My paper examines the often overlooked political role of women in Israel’s religious-Zionist settler movement, and in so doing examines the inherently gendered nature of the settlement movement. From the heart of Hebron to the hilltops of the northern West Bank, women have played a substantial role in protest, activism, organizing, and the general political life of radical far right settlers. The nature and scope of their participation is, however, often obscured by common assumptions about the relationship between the public and private spheres and women’s position within them (in particular religiously conservative women); the endurance of traditional ideas regarding women’s roles in national processes; and the women’s own framing of their roles and responsibilities as rooted in maternity and domesticity—in spite of, and at times precisely in defense of, their participation in political activity. My central argument is that religious-Zionist settler women’s overlapping subjectivities—Israeli, Orthodox Jewish, settler—express themselves in gendered ways and act on each other to produce a status quo that habitually challenges the relationship between the public and private spheres, and above all the idea that they are separate. This dynamic hinges on something that could, in a traditional reading of the public and private spheres, be considered a paradox: that the settlement enterprise is at once the largest project the Israeli state has ever undertaken and the recipient of vast amounts of public resources, while also being, essentially, a mass home- and community-building movement. In other words, the settlement project erodes any potential boundary between the public and private spheres by explicitly flipping the domestic space into the very site of national and political contestation. Seen in this light, the settlement enterprise is an inherently gendered one—and one that accumulates additional layers of gendered meaning when its torchbearers are fundamentalist women. My paper is divided into three parts: firstly, I consider the role of women in the public sphere and national processes in Israel in general; secondly, I explore the centrality of domesticity to the settler project, including its historical context vis-à-vis settler colonialism; and thirdly, I look at several examples of religious-Zionist settler women’s activism, in order to consider how the domestic, private realm in the occupied territories and women’s roles within it (as constituted within their Orthodox, nationalist framework) are instrumentalized by the religious far right in pursuit of their national and spiritual goals.

From its outset, the Zionist Movement's aspiration to turn the Holy Land (Palestine, under the Ottoman and the British Mandatory's rule) into the Jewish state relied upon the assumption that the area's ‘productive capacity’ was sufficient to sustain the millions of Jews who would immigrate to the land. This assumption was not obvious. Rather, it required empirical and political support. The primary challenge was to create a positive worldwide opinion of the Zionist vision. That is, to persuasively demonstrate that the difficulties engendered by the scarcity of water in the semi-arid climate of the land could be overcome. To this end, in the mid-1940s, the Zionist leaders commissioned the service of the best-known soil and water engineering experts of the time: Walter C. Lowdermilk and James B. Hays. The results of the water surveys conducted were made public in Lowdermilk’s, "Palestine, Land of Promise" (1944) and Hays’," T.V.A on the Jordan" (1948). The two publications built a narrative that asserted that proper water management would generate ample resources for the projected massive immigration to Palestine. However, during the first decade of its existence, the Israeli government reversed its original allegation of water. It was no longer an abundant resource, but instead one of profound scarcity. To reinforce this narrative, the government utilized effective propaganda, like the motto – “Save every drop”. Why? The proposed lecture will be based on visual art and a video clip. Its aim is to reveal an unknown aspect of the legal interests in the water availability conception during the early years of the Israeli Statism.

Israeli academia’s complicity in the occupation of Palestinian territories has received increased interest in the past decade. More recently, questions regarding the relationship between academia, the civil sphere, and the military have come to the fore of Israeli public discourse, following a right-wing campaign against a Hebrew University professor for purportedly ‘scolding’ a uniformed student and a sycophantic response from the institution itself. In this paper, I examine a landmark moment in the history of the relationship between university and state: the Hebrew University’s decision in the aftermath of the 1967 War to rebuild and expand its pre-1948 campus, now in occupied East Jerusalem, and thus to take upon itself a role as a major colonizing body in the city. Earlier critical examinations of the Hebrew U’s return to Mount Scopus have focused on the planners of the new campus and its nationalistic and moribund architecture. Building on their insights, this paper focuses on the university’s leading academics and their part in the transition. By examining internal university discussions, communications with government agencies, and contributions by academics to Israeli political discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, I aim to show the willing and active role the leading academics of the Hebrew U undertook in securing Israeli control of East Jerusalem, and their understanding of the political and demographic implications of their move to Mount Scopus. Based on a close reading of the arguments made within the university regarding the move, I argue that much of what was at stake in these discussions – for supporters and opposers alike – was the very ideal of the intellectual and of the academic mission. Thus, I suggest understanding the university’s move to East Jerusalem not as a decision to forsake academic considerations in the name of national interests, as it is sometimes presented; but rather, as the implementation of a (contested) vision in which the institutional-academic interest and the national one are inherently intertwined.

