Journal: Israeli Affairs

Fifty years of occupation and seventy years from partition, which led to the Nakba and establishment of Israel. Israel is a man in the seventies. He spent the last fifty years of his life as an occupier. Is the occupation merely an incident, a transient illness, in his life? Is it a constituent part of its being and nature? Is the occupation an illness, which Israel has to recover from? Is it evidence for its health, strength and agility?
The more the years pass, the twenty year interval between the Nakba and Naksa appears as a truce that is not quiet. This time marked the massacres of Kafr Qasem and Qubeiba, murder of infiltrators who returned to their homeland, and 1956 war. Overtime, this truce looks like a marginal detail in a project that is more than 120 years old. For example, who recalls that California was not part of the United States when it was established and that it was occupied almost a century later?

This year marks a 100 since the Balfour Declaration, 70 since the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, 50 since the Israeli occupation of the 1967 Palestinian territories, and we could add 120 years since the inaugural conference of the Zionist Organization in Basel. It is rather tempting to view the last three incidents as mere manifestations of a project that was planned for in Basel, and as one of the many occurrences of the 20th century in which a text translated to reality and a legend transformed into settlements. The temptation is strong but it must be resisted.

What is the nature of the foreign relations between Israel and former Soviet Union states?

How can we understand these countries’ policy transformations that were once supportive of Palestinian rights, and that have now sided with Israel in the International arena and the United Nations? The theme of this issue is a preliminary attempt to answer these questions. Within this theme, researcher Muhannad Mustafa offers an analysis of Israel-Azerbaijan relations and its impact on regional politics considering that it is a Muslim country with a Shia majority and for its strategic locality.

The Thought of Salvation in Zionism
The ancient Greek philosophy did not define the concept of historical progress; that is, time moves forward in a perpetual progress towards salvation. Greek philosophy envisaged time to be more of a circle. In other words, time did not move in a uniform direction towards progress and salvation. Augustine, who viewed and construed Christian theology as one that embraced the notion of progress: history has its teleology and particular direction. Its final station is salvation.

Abstract
The theme of the 62nd issue of the Israeli Affairs Quarterly Journal is Israel’s relations with Jewish Groups outside of Israel.

The notion of “the negation of exile” constitutes a central keystone in Zionist thought: It is a degrading state of being that must end, because the meaning of collective Jewish existence is only fulfilled in the land of Israel. He needs the land and the land needs him, she is his and he is hers, he is lacking without her and she is lacking without him. This is the logic that made immigration and colonization the ideological and practical foundations of Zionism (Aliyah in Hebrew – as in immigration – means “ascent”).