The Crisis of Israel's Democracy, 1948 - 2025: Origins, Developments, and Consequences focuses on Israeli democracy, its deep historical origins, development over seven decades, long-term consequences, and possible resolutions. While most commentaries on Israel's crisis focus on the proposals for judicial reform by the Netanyahu government, this study focuses on what it identifies as the fundamental problems of the Israeli regime-its ethnonational (rather than liberal-democratic) ...

Arguing that a comprehensive and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict depends on a resolution of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict within Israel as much as it does on resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, this timely book explores the causes and consequences of the growing conflict between Israel's Jewish majority and its Palestinian-Arab minority. It warns that if Jewish-Arab relations in Israel continue to deteriorate, this will...

This prescient book explores corruption in democracies, emphasizing how a society’s definition of the concept can change in different contexts and periods. Contributors examine both occurrences of corruption and resistance to it, as well as the democratic decline that can transpire when there is an absence of such resistance.Expert authors discuss key situations that aid our understanding of corruption, including instances of reform generated due to external demands, and corruption...

Ten leading scholars and practitioners of politics, political science, anthropology, Israel studies, and Middle East affairs address the theme of continuity and change in political culture as a tribute to Professor Myron (Mike) J. Aronoff whose work on political culture has built conceptual and methodological bridges between political science and anthropology.Topics include the legitimacy of the two-state solution, identity and memory, denationalization, the role of trust in peace n...

This volume considers corruption as a multidimensional, complex phenomenon in which various forms of corruption may overlap at any given time. Extending the seemingly paradoxical notion of “legal corruption” to such settings as the USA, Spain, and the Czech Republic, the book seeks to augment our understanding of corruption in democracies by focusing on conduct that is considered by large segments of the population to be corrupt even though they are not explicitly defined as such by the la...

This volume incisively analyzes the foreign policy of George W. Bush. Examining the legacy of the forty-third President, author Ilan Peleg explains the complex factors underlying the Bush Doctrine: neoconservative ideology, real and perceived challenges to US world supremacy, Bush's personality, the White House's unique decision-making process, and the impact of September 11. Peleg argues that in its shift from deterrence and containment to prevention and preemption, from multilateral lead...

"This volume addresses an important aspect in the political life of mostsocieties today: limitations on freedom of expression and the existence ofcensorship. As a topic for research, study, and reflection-particularly in itscomparative dimension-freedom of expression is a somewhat neglected area.The vast majority of studies in this field focus either on a specific aspect offreedom of expression or on a specific country. The current volume, however,...

This book deals comprehensively with different aspects of collective victimhood in contemporary Israel, but also with the wider implications of this important concept for many other societies, including the Palestinian one. The eight highly-diverse, scholarly chapters included in this volume offer analysis of the politics of victimhood (viewing it as increasingly dominant within contemporary Israel), assess victimhood as a focal point of the Jewish historical legacy, trace the evolution an...

This book deals with large-scale, systemic corruption, a phenomenon that it identifies as part of the political landscape in most, if not all, societies of the contemporary world. While the analysis is grounded in the political thought of earlier thinkers, especially Edmund Burke, and integrates the insights of several modern analysts of corruption, the volume offers a new, updated theoretical perspective on the topic. This perspective reflects deep concerns with corruption in a world faci...

In Islamic Exceptionalism, Brookings Institution scholar and acclaimed author Shadi Hamid offers a novel and provocative argument on how Islam is, in fact, "exceptional" in how it relates to politics, with profound implications for how we understand the future of the Middle East. Divides among citizens aren't just about power but are products of fundamental disagreements over the very nature and purpose of the modern nation state—and the vexing problem of religion's role in public...

The conflict between Palestine and Israel is one of the most highly publicized and bitter struggles in history. In this accessible and stimulating Very Short Introduction, Martin Bunton clearly explains the history of the problem, reducing it to its very essence - a modern territorial contest between two nations and one geographical territory. Adopting a fresh and original approach, each section covers a twenty-year span, to highlight the historical complexity of the conflict throughout su...

1948: As Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust, struggle toward the new State of Israel, Arab refugees are fleeing, many under duress. Sixty years later, the memory of trauma has shaped both peoples' collective understanding of who they are.After a war, the victors write history. How was the story of the exiled Palestinians erased -- from textbooks, maps, even the land? How do Jewish and Palestinian Israelis now engage with the histories of the Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe...