In “International Recognition of Palestine and the Risk of a West Bank ‘Frontier’” (published in the Europe-based online journal, "E-International Relations" in October 2025), sociologist and political scientist James Ron warns that recent diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state—by more than 150 countries, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Portugal, and the United Kingdom—could, under specific scenarios, unintentionally heighten the danger of large-scale violence in the West Bank. -/- Drawing on his comparative research on state violence in Serbia and (...) class='Hi'>Israel (Frontiers and Ghettos, University of California Press, 2003), Ron argues that when states lose uncontested control over adjacent territories without the protection of robust international peacekeeping forces, they may transform those newly independent regions into lawless frontiers characterized by ethnic cleansing and unrestrained force. -/- The essay cautions that if the West Bank were legally detached from Israel without durable international security guarantees, it could mirror Gaza’s tragic trajectory—an area externalized from Israel’s legal and moral responsibility and subjected to frontier-style warfare. -/- Using cases from Bosnia, the Sandžak, Lebanon, and Gaza, Ron demonstrates how sovereignty, geography, and legal jurisdiction shape the intensity of violence. -/- This analysis speaks to scholars and policymakers concerned with international law, state sovereignty, human-rights protection, and conflict prevention. It underscores a central lesson from comparative political violence: recognition without protection can turn liberation into catastrophe. (shrink)

Since the start of the occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel's domination of the Palestinians has deprived an entire population of any political status or protection. But even decades on, most people speak of this rule—both in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debates—as temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. In _The One-State Condition_, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir directly challenge this belief. Looking closely at the history and contemporary (...) formation of the ruling apparatus—the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories—Azoulay and Ophir outline the one-state condition of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status. Israeli citizenship is shaped through the active denial of Palestinian citizenship and civil rights. Though many Israelis, on both political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, few ultimately admit that Israel is no democracy or question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself. Too frequently ignored are the lasting effects of the deceptive denial of the events of 1948 and 1967, and the ways in which the resulting occupation has reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Azoulay and Ophir show that acknowledgment of the one-state _condition_ is not only a prerequisite for considering a one- or two-state _solution_; it is a prerequisite for advancing new ideas to move beyond the trap of this false dilemma. (shrink)

In the rabbinic literature from the land of Israel the poor are depicted not as passive recipients of gifts and support, but as independent agents who are responsible for their own behaviour. Communal care for the needy was expected to go beyond their basic needs for food, clothing and shelter; the physical safety of the poor and the value of their time as well as their dignity and self-worth were also included in the scope of charity. In this monograph, (...) Yael Wilfand offers a comprehensive and contextual analysis of major rabbinic texts on poverty and charity composed during the first five centuries of the Common Era in the land of Israel, principally the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Palestinian Talmud and midrashim. She shows that, for the rabbis, the poor were not necessarily considered outsiders; indeed, some students and rabbis in Palestine may have personally experienced poverty. Wilfand claims that such socio-economic diversity contributed to the thinking of these rabbis, who rarely saw poverty as a result of transgression (in contrast to the Babylonian Talmud). This book presents a number of contrasting viewpoints held by Palestinian rabbis over such questions as: Must communal administrators ensure applicants' eligibility for alms? Should the newly indigent from wealthy families receive exceptional levels of support? Might neighbouring gentiles qualify for economic assistance from Jewish communal sources? By examining Palestinian rabbinic sources within the contexts both of the hegemonic Greco-Roman (later, Christian) milieu and of the biblical heritage, this volume offers an absorbing account of some ancient approaches to timeless social challenges. (shrink)

This paper is based on review of the publications of the Islamic Movement and interviews with its leadership and activists. It argues that the Movement’s resistance to the 1948, 1967 and diasporic dismemberment of Palestine has constituted a critical challenge to Israeli policies, and contributed to reframing the internal Israeli political discourse. That is what led to its being banned by the state. The Islamic Movement was established in the 1970s. It remains, despite its split in 1996 into Northern (...) and Southern branches, a key player in Palestinian minority affairs at the political level, and at the social level through service provision to the marginalized Arab communities, especially in East Jerusalem. In 2015, the Israeli cabinet declared the Northern branch illegal and withdrew its status as a recognized organization. The findings of this paper show that this measure is directly linked to the Movement’s effectiveness in resisting the dispossession of the Palestinians, in advocating their right of return and other human rights, in providing leadership in the struggle over East Jerusalem, and in the organization and delivery of humanitarian services. (shrink)

