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The commitment to improving scientific literacy is voiced by governments throughout the world. One of the main objectives is the development of an informed and active citizenry able to participate in decision-making processes concerning socio-scientific issues (SSIs). There is a growing literature which suggests that engaging with the complexity of SSIs demands a high level of critical-thinking skills. These skills include: open-mindedness, independence, and scepticism. This three-year long study attempted to develop an intervention which will, in particular, provide subjects with an ability to be more open-minded, evaluate counter opinions, and respect those holding such opinions. The importance of developing an ability to value the ‘other' emerged from years of teaching academic English within an Israeli university, where initiating fruitful classroom discussion was problematic. The lack of dialogue resulted from individuals voicing strongly held opinions and seeming to be unable to acknowledge, and evaluate opposing views. This project was designed as an action research study. Both quantitative and qualitative data was collected, and analysed within an interpretive framework. As both the researcher and researched, many of my teaching methods were modified during the course of this study, including the introduction of pair-work in class. The study was conducted in three cycles over three consecutive years, primarily with two classes (one humanities and one science) in the pre-academic, mechina, program of an Israeli university. The mechina is a year-long programme and the students I taught had a single semester of English. This meant that three different cohorts of students were studied, (there were always 25-30 students in each class, so about 50 students were studied each year). The classes I taught were proficient in English, and were required to do a research project as part of the course. This project became my intervention. I developed a project based on devil's advocate which required them to choose an SSI that interested them, write a statement of their opinion, and then, much to their astonishment, find evidence to support the counter opinion. I gave a lesson on how to evaluate sources available on the internet. Although the project was set up as a standard research exercise, which is what they expected, the majority of students identified that this project made them more aware of the value of counter opinions – more ‘open-minded'. The primary method for collecting feedback on the project, and on other aspects of my course, utilized a projective technique – students wrote their views anonymously on a piece of paper; these are then analysed by coding the responses. This study also employed questionnaires, which were given to all students. These showed that the majority had little or no science education in high school, and yet registered high levels of interest in science and technology on a three-level Likert item. These findings add support to research that shows the more science studied in high school the lower the interest in the subject. Furthermore, by including a standard VOSTS (Views On Science-Technology-Society) I was able to show that my students believed the general public should participate in governmental decisions relating to SSIs. Responses to open-ended questions showed that most students, including those in the humanities, believed everyone should take science courses at university, and should have science classes in school (though not the current curriculum). In conclusion, this research indicated that interest in science was not related to studying the current school science curriculum. And feedback from the intervention demonstrated that students could be aware of a change in their cognitive skills, and independently acknowledge the importance of being open-minded – an important step towards promoting an active, informed, scientifically literate society.

The Israeli Communist Party (MKI) and its precursor, the Communist Party of Palestine (PKP), were a unique Arab-Jewish organization. Marginalized and persecuted for most of its formative years, the Communist Party developed, from 1919 to 1965, its own distinctive subculture. Negating and absorbing the Zionist-Socialist and Israeli statist cultures, influenced by both Soviet and left wing European traditions as well as Jewish traditional elements, the Jewish Communists developed their own cycle of holidays. Through the examination of primary sources, ranging from internal Communist documents and newspaper articles to photographs and posters, as well as interviews with contemporaries and comparison with parallel Communist experiences in the United States and in the Arab world – this thesis examines the myths and rituals reflected in the holidays, as practiced by the Jewish Communists in MKI and the Israeli Young Communist League (Banki). The thesis scrutinizes the identity these cultural practices produced. By examining the Jewish holidays, the Israeli civic holidays, May Day, the Soviet November 7th and May 9th holidays, and the rituals concerning the relations between Palestinians and Jews, it is shown that between the years 1919 and 1965 the Jewish Communists created a local, Jewish-Israeli, anti-Zionist patriotic identity. This identity, although sensitive to the working class, was not a working-class identity; it was philo-Soviet and interested in civic rights of Palestinians. A minority of Party Members were Palestinians. The thesis concludes that, nevertheless, the Jewish Communists were not able to withstand the attempts of some factions among themselves to favor the nationalist over the socialist principles. Burdened by the weight of the conflict between Arabs and Jews, the MKI finally split in 1965, ending a significant phase in the development of Communist subculture in Israel.

