from virtually nil to almost half of Likud’s members of the Knesset (MKs) active in promoting Jewish visits there. Thus, in 2012 MK Yuli Edelstein, later to become Speaker of the Knesset, stated, “My job is to deal with the daily process, connecting and
Yoram Peri and Paul L. Scham
combined to reduce the reaction to almost nothing. This is despite the fact that the individual in question is head of an extremist party that was banned from running for Knesset in 1988, when its leader was Rabbi Kahane. Since then, Kahanist leaders have
Materiality as an Agency of Knowledge
Competing Forms of Knowledge in Rachel's Tomb in Tiberias
Nimrod Luz
outrageous misleading of the public. ( Antebi 1995 ) As the letter was also addressed to Abd al-Wahab Darwasha, a Muslim member of the Knesset, Darwasha instigated an official query asking the Minister of Religious Affairs to investigate the matter and
Menachem Klein
government has passed three laws to limit alternative agents’ activities. In 2011, the Knesset approved the Nakba Law, which “authorizes the Finance Minister to reduce state funding or support to an institution if it holds an activity that rejects the
Guest Editors’ Introduction
Resisting Liberalism in Israel—the Case of Marginalized Mizrahim
Nissim Mizrachi and Menachem Mautner
electorate. Meretz, the Jewish leftist-liberal party, obtained votes barely sufficient to allow it to remain in the Knesset. The votes won by the Labor Party failed to lift it out of its middling size or to spread it beyond the middle class. These results
Menachem Begin’s World Travels in the 1950s
A Road to Political Legitimacy
Ofira Gruweis-Kovalsky
December 1948 was election season in the nascent State of Israel—the height of the campaign for the country’s first Constituent Assembly, soon to be renamed the Knesset. Elections were set for 25 January 1949. At this historic moment, Menachem Begin
Jeremy Schonfield, Alinda Damsma, and Marc Saperstein
to the monumental gift of British parliamentarians to the Knesset made by the sculptor Benno Elkan (whose name is consistently misspelled here ‘Beno Elkin’, a rare error in this well-edited book). A possible quibble is Fine’s failure to explore the
Liberalism in Israel
Between the ‘Good Person’ and the ‘Bad Citizen’
Menachem Mautner
the Western middle class,” who “were opposed and even publicly protested, claiming that their skills (intellectual, of course) were not coming to expression in these units.” The Election Campaign for the Second Knesset and Its Outcomes In November 1950
Dan Rabinowitz, Russell Stone, Guy Ben-Porat, Paul Scham, Wilhelm Kempf, Lior Libman, and Asaf Sharabi
older men. Rozin extensively documents both the public controversy that appeared in the press and in appeals to the Knesset for appropriate correction to this social practice, and the campaign to amend the inadequate laws inherited from the British
Naomi Chazan, Morad Elsana, Ian S. Lustick, Sam Lehman-Wilzig, Gideon Rahat, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Daphne Inbar, and Oren Barak
government (cabinet), Knesset committees, and the executive bureaucracy. Although the book is relatively short (126 pages of text), it is very heavy on detail—precisely because there is no real systematic way for those involved to accomplish what they wish in