Consequently, reform programs based on these guidelines, and intended for use in post-conflict and conflict-affected states, have had, at best, mixed results. The book challenges the necessity for this over-reliance on traditional Western liberal democratic solutions and instead advocates an alternative approach. It proposes that b...
"I swear by all that’s Holy, I will never come anywhere near the Palestine problem once I liberate myself from this trap." Ralph Bunche wrote these lines to his wife in 1949, during the armistice talks on Rhodes. A year later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his success in ending the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Ralph Bunche and the Arab-Israeli Conflict provides a comprehensive study of Ralph Bunche’s diplomatic activities on the Palestine question. Bunche was at the centre of the story from the referral of the issue to the United Nations in 1947 until the signing of the armistice agreements that ended the war. He began as advisor to UNSCOP and then headed the secretariat of the comm...
The 21st century exists in the shadow of the return of extremist Islam to the center of the world’s political stage, a process that began at the end of the previous century. While researchers have focused on the rise of Hamas, this return has in fact manifested itself in a range of independent Islamic extremist groups with their own philosophies. Jihad in Palestine provides a comprehensive study of the variety of Islamic extremist groups operating inside Israel/Palestine today, examining their philosophies and views concerning martyrdom, as well as their attitudes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These ideologies are presented in their own words, thanks to the author’s extensive tran...
This book argues that the nature of counterproliferation strengthens the effect of cultural factors in policy choices, and illustrates this by focusing on US and Israeli policy toward the Iranian nuclear program. The United States and Israel have been the two states most active in opposing Iran’s nuclear ambitions; however, the respective strategies of each of these states have changed repeatedly. This book explores how competing cultural schools of thought on grand strategy within each state inform and shape the key policy decisions in their attempts to prevent a nuclear Iran. Drawing on numerous interviews conducted with former high-level officials in each country as well as published me...
A dramatic shift is taking place in Israel and America. In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West Bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organisations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself. In the next generation, the liberal Zionist dream, the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals, may die. In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart lays out in chilling detail the looming danger to Israeli democracy and the American Jewish establishment's refusal to confront it. And he offers a fascinating, groundbreaking portrait of the two leader...
Introduces readers to the new perspectives, approaches and interpretive possibilities in Jewish American literature that emerged in the twenty-first Century.