Yair Wallach discusses his book A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem (Stanford University Press, 2020). Until the late nineteenth century, Hebrew was rare to come by in the streets of Jerusalem, visible only in a handful of synagogues and communal institutions. Yet in the early years of the twentieth century, Hebrew erupted into the city's urban space. It appeared in rabbinical proclamations, adverts and posters, stone inscriptions, signs of schools and hospitals, and even on "Jewish money", Hebrew-marked coins used for charity. But Hebrew's emergence into the streets took place at the moment when the meaning of the language was no longer stable and given. For Ashkenazim and Sephardim, reactionaries and modernisers, Zionists and their opponents, local elites and newly-arrived "pioneers", the language was a battleground over different visions for Jews in Palestine. After 1920, with the adoption of Hebrew as a state language by the British Mandatory government, Arab nationalists began to view Hebrew as a colonial tool and resisted its use on that basis. In this talk I will explore the dramatic emergence of Hebrew in turn of the century Jerusalem, the struggles over its meaning, and its subsequent alignment with the Zionist project. Yair Wallach is Senior Lecturer in Israeli Studies at SOAS, University of London, where he is also the head of the SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies. He is a cultural and social historian of modern Palestine/Israel, who has published articles in Hebrew, Arabic and English on urban and visual culture, and on Jewish-Arab relations. His book, A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2020, looks at Arabic and Hebrew street texts (inscriptions,banners, graffiti and other media) in modern Jerusalem. Dr. Wallach is currently (2020-2022) a Leverhulme Research Fellow, and his project "The Arab Ashkenazi" looks at Jewish Ashkenazi acculturation in the Arab Levant. Wallach has also published articles in Haaretz, the Guardian, and other media.

Israel Studies Seminar

Reconsidering Early Jewish Nationalist Ideologies Seminar: Yair Wallach, (SOAS): Language of Revival or Conquest? Hebrew in the Streets of early 20th century Jerusalem

Prof. Sandy Kedar (Haifa) discusses his co-authored book on the legal rights of the Bedouin in the Negev. Kedar presents his book, Emptied Lands (co-authored with Amara and Yiftachel). Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international- comparative perspectives, providing the first legal geographic analysis of the “dead Negev doctrine” used by Israel to dispossess and forcefully displace Bedouin inhabitants in order to Judaize the region. The authors reveal that through manipulative use of Ottoman, British and Israeli laws, the state has constructed its own version of terra nullius. Yet, the indigenous property and settlement system still functions, creating an ongoing resistance to the Jewish state. Emptied Lands critically examines several key land claims, court rulings, planning policies and development strategies, offering alternative local, regional, and international routes for justice. Professor Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar teaches at the Law School at the University of Haifa. He holds a Doctorate in Law (S.J.D) from Harvard Law School. He was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School as well as a Grotius International Law Visiting Scholar there and a visiting associate professor at the Frankel Institute for Judaic studies in the University of Michigan. His research focuses on legal geography, legal history, law and society and land regimes in settler societies and in Israel. He served as the President of the Israeli Law and Society Association, is the co-coordinator of the Legal Geography CRN of the Law and Society Association and a member of its international committee. He is the co-founder (in 2003) and director of the Association for Distributive Justice, an Israeli NGO addressing these issues

Sandy Kedar: Emptied Lands - A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev.

