Rubber bullets : power and conscience in modern Israel / by Yaron Ezrahi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ezrahi, Yaron.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National characteristics, Israeli.

Political culture--Israel.

Political culture.

Arab-Israeli conflict.

Public opinion.

Political violence.

Political ethics.

Israel.

Political ethics--Israel.

Political violence--Israel.

Arab-Israeli conflict--1993---Public opinion.

Public opinion--Israel.

Israel--Politics and government--1993-.

Politics and government.

Arab-Israeli conflict--Public opinion.

Physical Description:

307 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997.

Summary:

Among commentators on Israeli affairs, Yaron Ezrahi is distinguished by his analytical brilliance, his twin passions for Jewish tradition and the tradition of liberal democracy, and his ability to see behind current events to their causes, some of them three generations in the making, some three millennia. In Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel, he offers an uncommonly insightful analysis of the ways the history, politics, and national character of Israel come to bear on current affairs there. Ezrahi regards surprising and divisive recent events - such as the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu's defeat of Shimon Peres in the subsequent ministerial election - as signs of an ongoing, fundamental conflict in Israeli society. This conflict is between "collectivist" national aspirations, upon which the Israeli state was founded in 1948, and the ever more clamorous voices of individualism, called forth by Israel's tradition of liberal democracy. Ezrahi explores ways in which the conflict is felt in diverse aspects of Israeli life and culture, from the social dimensions of military service and the development of the modern Hebrew language to Israelis' attitudes toward nature and the status of women. As Ezrahi sees it, the use of rubber bullets - meant to wound but not to kill - against Palestinian agitators in 1987 epitomized the new Israeli ambivalence about military power, which reflects a more general one between the claims of national identity and those of the self.

Contents:

1. The Impoverished Language of the Israeli Self

2. The Limits of Private Space

3. Escape to Nature?

4. The Precariousness of Autobiographical Time

5. Self-narration as Self-defense

6. Father's Milk: Father's Tales That Feed and Kill

7. My Father, My Son

8. Historicizing the Fantasy of Jewish Power

9. Rubber Bullets

10. Women as Agents of the Anti-epic

11. From Here to Eternity and Back.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

National Jewish Book Awards - Israel, Winner, 1997

ISBN:

0374252793

9780374252793

OCLC:

34590946