Suchergebnisse

Yevgeny Maximovich Primakov knew the Middle East so well as, perhaps, nobody else in Russia did: he worked in Cairo from 1965 till 1969 and visited the city regularly after that period of time. He was personally acquainted with all of the highest representatives of Egyptian political and military elite. He had visited Israel multiple times since August, 1971. Five PrimeMinisters of the Jewish state (Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu) were his interlocutors in different years. Whatever views and powers he had in different years of his extremely intensive and multifaceted activity, the Middle East lacks very much statesmen of such magnitude and with such depth of understanding of geopolitical and regional processes which distinguished Yevgeny Maximovich, to the memory of whom the current essay is devoted. The June War of 1967 year, which is called in Western and Israeli historiography the Six-Day War, has radically changed the Middle East. Dozens of books and hundreds of scientific articles on this war have been published. The current research demonstrates the central role of Egyptian leaders in the onset of the war which nobody sought for. These lead-ers were driven by considerations and interests of pan-Arab solidarity which significantly contradicted in this case the interests of Egypt itself. By analyzing the causes of the war of June 1967 between Egypt and Israel it is proved that they laid to a certain significant extent beyond the context of bilateral relations of these countries.The tragic experience of June 1967 is important nowadays when it is taken for granted that a new war between Israel and Egypt could not erupt because these countries have nothing to divide after the return of the Sinai Peninsula. Once upon a time, in March 1957, Israel has already withdrawn its forces from the Sinai. The same situation of lack of territorial claims did not prevent abrupt escalation of conflict in May 1967 and the following outbreak of hos-tilities. Another important lesson is that security of any country, including Israel, cannot be guaranteed neither by deployment of the "blue helmets" nor by receiving American guaran-tees. As events of the second half of May 1967 demonstrated, both UN forces and American authorities were ready to shirk when the task of war prevention was most acute.

Issues related to psychological and environmental conditions are crucial for the analysis of contemporary activist art's political impact. Russia is a patriarchal society, and the Orthodox Church is particularly powerful because of its close relations with the state. The paper provides detailed examples of the repression and censorship of feminism and political art. Due to the fact that there were — and still are — very few radical feminist political leaders, relatively young members of a punk rock protest art group Pussy Riot, established in 2011, and some of their supporters within the artistic field (such as Evgenia Maltceva, whose case is discussed in detail in this paper) have become the most thought-provoking (and undoubtedly, the most famous, especially in the West) feminist leaders in Russia. However, the socio-psychological environment is not supportive, mainly for historical and psychological reasons: my argument is that they are charismatic but disconnected leaders without followers, and therefore their impact on trends within Russian politics and society is quite limited.

This article focuses on the most extensive mutiny in the history of the IDF, which broke out in Atlite Military Prison No. 6 on 9 Aug 1997. The central role of the army in Israeli political culture accounts for the fact that a mutiny of such extent has never taken place in the IDF military units & prisons. Israel's political culture, which emphasizes the importance of the state & is characterized by weak liberalism, is not a good breeding ground for civil disobedience, even in circumstances where one would expect such behavior. In the case under discussion, the mutiny was led by soldiers belonging to peripheral ethnic groups of the IDF recruit population; specifically, it was organized by new immigrants from the former Soviet Union & a number of Druze soldiers. Some military police officials & Israeli politicians of Russian origin claimed that there was no connection between the ethnicity of the prisoners & the riot. I would like to argue, however, that it was the prisoners' unique socialization in the USSR in the Perestroika period, when the attitude toward state & the army swayed from skepticism to hostility, that made this riot possible. I argue that what gave rise to the rebellion was not maltreatment by jail officials (as the mutineers themselves argued), but rather a different civic culture as it had developed among Soviet youngsters who were socialized in the atmosphere of "liberal nihilism" of the early 1990s -- a time when the majority of them emigrated to Israel. Adapted from the source document.

Israel Army veterans of kibbutz background who had served in the occupied territories during the Intifada were retrospectively asked how this service affected them. Some common themes were disclosed. Service in the territories deepened understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but increased fear and hate of Arabs. These feelings did not lead to a national extremism, but rather to a rationalistic position demanding a peaceful, political solution. The majority of respondents became firmer in their original "leftist" position, and the justification for their position was utilitarian, considering the needs of the Israeli side; only a few based their position on support for the Palestinians' rights or suffering. To cope with the conflict between their military duty and their moral values, soldiers either sought shelter in military orders or compartmentalized their humanistic values and military duty. Few criticized the army. The major criticism, that soldiers had not been given enough tools to deal with the challenges of the Intifada, was directed at the state. Many regarded military service during the Intifada as a most difficult experience, but with only a temporal imprint.