Hizky Shoham discusses the 'emotionologies' surrounding the Nazi-Zionist 'Transfer agreement.' Are boycotts emotional outbursts or practical political tools? The proposed paper looks at the emotional aspects of the public debate that raged in Jewish Palestine in the 1930s about the Nazi-Zionist agreement, in order to suggest a theory of boycotts as emotional scripts. The Ha'avara ('transfer') agreement enabled Jews to leave Germany and take some of their assets with them, in the form of German goods to be sold in Palestine, therefore breaking the worldwide anti-Nazi boycott. Drawing on contemporary media and archival sources and comparative studies about boycotts and 'buy national' campaigns, I analyze the discourse on emotions in the public debate about the agreement. Rather than so-called ‘practical’ politics, the debate focused on various emotions such as humiliation, fear, anger, and vengeance, their role in politics, and the right way to contain or release them. The emotionology (as defined by historians Peter and Carol Stearns) of Zionist pride prescribed ‘practicability’ as a demonstration of restraint and respectability, and denounced the anti-Nazi boycott movement as ‘exilic’ Jewish submissiveness. Nonetheless, this emotionology did not fit the actual ability of the Jewish public to contain the harsh emotions. Under the guise of “buy national” campaigns, anti-German feeling was channeled into an effective boycott of the Templers, a small German community living in Palestine since the nineteenth century. Based on Theodor Sarbin’s theory of emotions as cognitive schemes, the paper suggests theorizing boycotts as political dramas whose ‘effectivity’ depends mainly on their emotional scripting. Bio: Hizky Shoham’s works consist of anthropological history and sociology of Zionism, the Yishuv, and Israel; and cultural theory. He is a senior lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Bar Ilan University, Israel; and a research fellow in the Kogod Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies at the Shalom Hartman institute in Jerusalem. His publications include Carnival in Tel Aviv: Purim and the Celebration of Urban Zionism (Academic Studies Press, 2014); and Israel Celebrates: Festivals and Civic Culture in Israel (Brill, 2017).

Hizky Shoham - The Emotional Scripting of Boycotts: The Nazi-Zionist Agreement in Jewish Public Culture During the 1930s

Larissa Remeniick discuss the origins and present condition of the new (post-2010) Israeli diaspora in Berlin In this lecture, I reflect on the origins and present condition of the new (post-2010) Israeli diaspora in Berlin. Based on 10 months of participant observation, I map out the main sub-streams of this emigration, elicit the economic, professional, and political reasons for leaving Israel, and explore these émigrés’ initial encounter with German society. My observations suggest that many Israeli residents of Berlin (mostly secular) rediscover their Jewishness along diasporic lines and forge ties with the local religious and community organizations. Being a small minority in the German-speaking milieu, Israelis invest in building their own Hebrew-based community networks, cultural and educational institutions. Lastly, I explore these émigrés’ ties with Israel and conclude that many are sojourners rather than immigrants and that Berlin is but one phase in their life journey.

Larissa Remennick - The Israeli Diaspora in Berlin: Back to Being Jewish?

Lotem Perry-Hazzan discusses ethnic discrimination in admissions to Haredi schools in Israel Haredi education has been dominated by the Ashkenazic Haredi Independent Education school network since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. During the 1980s the Sephardic Haredi community established its own school network so as to avoid the discriminatory practices of the Ashkenazi-dominated schools. However, many Sephardic Haredi parents have preferred not to send their children to the Sephardic Haredi schools, which are perceived by these parents as less prestigious. Over the last decade, the issue of discriminatory admission policies to Haredi schools has been extensively deliberated in secular courts. The presentation will discuss the legal efforts to eradicate the discrimination in Haredi schools and account to their social and political implications. It will present, inter alia, an empirical study that demonstrated how policy changes prompted Sephardic Haredi parents to claim their rights. Dr. Lotem Perry-Hazan is Head of the Centre for Jewish and Democratic Education and the Educational Management Program at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her research interests include the intersection of law, religion, and culture in education and children’s rights in education. Many of her studies have focused on Haredi education in Israel and in other countries. Dr. Perry-Hazan is a graduate of NYU School of Law (LL.M., 2006) and the University of Haifa’s Faculty of Law (LL.B., 2004; Ph.D., 2011). She was a visiting scholar at the European Association for Education Law and Policy at Antwerp University (2012), Harvard University Graduate School of Education (2014), and Melbourne University Faculty of Education (2018).