This paper examines Israel's destruction and ‘humanitarianisation’ of Palestinian health systems, arguing that this should be understood as an instance of ‘necropolitics,’ as conceived by Achille Mbembe. We review the extensive, long‐term destruction of health systems in Palestine before 7 October 2023 and the catastrophic acceleration of that destruction in Gaza in the years since. We show that this process is central to Israel's project of limiting Palestinian life to what Mbembe calls a ‘death world’, a space (...) where power is exercised through the systematic exposure of a population to death, and that it serves the security and economic agendas of Israel and its allies. By reducing Palestinians to death‐like living conditions through the destruction and subsequent humanitarianisation of health infrastructure, Israel optimises its control over the remaining population of Gaza. We argue that necropolitics, and biopolitics more generally, are vital yet underused tools in bioethics, without which situations of extreme oppression cannot be adequately theorised. (shrink)

For over last 70 years, the concept of "return" attained primary focus for the national narrative of Palestinian struggle against devastating conditions, categorized as eviction from ancestral homeland, diffusion in all aspects and reconstitution of national unity. However, the very idea create fears among Israelis regarding their authority of whole Zionist enterprise, as well as demographic stability of Arab-Jewish ventures, with regards to the return of large number of Palestinians to their own places or any other part in (...) class='Hi'>Palestine. Discrimination in opposition to Palestinians is no longer perpetrated fully by Israeli state, but common to its society, as well. Our article is an answer to the complicated question: Can refugees along with other displaced victims ever claim their right in entering Israel and Palestine, since this State includes Gaza and West Bank territories? Various articles have made an attempt to clarify the matter through some internal laws and have also interpreted the rights mentioned in ‘International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights’, particularly while clarifying the idea evolved from the typical term: 'his own country’. The article focuses on the viable first point, specifically on the claim as a right of the Diasporas return to the formerly called ‘Palestine’. Various resources are utilised for the purpose of the research. This includes books, scholarly researched articles and newspapers etc. The study is analytical in nature and based on qualitative research method. Most of the literature used for the article is Secondary. The conclusion drawn in precise manner is that the intentions are blended in repeated violations of human rights, along with ethnic and religious refining and various innumerable deficiencies, and try to become regularly involved in sensitive issues. This turned out to be disheartening for the people living there as no efforts are made for a truthful resolution. (shrink)

One of the most significant factors that harms a society in the long term is the gradual distancing from its shared values ​​and potential to bring differences together. In this study, we will discuss the transformation of Hebrew from a sacred scriptural language into a language used in daily life, which was thought of years before the establishment of Israel in 1948. The journey began with Prophet Joseph and his eleven brothers arriving in Egypt, who, after Joseph's death, gradually (...) became a minority and the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. Their journey, initiated by Prophet Moses’s saviorship, was thwarted because they refused to enter the land of Canaan by fighting, and from that day on, nomadism and statelessness became their main problems. Consequently, before 1948, Jews were seen trying many ways to survive in different countries around the world. For a while, Jews lived in their own neighborhoods but chose to assimilate in the lands they lived in under various guidance, under the influence of the enlightenment period known as Haskalah. This allowed them to occupy many previously forbidden professions, including ministries. However, the Dreyfus Affair that occurred in France and the pogroms that started under the Russian Tsardom disrupted the assimilation process, leading to the maturation of Zionist thought. Meanwhile, in a world where Jews used the language of the countries they lived in with different regulations, a young man named Ben-Yehuda alone began the process of making Hebrew a spoken language and the banker Rothschild family supported this young man financially until the end. Despite all obstacles and difficulties, Hebrew was declared the official language in Palestine in 1922 and was made compulsory in kindergartens. The purpose of this study is to give a concrete example of the dilemma of what can I do alone, of humanity, who was turned into witnesses to the genocide that took place, especially after October 7, and also the importance of investing in people and the belief that the right goal will eventually be achieved one day. Thus, Zionism, summarized as Jewish nationalism, used religious motives over the promised land as a value that could keep all Jews together, while solving the critical aspect of a common language which was its most important pillar, in the early 1900s, and only the land part remained. (shrink)

