Online joint professional development: a novel approach to multicultural education

Purpose The current research presents findings from an innovative online Teachers Professional Development (TPD) program entitled – The Israeli Society is Meeting Online. This study aims to examine to what extent does online contact promote meaningful acquaintance among teachers from different cultures in Israeli society, and how did the online TPD program influence the way teachers perceive their roles in the Israeli education system. Design/methodology/approach This study implemented a qualitative phenomenological approach to learn about the teachers’ experiences (through the TPD program. Findings The findings indicate that teachers who live and study in a diverse and divided society can improve intergroup relations using online contact with teachers from other groups. This contact may lead to a significant acquaintance, which, in turn, prepares teachers as agents of change in the field of multicultural education. Originality/value Israeli society is diverse and divided and these divisions are reflected in the educational system, which is characterized by high degrees of prejudice, stereotyping and racism between groups. The findings highlight the educative potential of online contact in a diverse society and the importance of improving intergroup relations between teachers from different cultures prior to their attempts to promote multicultural education.

Reforming the Israeli–Arab conflict? Interreligious hospitality in Jaffa and its discontents

This ethnography analyzes three Israeli Reform Jewish rituals as manifestations of interreligious hospitality. The Daniel Reform congregation invites Muslim residents of Jaffa to participate in rituals incorporating Arabic and Muslim clergy and prayers. The egalitarian and pluralistic Jewish symbols and narratives promote neighborly relationships. Nevertheless, some participants’ responses reaffirm popular suspicions and prejudices, which the ceremony seeks to overcome. Interreligious hospitality here is not so much an act of theological reconciliation, but a political act also directed toward other actors – like the Israeli right-wing and Israeli society, which grant the Orthodox a monopoly on Judaism. While the shared ritual practice offers a dialogical model that engages broader publics through doing, the analytic frame of hospitality sensitizes us to the importance of space and language in the power relationships of hosts and guests. It helps explain the challenges to the messages of coexistence, which the rituals are designed to confirm.

Israeli Physical Persecution in Occupied Jerusalem

Israeli authorities have committed a wide range of human rights violations, including direct violence, land annexation and settlement building, home eviction and arbitrary arrest and detention. Such practices have been carried out with political cover from the Israeli government. In addition to the direct confiscation of Palestinian homes and other property, Israeli authorities and organizations such as settlement associations frequently use subterfuge or bribes to transfer ownership to Jewish residents and interests. Through historical review and analysis, this paper documents the most common types of direct and structural violence practiced by Israel, along with their effect on Palestinians, and highlights the roles of the various players in Israeli society.

Israeli Pre-Transitional Justice and the Nakba Law

Pre-transitional justice activities that expose past injustices during entrenched conflicts can incite strong reactions among actors who feel threatened by or dislike such activities, and who thus attempt to silence controversial truths. This article illuminates how attempts to silence controversial truths, in parallel with shutting down debate, can also have the unintended outcome of enlarging public discourse on previously marginalised issues. Thus, paradoxically, efforts to curb freedom of expression sometimes result instead in an expanded public capacity to debate previously silenced truths about the conflict. We conduct a case study of reactions to pre-transitional justice in Israeli society focusing on the so-called Nakba Law, enacted in 2011. Through interviews with members of the non-governmental organisation Zochrot, politicians, teachers and media persons, we first show the relationship between pre-transitional justice and enacting the Nakba Law. We then demonstrate that while the Nakba Law indeed aimed to hamper freedom of expression, it also enabled increased public knowledge about the meaning of Nakba. Our theoretical proposition regarding this paradox, in this case activated by instigating new memory laws, is highly relevant to other conflicts-in-resolution that experience pre-transitional justice processes.

K postavení menšin na území státu izrael v kontextu mezinárodního práva a zákona o národním státě

The New Israeli Basic Law that was adopted in 2018 called “Israel – the Nation State of the Jewish People” divided the Israeli society. Part of the inhabitants accepted this law with enthusiasm because of its emphasis on the reasons why the State of Israel was established. On the contrary, the more secular part of Israeli society, as well as the minority citizens, strongly objected to this law and described it as an unjust disregard of the non-Jewish citizens, an act of racial discrimination or even an apartheid. The aim of this paper is mainly to examine selected provisions of this law, i.e., the provisions related to the Israeli citizens, under public international law and find out to what extent these legal provisions are in accordance with or in contrary to international law.

Israeli Militarism Reconsidered

This article seeks to challenge conventional arguments about Israel’s ‘cultural militarism’ through a comparative analysis of Independence Day parades of the 1950s. Using media reports, newsreels, and archival documentation, it examines the parades and compares them to other cases from around the world. The discussion focuses on three features of the Israeli parades: the widespread civil criticism of the place of the military in Independence Day celebrations; the role of the crowds and their proximity to the marchers; and the partly militaristic character of the parades themselves. While the article does not deny the obvious militaristic connotations of soldiers marching in the streets, it stresses the unique relationship between the armed forces and society in Israel and argues that militarism alone is not a sufficient analytic framework for analyzing Israeli society.

Media coverage of COVID-19 state surveillance in Israel: the securitization and militarization of a civil-medical crisis

Israel, traditionally known as a nation-in-arms, has been undergoing processes of securitization and militarization from its inception to the present day. While several countries have employed surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of coronavirus, Israel was the only country in the world to authorize its internal security agency to track citizens’ cellphones to deal with this civil-medical crisis. Employing a reflexive thematic analysis to news media outlets, this study examined coverage of Israel Security Agency (ISA) surveillance by four leading Israeli news sites, inquiring into the socio-cultural imageries, and motifs that informed their reports. While two of the sites were mostly supportive and the other two were critical, the coverage as a whole was informed by national security imageries reminiscent of Israel’s nation-in-arms tradition. Our discussion contextualizes these findings within a three-decade tension that has prevailed in Israeli society and culture between securitization/militarization and democratization/demilitarization.