Besieged Bedfellows

Besieged Bedfellows
Author: Benjamin M. Joseph
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1988-02-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Of the several books that deal with the relationship between Israel and South Africa, this is the most scholarly and sophisticated. Joseph argues that the relationship took a long time to evolve and that it rests on a community of interests and complementary resources. Most important, as the world's two remaining political systems committed to separatist philosophies that exclude indigenous Third World majorities, they have developed an underlying sense of solidarity and kinship. . . . [T]his is a valuable and solid contribution to an understanding of what is widely held to be a highly anomolous relationship. Choice A provocative look at the surprisingly close relationship between Israel and South Africa. Besieged Bedfellows draws on a wealth of Western, South African, Israeli sources, including materials previously published only in Hebrew. The book examines the commercial and military spheres of this relationship as well as the available information on Israeli-South African nuclear cooperation. A seperate chapter addresses the familiar objection, Everyone does it [business with South Africa]--why focus on Israel? The book next gives a profile of South African Jewry and what, if any, role this community might have played in forging the connection. Besieged Bedfellows goes on to present a compelling case that there is a great deal more to the Israeli-South African relationship than expediency and realpolitik. The author demonstrates that as well as conducting business, South African whites and Israelis have shown a considerable amount of solidarity and understanding towards each other. He then carefully examines the backgrounds and ruling ideologies of these two political groups.

South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction

South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction
Author: Helen E. Purkitt
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2005-05-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780253003065

South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction offers an in-depth view of the secret development and voluntary disarmament of South Africa's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons program, Project Coast. Helen E. Purkitt and Stephen F. Burgess explore how systems used for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in South Africa were acquired and established beyond the gaze of international and domestic political actors. On the basis of archival evidence from Project Coast and their own extensive interviews with military and political officials, Purkitt and Burgess consider what motivates countries to acquire and build such powerful weaponry and examine when and how decisions are made to dismantle a military arsenal voluntarily. Questions such as how to destroy weapons safely and keep them from reappearing on international markets are considered along with comparative strategies for successful disarmament in other nation-states.

The Unspoken Alliance

The Unspoken Alliance
Author: Sasha Polakow-Suransky
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2011-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307388506

Prior to the Six-Day War, Israel was a darling of the international left, vocally opposed to apartheid and devoted to building alliances with black leaders in newly independent African nations. South Africa, for its part, was controlled by a regime of Afrikaner nationalists who had enthusiastically supported Hitler during World War II. But after Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, the country found itself estranged from former allies and threatened anew by old enemies. As both states became international pariahs, a covert—and lucrative—military relationship blossomed between these seemingly unlikely allies. Based on extensive archival research and exclusive interviews with former generals and high-level government officials in both countries, The Unspoken Alliance tells a troubling story of Cold War paranoia, moral compromises, and startling secrets.

Besieged

Besieged
Author: Sharon Alker
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0228005922

Siege literature has existed since antiquity but has not always been understood as a crucial element of culture. Focusing on its magnetic force, Besieged brings to light its popularity and potency between the British Civil War and the Great Northern War in Europe, a period in which literary texts reflected an urgent interest in siege mentality and tactics. Exploring the siege as represented in canonical works by Milton, Dryden, Defoe, Davenant, Cowley, Cavendish, and Bunyan, alongside a wide array of little-known memoirs, plays, poems, and works of prose fiction on military and civilian experiences of siege warfare, Besieged breaks new ground in the field of early modern war literature. Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson draw on theories of space and place to show how early modern Britons feverishly worked to make sense of the immediacy, horror, and trauma of urban warfare, offering a valuable perspective on the literature that captured the cultural imagination during and after the traumatic civil wars of the 1640s. Alker and Nelson demonstrate how the narratives of besieged cities became a compelling way to engage with the fragility of urban space, unstable social structures, developing technologies, and the inadequacy of old heroic martial models. Given the reality of urban warfare in our own age, Besieged provides a timely foundation for understanding the history of such spaces and their cultural representation.

Seeking Mandela

Seeking Mandela
Author: Heribert Adam
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781592133994

Lessons from South Africa for the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Theodor Herzl: From Europe to Zion

Theodor Herzl: From Europe to Zion
Author: Mark H. Gelber
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2012-01-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110936054

In 2004 the one-hundredth anniversary of Theodor Herzl’s death was commemorated throughout the world. The myth of Herzl, as it has developed over the last century, has perhaps become more important than the historical figure. This volume contains revised and expanded essays, which were originally delivered as lectures at international Herzl centennial conferences in Antwerp, London, and Jerusalem. Topics treated include the Herzl myth, Herzl’s nationalism and Zionism, his self-understanding and image, his authorship of comedies and philosophical tales, Herzl and Africa, as well as his reception in Israeli and other literature. Zweig films are also considered within this same context.

The Mortality and Morality of Nations

The Mortality and Morality of Nations
Author: Uriel Abulof
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2015-07-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316368750

Standing at the edge of life's abyss, we seek meaningful order. We commonly find this 'symbolic immortality' in religion, civilization, state and nation. What happens, however, when the nation itself appears mortal? The Mortality and Morality of Nations seeks to answer this question, theoretically and empirically. It argues that mortality makes morality, and right makes might; the nation's sense of a looming abyss informs its quest for a higher moral ground, which, if reached, can bolster its vitality. The book investigates nationalism's promise of moral immortality and its limitations via three case studies: French Canadians, Israeli Jews, and Afrikaners. All three have been insecure about the validity of their identity or the viability of their polity, or both. They have sought partial redress in existential self-legitimation: by the nation, of the nation and for the nation's very existence.

Peace-making in Divided Societies

Peace-making in Divided Societies
Author: Heribert Adam
Publisher: HSRC Press
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2002
Genre: Conflict management
ISBN: 9780796920805

An exploration of the lessons that the unresolved Israel-Palestinian conflict can draw from South Africa's 'negotiated revolution'. Six realms are compared: economic interdependence, religious divisions, third party intervention, leadership, political culture and violence. Contrasting insights form two opposite solutions to a nationalist conflict shed light on the nature of ethnicity as well as the limits of negotiation politics.

Neoliberal Apartheid

Neoliberal Apartheid
Author: Andy Clarno
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 022643009X

This is the first comparative analysis of the political transitions in South Africa and Palestine since the 1990s. Clarno s study is grounded in impressive ethnographic fieldwork, taking him from South African townships to Palestinian refugee camps, where he talked to a wide array of informants, from local residents to policymakers, political activists, business representatives, and local and international security personnel. The resulting inquiry accounts for the simultaneous development of extreme inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the poor in South Africa and Palestine/Israel over the last 20 years. Clarno places these transitions in a global context while arguing that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both countries. The width and depth of Clarno s research, combined with wide-ranging first-hand accounts of realities otherwise difficult for researchers to access, make Neoliberal Apartheid a path-breaking contribution to the study of social change, political transitions, and security dynamics in highly unequal societies. Take one example of Clarno s major themes, to wit, the issue of security. Both places have generated advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. In South Africa, racialized anxieties about black crime shape the growth of private security forces that police poor black South Africans in wealthy neighborhoods. Meanwhile, a discourse of Muslim terrorism informs the coordinated network of security forcesinvolving Israel, the United States, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authoritythat polices Palestinians in the West Bank. Overall, Clarno s pathbreaking book shows how the shifting relationship between racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire has generated inequality and insecurity, marginalization and securitization in South Africa, Palestine/Israel, and other parts of the world."