Showing posts with label Baruch Kimmerling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baruch Kimmerling. Show all posts

2024-05-28

Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians : Kimmerling, Baruch

Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians eBook : Kimmerling, Baruch: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store

https://archive.org/details/politicideariels00kimm_0/page/n7/mode/2up



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Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians Kindle Edition
by Baruch Kimmerling (Author) Format: Kindle Edition



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Ariel Sharon is one of the most experienced, shrewd and frightening leaders of the new millennium. Despite being found both directly and indirectly responsible for acts considered war crimes under international law, he became Prime Minister of Israel, a political victory he won by provoking the Palestinians into a new uprising, the second intifada.
From the beginning of his career Sharon was regarded as the most brutal, deceitful and unrestrained of all the Israeli generals and politicians. A man of monstrous vision, his attempts to destroy the Palestinian people have included the proposal to make Jordan the Palestinian state and the now infamous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which resulted in the Shabra and Shatila massacres.
Baruch Kimmerling's new book describes Sharon's quest to reshape the whole geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. He describes how Sharon is committed to politicide, the destruction of the Palestinian political identity, and how he has won the support of powerful elements within Israeli society and the present American administration in order to achieve this. At this time of crisis Kimmerling exposes the brutality of Sharon and his junta's "solutions" and constructs a devastating indictment of a man whose cruelty and ruthlessness have resulted in widespread and indiscriminate slaughter.

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Baruch Kimmerling, a Jew with a biblical conscience, gives us in Politicide not only a devastating critique of Ariel Sharon but an acutely perceived history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. He writes with care and with passion. It is a book both scholarly and heartfelt and I hope it will be widely read. -- Howard Zinn
About the Author
Baruch Kimmerling was Distinguished Research Professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto and George S. Wise Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He published numerous books and articles on Israel and Palestine including, with Joel S. Migdal, a revised and enlarged edition of Palestinians: The Making of a People. He died in 2007.

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Top reviews from other countries

Michael Hoffman
5.0 out of 5 stars A Devastating Expose of Ariel SharonReviewed in the United States on 12 June 2003
Verified Purchase

Prof. Baruch Kimmerling's new book about the checkered career, heinous war crimes and diabolical treachery of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is of such critical importance to understanding the expolsive Middle East crisis, that one would think it would make the cover of Newsweek, and be the subject of discussion and debate from the New York Times to the CBS Nightly News. Needless to say, publicity for Kimmerling's expose has been tightly suppressed by the Establishment media, who have a vested interest in portraying the Butcher of Beirut as an honorable, if hawkish warrior and Zionist "patriot."

The truth, according to Kimmerling's formidable research, is very different. The bill of indictment is eye-popping. Sharon is a Nazi, a racist and an assassin intent on imposing a defacto concentration camp on the Palestinians. Extreme? Yes, but Sharon is the epitome of extremism.The bloody wreckage of Palestinian AND Israeli lives is effectively the basis for "Politicide."

Put aside the System-approved fantasies by Bernard Lewis, Dore Gold and Steve Emerson. Instead, study this courageous and revealing work from a writer who embodies a voice of conscience and dissent against what is done in the name of the Jewish people to the hapless natives of Palestine.

The fact that this book is being denied publicity by the corporate media is one hint of its power. The System seeks to protect at all costs the reigning paradigm. In "Politicide," Kimmerling indicts mass murderer Sharon, and he does so without polemics, with a cool recitation of facts.

"Politicide" is fallible and there are a couple of errors: the author upholds the official Israeli line on the Jenin massacre and the attack on the Church of the Nativity; and there is one noteworthy omission: all mention of Baruch Goldstein's 1994 massacre of 40 Palestinians as the flash point that initiated suicide bombings, beginning in April of that year.

With those caveats noted, this book is nonetheless a huge embarrassment for the legion of Sharon partisans in the American media and US government ,and they are doing their worst to keep "Politicide" in the deep freeze. But if Kimmerling's work gains a wide American readership, I predict that Sharon's usefulness to the Cryptocracy will be finished and many lives may be saved.
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E. Rodin MD
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read for American public and politiciansReviewed in the United States on 8 July 2006
Verified Purchase

Professor Kimmerling's book is an important contribution to the understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian war and should be read by everyone who is concerned about the future of our country. America's Middle East policy is at this time not evenhanded but clearly favors Israel's wishes over those of other countries in the region. Since Kimmerling documents the oppressive policies of Israel toward its conquered Palestinian population Americans need to read this book which presents the proverbial other side of the coin.

This is especially topical now when guns are blazing again in Gaza and Israel uses the pretext of freeing a kidnapped soldier to punish the Palestinian people for democratically electing a Hamas led government. The current situation clearly proves Kimmerling's point, that a viable Palestinian state will not be tolerated by Israel's government.

The book discusses the "pre-emptive" 1967 war which led to the Yom Kippur war and the ill advised invasion of Lebanon for which Sharon was mainly responsible. He was also the main architect of the settlement program in the occupied territories which has now become a millstone around the neck not only of Israelis and Palestinians but also Americans because neither of the parties can see a just solution to this increasingly vexing problem. Kimmerling's excerpts from "Machsomwatch," which detail the conditions Palestinians are forced to live under are especially poignant.

When one reads this book it becomes clear why the rest of the world does not trust America at this time and only when America will begin to support, instead of vetoing, resolutions in the UN which demand an end to Israel's current practices will there be a semblance of hope for peace.
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April 15, 2024
First thing to know: this book is primarily about what Baruch Kimmerling calls 'politicide' in the Israel-Palestine conflict and about Ariel Sharon second; this is no biography of Ariel Sharon. This is a book about politicide and how Ariel Sharon's career as a military officer and politician factored into it.
Sharon served in the military as a young man from the first Israel war in 1948, and as a general and later as the Secretary of Defense. During much of that time he largely was a hardliner on the right in Israel's poltics, in part because, in his view, the endgame for Israel should be make the Kingdom of Jordan the Palestinian state. 

However, as Prime Minister, he successfully recast himself as a moderate (in part, probably thanks to the rise of Netanyahu), and gave the image of disengaging from some of the territories (mainly the Gaze Strip) which Israel had long occupied, while at the same time he advanced forward settlements in the West Bank that would ultimately make the two-state solution nigh-impossible.

Kimmerling's book, which does not reach the end of Sharon's priemership (which ended after going into a coma in early 2006, a state which he remained in for eight years before dying in 2014), manages to show, quite effectively, how Sharon was so heavily involved in the 'politicide' of the Palestinians (which is to say, led the destruction the Palestinians' aspirations for statehood).
It's certainly no uplifting topic, since Kimmerling's bleak analysis of the situation as it was then and, his hints of where the conflict was headed have proven to be largely true two decades later, even with Sharon out of the picture. Its certainly a relevent book, especially amidst bloodshed now taking place there in 2023.

