Regulating non‐government schools: Explaining success and failure

The challenge faced by governments in the regulation of powerful private actors has allegedly intensified in recent years. This study explores the means at the disposal of governments, and their effectiveness, with respect to the regulation of private actors that demonstrate considerable independence and political efficacy. It is argued that a modified ‘Contextual Interaction Theory’ (CIT), which focuses on the interaction between generic policy instruments (carrots, sticks, and sermons) and target group attributes (motivation, information, and power), and is augmented by a consideration of a separate institutional dimension, offers a useful analytical framework for understanding both the challenge faced by governments and the options for dealing with it. This framework is applied to a study of the introduction of ‘new accountability’ to Australian and Israeli non‐government schools. The use of the standard CIT lenses helps explain Australian success and Israeli government failure in the introduction of new accountability. Australian success is attributable to a judicious mix of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ instruments that favorably impacted target group information and motivation. In Israel, in contrast, policy instrument mixes failed to alter the main target group's oppositional stance. Institutional engineering, however, could provide a promising way for Israeli policymakers to enhance policy instrument effectiveness, by influencing target group power and motivation.     

Evangelical Protestantism and foreign policy in the United States after September 11

Much that has been written on evangelicals in the United States concerns their impact on domestic politics. But the election of George W. Bush has resulted in a new importance for the relationship between evangelicals and US foreign policy. This has become particularly clear following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Three issues deserve further study. One is evangelicals’ attitude to Islam. The second involves the relationship between evangelicals and Israel. The third concerns the stance of evangelicals towards war with Iraq. Through an examination of these three issues, Durham explores a number of important ­questions, ranging from the relationship of evangelicals’ theology and their politics to their partly supportive, partly critical attitude towards an administration itself led by an evangelical. Many evangelicals see the ‘war against terror’ as a war against Islam and unreservedly approve of Israeli policy, and many supported the launch of war in Iraq. Yet evangelicalism is not a monolith and, with regard to its disputes over how to respond to the ‘threat’ of Islam or what view to take of the Israel–Palestine conflict, Durham offers new insights into a powerful voting bloc and source of pressure within US politics.     

Consumerism as a Civilizing Process: Israel and Judaism in the Second Age of Modernity

Modern post-emancipatory Jews have long been associated with cosmopolitanism, mostly as a bad thing. They've been anathematized as rootless cosmopolitans so often that cosmopolitan, used as a noun, is in some circles an anti-Semitic code word. During the heroic moments of Zionism, as with other liberation movements, this cosmopolitan strand of Judaism was de-emphasized in favor of conceptions that emphasized separateness and self-consciousness. There exists a side of Jewish identity that Zionism consciously suppressed, namely its urban, pleasure-loving, shopping-oriented cosmopolitanism. This exists also in social theory: Consumerism and modernism are joined at the hip because consumption is an indispensable part of the civilizing process. The process of consumption, of expressing our identity through tastes and possessions, changes the entire field of interaction. It makes possible new kinds of social identity. And it makes possible new forms of social integration, based on individuation and sympathy.     

Social Disadvantage and Students' Perceived Injustice in Socially Integrated Schools in Israel

In this study we explored objective and attributed explanations of perceived injustice (PI) with respect to instrumental and relational rewards among junior high school students. Despite the socially heterogeneous school and classroom setting, PI found was relatively modest and differentiated by domain. It was more effectively accounted for by cognitive ability than by socioeconomic status, while the effect of ethnic extraction was very small. PI was attributed much less to social background than to teacher and individual factors with regards to instrumental rewards, and to teacher and peer behavior concerning relational rewards. To explain these findings we have suggested the egalitarian climate of the school and its success in bringing students to comply with the meritocratic norm, the disadvantaged students' rational consideration of the positive contribution of the integrated school to their life chances, and the diminishing ethnic identification among the younger strata of the Israeli society.     

Policymaking for Vexatious Problems

Idealized policymaking may aspire to solve problems, but the nature of vexatious problems is to resist solution. In these cases, coping and its variants, like accommodation, avoidance, ambiguity, indirection, and improvisation may be more suitable than the pursuit of solution. Two illustrations concerned with the problematic city of Jerusalem demonstrate the possibilities and the pitfalls that may be associated with coping: (1) negotiations involving Israelis and Palestinians; and (2) tensions between religious and secular Jews.     