In 1956, Israeli Kariel Gardosh (pen name Dosh) created the cartoon character of Srulik. Just over a decade later, the Palestinian cartoonist and journalist Naji al-Ali started publishing in Al-Siyasa the comic strip which featured the Palestinian cartoon character Handhala. Over time, the figures of Srulik and Handhala gained much popularity and turned into epitomic characters representing respectively the “psychological disposition” (Kracauer) of Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Dosh was born in Budapest and, after he lost most of his family in the Holocaust, he immigrated to Palestine/Israel and died there in 2000. Al-Naji’s biography involves a different national catastrophe and exodus—he was born in a village near Nazareth in Palestine and, after the Palestinian exodus (Nakba) of 1948, he became a refugee in Lebanon and spent most of his adult life in that country. The purpose of this comparative study is not only to point to striking similarities between the two rivalry national characters of Srulik and Handhala (both are boys marked by naiveté, innocence, and perseverance—nehishut in the Israeli-Zionist context and sumud in the Palestinian case), but to explore the dilemmas the cartoonists faced in depicting their eyewitness figures as the realities around them changed. Thereby, the paper investigates the transmutations in representation and the considerations in having the boy-like cartoon characters mature with time. Overall, Handhala is the perpetual onlooker who, with his hands behind his back, observes the injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people by Israel, the Arab world, and the superpowers. Conversely, the figure of Srulik is a testimonial to the ideological slippage at the heart of Zionism, both in terms of its ambivalence towards Jewish legacy (e.g., the need for “the new breed of Jew”) and in educing from a history of persecution the guiding principle of “never again” which resulted in aggression towards the neighboring Arab states and in the oppression of the Palestinian people. Indeed, in later depictions, Srulik occasionally can no longer stand by and he is armed with a machine gun; a figure motivated by a collective sense of victimhood but no longer a victim. Finally, The paper will relate these dilemmas to the argument that, in the arts, the Zionist epic is structured around a teleological narrative while the Palestinian narrative is marked by muteness, circularity, and the stillness of time.

The Palestinian/Israeli conflict remains one of the most intractable and divisive conflicts in the Middle East. Despite the creation of Israel in 1948, and the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (known collectively as the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)) in 1967, the Palestinian yearning for an independent state has never been extinguished. Since 1991, there have numerous attempts at negotiating a mutually acceptable peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis that would see the advent of a sovereign Palestine in accordance with the two-state solution. Every one of these efforts has failed. The extensive literature on this topic can be divided broadly into two areas of investigation: one focusing on the vagaries and exigencies of the negotiation process and the diplomatic goals of the various participants, and the other focusing on the continued efficacy of the two-state solution, and with outlining possible alternatives. While these analyses address to varying degrees Palestinian state-building efforts, they fail to address in any detail concomitant Israeli state-formation and state-building efforts that have continued since 1967. This is an important piece of the analytical puzzle when considering the question of why a sovereign Palestine has failed to materialise. Consequently, this paper will argue that one of the key reasons why a Palestinian state has yet to eventuate is that Palestinians and Israelis are engaged in duelling state-formation and state-building exercises. This qualitative analysis will employ a theoretical framework that combines aspects of the state-formation and state-building literature to examine critically the key variables of sovereignty, legitimacy, and nation-building. It will then investigate the operation of these variables in a detailed analysis of critical junctures in the state-formation and state-building activities of Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Specifically, the paper will investigate the contest between Israelis and Palestinians for Westphalian and domestic sovereignty in the OPT, and the raison d’être of Israel’s occupation regime. The paper also examines critically the contest between Israelis and Palestinians over the legitimacy of any prospective Palestinian state. Finally, given the effects of these contests, the paper will analyse the struggle over Palestinian nation-building as it relates to both Israeli and Palestinian state-building efforts. Overall, this analysis aims to provide an alternative explanation as to why a Palestinian state has failed to materialise, and an insight into why this conflict remains intractable.