Rebecca Kook

Mapping the nation: street names and Arab‐Palestinian identity: three case studies

The naming of streets is part of the ongoing process of mapping the boundaries of the nation. This article examines three sets of Arab-Palestinian street names – pre-1948 Haifa and Jerusalem and post-1948 Umm el Fahm – as locally constructed ‘texts of identity’ in the historical and political context of their official creation. The investigation aims at charting the ideological orientations represented and the political messages entailed in these three different textual manifestations of Arab-Palestinian national identity. The analysis focuses on notions of historical and cultural heritage as expressed in the choice of street names. Finally, it offers an interpretative evaluation of this process, placing it within broader ideological and historical contexts.

The Shifting Status of African Americans in the American Collective Identity.

ent symbolic indicators, African Americans were completely excluded from the American collective identity up until the 1960s. From the 1970s and onward, a gradual process of inclusion in terms of both written symbols (textbooks and general American history books) and commemorative symbols (postal stamps, monuments, holidays, and the like) can be observed. The 1980s and 1990s have seen a flourish of new studies on

Public Policy and Social Science Training in Israel: The Impact of Structural Change on the Constitution of Knowledge

Recent reforms instituted in the network of higher education in Israel have focused on two elements: adjusting the managerial structure of the universities to make it more amenable to market criteria of efficiency and reducing the proportional weight of state funding to the universities compared to that allotted to the technical and professional colleges. The main elements of this process—increasing power of managers in academic institutions, shifting universities toward entrepreneurialism, the idea of the “service university,” and the “massification” of the system of higher education—are characteristic of similar changes in higher education in the U.K., the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia.This article examines the impact of organizational and structural changes on the categories of knowledge produced, and by extension on the production of knowledge itself. By examining changes in the organization of higher education in Israel and in particular in the social sciences, the article suggests that institutional and academic diversification have influenced the categorization of legitimate knowledge pertaining to society, the economy, and the political arena—the traditional terrain of the social sciences—and hence what is considered “knowledge worth knowing” about these subjects. Finally, the article points to certain political interests that have motivated this change, and examines their larger impact upon Israeli society.

Representation, minorities and electoral reform: the case of the Palestinian minority in Israel

ABSTRACT The article examines the impact of the recent change in the electoral threshold in Israel, from 2 per cent to 3.25 per cent, on the political representation of the Palestinian minority in Israel in the 2015 national election. I argue that the change in the threshold had a direct impact on Palestinian electoral representation and that this change provided incentives to Palestinian leadership to broaden their appeal and become more inclusive in their agenda. Following recent scholarship on ethnic minorities and employing the concept of “representational claims”, I suggest that through the provision of electoral incentives, institutional design can influence not only the degree of representation, but its substantive claims as well.

Changing Representations of National Identity and Political Legitimacy: Independence Day Celebrations in Israel, 1952–1998

The construction of meaning and the invention of tradition always take place within a social and political context. Hence, the apolitical purpose of memory and the apolitical utility of national identity, in a broad sense, are linked to power; to the myriad and diverse efforts to maintain, stabilise and perpetuate that power. Focusing on official acts of commemoration, this article explores how political legitimacy—the primary basis for stabilising power—is reflected in and constructed by the constitution of national identity that is linked, in turn, to the definition of collective memory. To this end, the author examines the link between the official articulations of political legitimacy and the official constructions of the nation in Israel, and how these have changed over time. This is accomplished by providing a systematic reading of the texts constituted by the main Independence Day celebration in Israel—in particular, the ceremony known as the ‘Lighting of the Torches’—during the first fifty years of Israeli sovereignty (1952–1998).