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This article explores how age became racialized in the context of British Mandate Palestine (1917–48). Specifically, it charts European Zionist discourses about how Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews aged in different ways. These discourses, which I call “age talk,” played an important role in the court case of Rachel Habshush Ohevet-Ami. In June 1939, Ohevet-Ami, a young Jewish woman of Yemeni and Moroccan descent, disguised herself as an “Arab” and attempted to execute an attack targeting Palestinians in Jerusalem. In her ensuing trial, two questions would decide Ohevet-Ami’s fate: How old was she? And who had the power to decide? As this article searches for an answer, it addresses questions along the way that lie at the heart of the history of British Mandate Palestine about what it meant to be an Arab or a Jew, an “oriental” or a “European,” a terrorist or a freedom fighter, and a child or an adult.

A major controversy in the Land of Israel under the British Mandate for Palestine was whether or not the leadership of the Yishuv had the authority to subject the greatest possible number of Jewish sectors to its own policies without the jurisdiction of a sovereign government. The article focuses on the spring-summer of 1947, when the British executed Zionist underground members of Etzel and Lehi, and anti-British sentiment surged in the Yishuv, challenging the earlier consensus on authority A national myth about the fortitude and sacrifice of the martyred men \"hung on the gallows\" was promulgated by the Etzel as the crowning expression of \"Triumph of defeat\" that would end British rule. The hope of the Etzel and the fear of the Yishuv leadership was that the gallows affair would shift various groups in the direction of the \"dissenters from national authority.\" Trials, rescue efforts, mourning over the hanged martyrs and exposure to the Etzel (and Lehi) propaganda greatly increased support for the Irgun. The struggle with Mapai leadership would be tested vis-a-vis the impact of what it regarded as the \"poisonous magic\" of the gallows, as well as its endeavors to create a formula of evolutionary Zionism which would prove an antidote to the myth of the \"gallows martyrs.\"

A major controversy in the Land of Israel under the British Mandate for Palestine was whether or not the leadership of the Yishuv had the authority to subject the greatest possible number of Jewish sectors to its own policies without the jurisdiction of a sovereign government. The article focuses on the spring-summer of 1947, when the British executed Zionist underground members of Etzel and Lehi, and anti-British sentiment surged in the Yishuv, challenging the earlier consensus on authority. A national myth about the fortitude and sacrifice of the martyred men \"hung on the gallows\" was promulgated by the Etzel as the crowning expression of \"Triumph of defeat\" that would end British rule. The hope of the Etzel and the fear of the Yishuv leadership was that the gallows affair would shift various groups in the direction of the \"dissenters from national authority.\" Trials, rescue efforts, mourning over the hanged martyrs and exposure to the Etzel (and Lehi) propaganda greatly increased support for the Irgun. The struggle with Mapai leadership would be tested vis-à-vis the impact of what it regarded as the \"poisonous magic\" of the gallows, as well as its endeavors to create a formula of evolutionary Zionism which would prove an antidote to the myth of the \"gallows martyrs.\"

How do terrorist groups control their members? Do the tools groups use to monitor their operatives and enforce discipline create security vulnerabilities that governments can exploit?The Terrorist's Dilemmais the first book to systematically examine the great variation in how terrorist groups are structured. Employing a broad range of agency theory, historical case studies, and terrorists' own internal documents, Jacob Shapiro provocatively discusses the core managerial challenges that terrorists face and illustrates how their political goals interact with the operational environment to push them to organize in particular ways. Shapiro provides a historically informed explanation for why some groups have little hierarchy, while others resemble miniature firms, complete with line charts and written disciplinary codes. Looking at groups in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, he highlights how consistent and widespread the terrorist's dilemma--balancing the desire to maintain control with the need for secrecy--has been since the 1880s. Through an analysis of more than a hundred terrorist autobiographies he shows how prevalent bureaucracy has been, and he utilizes a cache of internal documents from al-Qa'ida in Iraq to outline why this deadly group used so much paperwork to handle its people. Tracing the strategic interaction between terrorist leaders and their operatives, Shapiro closes with a series of comparative case studies, indicating that the differences in how groups in the same conflict approach their dilemmas are consistent with an agency theory perspective. The Terrorist's Dilemmademonstrates the management constraints inherent to terrorist groups and sheds light on specific organizational details that can be exploited to more efficiently combat terrorist activity.