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The Palestinian People: A History - Kimmerling, 1993, 2003

The Palestinian People: A History - Kimmerling, Baruch, Migdal, Joel S. | 9780674011298 | Amazon.com.au | Books

1993 edition
https://archive.org/details/palestiniansmaki00kimm/page/n7/mode/2up

1994  [better]



2004 [only the part 4 is new]










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The Palestinian People: A History Paperback – 27 March 2003
by Baruch Kimmerling (Author), Joel S. Migdal (Author)
3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 12 ratings



Edition: 1st


In a timely reminder of how the past informs the present, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal offer an authoritative account of the history of the Palestinian people from their modern origins to the Oslo peace process and beyond.

Palestinians struggled to create themselves as a people from the first revolt of the Arabs in Palestine in 1834 through the British Mandate to the impact of Zionism and the founding of Israel. Their relationship with the Jewish people and the State of Israel has been fundamental in shaping that identity, and today Palestinians find themselves again at a critical juncture. In the 1990s cornerstones for peace were laid for eventual Palestinian-Israeli coexistence, including mutual acceptance, the renunciation of violence as a permanent strategy, and the establishment for the first time of Palestinian self-government. But the dawn of the twenty-first century saw a reversion to unmitigated hatred and mutual demonization. By mid-2002 the brutal violence of the Intifada had crippled Palestine's fledgling political institutions and threatened the fragile social cohesion painstakingly constructed after 1967. Kimmerling and Migdal unravel what went right--and what went wrong--in the Oslo peace process, and what lessons we can draw about the forces that help to shape a people. The authors present a balanced, insightful, and sobering look at the realities of creating peace in the Middle East.





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2024-05-27

Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies - Kimmerling, Baruch | 9780231143295 | Amazon.com.au | Books

Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies - Kimmerling, Baruch | 9780231143295 | Amazon.com.au | Books

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Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies Paperback – Illustrated, 22 July 2010
by Baruch Kimmerling (Author)






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By revisiting the past hundred years of shared Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli history, Baruch Kimmerling reveals surprising relations of influence between a stateless indigenous society and the settler-immigrants who would later form the state of Israel. Shattering our assumptions about these two seemingly irreconcilable cultures, Kimmerling composes a sophisticated portrait of one side's behavior and characteristics and the way in which they irrevocably shaped those of the other.

Kimmerling focuses on the clashes, tensions, and complementarities that link Jewish, Palestinian, and Israeli identities. He explores the phenomena of reciprocal relationships between Jewish and Arab communities in mandatory Palestine, relations between state and society in Israel, patterns of militarism, the problems of jurisdiction in an immigrant-settler society, and the ongoing struggle of Israel to achieve legitimacy as both a Jewish and a democratic state. By merging Israeli and Jewish studies with a vast body of scholarship on Palestinians and the Middle East, Kimmerling introduces a unique conceptual framework for analyzing the cultural, political, and material overlap of both societies. A must read for those concerned with Israel and the relations between Jews and Arabs, Clash of Identities is a provocative exploration of the ever-evolving, always-contending identities available to Israelis and Palestinians and the fascinating contexts in which they take form.
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Marginal At the Center: The Life Story of a Public Sociologist | Baruch Kimmerling

Marginal At the Center: The Life Story of a Public Sociologist | BERGHAHN BOOKS

https://librarysearch.adelaide.edu.au/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma9928228841801811&context=L&vid=61ADELAIDE_INST:UOFA&lang=en&search_scope=all&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=Everything&query=any,contains,Baruch%20Kimmerling&offset=0


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CONTENTS
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Introduction: A Guerilla Fighter for Ideas

PART I: AND THIS IS THE STORY

Chapter 1. So that the child would not understand
Chapter 2. Fleeing
Chapter 3. Fantasies
Chapter 4. Ariel and Michael
Chapter 5. The Transylvania was not the Roslan
Chapter 6. The Library

PART II: CAMPUS

Chapter 7. At the Dormitories
Chapter 8. Adam
Chapter 9. My Body's Betrayal
Chapter 10. Diana

PART III: THE STRUGGLE OVER THE PARADIGM

Chapter 11. March 6th, 1969
Chapter 12. The Department
Chapter 13. On Zionism
Chapter 14. Between Boston and Toronto
Chapter 15. On One Hand and on the Other Hand
Chapter 16. Ancestors’ Sepulchers and Sons’ Graves
Chapter 17. About The Nuclear Issue
Chapter 18. This Constitution is Prostitution
Chapter 19. The Mouse that Roared
Chapter 20. State Option
Chapter 21. The Right to Resist the Occupation
Chapter 22. Kulturkampf
Chapter 23. Politicians
Chapter 24. Between Despair and Hope

In Lieu of a Conclusion: Question Marks

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MARGINAL AT THE CENTER
The Life Story of a Public Sociologist
Baruch Kimmerling
Translated from the Hebrew by Diana Kimmerling

258 pages, 13 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-0-85745-720-2 $34.95/£27.95 / Pb / Published (June 2012)

eISBN 978-0-85745-751-6 eBook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9780857457202
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REVIEWS

“What a wonderful read Baruch Kimmerling’s memoir is! [it takes] us from Kimmerling’s childhood in Romania, including his dramatic escape in 1944 on a horse-drawn carriage dodging a roundup of Jews in his hometown, to his final months in Jerusalem. His account, expertly translated by his wife Diana, is not a chronological story but one in which personal vignettes serve as launching pads for explorations of Israeli society and academia.” · The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms

“Some of the chapters… which describe his life as a public sociologist in Israel-Palestine, could well be read by sociologists in Northern Ireland, South Africa and other conflict zones as a lesson in how to use sociology to try to make a difference.” · Magazine of the British Sociological Association


DESCRIPTION

A self-proclaimed guerrilla fighter for ideas, Baruch Kimmerling was an outspoken critic, a prolific writer, and a “public” sociologist. While he lived at the center of the Israeli society in which he was involved as both a scientist and a concerned citizen, he nevertheless felt marginal because of his unconventional worldview, his empathy for the oppressed, and his exceptional sense of universal justice, which were at odds with prevailing views. 

In this autobiography, the author, who was born in Transylvania in 1939 with cerebral palsy, describes how he and his family escaped the Nazis and the circumstances that brought them to Israel, the development of his understanding of Israeli and Palestinian histories, of the narratives each society tells itself, and of the implacable “situation”—along with predictions of some of the most disturbing developments that are taking place right now as well as solutions he hoped were still possible. Kimmerling’s deep concern for Israel's well-being, peace, and success also reveals that he was in effect a devoted Zionist, contrary to the claims of his detractors. He dreamed of a genuinely democratic Israel, a country able to embrace all of its citizens without discrimination and to adopt peace as its most important objective. It is to this dream that this posthumous translation from Hebrew has been dedicated.