This chapter traces two distinct, yet concurrent storylines among American Jewish communal organizations in the years 2001–2018, with one storyline focusing on conservative voices and the other on progressive voices. Together, the two narratives show how the more liberal and moderate voices that had dominated in the mid-twentieth century came to be sidelined in favor of conservatives. The first storyline is the conservative one, a story of how centrist and right-leaning Jewish organizations shifted further to the right, aligning with conservative (...) evangelical organizations that were increasingly dominant in these decades. They found common ground over their shared security concern during the early years of the War on Terror and over their shared belief that the proliferation of Christian Zionism served as a positive development for Israel. The second, concurrent storyline occurred among left-leaning and progressive Jewish organizations and leaders. These progressive groups continued to value religious pluralism and other liberal values, even as the right consolidated power, and they increasingly supported the concept of a two-state solution for Israel–Palestine. As progressive Jews found themselves marginalized, they had to find creative ways to pursue their interfaith and sociopolitical agendas. This chapter covers these two storylines, conservative and progressive, across nearly two decades, culminating in a single illustrative event under the first Trump administration, the 2018 relocation of the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The embassy’s opening ceremony, and its larger context, reveal who had what kind of power in the Trump era. They suggest the difficult choices and compromises that moderates needed to make to navigate the era’s shifting alliances. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of “global fertility chains.” The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a (...) nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, their reliance on women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the constitutive role of national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to postulate which are the conditions for a future peace—if it is at all possible—between Israel and Palestine, in the light of the events of 7 October 2023, the unprecedented attack on civilians of Israel, mostly women, elderly people and children, by members of the terrorist group Hamas, and the counterattack by Israeli forces, which, unfortunately, killed many civilians too. Taking as a starting point mainly the theoretical grounds of Kant and Rawls, (...) I intend to discuss the conditions for a future peace between the people of Israel and Palestine, and for the establishment of the UN’s proposal for two states—the State of Israel and the State of Palestine. I wish to consider whether the present events prejudice or even exclude that solution, in the short, medium and long term. (shrink)

Social researchers have extensively addressed the immigration of one million Russian speakers to Israel/palestine over the past twenty-five years. However, the immigrants’ incorporation into the Israeli occupation regime and the ongoing colonisation of Palestine have rarely been questioned as such. In the interviews informing this article, Russian-speaking immigrant women living in Arab-Palestinian communities discuss their complex relations with Palestinian, Jewish-Israeli and Russian-Israeli communities. Sharing a background with Russian-speaking Jewish Israelis on the one hand, and marital kinship (...) ties to Palestinians on the other, these women encounter multiple boundaries of territory and identity in their everyday lives. Drawing on feminist border thinking, I explore these encounters as a navigation through geopolitical and epistemic borderlands in a dense colonial reality. I am particularly interested in the potential of such an exploration to question essentialism and destabilise binary ethno-national categories of identity, such as Arab/jew and Israeli/palestinian, that dominate not only hegemonic but also emancipatory discourses. These binary divisions are not a straightforward outcome of political regimes but rather the result of ongoing border-making processes, which are vulnerable to disorder and disruption. This perspective aims to enrich understandings of the roles that gendered ethno-national identities play in sustaining the colonial relations of power in Israel/palestine. (shrink)

