MER Article 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 Baruch Kimmerling • 3 min read
MER Article 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 Fareed Mohamedi • 4 min read
MER Article 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 neg Joel Beinin, Salim Tamari • 10 min read
MER Article Dangerous Asset Two major schools of interpretation seek to explain why the United States grants Israel an annual subsidy of nearly $4 billion and consistently supports Israeli militarism and expansionism. The domestic politics approach attributes the “special relationship” to the political and financial power of the Zionist lobby and Jewish influence in Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article 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 Deput Jeffrey Blankfort • 5 min read
MER Article 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 establis Jane Hunter • 5 min read
MER Article 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 e Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article 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 Joe Stork • 5 min read
Forbidden Territory, Promised Land Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews (trans. A. M. Berrett) (London: Zed Books, 1987). Shlomo Swirski, Israel: The Oriental Majority (trans. Barbara Swirski) (London: Zed Books, 1989). Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1 Ammiel Alcalay • 10 min read
A "Miracle" Made in Moscow and Washington If the intifada has been an Israeli nightmare, upsetting a reality with which most Israelis had grown comfortable, the immigration wave of Soviet Jews to Israel which began in December may turn into a “miracle” that will lift the morale of many Israelis for years to come. The Soviet immigration wave Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi • 4 min read
Aspersion and Intrigue Question: What is more popular reading in the West Bank than the UNLU’s leaflets? Answer: Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari’s Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising -- Israel’s Third Front, now translated into Arabic and serialized in the daily al-Quds this spring. Like the fake manifestos written by Israel Joost Hiltermann • 2 min read
Eyeless in Judea One of the major problems confronting the Israeli security forces during the Palestinian uprising was the disintegration, by June 1988, of Israel’s system of penetration and control over the clandestine national movement. First, the apparatus of the military government received a considerable blow w Salim Tamari • 17 min read
