Critical Essays on Israeli Society, Religion, and Government: Books on Israel, Volume IV

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION Walter P. Zenner and Kevin Avruch This is the fourth volume to be published under the aegis of the Association for Israel Studies which brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines and perspectives in reviewing recent work on modern Israel. The previous volumes in this series, all published by the State University of New York Press, are: Books on Israel, vol. 1 (I. Lustick, ed.). 1988; Critical Essays on Israeli Society, Politics, and Culture (Books, vol. 2) (I. Lustick and B. Rubin, eds.). 1991; and Critical Essays on Israeli Social Issues and Scholarship (Books, vol. 3) (R. Stone and W. Zenner, eds.), 1994. Although no volume by itself pretends to offer a comprehensive coverage of this broad topic, as a series, Books on Israel offers interested students of contemporary Israel a "state-of the art" view of current literature in selected fields-perhaps most usefully literature outside the field of the reader's own specialization-and of the important questions being asked in each. Each chapter is especially written for this volume, and, while the authors have structured their contributions as "review essays," this format is intended to serve as a platform for a critical reflection on the work or works reviewed, and on their importance for an understanding of Israeli society and culture. When the third volume of this series, Critical Essays on Israeli Social Issues and Scholarship went to press in 1994, 1 2 Introduction the peace process among Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab states seemed to be dead in the water. How differently the situation looks today. While the peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians is still unstable, it has resulted in the establishment of a PLO-Ied authority in Gaza and Jericho, the virtual withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from some West Bank towns, open diplomatic contacts between Israel and several Ara'J states, and a treaty between Israel and Jordan. However, it has led also to a new round of violence, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 by a disgruntled Jewish law student with extreme religious-nationalist leanings (and, perhaps most disturbingly, with the apparent blessing of some Israeli and other rabbis). Nevertheless, the issues on which diplomats, politicians, scholars, and the general public have been fixated for fortyodd years have been transformed. Instead of concern with how obdurate each side is on these issues, they can now turn to the solution of speciflc problems, one of the most crucial of which will be water resource management, the subject of Ofira Seliktar's chapter in this volume. Meanwhile. Mohammed Abu-Nimer focuses on the human dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by examining the dilemmas which face peace activists on both sides. His chapter continues an exploration of themes taken up by Han Peleg's essay in the third volume of this series to which we have previously referred-"The Arab-Israeli Conflict and the Vic-tory of Otherness"-and, in the same volume, by Efraim Inbar in "The Intercommunal Dimension in the Arab-Israeli Con-, flict: The Intifada." Abu-Nimer shows in particular how difn-cult Jews in the peace camp have found the bridging of the "Great Rift Valley" that separates Jews and Arabs in Israel. In this vein, readers should also consult the essay by Myron Aronoff in "The Ambiguities of a 'Binational' Israel" found in the second volume of the series, Turning to issues of government and society, the chapters in this volume by Efraim Ben-Zadok and Samuel Krislov direct our attention to institutions that have been neglected Introduction 3 previously by students of Israeli government. In contrast to the more usual concern with Israel's national government and politics, Ben-Zadok concentrates on local governance. He reviews some of the current literature on local government and protest movements, showing the new dynamism in local governance in Israel, and how closely government on the local level reflects ethnic and other rifts within the body social. Krislov focuses on the courts, and places issues surrounding the court system and Israeli legal culture in general within the larger context of Israel's multicultural-and particularly its Judaic-background. Jeff Halper's contribution, reviewing studies of Jerusalem , is a departure for this series in that it concentrates on one locality. Jerusalem is, of course, unique among Israeli cities, but review articles could be written about other localities as well...