Beyond silence and voice: gender,sexuality and antimilitarism in Turkey and Israel

Turkey and Israel project two distinct military regimes which construct gender and sexuality in specific ways as part of their respective security agendas. Despite the differences, however, both entitle women and LGBTQs to certain exemptions from the military service, and in doing so silence their antimilitarist activism. Women and LGBTQs counter this process through their acts of conscientious objection, through which they claim a voice in matters of militarism, security and war. While doing so, however, they reproduce a dichotomous conceptualisation of silence and voice, which falls short of explaining their agency as well as its outcomes. Drawing on a comparative analysis, I argue that a more nuanced understanding of agency necessitates deconstructing the dichotomy between silence and voice, each of which may have multiple meanings, connotations and consequences. Whereas silent acts of grey objection do not always point to a lack of agency and resistance, or domination, and may indeed create change; voice and visibility that follow their declared acts of objection may entail costs and loss of agency, in that not only does it come at the expense of the masculinisation/militarisation of their acts but may also result in the immediate deterioration of their rights to refuse.     

Of Anti-Zionists and Antideutsche: The Post-War German Left and Its Relationship with Israel

The semicentennial anniversary in 2017 of the 1967 Middle East War is an occasion to reflect on the impact of a war that brought dramatic changes to the Middle East and beyond. One of the ramifications of the Israeli victory in 1967 was the growing criticism of the Jewish state among the European Left—a movement that held largely positive attitudes regarding Israel up until the so-called Six Day War. These shifting sentiments also affected the relations between the Jewish State and the emerging “New Left” of the young Federal Republic of Germany—a country that would become one of Israel’s most important allies. This article examines the relationship between the German Left and Israel over five decades. It proceeds chronologically by tracing the shifting view toward Israel occasioned by the 1967 war, before examining the evolution of that relationship to the current era. We conclude with a discussion of the drivers behind the complex and uneven relationship, and we argue that these sentiments are closely connected to perceptions of self-identity among members of the German Left.     

Trading Refugees for Land and Symbols: The Palestinian Negotiation Strategy in the Oslo Process

This article analyses the negotiation strategy of the PalestineLiberation Organization regarding the refugee issue in the failedIsraeli–Palestinian peace process from 1993 to 2001. Itis argued that the PLO was on the brink of conceding the ‘rightof return’ for the sake of territorial concessions fromIsrael. The author discusses the implications of this strategyfor the domestic legitimacy of the Palestinian leadership, asgiving up the right of return would violate a core tenet inPalestinian national mythology. The PLO negotiators tried tosolve that dilemma by, first, separating the principle of returnfrom its implementation—making it possible for the PLOto remain committed to the principle, while offering compromiseson physical return—and, second, by demanding symbolicgestures from Israel, including acknowledgment of Israel's historicresponsibility for the refugee problem. It is argued that Israel'srefusal to offer a minimum of face-saving gestures preventedthe PLO from formalizing its compromise proposal.     

Israel: ethnocracy or multicracy?

Much of the recent academic literature that assesses democracy in Israel labels it either as incomplete or flawed, yet such literature employs minimal systematic analysis of how the state is actually governed. Since the 1990s, there has been a tendency to describe the Israeli political regime as an ethnocracy. This article argues that the term ‘ethnocracy’, when applied to Israel, has certain weaknesses and instead proposes the concept of ‘multicracy’ (multiformocracy) as a more appropriate term by which to describe Israel's political organization. It will demonstrate that existing Israeli democratic institutions do not control the state's policymaking in full and that several politically important processes are controlled or at least influenced by various other politically active forces. Whilst these forces can influence, stimulate, inhibit, and otherwise change governmental decisions and actions, they can be labeled as kratiae. While the capacity of Israel's democracy to govern is weak, these other kratiae can intervene in policymaking and the state's regime acts as democracy-dominated multicracy.     

‘Exempted soldiers’ in the ‘New Sensitivity Military’: public opinion among Jewish Israelis concerning selective conscientious objection (military refusal) and the Military Recruitment Model

In recent decades (the ?post-heroic‘ condition) - threats of widespread selective conscientious objection have become a political tool to advance opposing political agendas in Israel. This article examines attitudes amongst the Israeli public concerning the legitimacy of demands that different groups of soldiers be exempted from military operations to which they are ideologically opposed (such as serving in the occupied territories or, conversely, participating in evacuation of settlements). The results point to a multi-cultural model embracing diversity management not as a neo-liberal ideal but rather as a strategy for co-option, containment and inclusion, with a view to preserving the “people's army” model.