Searching for a Homeland: The Territorial Dimension in the Zionist Movement and the Boundaries of Jewish Nationalism

By Yitzhak Conforti

Volume 14, Issue 1, pages 36-54

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between territorial borders and ethnic boundaries in the Zionist movement. Beginning with the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, the distinction between these two components of the Zionist movement rose to the forefront of the Zionist consciousness. The argument over the Uganda proposal revealed the differing preferences of political and practical Zionism. But this argument, which ended with the rejection of the Uganda plan in 1905, did not terminate the discussion of the relationship between ‘the people’ and ‘the land’. The aspiration of Zionism’s central stream to establish a Jewish nation-state in Palestine was challenged by political groups on the right and on the left, each of which emphasized either the ethnic or the territorial component. While Palestinian Zionism reinforced the territorial component during the 1920s and ’30s, the 1937 partition plan of the Peel Commission returned the issue of the relationship between the people and the land to the centre ring of political decision-making. This article demonstrates that the attempt of the central stream of the Zionist movement to balance between the people and the land, between the ethnic and the territorial components, defined the boundaries of Zionism during the period discussed.

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Identity Construction and the Causes of Genocidal Mass Murder

By Daniel Chirot and Daniel Karell

Volume 14, Issue 3, pages 484-499

Introduction

What kinds of groups are targets of genocidal mass murder? To answer that we need to know the causes of genocide, but also how various kinds of identities come to define groups of people, and why in some cases they come into conflict with each other.

Defining genocide is difficult. The word, first introduced by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book on occupied Europe, referred to the German Holocaust (or Shoah) of the Jews then going on. Lemkin also considered the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 to be genocide. A definition of genocide was then adopted by the United Nations in 1948. It said that genocides were acts ‘committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,’ carried out by:

Killing members of the group; … [c]ausing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; … [d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; … [i]mposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; … [f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

(Quoted in Kuper 1982:19)

The Genocide Convention implies an obligation by the members of the United Nations to intervene to stop genocide. The very first article states: ‘The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and punish’ (quoted in Kuper 1982:210).

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Towards an Explanation for the Bosnian Genocide of 1992–1995

By Marko Attila Hoare

Volume 14, Issue 3, pages 516-532

Introduction

Scholarly interest in genocide has grown exponentially over the past two decades, due largely to two high-profile genocides during the first half of the 1990s: the genocide in Rwanda of 1994 and, in particular, the genocide in Bosnia-Hercegovina of 1992-95. Yet, paradoxically, the Bosnian genocide has inspired relatively little original research from scholars outside of Bosnia-Hercegovina itself. This article will examine the existing literature while suggesting a theoretical and historical framework by which the genocide might be understood. It will examine how far the genocide can be explained through internal versus external causes, ideological determination versus contingency, and short-term versus long-term factors.

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Securitization as a Source of Insecurity: A Ground-Level Look at the Functioning of Europe’s External Border in Lampedusa

By Giacomo Orsini

Volume 16, Issue 1, pages 135-147

Abstract

Immigration to Europe increasingly emerges as a core security concern. In response to these growing anxieties the external border of Schengen space of free movement of people was established to limit uncontrolled immigration to the European Union. Yet, looking closely at how this border works in Lampedusa and its surrounding seawaters, one realizes the functioning of the European external border works to undermine the legitimacy of institutions on the island, de facto challenging law enforcement both on the island as well as at sea. Based on the data collected during the six-months-long fieldwork that I conducted on the island, this paper disentangles the complex machinery of the border as it structures in Lampedusa, and presents how such complex governing technology works through authorities’ strategic use of local land and seawaters and their simultaneous neglect for the concerns of the population inhabiting them – representing a major source of insecurity for islanders.

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Liturgy of Nation-Formation: Patrick Pearse and the Theological Background of the Easter Rising of 1916

By Maciej Ruczaj

Volume 13, Issue 3, pages 412-428

Abstract

The Dublin 1916 Easter Rising is most often analysed in terms of the ‘blood sacrifice’ concept and its ‘theatrical’ aspect with both rhetorical devices being ascribed to Patrick (Padraic) Pearse – poet, dramatist, and a crucial figure in the development of the discourse of Irish nationalism. This article proposes a reading of Pearse’s literary and political texts centred on the relation between the religious and the political. Starting with the delineation of the complex ‘translation of the sacred’ from the religious to the secular context, the article then examines the two above-mentioned key dimensions of the Rising, its sacrificial and ‘theatrical’ aspects, demonstrating their theological affinities. The two are interconnected through the thomistic theory of the liturgical sign, suggesting that the Easter Rising, as a crucial event in the construction of Irish nationhood, was devised and carried out per analogiam to the liturgical symbolism of the Catholic Mass.

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