The conflict in Gaza and Israel that ignited on October 7, 2023 signals a catastrophic breakdown in the possibility of ethical dialogue in the region. The actions on both sides have revealed a dissolution of ethical restraints, with unimaginably cruel attacks on civilians, murder of children, destruction of health facilities, and denial of basic needs such as water, food, and shelter. There is a need both to understand the nature of the ethical singularity represented by this conflict and what, (...) if any, options are available to allow the reconstruction of communication between the warring parties. This article seeks to address these tasks by analysing the conflict as inherently an ethical one, in the sense that it exposes a rupture in the fabric of communicative relationships that has evolved systematically out of the deep cultural structures from which all protagonists have emerged. Drawing on the work of Levinas, Habermas, Arendt, and others, and referring to the specific circumstances in the region, it examines the ethical sources of the crisis and tries to identify conditions for its resolution. The possibility of reconciliation—that is, of refiguring relationships to open up a space for dialogue to create pathways to heal the ruptures—is examined. The dark legacy of the Holocaust is identified as an abiding cultural vulnerability for both societies. It is concluded, however, that the rich history of partnerships and collaborations between Jews and Palestinians provides a robust infrastructure on the basis of which a sustainable peace might be built, providing a much-needed source of hope. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a powerful resurgence of settler colonialism as an interpretive framework through which to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Attached to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies, this so-called ‘turn’ to settler colonialism has seen Israel-Palestine increasingly compared alongside New World white settler societies like Australia, Canada and the United States. In seeking to undercut the lens of exceptionalism through which the conflict has conventionally been viewed, the settler colonial paradigm has some important (...) counter-hegemonic implications for reframing Israel-Palestine, not least of which is its prescription for decolonization. However, it is paradoxically in the context of decolonization that the limits of the settler colonial paradigm become most apparent. I argue that these limitations are connected to the dominance of Patrick Wolfe’s structural account of settler colonialism, which leaves very little room for transformation, and to the particular connotations settler colonial studies has acquired from the New World contexts in which it is most often articulated. This is particularly the case in Israel-Palestine, where these connotations preclude engagement with the national aspects of the conflict and leave under-examined the unique resonances of the settler/native distinction, which need reckoning with in any serious account of decolonization. (shrink)

In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the complete demolition of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. The Radical Enlightenment played a part in this revolutionary process, which effectively overthrew all justification for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions (...) of the eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have received limited scholarly attention. The greatest obstacle to the movement finding its proper place in modern historical writing is its international scope: the Racial Enlightenment was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this wide-ranging volume, Jonathan Israel offers a novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents. Particular emphasis is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism. (shrink)

The concept of potential plays a prominent role in the thinking of parents, educators and planners the world over. Although this concept accurately reflects central features of human nature, its current use perpetuates traditional myths of fixity, harmony and value, calculated to cause untold mischief in social and educational practice. First published in 1985, Israel Scheffler's book aims to demythologise the concept of potential. He shows its roots in genuine aspects of human nature, but at the same time (...) frees it from outworn philosophical myths by means of analytical reconstruction - thereby improving both its theoretical and its practical applicability. The book concludes with an interpretation of policy-making in education, and reflections on the ideal education of a policy-maker. It emphasises human symbolism, choice, temporal continuity, and self-determination as indispensible elements of any adequate philosophy of education. _Of Human Potential _will be of interest to a broad range of philosophers, educators and social scientists. (shrink)

Ongoing political, military and social violence gives the impression that liberal ideas of freedom, democracy and multicultural society do not serve as a barrier to the shedding of blood. This paper shows that recognizing the way powerful interests color our conceptions of truth and value and need not automatically result in a purge of all existing social-political categories. Consequently, the paper addresses many of the ambiguities that a critique of ideology and values tends to evoke, paying special attention to the (...) prevailing explanations of world power, violence and world peace in our contemporary reality, especially in the fields of sociology and ideology. The significance of several factors in the American Weltanschauung that have a major impact on life today have been examined. (shrink)