Baruch Kimmerling was Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His many publications include The Invention and Decline of Israeliness (University of California Press, 2001); A History of the Palestinian People (with Joel S. Migdal, Harvard University Press, 2003); and Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies (Columbia University Press, 2008).


Subject: SociologyJewish Studies
Area: Middle East & IsraelSubject Codes



A Guerilla Fighter for Ideas

I did not pave roads and I did not dry up swamps. I was not a pioneer, a warrior,
or even a military officer. I did not establish settlements and I did not build
industrial plants. I wasn’t exactly a Holocaust survivor or a secret agent. I
neither founded nor wrecked political parties. I was never even a member of
one or a public figure. I wasn’t a pop star, a cultural hero, an actor in the theater,
or a player in a stadium. I am not a poet, an author, a sculptor, or a painter. I am
certainly not a dancer. So, what actually did I do that would justify the writing
of an autobiography and, even more so, its reading?
I was, and still am, primarily a producer, critic, disseminator and examiner
of ideas as well as someone who has been trying to shelve several ideas which,
according to my values, should be abandoned. At the very least, I tried to argue
with their advocates and I like to think of myself as a guerilla fighter for ideas.
However, an idea must also pass the reality test; that is, it is necessary to
examine, using different methods, how people, groups, and organizations act
and react in real life and to ask how their actual practice compares to the norms
and ideologies according to which they claim to act. What am I, then? I
research societies using a comparative approach, a discipline known in public
as “sociology.” But sociology also includes the study of history, culture, and
economics as well as the examination of ideas, the investigation of social
movements, states and the relationships between them, and all patterns of
activities of groups of men and women and their identity.
Sociology may be classified in many ways. For the purpose of this book, I
will distinguish between academic and public sociology, a concept that is still
not widely known in Israel. The academic sociologist whose credentials are
well established is secluded in the academic ivory tower and his goal is to
advance human knowledge. Whether his findings will ever be used is not a
major concern of his and his main audience is primarily his students and
colleagues—which is not insignificant. Indeed, he may, from time to time,
emerge from the tower to talk to a larger public, mostly when he is challenged
by other social agents such as the media, or when he is called on by the public
relations department of the university that employs him to support some cause.
But these are not his main concerns.
2 Marginal at the Center
The “public” sociologist (or the intellectual) must be an academic sociologist
who is obliged, no less than his academic colleague, to succeed in the area of
research and observe the professional ethos. At the same time, in addition to his
research, he must also try to influence, with the help of his ideas, the public
political, social, economic, and cultural agenda, primarily through the creation
and distribution of alternative ideas capable of replacing those that are currently
dominant. He also aims to correct what seems to him to be flawed in his own
society. The public sociologist sees these activities as part of his duty. The most
prominent example, in my opinion, is that of the French sociologist and
philosopher Raymond Aron. Aron, after serving in de Gaulle’s Forces Françaises
Libres, returned to France and became a professor of Social Thought and
Political Sociology at the Sorbonne (and a few other universities in France).
At the same time, over a period of thirty years, he wrote a column for the
newspaper Le Figaro. He and Jean-Paul Sartre were of the same vehement
opinion about the need to withdraw the French settlers from Algeria. They did,
however, differ in their philosophical paradigms and in their ideological
approach. Aron opposed Sartre’s existentialism and was a rationalist and a
humanist and, in contrast to Sartre and most of the French intellectuals of that
period, did not sympathize with Communism and did not support the Soviet
Union. As a result, he was unjustifiably considered a conservative.
It is unnecessary, I believe, for me to state that I see myself as a “public”
sociologist, as will be seen later, primarily in part four of this book.
The creation of an idea is a strange process that I myself do not fully
understand, even when it occurs in my own mind. Furthermore, I did not find
satisfying explanations for the phenomenon of intellectual creativity. I am not
referring here to a single concept, like those written by a copywriter, but rather
to the creation of a complex world of content such as a new paradigm. A paradigm contains a system of criteria that permits an examination in the field that
either supports or rejects accepted opinions such as, for example, the one
claiming that Israel is not a militaristic society. This process includes the
precise identification of the types of militarism that do and do not exist in Israel
through a quite innovative assumption that militarism does not have a singular
and uniform social pattern. Rather, it changes its form in different places and
from one period to another and throughout its various forms, it is possible
to see a common trait—the over-reliance on the use of force in an attempt to
solve social and political problems. Among the public at large and even among
many researchers, there is a tendency to relate to only one of the many forms
of militarism—the Praetorian type, in which the army comes out of its barracks
and the military officers seize power. The fact that this obviously did not occur
in Israel is convenient for those denying the existence of Israeli militarism.
However, all those researchers and thinkers who are, presumably, concerned
about Israel’s “good name” as a democratic state usually highlight, with praise,
the involvement of the military and the defense establishment in general in
almost all aspects of life in Israel—culture, education, economics and, of course,
politics. “The whole nation is an army,” is frequently stated with pride. A
Introduction 3
researcher and close friend of mine once claimed that the fact that most Jewish
men in the prime of their active life serve first in the army and then spend at
least one month a year in the reserves “civilianizes” the army by making it
transparent, accessible, and free of myths to most civilians. When I tried to
turn the argument upside-down by asking whether it would not be more
reasonable to assume that the extended period of time that the Israeli man (and
also, to a lesser extent, the Israeli woman) spends in the rigid military framework
may burn into his consciousness the values of army and power, or what the
professional literature calls the “military mind,” I did not receive either a theoretical or an empirical answer to my question. Therefore, I identified two interconnected types of militarism that are found in Israel: cultural militarism,
which turns the army and its symbols into a central component of the national
culture and identity; and cognitive militarism, which causes people to think in
militaristic and aggressive terms without even being aware of it. The problem
is not that the army is militaristic, since this is the nature and essence of an
army, but rather that the bulk of civilian society is also militaristic.
It is not, however, the intention of this introduction to deal with Israeli
militarism but rather to use it as an example of the development and metamorphosis of an idea and a genuine sociological issue that I researched and promoted. This idea gradually developed and matured within me over almost seven
years, during which time I criticized and dismantled the dominant thought on
the subject through discussions and debates with friends and colleagues and
sometimes, while lecturing at the university, through arguments and dialogues
with students. I am indebted to my students for several stages in the development of various ideas. In this case, for example, I owe a debt to the female
student who said in one of the lessons “We think army” and another student
who stated that “Even when we make peace, we do it using power.”
The more an idea is accepted, the more ungrateful it becomes. After a while,
it enters the public domain and severs itself from you altogether as if you were
not its “father-begetter.” I often hear many of my ideas flying around the public
sphere in the country (and some even in the world at large)—such as, for
example, Israel as a frontier society or as a state with multiple socio-political
borders, or the confrontation between the two collective identities “The Land
of Israel” vs. “The State of Israel”—without any attribution or disguised by
another concept. On the one hand, I rejoice when this happens because there
can be no greater triumph for a creator of ideas than the acceptance of his idea
as self-evident. On the other hand, the terrible little demon inside me squeals
and screams, “…but this is my child, mine, mine…” This does not mean that all
my ideas were good, and even when I suspect that they weren’t too bad, that
doesn’t mean that they were accepted. The consolidation of ideas is an ongoing
process of trial and error: primarily error.
Throughout my public writing, I almost never dealt with social topics such
as welfare, but I devoted quite a lot of space to the harm inflicted on the
universities and higher education and from this perspective, I consider myself
an elitist. I barely dealt with subjects regarding social inequalities (except,
4 Marginal at the Center
marginally, in my Hebrew book The End of Ashkenazi Hegemony) not because I
didn’t consider them important, but rather because I suppose that some
“division of labor” must exist in the sphere of public debate and struggle. Apart
from that, I also reasoned that those issues are interdependent and that changes
in the regime of occupation are a necessary precondition for the radical
treatment of problems such as poverty, education (which often functions to
reinforce existing social barriers, especially in the geographical periphery of the
country), the environment, and more.
I believe that it is proper for all human beings to have an absolute equality
of opportunity and self-actualization, and that the state must assist the weak in
the society. These core values lead me to believe that the state is obliged to act
less as a symbol and a realization of the national identity and more as a welfare
state that redistributes the common resources. Nevertheless, I do not classify
myself as a member of the left wing. My personal political identity is that of a
radical humanist. I do, however, find myself in most matters to be close to the
left although I am critical of its ideological stagnation.
This book is a combination of my life story and, briefly, that of family
members from previous generations whom I consider part of my story, together
with the most important expressions of my works both as an academic and a
public sociologist. I was able to mention only a few of the hundreds of articles
that I published in Hebrew and English and the arguments I made; otherwise
I would never have been able to complete this manuscript and no publisher
would have published it. The story does not necessarily unfold in chronological
order, and the connection between the autobiographical sections and the other
content is primarily associative. This structure may make it more difficult for
the reader, but this pattern of thinking is typical of me and is part of me.
Is there any connection between various events in my life and my public
stances? I don’t know and, in truth, this does not concern me.
Jerusalem, February 21, 2007
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Baruch Kimmerling, From Barak to the Road Map, NLR 23, September–October 2003

