Gad Barzilai

Cultured Technology: The Internet and Religious Fundamentalism

In this article we identify four principal dimensions of religious fundamentalism as they interact with the Internet: hierarchy, patriarchy, discipline, and seclusion. We also develop the concept of cultured technology, and analyze the ways communities reshape a technology and make it a part of their culture, while at the same time changing their customary ways of life and unwritten laws to adapt to it. Later, we give examples for our theoretical framework through an empirical examination of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel. Our empirical study is based on a data set of 686,192 users and 60,346 virtual communities. The results show the complexity of interactions between religious fundamentalism and the Internet, and invite further discussions of cultured technology as a means to understand how the Internet has been culturally constructed, modified, and adapted to the needs of fundamentalist communities and how they in turn have been affected by it.

Fantasies of Liberalism and Liberal Jurisprudence: State Law, Politics, and the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian Community

I. Between Bergman (1969) and Kaadan (2000) About thirty years after Bergman case, Israel constitutional structure and its legal culture are not responsive to minority needs, and more largely to social needs of deprived communities. The liberal language and judicial review over Knesset legislation that have been empowered by and followed Bergman have not reconciled this utterly problematic discrepancy between jurisprudence and social needs.

Beyond Relativism: Where Is Political Power in Legal Pluralism?

Both decentralization of state law and cultural relativism have been fundamentally embedded in legal pluralism. As a scholarly trend in law and society, it has insightfully challenged the underpinnings of analytical positivist jurisprudence. Nevertheless, a theoretical concept of political power has significantly been missing in research on the plurality of legal practices in various jurisdictions. This Article aims to critically offer a theoretical concept of political power that takes legal decentralization and cultural relativism seriously and yet points to how and where we should look into political power, assuming that legal pluralism itself may be a strategy of elites and nation-states amid globalization. First, the Article explores the contributions of legal pluralism, and its limits, in intellectually revolting against analytical positivist jurisprudence. Second, it explicates why a concept of political power has been missing, and why such a concept is required for better comprehension of legal pluralism. Third, it calls for a look into three sites of political power in the praxis of legal pluralism: politics of identities, non-ruling communities, and neo-liberal globalization. Last, the Article constructs a concept of political-legal transformations that enables us to unveil political power in the context of de-centralized legal pluralities. Power is produced in, resides in and is generated in the dynamic interactions between nation-states, localities and global agents. Transformative relations along these dimensions allow the nation-state to forfeit some elements of power, both in economics and in law, but they also enable it to maintain some essential ingredients of political power that are often veiled in the rhetoric of globalized pluralism.

War, Democracy, and Internal Conflict: Israel in a Comparative Perspective

Many scholars of international relations still aim to conceptualize the phenomenon of war as a predominantly international event. This article shifts the analytical outlook. It looks at wars from the perspective of domestic politics, where war is perceived not only as a result of internal propensities but also as a cause of internal upheavals, dissent, or consent. How is internal political order in democracies influenced by wars? The relevant dilemma is how dissent and consent are formed in wartime. I examine how contrasting political dilemmas and attitudes regarding military force interact with characteristics of wars and military operations, state apparatuses, fear responses, threat concepts, cultural values (mainly those affecting political behavior), and political institutions (primarily ruling coalitions). My main concern is not how wars are conducted militarily, but rather how a society is mobilized, managed, and affected by adverse security conditions. I combine an analysis of the Arab-Palestinian-Israeli conflict with studies about conflicts and order to show

Social Protest and the Absence of Legalistic Discourse: In the Quest for New Language of Dissent

Legalistic discourse, lawyers and lawyering had minor representation during the 2011 summer protest events in Israel. In this paper we explore and analyze this phenomena by employing content analysis on various primary and secondary sources, among them structured personal interviews with leaders and major activists involved in the protest, flyers, video recordings made by demonstrators and songs written by them. Our findings show that participants cumulatively produced a pyramid-like structure of social power that is anchored in the enterprise of organizing the protest. Our findings explicate how the non-legalistic and even anti-legalistic discourse of the protest was formed, shaped and generated within the power relations of the protest, and how a pyramid of power produced a new poetics of protest that rejected the traditional poetics of state law. The power relations that generated the discourse regarding state law were embedded in socioeconomic stratification along the divide of center and periphery in Israel.

A Jewish democracy at war: Attitudes of secular Jewish political parties in Israel toward the question of war (1949–1988)

Abstract This articles main purpose is to illuminate, analyze, and explain, for the first time, the diversity of attitudes that prevailed in Israel between 1949 and 1988 toward the question of war. The Israeli case is particularly interesting because of the fact that the Arab‐Palestinian‐Israeli conflict continued throughout that entire period. The articles basic contention is that Israel is characterized by a fundamental rift, in the form of an ingrained pattern of controversy, over the question of war. Relying on primary historical sources, brought to light for the first time herein, I have discovered the existence of three sets of attitudes among the Jewish secular political parties in Israel. Each set of attitudes (namely, each political approach) reflects a certain basic outlook toward the implementation of military force. The study reveals the diversity of dilemmas and attitudes regarding the question of when, if at all, Israel should implement military force against Arab states and against the Pa...