Since the founding of the state of Israel there has been a series of prolonged conflicts between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries, and especially Palestine. The entire global community was shocked by the issue of the bombardment of women and children in Gaza and Rafah. Amid the chaos of the Western subjectivity lobby and the silence of several influential muslim leaders and the UN, the Islamic and non-Islamic world needs to understand the future roots of (...) class='Hi'>Israel’s mysterious agenda through ta’wīl and predictive analysis of Islamic Eschatology initiated by Imran Nazar Hosein. This article examines Israel’s agenda by studying the chronological eschatological concept of “Three Paxes” especially “Pax Judaica” using analytical-descriptive methods. In this qualitative research, researchers used library research by collecting data from several references such as main reference books, journals, videos, and others. According to the findings in this article, in Islamic Eschatology; the agenda is three stages starting in Great Britain (Pax Britannica) then in the US (Pax Americana), and moving on to Israel (Pax Judaica) before finally, the Antichrist appears to take over the throne of King Solomon in Jerusalem. Finally, the conclusion of Israel’s agenda from Imran Hosein’s allegorical interpretation is none other than to prepare a false Jesus (al-Dajjāl) after his systems (control of usury and the monetary system, politics, the emergence of Gog and Magog and biggest war) begin to be fulfilled. (shrink)

Kaplan says that monsters violate Principle 2 of his theory. Principle 2 is that indexicals, pure and demonstrative alike, are directly referential. In providing this explanation of there being no monsters, Kaplan feels his theory has an advantage over double-indexing theories like Kamp’s or Segerberg’s (or Stalnaker’s), which either embrace monsters or avoid them only by ad hoc stipulation, in the sharp conceptual distinction it draws between circumstances of evaluation and contexts of utterance. We shall argue that Kaplan’s prohibition (...) is also essentially stipulative, and that it is too general. The main difference between ourselves and Kaplan is that the basic carriers of a truth-value is a sentence-in-a-context; our account is utterance-based. (shrink)

Anyone familiar with Nelson Goodman’s philosophical career knows that to have quarreled with him was a hazardous enterprise. For aside from his creative brilliance and analytical subtlety, he was also one of the foremost dialecticians of the age. Seeing through the flaws of rival views and rebutting putative counterarguments to his own came as easily to him as breathing. To recall his rejoinders to a long list of would-be rebuttals of his paper, “On Likeness of Meaning”, or the acute series (...) of counterexamples to received views of scientific law in his pioneering paper, “The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals”, or his replies to criticisms of his nominalism in “A World of Individuals”, or again, his replies to confident attacks on his theory of projection is to find ample evidence of an intimidating intellectual presence. To take issue with him was in fact to take one’s philosophical life in one’s hands and many are those over the course of his career who rued the venture. (shrink)

Halakha consists of a variety of laws that determine the halakhic status of various actions. Halakhic laws, by their very nature, have a general aspect in that they apply to all similar actions under similar conditions. In this paper, I examine, from a philosophical-analytical point of view, the relationship between the general aspect of the halakhic laws and the fact that these laws apply to particular actions. After the introduction, this paper is divided into three parts. First, I distinguish between (...) two competing theses regarding the "metaphysical order" between the general aspect of halakhic law and its individual cases. The first one, I call 'Halakhic Generalism', according to which the general aspect of Halakhic law has essential precedence. The second one I refer to as 'Halakhic Particularism', according to which the general aspect of the halakhic law is nothing more than a generalization of all its individual cases. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the particularist position has the power to justify a unique and puzzling halakhic principle. According to this principle, in cases of normative over-determination where the same action is forbidden due to two different halakhic laws, then "a prohibition does not apply to a prohibition". Finally, I compare the reasoning I offer for this principle to alternative justifications of said principle. I argue that, compared to the alternatives, the particularist position provides the best explanation for the principle. (shrink)