Baruch Kimmerling, From Barak to the Road Map, NLR 23, September–October 2003


Ran Edelist, Ehud Barak: Fighting the Demons
Kinneret: Tel Aviv 2003
BARUCH KIMMERLING

FROM BARAK TO THE ROAD MAP

About a year ago, the New York Review of Books devoted its pages to an interesting exchange on the question of who was to blame for the collapse of the Camp David peace talks between Barak and Arafat, presided over by Clinton. This was—and still is—not a purely historical issue: what happened at Camp David has a direct bearing on the present and future of Israeli–Palestinian relations. The exchange in the nyrb , however—on one side, an interview with Barak by the Israeli historian, Benny Morris; on the other, a ‘Reply to Ehud Barak’ by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha—was principally concerned, above all on the Barak–Morris side, with clearing one or other of the participants in the aborted talks of responsibility for their failure. In doing so, the debate became decontextualized, avoiding wider discussion of what really went wrong and why, and concentrating instead on the interpersonal dynamics that developed at Camp David and the psychologies of the major players. The tragic outcome of the June 2000 negotiations was the widespread Western and Israeli acceptance of Barak’s declaration that his ‘most generous offer’ was rejected due to mysterious reasons of Arafat’s—the ultimate proof that Israel has ‘no partners’ among the Palestinians for peace-making. This fateful ‘conclusion’ helped trigger the Palestinian uprising of September 2000; and the combination of Barak’s assertion with the intensification of Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians within the Green Line resulted in the collapse of the Israeli peace camp and Ariel Sharon’s two landslide electoral victories.

In the course of that dreadful aftermath, and especially following Deborah Sontag’s ‘revisionist’ descriptions of the Camp David summit, set out in the New York Times in July 2001, and Malley and Agha’s initial nyrb piece in August 2001, ‘A Tragedy of Errors’, Barak—a politician aspiring to a comeback: if Sharon could, it seems anything is possible—clearly felt that he owed something to the Israeli people and the world at large. To that end, he recruited a noted historian and chose, with the New York Review , the most respectable of American forums in which to construct his face-saving version of the story. That scholars of such calibre can so easily be employed to further the public-relations aims of politicians is deeply regrettable; but the Barak–Morris piece was certainly effective. Prior to the Camp David talks, Barak and Clinton had agreed that every move would be coordinated in advance between the United States and Israel; and that if the summit failed, Israel would not take the blame. Clinton stood by this, as did most of his subordinates. The exception was Malley, the President’s Special Assistant for Arab–Israeli Affairs during the negotiations, who came out with his own, fairly devastating account of Barak’s strategy, and apportioned blame for the failure between all three sides. Nevertheless, with the support of both Morris and Dennis Ross, Clinton’s point-man for dealing with the Palestinians (employed today as director of a hawkish, pro-Israeli research institute), and through numerous personal articles and appearances, Barak has succeeded in convincing most of the American public of the validity of his ‘no partner’ claim.

Still more important for Barak, however, was to explain himself before the annals of Israeli history. For this purpose he recruited the services of Ran Edelist, a well-known journalist specializing in military-intelligence stories, whose 500-hundred-page tome recounts the story of Barak’s brief tenure, from his assumption of office in July 1999 to his ouster in February 2001. Fighting the Demons is virtually a daily chronicle of these months, closely following the Prime Minister’s appointments diary, detailing his conversations—significant and otherwise—and innumerable trips abroad. It is also replete with philosophical and historiographic monologues, and the not-so-very-deep insights of Barak the man. Nevertheless, it is a more interesting document than might have been expected, or intended. Although most of the book was apparently penned in close collaboration with Barak, something clearly changed during the writing process. A careful reader will detect that, at a certain point, Edelist’s path diverges from his hero’s. Despite Barak’s regular interjections, and without ever quite admitting it, the work offers an interpretation closer to that of Malley and Sontag—or of other critical accounts, such as Yossi Beilin’s 1999 Touching Peace, or even that of Barak’s close aide, Gilad Sheer, in his 2001 Just Beyond Reach—than to the Barak–Morris narrative.