Lotem Perry-Hazan: Ethnic segregation in the Haredi education in Israel: Policies and practices

Heather Monro discusses the implications of Ashkenazi Hegemony in the Israeli Haredi society. Discrimination against Sephardim has become a growing issue in the Haredi world in Israel, but one which has taken a backseat to the more pressing questions of gender inequality and the religious-secular divide. Heather Munro's research has revealed that new Haredi feminist movements are increasingly engaged with the intersectionality debates of mainstream equality movements, and Sephardi discrimination is often inextricably wound up with other community struggles. Ashkenazi women with whom she engages articulate an Orientalist-type perception of Sephardim, including a rhetoric of cultural superiority. Sephardi women describe the way in which they have experienced discrimination as overly sexualising; most discrimination has occurred around issues of access to Ashkenazi institutional services like schools, which are perceived by both Sephardim and Ashkenazim as higher quality. Women are beginning to engage with the question of Sephardi discrimination through new Haredi feminist movements, which are gaining support despite Ashkenazi rabbinical denouncements of women politicians. Women may, ultimately, be the drivers behind anti-discrimination movements within the Israeli Haredi world.

Heather Munro: Ashkenazi Hegemony in Haredi Israeli Society and Implications for the Future

Peter Bergamin discusses his new book: The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology Abba Ahimeir (1897 –1962) writer, journalist and historian began his public life as a socialist, but subsequently moved toward the rightward extreme of Zionist ideology. One of the earliest opponents of the British Mandate, in 1930 he founded a radical organization called Brit Habiryonim (the Union of Zionist Rebels). This was a clandestine, self-declared fascist faction of the Revisionist Zionist Movement (ZRM) in Palestine whose official ideology was Maximalist Revisionism, an ideology for which Ahimeir is now most well-known. Ahimeir's career as a political activist came to an early end, when he was arrested in connection with the murder of the Labour Zionist leader, Chaim Arlosoroff. Although acquitted, Ahimeir nonetheless went to prison for his involvement as a political activist. Bergamin's book is the first intellectual biography of one of the most influential figures on the Zionist Right. Based on much unseen primary source material from the Ahimeir archive in Ramat Gan and the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv, as well as Ahimeir's newspaper articles, Bergamin provides a rigorous analysis of Ahimeir's ideological development. The book positions him more accurately within the contexts of the Israeli right and the Zionist movement in general, updates common misunderstanding about this period of history and revises Israeli collective memory.

The Making of the Israeli Far Right Book Talk by Peter Bergamin

Ali Alavi discusses the history of Iran's relations with Palestinian organisation and the Palestinian cause, and their implication to Iranian-Israeli relations. Examining the nature of relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Palestine, the talk investigates the relationship between state and authorities in the Middle East. Analysing the connections of the Iranian revolutionary movements, both the Left and the Islamic camps’ perspectives are scrutinised. To provide a historical background to the post-revolutionary period, the genealogy of pro-Palestinian sentiments before 1979 are also traced. The lecture contextualises the events from the beginning of the Palestinian predicament to the post-Arab spring era. In demonstrating the pro-Palestinian stance of post-revolutionary Iran, the study focuses on the roots of the ideological outlook and the interest of the state. The study also investigates the connections between the Islamic Republic and the Palestinian Islamic Movements of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in depth. Despite a growing body of literature on the Iranian Revolution and its impacts on the region, Iran’s connection with Palestine has been overlooked. This talk fills the gap in academia and enables the audience to unpack the history of the two states. Ultimately the talk aims to answer the questions: what the roots of Iranian pro-Palestinian tendencies are. The talk is based on the book (Iran and Palestine, Past Present, Future) published in August 2019. It transforms the notion of solidarity into a concept of desire for justice. In order to complete the book, the author conducted valuable interviews with Palestinian high representatives in Iran and some Iranian prominent academics active in the sociology of the Palestinian cause. Seyed Ali Alavi is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. He holds a PhD in Politics from SOAS. Ali’s book “Iran and Palestine, Past, Present, Future” was published by Routledge in 2019. Ali also writes and comments about contemporary politics of the Middle East and Europe and he has appeared in a number of interviews by Euronews, Al-Jazeera English, RT, LBC Radio, Radio Four and other outlets.