The image of the Moor in Spanish literature reveals a paradox at the heart of Christian and Castilian hegemony in the period between the conquest of Nasrid Granada in 1492 and the expulsion of the Moriscos by Philip III in 1609.­­ Depictions fall between two extremes. On the “vilifying” side, Moors are hateful dogs, miserly, treacherous, lazy and overreaching. On the “idealizing” side, the men are noble, loyal, heroic, courtly—they even mirror the virtues that Christian knights aspire to—while the women (...) are endowed with singular beauty and discretion.Anti-Muslim diatribes are fairly common and predictable: they are flat and repetitive in their assertion of Old Christian superiority over every aspect of the lives of Muslims or crypto-Muslims. Any sign of cultural otherness is ridiculed; the conquering caste, insecure about its own lofty standards of limpieza de sangre, laughs away whatever trace of old Hispano-Arab splendor might remain in the Morisco. Or, conversely, the uneasy master recasts wretched Moriscos as ominous brethren of the Ottoman Turk.The truly vexed problem, however, consists in determining the meaning of idealized Moors in historiography, ballads, drama, and the novel. Roughly speaking, modern criticism divides into two camps in attempting to explain this curious phenomenon of literary infatuation with a cultural and religious minority subjected to growing popular hostility, Inquisitional hounding, and economic exploitation. I will call one camp “aestheticist” and the other “social.” Israel Burshatin, assistant professor of Spanish at Haverford College, is currently preparing a critical edition of Pedro del Corral’s Crónica sarracina. (shrink)

This article examines the process for the eviction of tenants (PET), which offers landlords a swift path for obtaining an eviction order against their tenants, as a case study exposing the politics of procedure. It shows that the PET is but one stage in a longstanding battle waged between two interest groups—landlords and tenants—involving both substantive law and procedural law. But while the story of their conflict over substantive law, fought in the parliament through the regular legislative process, is (...) well-known, the story of the procedural amendments, despite their immense impact, remains shrouded in mystery and is told here for the first time. The reason for that, we argue, is that despite the vast impact of procedure on substantive right, many in the Israeli legal system mistakenly view civil procedure rules as highly technical and neutral directives for the day-to-day operation of the litigation process. The conclusion from such a view is that rulemaking should be left to expert legal technicians and court administrators and that transparency mechanisms or public participation are to be avoided as unnecessary due to the costs and burdens they impose on the rulemaking process. The article concludes with a call for overhauling the rulemaking process in Israel. We argue that the secretive and opaque process is anathema to democracy. Bearing in mind that procedural rules are inevitably imbued with substantive values and have an enormous effect on the substantive rights of the citizenry, the rulemaking process should be radically altered to enable all interested parties to take part in the process, making it far more transparent and subject to public scrutiny in all its stages. (shrink)

Nie Bao 聶豹 (1487–1563) was a Neo-Confucian philosopher and scholar-official of sixteenthcentury Ming China. In his Ming ru xue an 明儒學案 (Case studies of Ming Confucians), Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 placed him in the Jiangxi (Jiangyou 江右) group of Wang Yangming followers. Nie Bao met the influential founder of the Ming School of Mind in 1526 and was inspired by his teaching of the innate knowing (liangzhi 良知). However, he differed from other followers in his quietist approach to realizing and extending (...) this knowledge. While developing his ideas over the course of two decades, as a holder of the highest civil service examination degree, Nie Bao also held a series of impactful official positions, and earned a reputation for effectiveness and integrity. However, he was also the unwitting victim of factionalism at the Ming court, which led to his imprisonment in 1548. The goal of this article is to provide a sketch of Nie Bao’s political trajectory and intellectual development from his early years until his imprisonment, as well as translation of significant passages pertaining to that trajectory and development. By the time of his imprisonment, Nie Bao had articulated the essential elements of his philosophy of returning to the root (by which he meant silence), and attaining centeredness and, with that, his unique interpretation of his teacher’s central tenet. (shrink)

Arguably the most decisive shift in the history of ideas in modern times was the complete demolition during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - in the wake of the Scientific Revolution - of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, culminating in Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. In this revolutionary process which effectively overthrew all justicfication for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of (...) education, and slavery, substituting the modern principles of equality, democracy, and universality, the Radical Enlightenment played a crucially important part. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have been astonishingly little studied doubtless largely because of its very wide international sweep and the obvious difficulty of fitting in into the restrictive conventions of 'national history' which until recently tended to dominate all historiography. The greatest obstacle to the Radical Enlightenment finding its proper place in modern historical writing is simply that it was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents, particular stress is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism. (shrink)

