Lenin on the Jewish Question: the Theoretical Setting

Western scholars studying Lenin's writings on the Jewish question tend to view them as reflecting no more than the tactical needs of the struggles he conducted against the Jewish Bund. This article examines these writings in the context not of Lenin's political quarrels with the Bund but of his theoretical conception of the relationship between modernization and ethnic conflict. Underlying Lenin's views on the Jewish question and the positions he took vis-à-vis the Bund was a carefully considered theory of nationality grounded in a clearly defined Marxist outlook on history. That theory of nationality, however, happened to be erroneous in that it stipulated the gradual elimination of ethnic conflict as a by-product of modernization. In reality, as theorists of ethnicity have shown in the last 15 years, modernization may have the exactly opposite effect. For the benefits of modernity, whether economic or political, accrue in unequal measures to members of different ethnic groups, thus intensifying ethnic solidarity and the friction between ethnic communities. Lenin's over-optimistic view of the effect of economic development on inter-ethnic relations caused him to judge the Jewish problem in Russia in an unrealistic way, and gave his comments on that problem the appearance of ad hoc tactical pronouncements.     

‘Heart-Beguiling Araby’ on the Frontier of Empire: Early Anglo-Arab Relations in Transjordan

In 1920 the British government of Palestine sent six officers to establish a British presence in Transjordan. Lacking military and financial support, they could not possibly control a country populated by more than 200,000 tribespeople, many of them members of powerful tribal confederacies. The key to explaining why the British chose this unorthodox way to takeover a new territory lies in the special attitude towards Arabia entertained by the British following World War One. British policy derived from an alleged cultural affinity between the British and the ‘Bedouin’, coupled with a colonial tradition of attributing British administrators with a ‘natural’ ability to rule over natives. These two myths gave the British an inflated belief in their ability to rule local society. Drawing on official reports, private papers and local accounts, this article shows that the British grossly misunderstood local conditions and could not deal with the tribal communities that frustrated their attempt to assert British influence.     

Interest Groups in the Israeli High Court of Justice: Measuring Success in Litigation and in Out-of-Court Settlements

The question of whether and to what extent interest groups are more successful than other parties in litigation is the subject of many debates among social scientists. Previous works in the field concentrated on checking outcomes of cases that were disposed of by courts in officially published final decisions. We sought to analyze not only final court decisions but also the outcomes of out-of-court settlements. Drawing from Marc Galanter's hypothesis that groups, especially those who are "repeat players," are likely to use out-of-court settlements more often and more efficiently than other litigants (Galanter 1974), we measured actual case outcomes of petitions brought before the Israeli High Court of Justice. We found that groups in general, and "repeat player" groups in particular, achieved a success rate significantly higher than other litigants. We also found that the relative advantage of groups in litigation is the result of their ability to reach out-of-court settlements with government agencies.     

Public Lawyers and Private Clients: An Empirical Observation on the Relative Success Rates of Cause Lawyers

Cause lawyering is often criticized for creating an untenable tension between the professional obligations of the lawyer to the individual client and the lawyer's ideological commitment to public causes. I sought to test empirically the validity of this argument by comparing the relative success rates of political lawyers and non‐political lawyers in defending their clients' interests in litigation concerning house‐demolition orders before the Israeli High Court of Justice. I found that the general success rates of political lawyers in the research population were significantly higher than those of non‐political lawyers. These findings can serve as an additional support for the various arguments in favor of cause lawyering.     

How Great Powers Rule: Coercion and Positive Inducements in International Order Enforcement

Despite a scholarly consensus that hegemony is exercised primarily through the use of coercion and positive inducements, scholars of international relations have devoted little attention to how dominant states choose between these influence tools to impose their desired international order on weak but recalcitrant states. This article presents an analytical framework to examine the determinants of such choices. In doing so, it develops three alternative theoretical models of international order enforcement from extant international relations literature and offers a preliminary assessment of their relative merits by way of a comparative study of two cases drawn from the nineteenth-century Pax Britannica. This plausibility probe shows that social conventions can play an important role in the choice of enforcement strategies and that neither realist nor domestic-politics explanations offer useful general models of the enforcement of international order.