Seyed Ali Alavi - Iran and Palestine: Past, Present and Future

Dr. Calahorra studies some dramatic changes in the ways legislation is conducted in Israel Politicians, whether they be ordinary MPs and or government ministers (GMs), compete on the ability to influence policy outcomes. After elections and the formation of government, they do that through legislation ("Competition through Legislation"), in parliamentary democracies that allow such competition. This is a two-stage competition: the initiation of a bill – drafting the bill and filing it with parliament’s administration – and the actual legislation of the bill. It is not always competition between two conflicting policy goals. Sometimes both MPs and the GMs propose very similar bills, which wish to advance the same policy goal in similar ways, and sometimes they propose bills with conflicting goals. It is an unfair and unequal competition, as usually the rules of the legislative procedure usually favor the government’s bills (GBs) over those of the MPs (PMBs). In most countries where competition through legislation is theoretically possible it does not take place in fact. In Israel, it does. What makes Israel interesting and possibly unique is not only the enormous number of bills initiated, according to the Knesset's National Legislation Data, (6642 bills during 4 years of the 20th Knesset, 2015-2019) but also the fact that 90% of the bills were Private Members' Bills (PMBs), and only 9% were Government Bills. Even more interesting is the fact that 88% of the PMBs (5317) did not even make it to the preliminary stage of legislation, and only 4% (246) actually passed the third reading and became law. The Government was more successful, with 57% of its bills becoming law (359 out of 595), but still, in total, only 9% of the bills proposed during the 20th Knesset actually became law. The Data further shows a consistent rise in the total number of bills that had been submitted to the Knesset over the years, with an exponential rise in the number of PMBs, from less than a dozen in the 1st Knesset in 1949 to more than 6000 the 20th Knesset. The number of GBs, has more than doubled to almost 600. Until the 80’s (10th Knesset), the majority of the submitted bills were GBs but since then, a decisive majority of the bills is PMBs. The government has grown less successful in legislating GBs over the years: from 92% in average until the 80’s to 55% in the 2000’s. The total success rate of legislation, of all origins, has dropped from 87% in average in the 50’s to 10% in average since the 90’s. There are many possible explanations for this phenomena: The transfer of government from Labor to Likud in 1977; The rise of judicial activism in the early 80’s; The changes in the electoral system; The rise and fall of democratic internal party candidate selection; The introduction of the human rights Basic Laws and the constitutional revolution; The weakness of other parliamentary tools; The gradual weakening of the government due to the reduction in size of the coalition; The gradual rise in the power of the Knesset's committees. By using Israel as a test-case, and theories on government’s agenda setting powers and the way that vote seeking and coalition considerations affect legislation, I will try to answer such questions as: What factors affect the competition between MPs and GMs through legislation (agenda setting powers, vote-seeking, coalition agreements)? What are the incentives of a GM to initiate a bill and to see it through the legislative process in comparison to those of an MP (from the opposition or from the coalition)? The Israeli test-case can also help answer questions such as what are the advantages and disadvantages of competition through legislations. On the one hand, it promotes pluralism, facilitates cooperation between different sides of the political map and promotes social consensus. It can also circumvent obstacles to legal reforms in a certain field, regulatory capture of GMs. However, legislative competition has also shortcomings. It delays the legislation of government bills, forces the government and Parliament to waste resources on legislation that deals with issues that the public considers to be of low priority or on bills that are in fact mere declaration, and attempts to promote changes in policy contrary to the policy of the majority. Further research is needed to answer the question what changes, if any, should be made to the Israeli legislative process as a result of this analysis.