This article seeks to outline the main elements in the historiographical controversy over the significance of 'Spinozism' as an eighteenth-century Enlightenment category and the validity or otherwise of the concept of 'Radical Enlightenment' as well as the relationship between these two categories. Defining 'Radical Enlightenment' as the philosophical rejection of religious authority combined with a democratic tending system of social and political thought, and as a partly clandestine tradition that evolved in opposition to the moderate mainstream Enlightenment, it seeks (...) to sketch in the main features both of the 'negative critique' broadly opposing this way of understanding the Western Enlightenment and the 'positive critique' that accepts this classification in broad outline. (shrink)

The rise of Kabbalah led to a theological revolution in Judaism regarding the issue of God’s subordination to logic. At the end of the sixteenth century, Judaism was first heard claiming that God’s omnipotence requires its superiority over logic also. Over time this perception gained more and more supporters, and in the last two hundred years it was formed as the new Jewish consensus, with the previous consensus now denounced as heresy. A particularly extreme version of the concept (...) of total divine omnipotence is found in the theology of the late Chabad. According to them, God’s omnipotence requires that He be able to “dress Himself” into a body or to create another God like Him, similar to what is claimed in the Christian dogmas. My article will describe the revolution that has taken place in Jewish theology regarding the problem of the ‘impossibilities’, and subject to the limitations of the framework, will try to trace its causes. (shrink)

There has been much discussion about the tactics used by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and government in the conflict in Gaza following October 7, 2023, which have caused, among other things, systematic destruction of hospitals and schools, the deaths of large numbers of civilians, including women and children, mass starvation, and denial of humanitarian aid. The Israeli government and IDF have sought to justify their actions using ethical arguments, many of which relate to their proclaimed role as the representatives (...) of the Jewish state and of Jewish culture and history. Arguing from the extensive corpus of Jewish ethical thought, extending back thousands of years, this article poses a simple question: Are the above actions by the Israeli government and IDF in Gaza consistent with the ethical tradition of Judaism and the obligations that flow from it? To answer this question, key texts are analysed, especially the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, and multiple arguments are examined, taking into account the complexities of context and diverse interpretive theories. The paper is presented in two parts, the first discussing the question and methodological issues and the second providing the data and conclusions. We conclude that the alleged acts of the Israeli government and IDF in Gaza are clearly and directly contrary to the Judaic tradition of ethics as it has developed over the millennia. The conduct of the war cannot truthfully be presented in any meaningful sense as representing, or indeed, consistent with, Jewish culture or ethics. These findings have potentially far-reaching consequences, including for the claimed status of Israel as a Jewish state, the relationship between criticism of the government of Israel and the scourge of antisemitism, and the identity of Jewish people both within and outside Israel. (shrink)

In this paper I propose to examine a mythical character that has a tremendous influence on the debate over the new Israeli-Jewish identity. The paper argues that the Wandering/Eternal Jew, aside from its intrinsic importance for Jewish History, functions as a mechanism through which the opposition with the Sabra is maintained in Israeli society. Present time history textbooks try to capture only those aspects of Israeli history relevant for modern contemporary society and culture, for the great majority of scholars (...) the myth of the Eternal Jew being a grotesque falsification. Despite this though, the character of the Eternal relates to different aspects of the identity- problems raised by the opposition Jewish versus Israeli and can be absolutely relevant in this sense. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Leibniz’s _Theodicy_ functioned primarily as a response to Spinoza and Bayle, and in this Leibniz was prescient, recognizing in both Spinoza and Bayle a threat to a divinely-ordered world and with it a threat to a divinely-delivered morality. Indeed, the debate between Leibniz and Spinoza and Bayle can be productively mapped onto later Enlightenment controversies—Spinoza and Bayle are the primary sources of Enlightenment debate over morality (as opposed to Hume and Kant, as is often assumed).