Edelist does not scant the ‘problematic’ aspects of Barak’s character: his personal insensitivities, chronic suspicion, bullying, hierarchical approach and difficulties with working in a team or consulting advisors are, in any case, already well known to the Israeli public. Edelist’s contribution, however, is to explain that all Barak’s weaknesses are compensated by his exceptional gifts: dazzling intelligence, personal integrity, strategic understanding, global outlook, physical courage and resilience. Also praised are his resolute defence of the national interest over any merely personal or party concerns, precision skills (clock-repairing is a hobby), musical talent (piano), grasp of nuance and ability to take tough decisions after meticulously weighing the costs. In short: a national and, indeed, world leader of a stature that Israel has not seen since David Ben-Gurion. The only contemporary comparison—though Barak has criticisms even of him—is Clinton. A man of such qualities, Edelist declares at the outset of his book, did not stand a chance. Barak failed not because of his flaws but because of his sterling strengths. The Israeli people were not mature enough for such a leader.

Fighting the Demons is full of carefully chosen biographical nuggets—especially emphasized is a humiliating childhood on the Mishmar Hasharon kibbutz, which impelled Barak to become the most successful child of all—but, despite its pretensions, the book comes nowhere near real biography. Born in 1942, Barak was drafted into the army at the age of seventeen and worked his way up through a succession of elite units, command and General Staff positions. Deputy Commander of the Israeli invasion force in Lebanon in 1982, promoted Head of the Military Intelligence Branch the following year and Chief of Staff in 1991, Barak’s career has also been marked by his personal participation in various brutal death-squad activities, selectively surveyed by Edelist. In the 1973 ‘Operation Springtime of Youth’ Barak, dressed as a woman, led a raid on a plo group in Beirut, implicated in the 1972 Munich Olympics murder of Israeli athletes; the attack killed the head of Fatah’s intelligence as well as his wife, who tried to shield him. In 1988, according to the New York Times, Barak circled overhead in a Boeing 707 as Israeli commandos assassinated Arafat’s deputy, Abu Jihad, in Tunis, in front of his wife and children; though this has always been denied by the Israeli government and Edelist makes no mention of the event. Barak was also responsible for ordering the advance during the 1982 Lebanon War into the ambush at Sultan Yaacub—covered up by the military until 1994, and absent from Edelist’s book—as well as for the ‘training accident’ at the Tzeelim base in the Negev Desert in 1991, involving a rehearsal for a landing in Iraq in order to liquidate Saddam Hussein. A missile landed among a group of soldiers, killing five and wounding seven others. Barak is accused of having scrambled into his helicopter before any of the wounded could be evacuated and fleeing to Tel Aviv. Under Yitzhak Rabin he served as Minister of the Interior from July to November 1995, and Minister of Foreign Affairs from then until June 1996.

Nevertheless, after the Netanyahu years Barak’s election as prime minister in 1999 kindled real hope among certain sectors of the Israeli population and profound anxieties among others—chiefly the Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories and the ultra-Orthodox, alarmed by his campaign promises to ‘separate religion from politics’ and institute conscription among yeshiva students. His victory was warmly welcomed among Israeli Arabs (more than 90 per cent of whom voted for him), Palestinians, leaders of the Arab states—in particular, Mubarak in Egypt and Abdullah ii in Jordan—and the rest of what is known as the Western world.

Barak, however, had an agenda and priorities of his own. It is true that he faced difficulties in tying together left and right blocs in the Knesset; but it is doubtful that this was the reason he established a government that included the chauvinistic National Religious, Yisrael B’Aliyah and Shas parties, alongside the centre-left Meretz. ‘I am closer to Yitzhak Levy [of the nrp] than to Yossi Sarid [of Meretz],’ Barak declared. He would have preferred to form a government with Likud, headed by Sharon, for whom he entertained a great admiration following their joint military endeavours. From the outset, the support of the ‘Jewish parlimentary majority’ was more important to him than that of Israeli Arabs; though he acknowledged the latter’s distress and pledged to strive for their ‘full equality’, this would only be sought after a final settlement with the Palestinians had been agreed. The essence of Barak’s approach, however, as distinct from Rabin’s, was demonstrated by his decision to freeze implementation of all interim agreements with the Palestinians arising from the Oslo–Wye accords—among them a partial redeployment of Israeli troops on the West Bank; Palestinian control over three villages near Jerusalem; the release of pre-1993 prisoners—in favour of a comprehensive, permanent-status settlement. (The only exception was the opening of a main road in Hebron, after considerable delay.)

Instead, Barak chose to make agreement with Syria his first priority. There were two reasons for this: firstly, such an accord looked relatively simple, compared to the emotionally loaded negotiations with the Palestinians; less explicitly, Barak foresaw that isolating the Palestinian leadership in this way might force them to agree to sign on to a final settlement on his terms. When the Shepherdstown talks with Syria foundered over a few metres of land along the water’s edge, due for demilitarization in any case—Barak’s hesitation here probably caused by anxiety over Syrian access to the Kinneret Lake, Israel’s main water reservoir—Barak decided to withdraw from Lebanon without an agreement, despite the opposition of his chiefs of staff: the sole accomplishment of his premiership. It was only then, in the summer of 2000, when the end of Clinton’s tenure (and, in retrospect, his own) was drawing near, that Barak finally found time to hold talks with the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership had been begging for concessions—especially the release of prisoners, the most painful issue for their people—to ease the pressure on it from below. On the one hand, the pa was expected to behave ‘like Ben-Gurion in the Altalena affair’, ordering an Etzel underground weapon ship to be sunk in 1948; a command that caused uproar among the Jewish population. On the other, it was unable to provide its people with any sign of success. The Intelligence Services warned of a weakening of the pa’s control and a strengthening of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad; Barak insisted that there would be no release of prisoners ‘with blood on their hands’ or territorial ‘concessions’ until a final status agreement had been reached. Before he was elected, Barak once said that he understood the Palestinians; that if he were one of them, he would join a terrorist organization. This, of course, immediately caused an uproar and Barak was forced to insist that he had been misconstrued, his remarks taken out of context, and so on. After reading Edelist’s book, one can believe him. He does not have, and has never had, any ability to empathize either with his adversaries or with his friends. This is without doubt one of the reasons for the failure of his negotiations with both Assad and Arafat and for his poor relations with fellow Israeli politicians, including members of his own party.