Tamar Calahorra, Competition between Members of Parliament and Governmental ministries on Policy Outcomes through Legislation – Israel as a Test case

Nancy Hawker (The Aga Khan University) considers the developing place of Arabic in official nation-statist platforms in Israel In the governing institutions of Israel, Arabic is suppressed. This practice crystallised in the early years of the state: there were points in history where it might not have gone in the direction of suppression; some activists in the 1960s had campaigned for some kind of minority Arabic-speaking official state platform to be maintained. In relation to insider/outsider dynamics, Arabic-speakers who also speak Hebrew make linguistic choices that result in the avoidance of Arabic in situations where Jewish Israelis are also present. These two elements form the sociolinguistic habitus of the Palestinians and other Arabs in the area controlled by Israel. When speaking Arabic, to give their propositions authority, Palestinians and other Arabs mobilise multilingual repertoires, including codeswitching with and borrowing from Hebrew, for rhetoric effect and style. The analysis moves away from scholarship that has been concerned 'language endangerment' which has channeled concerns about political problems. The Palestinian multilinguals are performing the aspirations of an emergent middle class elite. On the political stage, this elite challenges the ethnorepublican political structures of Israel, as well as ethnonationalist campaigns, with different inhabitations of citizenship that envisage liberal equality, dignity and autonomy. Under conditions of late capitalism, multilingual language skills are re-packaged as marketable resource: this creates value, but in a contested way, with ambivalent opportunities. With evidence from fieldwork on the political campaigning trails, from street surveys, from cultural products, and from archive sources, the research presented at the seminar contributes to work in sociolinguistics linking language with politics via discursive practices that negotiate who is a legitimate speaker. In conclusion it considers that speakers with sufficient linguistic and material resources – an elite class – form (political, cultural) platforms on which they insist on the legitimacy of their speech. This is not a pattern confined to Palestinians: it is a perfectly normal adaptation of speakers of undervalued languages communicating in contexts of linguistic hegemonies. Dr Nancy Hawker (DPhil Oxon, MA SOAS) is the 2019 Research Fellow at the Aga Khan University – Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (https://www.aku.edu/govprogramme/Pages/home.aspx). Her current research analyses audience receptivity to women's testimonies that have been translated between Arabic and English in human rights organisations. Her main research has been on the sociolinguistics of Palestinian Arabic and Modern Israeli Hebrew in zones of contact and conflict. After publishing Palestinian-Israeli Contact and Linguistic Practices (2013), her Leverhulme Fellowship at Oxford University (2014-2019) resulted in The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship (2019). She previously worked at Amnesty International’s Secretariat in London.

Nancy Hawker - Palestinian multilingualism: A perfectly normal adaptation to colonialism, conflict and late capitalism

Yoav Ronel (Bezalel and BGU) considers representations of a melancholic national and subjective desire in the prose of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (1865-1921) This talk deals with the representations of a melancholic national and subjective desire, in the prose of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (1865-1921), one of the prominent figures of the revival period of modern Hebrew Literature. Berdichevsky – as critics have shown repeatedly – claimed that the national revival will come from the birth of a new, erotic, willful and vital subject: the young, in-love and “detached” (Talush) protagonist of many of his stories, who represents the fracture point of Jewish modernity and secularism at the end of the 19th century. Ronel suggests that erotic love and the desire for a national revival in Berdichevsky’s poetic work appear as experiences of a melancholic desire that does not exhaust itself because it has already lost its object. And that this desire is the hinge around which the new life of Berdichevsky’s work turns. The erotic and vital desire – both subjective and national – is built upon an inherent sadness and melancholy. The revival period was characterized by a tension between the desire for the founding of sovereign Jewish nationality, and a deep doubt concerning the historical possibility of that project. Berdichevsky held a radical and anti-positivist position concerning the national-political debate: In his publicist and philosophical texts, the author repeatedly called for the need for Jewish sovereignty, and for the cultivation of a subjective and collective erotic will. Such calls stood against Berdichevsky’s disbelief in the possibility of such endeavour, and even in the survival of modern Jewish culture. Ronel argues that the melancholy found at the heart of his work is not opposed to the erotic and the national desire but preserves them. That is why Berdichevsky’s poetic and philosophical language does not distinguish between love and melancholy. Melancholy, Ronel thus argues, is not a biographical or psychological sadness and loss, but a poetic-political device. It is a mechanism for the suspension of subjective and national desire, and functions as the key to a renewed understanding of the author’s work and life.

