Suchergebnisse

Zionism was inspired as a movement--one driven by the search for a homeland for the stateless and persecuted Jewish people. Yet it trampled the rights of the Arabs in Palestine. Today it has become so controversial that it defies understanding and trumps reasoned public debate. So argues prominent British writer Jacqueline Rose, who uses her political and psychoanalytic skills in this book to take an unprecedented look at Zionism--one of the most powerful ideologies of modern times. Rose enters the inner world of the movement and asks a new set of questions. How did Zionism take shape as an identity? And why does it seem so immutable? Analyzing the messianic fervor of Zionism, she argues that it colors Israel's most profound self-image to this day. Rose also explores the message of dissidents, who, while believing themselves the true Zionists, warned at the outset against the dangers of statehood for the Jewish people. She suggests that these dissidents were prescient in their recognition of the legitimate claims of the Palestinian Arabs. In fact, she writes, their thinking holds the knowledge the Jewish state needs today in order to transform itself. In perhaps the most provocative part of her analysis, Rose proposes that the link between the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state, so often used to justify Israel's policies, needs to be rethought in terms of the shame felt by the first leaders of the nation toward their own European history. For anyone concerned with the conflict in Israel-Palestine, this timely book offers a unique understanding of Zionism as an unavoidable psychic and historical force.

In order to understand the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan, it is important to go beyond culturalist and orientalist explanations. As an alternative, this article foregrounds four factors that have been instrumental in projecting fundamentalism to a near-hegemonic position in the country. First, the fact that Pakistan has been imagined as a community of Muslims offers the fundamentalist an edge over secular rivals. This confessional intrinsicality is compounded by an official appeasement and patronage of the fundamentalists. Second, elaborate charity networks offering an 'alternative society' that caters to basic needs such as health, education and jobs have helped Islamic fundamentalism expand its outreach during a neoliberal period when the state shunned its welfare role. Third, the radical decline of the Pakistani left spawned a political vacuum that allowed the fundamentalists to become a mainstream platform for the public to vent their anger. Finally, imperialism, in particular the United States, contributed to the growth of fundamentalism in Pakistan in the context of the Cold War. This process apexed during the Afghan Jihad of the 1980s, and it laid the grounds for 9/11 and beyond.