For by the summer of 2000, the seeds of mutual mistrust between Arafat and Barak had already been sown. Though the central negotiations conducted at Camp David were preceded by innumerable talks at all levels, these were unproductive. Arafat was opposed a priori to Barak’s approach—a freeze on the third, more extensive troop withdrawal and other previous Israeli commitments, and transition to talks on the conditions for a final comprehensive settlement—and still had nothing to display to an increasingly restive Palestinian populace as fruit of the Oslo accords. Yet because all the cards were in Israel’s hands, Arafat had no alternative but to agree to take part in Camp David.

The Israeli proposal, as transmitted to Clinton, was quite detailed. On territory, the Palestinians were to be offered 80:20—that is, 80 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be under the control and sovereignty of the Palestinian state; 20 per cent would be annexed to Israel, including seven settlement blocs which comprised around 80 per cent of the Jewish settler population; a viaduct would be built to link the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Earlier, the possibility of Israel holding a long-term lease on an additional 10 per cent of the West Bank along the Jordan Valley, ‘for security reasons’, had also been discussed. Later it would be argued that keeping the river under Israeli control was important mainly for Jordan, anxious about Palestinian irredentism and the possible unification of the two banks. The right of return would be recognized only with respect to the Palestinian state; while Israel would help in the rehabilitation of the refugees, it would not acknowledge any moral or legal responsibility for the creation of the problem. The municipal boundaries of Jerusalem would be expanded—apparently to include the annexation of Abu Dis, Azariya and a few other villages—so there would, nominally, be something to share. The intention was to leave most of the current area of the city under Israeli sovereignty; the additional territory would be sold to the Palestinians as their ‘Jerusalem’. A bypass road would then be paved around East Jerusalem to allow worshippers to reach the holy shrine of Haram al-Sharif, the Islamic ‘Noble Sanctuary’ and Jewish Temple Mount.

It should be recalled that the Palestinians, from their perspective, had already made the ultimate concession, and thus were without bargaining chips. In the Oslo agreements, they had recognized Israel’s right to exist in 78 per cent of historical Palestine in the hope that, following the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan—and on the basis of the Arab interpretation of unsc Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967—they might recover the remainder, with minor border adjustments. Yet—although later there was a certain slackening of Israeli demands—talk continued concerning annexation of another 12 per cent or so of the West Bank in order to create three settlement blocs, thus dividing the Palestinian state into separate cantons, with the connexions between them very problematic. The Palestinians called the portions allotted to them bantustans; but the original enclaves created by the Afrikaners for South African blacks were far better endowed than those of Barak’s ‘generous’ proposal.

Is it any wonder, then, that Arafat, who was aware of the coordinated American–Israeli position, was brought unwillingly to the summit? Even Edelist’s book indirectly supports Sontag’s argument, that ‘the Palestinians felt that they were being dragged to the verdant hills of Maryland to be put under joint pressure by an Israeli prime minister and an American president who, because of their separate political timetables and concerns about their legacies, had a personal sense of urgency.’ The Palestinians said they had been repeatedly told by the Americans that the Israeli leader’s coalition was unstable; after a while, they said, the goal of the summit meeting seemed to be as much about rescuing Mr Barak as about making peace. These were the reasons that most of the Palestinian delegation decided in advance to adopt a futile ‘bunker strategy’ of automatically refusing any proposal.

Arafat’s suspicions were confirmed when the short-fused Clinton launched a crude attack on him, impugning his honour. On another occasion, when the delegations got swept up into an argument over whether the remains of the Temple were indeed buried beneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque, it was the Protestant Clinton who gave a sermon on Solomon’s Holy Temple according to the Bible. One of the president’s Jewish aides intervened to save the embarrassing situation, commenting that this was the President’s personal opinion and did not reflect the official position of the United States. In his account of the Camp David meetings, Barak’s Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami has remarked that this episode reflects the extent to which Arafat was a prisoner of his own myths; what the incident really shows is the extent to which each side was sunk in myths of its own. This is apparently the chief reason why the talks ultimately fell apart over the status of the Temple Mount, despite the fact that the Palestinians had already agreed to a division of the city and Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall, in exchange for control over the rest of the area of the mosque and the Arab neighbourhoods.

During the course of the talks Barak did indeed agree to be ‘flexible’ about the Israeli proposals on the various issues, and was close to a territorial concession of over 92 per cent. But each proposal, and each issue, was discussed individually; and it was stressed that, until everything had been agreed upon, nothing was agreed. Thus the Palestinians were made discrete offers in many different areas, mainly out of the certainty that all would be rejected outright regardless, while the Palestinians—or so it was reported at the time—did not make any counter-proposals. Afterward, Barak could group together all the separate instances and claim that he had made an incomparably generous offer to the Palestinians.

When the summit failed, and with the remnants of his government now coming to pieces, Barak made his fateful declaration that there was ‘no partner’ on the Palestinian side. Clinton—also out of a decidedly personal interest—was true to his promise and backed him up. There were further so-called ‘non-talks’ and ‘non-papers’ in Taba where, according to some sources, the parties came closer to agreement than ever before. As far as Barak and Arafat were concerned, however, the game at Camp David was over. From that episode to armed conflict was just a question of time.

After seven years of futile talks that had failed to make any significant advance in the Palestinian cause—accompanied by the intensification of the Jewish colonization process in the Occupied Palestinian Territories—the question was not whether but when the anger and violence would erupt, and in what form. The Palestinians were not entirely unaware of the asymmetry in the power relations with Israel, but they changed the paradigm. From an attempt to end the occupation and achieve independence that relied upon diplomatic efforts and depended on the kindness of the Jews and Americans, they moved on to a ‘war for independence’, fuelled in part by religious emotions; the type of struggle in which the people are prepared to pay a high personal and collective price in order to achieve what they see as a paramount objective.

In this respect, Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount in 2000 was only the match that ignited the stores of fuel that Peres, Netanyahu and Barak had each amassed in turn. Barak had paved the way for Sharon’s victory in February 2001 with an unprecedented 52 per cent of the vote—a shift historically reinforced by the general election of January 2003, in which the right-wing bloc secured 69 out of 120 Knesset seats, and Sharon became the first Israeli Prime Minister to win a second term since Menachem Begin in 1981.

Under Sharon, Israel has become a state oriented towards one major goal: the politicide of the Palestinian people. Politicide is a process whose ultimate aim is to destroy a certain people’s prospects—indeed, their very will—for legitimate self-determination and sovereignty over land they consider their homeland. It is, in fact, a reversal of the process suggested by Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War and since then accepted as a standard international principle. Politicide includes a mixture of martial, political, social and psychological measures. The most commonly used techniques in this process are expropriation of lands and their colonization; restrictions on spatial mobility (curfews, closures, roadblocks); murder; localized massacres; mass detentions; division, or elimination, of leaders and elite groups; hindrance of regular education and schooling; physical destruction of public institutions and infrastructure, private homes and property; starvation; social and political isolation; re-education; and partial or, if feasible, complete ethnic cleansing, although this may not occur as a single dramatic action. The aim of most of these practices is to make life so unbearable that the greatest possible majority of the rival population, especially its elite and middle classes, will leave the area ‘voluntarily’. Typically, all such actions are taken in the name of law and order; a key aim is to achieve the power to define one’s own side as the law enforcers, and the other as criminals and terrorists. An alternative goal may be the establishment of a puppet regime—like those of the bantustans—that is completely obedient but provides an illusion of self-determination to the oppressed ethnic or racial community.