Yoav Ronel - 'Love, Zionism and Melancholy in the Prose of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky'

Avihu Shoshana (Haifa University) discusses findings from his ethnography of social selection in Israeli night-clubs. This ethnographic study examines how micro-inequality operates face-to-face in everyday (or actually everynight) context of the nocturnal space of night clubs, focusing in particular on the long line awaiting entry to the club and undergoing the selection process to determine who is a bona fide customer and who will be denied access. The study entailed ethnographic observations of the long queue at the entrance to the club; in-depth interviews with the selectors (as they are called in Israel, or doormen and bouncers as they are referred to in the US and England); interviews with the partygoers in the long queue to enter the club aiming to examine their spatial and temporal experiences, especially interviews with individuals who do not pass selection (those whose ethnicity is depicted as "excessive" or referred to by the selectors as "heavy Oriental"); interviews with individuals who pass selection easily and regularly (individuals whose ethnicity is hegemonic and transparent and Oriental individuals who "pass" as hegemonic subjects); and ethnographic observation within the club (and especially the relations between different groups). The main research findings reveal a scenario of social selection (which includes specific status cues); differences in the waiting time experience between those who pass selection and those who do not pass selection; and unique reflexive engagement with respect to the spatial qualities of nightclubs among those who do not pass selection. The discussion section addresses the unique qualities of nocturnal inequality through the identification of a new symbolic type or unique spatio-temporal subjectivity in night life ("the one who does not pass selection"); the experiences of the subjects who do not pass selection (loss of singularity and privacy, the interpellation of symbolic type in hegemonic hierarchical-ethnic order and experiences of state abandonment and lawlessness); and the structural qualities of the nocturnal space (what I call hyper-structure as compared to anti-structure) associated with nightclubs. This cultural study of nightclubs enables us to discuss the connection between state, space, nocturnal inequality and subjectivity in everynight life. Avihu Shoshana, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel. Avihu’s areas of research include cultural sociology; anthropology of education; ethnicity, race and social class; everyday inequalities; discourse, subjectivity and emotion. His articles have appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies; Qualitative Sociology; Sociological Quarterly; Poetics; Sociology; Symbolic Interaction; Sociological Forum; Anthropology & Education Quarterly; Critical Studies in Education; Anthropological Theory; Ethos; Journal of Contemporary Ethnography; and Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. Avihu's recent articles published in these journals deal with Palestinian professionals in labor organizations in Israel; Muslim students in Israeli universities; upward mobility (economic and cultural) of Mizrahim and Ashkenazim in Israel; ethnographies of schools from various socio-economic classes in Israel; social selection and ethnic distinctions for night clubs in Tel Aviv; and contemporary orders of discourse about ethnicity and class in Israel.