The map of Palestine appended to the British Mandate document was used for many years as the emblem of the Revisionist movement and its political successors even after the establishment of the state. It became the most recognizable of all Revisionist symbols. But why would the Revisionists who fought bitterly against British rule and viewed themselves as those who helped precipitate its end, sanctify a map drawn up for the purposes of the Mandate? Why would they embrace a map with borders drawn by France and Britain to accommodate their own vested interests, entirely disconnected from history, geography, or demography, let alone Zionist aspirations? The unembellished Mandate map first appeared as a Revisionist symbol on the masthead of Hamashkif, the organ of the Revisionist movement (published from late 1938 to 1949). Its use as the logo of a newspaper under the editorship of Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky attests to a shift in Revisionist ideology: The masthead of Hayarden, the daily that preceded Hamashkif, bore a different map. After its appearance in Hamashkif, the Mandate map was also incorporated as the emblem of the Etzel underground movement, superimposed with a hand holding a rifle. After the establishment of the State of Israel, the unembellished map became the emblem of the Herut movement and remained so throughout the movement's existence as a political entity (until 1988). The conventional view that this map symbolizes sovereignty over the historic Land of Israel on both sides of the Jordan River in keeping with Jabotinsky's famous poem “The East Bank of the Jordan,” is not borne out by the facts and even conflicts with what the author of the poem is trying to say, as we shall explain below. The article explores the attitude of the Revisionist movement and its organizations to British rule with a focus on differences of opinion within the movement and how these led to the adoption and “canonization” of iconic maps.

The article presents a short history of the Matzpen group and aims at scrutinizing their history as a possible approach to broader questions of Jewish, Israeli, and general history. Starting with the political origins of the group as split from Israeli communism, it concentrates mostly on Matzpen's dealing with the Palestine conflict. Based on a socialist “horizon of expectation”, Matzpen struggled for a so-called de-Zionization of Israeli society and simultaneously for the recognition of Israeli Jewry as a Hebrew Nation within the Arab world. It concludes by discussing the central tension arising from the Israeli Left's struggle for a Hebrew nation and a socialist revolution. It led them to maintain distance from a new collective notion of Jewishness after Auschwitz, which regarded the existence of a Jewish state as a guarantee for Jewish life after the Holocaust.

Zionism was inspired as a movement--one driven by the search for a homeland for the stateless and persecuted Jewish people. Yet it trampled the rights of the Arabs in Palestine. Today it has become so controversial that it defies understanding and trumps reasoned public debate. So argues prominent British writer Jacqueline Rose, who uses her political and psychoanalytic skills in this book to take an unprecedented look at Zionism--one of the most powerful ideologies of modern times. Rose enters the inner world of the movement and asks a new set of questions. How did Zionism take shape as an identity? And why does it seem so immutable? Analyzing the messianic fervor of Zionism, she argues that it colors Israel's most profound self-image to this day. Rose also explores the message of dissidents, who, while believing themselves the true Zionists, warned at the outset against the dangers of statehood for the Jewish people. She suggests that these dissidents were prescient in their recognition of the legitimate claims of the Palestinian Arabs. In fact, she writes, their thinking holds the knowledge the Jewish state needs today in order to transform itself. In perhaps the most provocative part of her analysis, Rose proposes that the link between the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state, so often used to justify Israel's policies, needs to be rethought in terms of the shame felt by the first leaders of the nation toward their own European history. For anyone concerned with the conflict in Israel-Palestine, this timely book offers a unique understanding of Zionism as an unavoidable psychic and historical force.

The Israeli Socialist Organization (ISO) known later as Matzpen was founded in 1962 but did not earn much notice until after the 1967 Six- Day War when it attracted great attention, chiefly for being the first Israeli organization to speak against Israel abroad. The rhetoric that characterized Matzpen was largely based on a historical analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The article argues that Matzpen underwent significant ideological shifts that influenced and at times changed the way it perceived historical events retroactively. A systematic reading of Matzpen's publications from its seminal book in 1961 until the end of 1972, reveal that unlike the common notion, transitions in Matzpen's view regarding the nature of Zionism and its relation to the Western powers in the Middle Eastern context, occurred also before the Six-Day War. The War was merely one important turning point in a process of de-Zionization.

Begin claimed that such rumors would only strengthen the Irgun's opponents and impede its activities in Israel. [...]Begin demanded that Kook concentrate his efforts entirely on procuring arms and ammunitions for the fighters in Israel, because, according to Begin, the future of the Zionist struggle for national independence lay in the military front and not in the campaign to bring immigrants to Israel. The insistence of Jewish leaders to claim that there is a universal Jewish people, which allows every Jew to be a member of the American, Russian, Argentinean and even the German nation and at the same time to be a member of the 'Jewish people,' is utterly unrealistic and politically meaningless. . [...]we want the Land of Israel to be a free state and not a 'Jewish State' . . On the contrary it strengthens it.24 To Agassi this Kookian premise that views Israel as a theocracy-a community that, just like the traditional Jewish ghetto, is defined by a common religion and not by a common national identity and national institutions-not only prevents Israel from becoming a normal nationstate, but also perpetuates the tensions between the Jewish state and the Arab world. [...]according to Agassi, the conclusion that needs to be drawn from Kook's observations about the anomalous condition of the Jewish State is that the intentional blurring of the differences between religion and nationalism in Israel contributes greatly to the continuing state of war between Israel and the Arabs, and that this state of war, in return, maintains the ghetto-like character of Israeli society. According to Agassi's interpretation of Kook's ideas, Israel's existence as a theocracy prevents it from achieving peace with the Arab world because the mostly Muslim Arab world would never tolerate a foreign religious entity in its midst-especially one that also treats its own Arab population as second-class citizens.