The hard facts are, however, that a Palestinian people exists, and the possibility of its politicide—or its being ethnically cleansed from the country—without fatal consequences for Israel, is nil. On the other hand, Israel is not only an established presence in the region but also, in local terms, a military, economic and technological superpower. Like many other immigrant-settler societies it was born in sin, on the ruins of another culture that had suffered politicide and partial ethnic cleansing—although the Zionist state did not succeed in annihilating the rival indigenous culture, as many other immigrant-settler societies have done. In 1948 it lacked the power to do so, and the strength of post-colonial sentiment at the time made such actions less internationally acceptable. Unlike the outcome in Algeria, Zambia or South Africa, however, the Palestinians were unable to overthrow their colonizers. The Jewish state in the Middle East succeeded in proving its viability, developing its own vital society and culture. Its long-term development and internal normalcy depend, however, on its recognition as a legitimate entity by the other peoples of the region. The peace accord signed with Egypt was, in this sense, Zionism’s second biggest victory. Its biggest was the Oslo agreement, in which the Zionist movement’s primary victim and adversary recognized the right of a Jewish state to exist in Palestine. Just as Sadat’s treaty with Begin was a delayed result of Israeli victory in the 1967 and 1973 wars, this revolutionary change in mainstream Palestinian political thought occurred in the aftermath of American victory in the Gulf War of 1991.

Similarly, it was in the run-up to its invasion of Iraq that the Bush Administration issued its new ‘Road Map’. Its goal is to close down all armed resistance to Israel in exchange for the establishment, within temporary borders, of an entity described as a ‘Palestinian state’ by the end of 2003. This is to be followed by the withdrawal of Israeli forces from pa territories and elections for a new Palestinian Council, leading to negotiations with Israel on a permanent agreement, to be reached by 2005. The so-called ‘Quartet’ of the us, eu, un and Russia is supposed to supervise implementation of the plan, which leaves all the matters in dispute—borders, refugees, status of Jerusalem, among others—open. This strategy fits well with Sharon’s tactic of buying time to continue his politicide policy—a tactic that rests on the assumption that Palestinian terrorist attacks will continue, drawing forth a correspondingly savage Israeli military response.

The effectiveness of Sharon’s approach was attested by a public opinion poll conducted in early December 2002. More than seven out of ten Palestinians and Israelis indicated that they were ready to undertake a settlement process based on the Palestinians refraining from violence and the Israelis agreeing to a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. Fewer than one in five Palestinians and Israelis (in both cases the percentages were remarkably similar) were committed to the idea of regaining historical Palestine or holding on to the Occupied Territories. However, a large proportion of both the Palestinian and Israeli majorities expressed no confidence in the readiness of the other side to give up violence or make the necessary concessions. Thus the bulk of Palestinians continued to support the use of violent methods in the Intifada, while a similar proportion of Israelis continued to favour a violent crackdown by the idf.

Being an able map-reader, Sharon has found the new Bush plan very convenient. Speaking in November 2002, he outlined a clear vision of how the conflict should be managed: with the implementation of the Road Map, Israel would be able to create a contiguous area of territory in the West Bank which, through a combination of tunnels and bridges, would allow Palestinians to travel from Jenin to Hebron without passing through any Israeli roadblocks or checkpoints. Israel would undertake measures such as ‘creating territorial continuity between Palestinian population centres’—that is, withdrawing from cities such as Jenin, Nablus and Hebron—as long as the Palestinians remain engaged in making a ‘sincere and real effort to stop terror’. Then, after the required reforms in the Palestinian Authority had been completed, the next phase of the Bush plan would come into effect: the establishment of a Palestinian state, within ‘provisional’ borders.

The intention is obvious. The ‘Palestinian state’ will be formed by three enclaves around the cities of Jenin, Nablus, and Hebron, lacking territorial contiguity. The plan to connect the enclaves with tunnels and bridges means that a strong Israeli presence will exist in most other areas of the West Bank. To drive the point home, Sharon added:

This Palestinian state will be completely demilitarized. It will be allowed to maintain lightly armed police and internal forces to ensure civil order. Israel will continue to control all movement in and out of the Palestinian state, will command its airspace, and not allow it to form alliances with Israel’s enemies.

Sharon knows very well that it would be virtually impossible for a Palestinian leader to end the conflict in exchange for such limited sovereignty and territory. However, the very mention of the code words ‘Palestinian state’—taboo in the right-wing lexicon—endows him with an image of moderation abroad and positions him at the centre of the domestic political spectrum. Such gestures also win him an almost unlimited amount of time to continue his programme of politicide, which throughout has received the unconditional support of Ehud Barak.

In the aftermath of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq—and the glaring failure to find any weapons of mass destruction—Washington is now attempting to burnish its image as a peacemaker by pushing the Road Map again. But while Western media attention has been taken up with the hudna, or truce agreement, by the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority, few remarked on the precise wording of Israel’s 26 May 2003 statement regarding its ‘adoption’ of the plan, which declared: ‘the Government of Israel resolves that all of Israel’s comments, as addressed in the [Bush] Administration’s statement, will be implemented in full during the implementation phase of the Road Map.’ In other words, it was not the map itself that was accepted but the fourteen conditions and reservations, each quite separate from the content of the original document. This allows Sharon to say that he has adopted his own version of the Road Map and gives Bush the chance to issue a statement about a ‘positive step’ and come to Aqaba for a photo opportunity.

The Israeli conditions, however, are based on an incorrect perception of the causality and logic of the conflict—the presumption that the root of the violence lies in ‘Palestinian terrorism’, rather than in Israel’s generation-long occupation and illegal colonization of Palestinian lands and its exploitation and harassment of the entire people. Thus the initial Israeli ‘condition’ states that: ‘In the first phase of the plan and as a condition for progress to the second phase, the Palestinians will complete the dismantling of terrorist organizations . . . and their infrastructure, collect all illegal weapons and transfer them to a third party’. Were the document’s framers to adopt a more accurate perspective on the historical and political causalities, they would propose the prompt termination of occupation, and withdrawal of Israeli military forces to the pre-1967 borders as the first—and not the last—phase of the process. Under such conditions, it would then make sense to demand that the sovereign Palestinian state cease its resistance against a non-existent occupation and act, gradually but forcefully, against terrorist organizations that might endanger its own authority or stability.