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link; likewise, a moral tradition is only as just as its most violent adherents. Religions that generate or tolerate violent extremists face a distinctive internal dilemma: non-violent believers, better acquainted than outsiders with their tradition's capacity for zeal, often hesitate to oppose the extremists for fear of being seen as traitors to the faith. This study interprets that tension as a systemic weakness within religious communities. It argues that within modern history, (...) Christian Zionism has functioned as the vulnerable link of Christianism, and Jewish Zionism as the vulnerable link of Judaism - each an eschatological or political amplification of older theological motifs. The article traces the chain of influences from centuries of Christian anti-Judaism through nineteenth- and twentieth-century British evangelical eschatology (e.g., Shaftesbury, Hechler, Balfour), Jewish political Zionism (e.g., Rothschild, Herzl, Weizmann), and British imperial strategy (e.g., Sykes). The resulting synthesis, it contends, produced the ideological preconditions for today's conflicts in Israel-Palestine. Section 2, "Political Evangelicalism Entails Vast Immiseration," tells the story about broken covenants and parochial ultimata leading inexorably to the intractable conflict over the land of Palestine. Section 3, "Microlectics Microlect," is a self-referential specialized way of speaking and writing about specialized ways of speaking and writing, which are called "microlects." These are semi-formal capsules of thought about specific topics. Sections 3-9 present microlects referring to philosophy, biology, and theology, leading to section 10, the "Christian-Anti-Human Microlect." Section 11, the "Ism Microlect," describes a desirable but impossible "Ism Place.". (shrink)

The paper represents a consideration of the influence of G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectical method on Marx’s analysis of the debate over Jewish political rights in 19th Century Germany. As a follow on, I will consider how Marx’s analytical insights and perversions on “The Jewish Ques- tion” may provide us with guidance towards an enriched understanding of the currently confounded standoff be- tween the State of Israel and the Palestinian indepen- dence movement.

The "moral justification" is supposed to be that capturing soldiers in a cross border raid, and killing others, is an outrageous crime. We know, for certain, that Israel, the United States and other Western governments, as well as the mainstream of articulate Western opinion, do not believe a word of that. Sufficient evidence is their tolerance for many years of US backed Israeli crimes in Lebanon, including four invasions before this one, occupation in violation of Security Council orders for (...) 22 years, and regular killings and abductions. To mention just one question that every journal should be answering: When did Nasrallah assume a leadership role? Answer: When the Rabin government escalated its crimes in Lebanon, murdering Sheikh Abbas Mussawi and his wife and child with missiles fired from a US helicopter. Nasrallah was chosen as his successor. Only one of innumerable cases. There is, after all, a good reason why last February, 70% of Lebanese called for the capture of Israeli soldiers for prisoner exchange. (shrink)

This Article assesses one kind of argument for an intergenerational right of return in the context of the Israel/palestine conflict. The question is whether descendants of those who were made refugees in the 1948 War can acquire occupancy rights from their parents through inheritance and bequest over territory that they have never lived on. Standard arguments for their inheriting such rights fail for a range of reasons. However, a less familiar argument for inheritance or bequest succeeds—descendants can (...) acquire such rights because their parents have an interest in their being able to live the kind of life that, due to the violation of their rights, they were deprived of. (shrink)

This interview with media anthropologist, Rebecca L. Stein, conducted by Noa Levin and Andrew Fisher in Spring 2023, takes her recent book Screenshots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (2021) as its starting point in order to explore issues of state violence and the militarization of social media in Israel/Palestine. This book marks the culmination of a decade-long research project into the camera dreams introduced by digital imaging technologies and the fraught histories of their (...) disillusionment. Stein discusses the way her research has critically conceptualized the recent history of hopes invested in the digital image in this geopolitical context, by the occupier as much as the occupied, and charts the failures and mistakes, obstructions and appropriations that characterize the conflicted visual cultures of Israel/Palestine. (shrink)

This paper looks at the documentary Five Broken Cameras (Palestine, Israel, France, Netherlands, 2011) to discuss the temporal implications of a quotidian under occupation. More specifically, the investigation casts light over the peaceful resistance against the Israeli wall in the Palestinian village of Bil’in portrayed by the lenses of Emad Burnat, a Palestinian villager who becomes the village´s filmmaker after the acquisition of his first camera. Upon the analysis, I claim that in the context of the Palestinian (...) struggle, cinema is both an integral part of the resistance and an instrument to structure the experience of time in an area fragmented by the occupation. (shrink)