Avihu Shoshana - 'Nocturnal Inequality: Ethnographies of Social Selection and Waiting in Line for Night Clubs in Tel-Aviv'

Jonathan Leslie considers the history of Iran's "becoming" and existential threat in Israel Years after the Islamic Republic of Iran resumed its nuclear development program, Israeli leaders began constructing a narrative aimed at instilling in their polity the fear of Iran as an existential threat to the Jewish State. Building upon Israel’s geopolitical insecurity, politicians, assisted by societal elites, repeatedly claimed that the imminent acquisition of a bomb by Iran’s religious fundamentalist regime undermined Israel’s security and threatened the stability of the world order. This project examines how Israeli leaders crafted a narrative in which Iran’s rulers sought the destruction of Israel; how the Israeli public internalized this perception of Iran as an enemy; and how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu incorporated this message into his foreign policy agenda and used it in efforts to secure the support of international allies. Through the lens of securitization theory, this project analyzes primary source documents to show the divergence between the narrative’s content and historical facts. In doing so, it highlights how perception eclipses reality when a powerful securitizing actor claiming exclusive access to material information identifies a threat source and publicly promotes its danger. It then examines how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strategically embraced populist strategies to advocate for extraordinary action against Iran and to bolster his status as a leader and national protector. Taking advantage of Israel’s failure in the Second Lebanon War and Iran’s election of a radical and bombastic president, Netanyahu chose resonant tropes – misusing history, recasting Holocaust memory, and fashioning an overarching moral imperative – to create a permanent crisis and secure Israelis’ acquiescence. By 2015, however, he had failed to convince international powers that a negotiated deal suspending Iran’s nuclear enrichment program would make Israel and the world less safe. This project contributes to our understanding of current and future developments in the Israel-Iran enmity, both predictable and unanticipated.

Jonathan Leslie - Fear and Insecurity: Competing Narratives of the Iran-Israel Relationship

Moriel Ram (SOAS) discusses how sand and snow produce potent imageries and physical realities in Israeli political culture. The talk examines how sand and snow produce potent imageries and physical realities which both solidify and undermine social hierarchies, cultural imagination and power relations. Focusing on Israel's fortification campaign in the Sinai Peninsula and touristic schemes in the Golan Heights between 1967 and 1973, Ram examine two projects which utilised sand and snow to shape contested spaces into geopolitical fantasies. First, the Bar-Lev line, built on a massive sand wall on top of the Eastern Bank of the Suez Canal and designed as the state's ultimate barrier. Second, the ski resort at the peak of Mount Hermon that was formed as a gateway to an imagined Europe. Ram argues that in both cases, the materiality of sand and snow, was mobilised to normalise the act of occupation, but at the same time challenged this very effort due to the fluidic nature of these materials which are constantly 'on the move' changing in shape, structure, and volume. Hence, an analysis of how sand and snow 'act' is also a call to read them as more than natural elements that are part of a silent landscape for human interaction, but as political matters that matter. Moriel Ram is a political and cultural geographer. His main interest lies in exploring how matter matters in unstable environments. Past and present research include the militarization of natural resources in contested territories in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The infrastructure of faith and religion in Israel's contested urban environments. The interaction between human lives and medical equipment in the development of clinical aid to African states and the representation of dead matter in popular culture through the figure of the zombie.

Moriel Ram, 'A tale of sand and snow: Bar-Lev line and the Hermon ski site as material fantasies'

Yehouda Shenhav and Yaacov Yadgar discuss the uses and misuses of a discourse on “Judaism” in Israel. Session 3 in a series of three.

The Folly of Secularism Dialogues on the theopolitics of the nation-state: Israel in a wider context. Session 3: Israel: a dialogue between Yehouda Shenhav (Tel Aviv) and Yaacov Yadgar (Oxford)

Israel Studies Seminar: Perspectives on Israel. During this academic year, the Israel Studies Seminar will explore what it means to widen the horizons of conventional discourse about Israel by focusing on various perspectives of Israel. The seminar’s objective is to situate Israel within broader contexts, including thematic, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, and geo-strategical. Our speakers this year are invited to offer views of Israel from the socio-political or historical vantage points of various traditions, groups, cultures and states, or from certain epistemological perspectives. We hope that by doing so we will be able to illuminate topics that may be otherwise neglected in the field of Israel studies, but are nevertheless crucial for understanding Israeli and Middle Eastern politics at large.

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Israel Studies Seminar

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