One of the main flaws of the Oslo accords was the assumption that the Palestinian Authority would be a subcontractor regime, working to maintain Israel’s security, while all other issues would be subject to endless rounds of negotiations with every concession depending on Israeli generosity. This approach proved futile. In addition, the collapse of the Oslo process showed that the long period of ‘trust building’ caused mainly mutual distrust and offered plenty of opportunities for internal projectionist forces to sabotage any agreements. A minimal requirement of a realistic peace plan is to give the Palestinians some possibility of achieving one of their major aims: a sovereign state over 22 per cent of historic Palestine. An explicit statement of this goal could create a greater symmetry among the parties and provide incentives for settling all the additional issues such as Jerusalem, refugees, the division of water resources and so on. Finally, the Road Map includes two contradictory demands on the Palestinians, as preconditions for a settlement: on the one hand, they are to establish an authoritarian regime to fight dissident terror organizations; on the other they are to democratize their polity. Again, the understanding of the causality at stake needs to be reversed, if this is not to be simply a hypocritical pretext for avoiding any agreement—for a settlement itself, with popular backing, might be the best means to accelerate the democratization of all the parties involved. Without, at the very least, such adaptations as these, the Road Map merely points the way to the continued politicide of the Palestinian people under the umbrella of a Pax Americana.
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Baruch Kimmerling - Wikipedia an Israeli sociologist

Baruch Kimmerling - Wikipedia

Baruch Kimmerling

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Baruch Kimmerling (Hebrew: ברוך קימרלינג‎; 16 October 1939 – 20 May 2007) was an Israeli scholar and professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Upon his death in 2007, The Times described him as "the first academic to use scholarship to reexamine the founding tenets of Zionism and the Israeli State".[1] Though a sociologist by training, Kimmerling was associated with the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who question the official narrative of Israel's creation.[2]

Biography[edit]

Baruch Kimmerling was born in the Transylvanian town of Turda, Romania in 1939.[3] He was born with cerebral palsy, a developmental disability which led him using on a wheelchair for the last three decades of his life.[2] His family narrowly avoided the Holocaust by escaping from Turda in a Romani wagon in 1944, after rumors of the imminent deportation of the Jews began circulating. During the journey, the wagon was strafed by a German plane. When the Kimmerling family returned to Turda after the war had ended, they discovered their property had gone.[3] The family immigrated to Israel in 1952, and took up residence in a ma'abara (immigrants' camp), Sha'ar ha-Aliya, before moving to a small apartment on the outskirts of Netanya.[4]

Despite his significant disabilities, which caused Kimmerling to experience motor difficulties and speech problems, his parents raised him as a typical child and encouraged him to strive high.[4] Exempt from conscription into the Israel Defense Forces, Kimmerling enrolled in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1963, and obtained his PhD in 1973 as a sociologist.[3] Kimmerling was known for his work analyzing pre-1948 Jewish settlement in Palestine in terms of colonialism.[2][5] He lectured widely and wrote nine books and hundreds of essays.[3] He also wrote numerous newspaper articles, in venues such as Haaretz and The Nation.[2][3] He held a chair at the University of Toronto.[3]

In August 1975, he married Diana Aidan, a Libyan-born immigrant from Italy who had moved to Israel from Naples in 1967, and was a doctoral student under Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz. She gave up her professional career to become a homemaker. The couple had three children: Shira (born 1976), Eli (born 1978), and Naama (born 1981).[4]

Kimmerling was an outspoken critic of Israeli policies, and spoke out on issues related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.[1] He was dubbed one of Israel's New Historians, and himself insisted that he was a patriotic Zionist dedicated to celebrating the diversities of cultures within Israel, and to the ideals of a secular state.[4] Kimmerling was an atheist, and lamented the inability of Jews and Arabs to "separate religion from nationality."[3] Unlike some critics of Israeli policy, he publicly opposed the proposed boycott of Israeli academics by the Association of University Teachers in the United Kingdom, arguing that it would "weaken the last public sphere of free thinking and free speech in Israel."[6]

Kimmerling died at the age of 67 after a long battle with cancer.[2] He was buried in the secular cemetery at Kibbutz Mishmarot, leaving his wife, Diana Aidan, and three children.[2]

Major publications[edit]

  1. Zionism and Territory: The Socioterritorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics. Berkeley: University of California, Institute of International Studies, 1983, 289 pages.
  2. Zionism and Economy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1983, 169 pages.
  3. The Interrupted System: Israeli Civilians in War and Routine Times. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1985. [229 pages]
  4. (As editor) The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, 330 pages
  5. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People. New York: Free Press, 1993, 396 pages. Paperback enlarged edition: Harvard University Press. Italian version: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1994. Enlarged Edition, 2002 [page 512]. Enlarged and revised Hebrew version: Keter, 1998, 300 pages. Arabic: Ramallah, 2001.
  6. The End of Ashkenazi Hegemony. Jerusalem: Keter, 2001, 124 pages (Hebrew).
  7. The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Culture and Military in Israel. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 268 pages.
  8. Politicide: Sharon's War Against the Palestinians. London: Verso, 2003.
  9. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003, 604 pages.
  10. Immigrants, Settlers, Natives: Israel Between Plurality of Cultures and Cultural Wars. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004 (Hebrew, 630 pages).
  11. Sociology of Politics: A Reader. Binyamina: The Open University, 2005 (Hebrew)
  12. Shuli bamerkaz: Sippur hayyim shel sotziolog tzibburi (Marginal in the Center: The Autobiography of a Public Sociologist), Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2007, 252 pages, (Hebrew)
  13. Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, 431 pages.
  14. Marginal at the Center: The Life Story of a Public Sociologist, Translated from the Hebrew by Diana Kimmerling, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2012, 258 pages.

References[edit]

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b "Professor Baruch Kimmerling". The Times. 14 June 2007. Retrieved 9 September 2011.
  2. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Haaretz Staff (22 May 2007). "Sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, 'new historian,' dies at age 67". Haaretz. Retrieved 9 September 2011.
  3. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g Joffe, Lawrence (26 June 2007). "Obituary: Baruch Kimmerling". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 September 2011.
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Karpel, Dalia (19 October 2006). "A life less ordinary". Haaretz. Retrieved 9 September 2011.
  5. ^ Lockman, Zachary (2009). "Review of Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies". Shofar. 28 (1): 179–181. doi:10.5703/shofar.28.1.179. ISSN 0882-8539.
  6. ^ Lynfield, Ben (12 May 2005). "British boycott riles Israeli academics". The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 10 September 2011.

External links[edit]

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