This dissertation interrogates the political use of the past in global politics, with a focus on Israel/Palestine. Collective memory is mostly theorised in IR as determinant of national identities. Similarly, in the field of Memory Studies, collective memory is mostly confined to “Methodological Nationalism.” My main argument is that while national narratives purport to be stand-alone stories of the past, or monological narratives, they are in fact in constant negotiation with other stories of that past, they are dialogical. Furthermore, their dynamic transcends the boundaries of the nation state and of transnational institutional politics. To encapsulate these cross-narrative intertextual relationships into a framework that would enable productive analysis, I suggest the re-articulation of the dialogical relationships as transnational constellations, which focus first and foremost on the narratives themselves.

Cohabitation in contested territories is extremely difficult, especially when there is an occupying power and an occupied people sharing the same area and have limited access to each other's exclusive domains. Throughout history, these conditions have been temporal - usually, one of the two powers gains control of the area and the other is exiled or forced to assimilate. In the case of the city of Hebron in the Occupied West Bank/Israel this will never be a reality. Due to its religious importance to Jews, Muslims, and Arabs, Hebron will always be seen by the state of Israel and the nation of Palestine as "theirs", a condition formalized as part of The Protocol Concerning the Redeployment in Hebron of 1997. As a result of the protocol the city was meticulously segregated down to the block and building scale. Currently, 80% of Hebron is Palestinian (H1) while 20% is Israeli (H2). Even though Palestinian Hebron is larger, it is under complete Israeli military control while H2's only constraint is limited entry H1. These divisions are extremely complex as there is no wall around the city to differentiate both "neighborhood nations." Hebron is a complex metropolis of layers assigned by altitude, religious affiliation and military strategy. Hebronites experience various privileges and restrictions depending on their national affiliation, a reality that incubates resentments between both communities. The thesis aims to create nationless spaces, unaffiliated "engineered paradises" deployed at the urban scale, to provide a respite from the toxicity of the Arab-Israeli conflict. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

The Israel-Palestine conflict has lasted for 60 years. Within these years, there are five main wars between the Jews and Arabs, and two Palestinian intifada. The Oslo Accord in 1993 once built up the hope of peace, but ended in failure. Palestinians still live under Israeli occupation, stay abroad as refugees, or live in Israel as second-class citizens. ¡@¡@For Edward Said, the question of Palestine is definitely not a conflict between civilizations, it is one between the colonists and the colonized. Said puts great emphasis on the causality of the building of Israel and the Palestinian dispossession; also, he thinks that the identity is not discovered but established. He tried to break the myth of dualism in the Israel-Palestine conflict situation, opposed the kind of ideology of difference which leads to domination, and find the real problem of this long-lasting conflict.

The apparent tension between Israel as a democracy and Israel as a specifically Jewish state has played a central role in much academic and popular debate about the region. Taking an actor-centred perspective of national subject and citizenship formation, this thesis treats Jewish nationalism and democratic citizenship not simply as abstractions, but as categories lived out in the everyday lives of Jewish Israeli youth. The ethnography focuses on secular and religious Jewish Israeli high school teens as they approach conscription age and begin to make decisions about their rights and responsibilities as Jewish Israeli citizens. This is done in a context of their school, recreational, and family life. Through the engagement of these youth with processes around the Disengagement from Gaza, which saw the radicalisation of existing conflicts between “secular” and “religious” Jews, I show how these teens reproduce Jewish democracy in their everyday lives, taking it from an abstract conundrum to an un-ambiguous way of being Israeli. What might be considered paradoxical in fact resembles what I consider the multiplexity of Jewish Israeli identity that considers the multiple ethnic, religious, and civic resources that constitute Jewish Israeli national subjectivity. The tensions between democratic citizenship and Jewish nationalism are therefore productive of a particular form of identity. The particular focus of the thesis is how and why Jewish Israeli youth reproduce Jewish nationalism, and subsequently how people themselves construct a sense of nationhood through the shared experiences of kin and peers. This ultimately establishes the nation as not only an “imagined community” but a tangible network of shared experiences, rooting it in intimate relationships that inspire feelings of national connectedness. The vagueness of why people would want to contribute to an abstract society is partly understood in an Israeli context through looking at the intimate familial motivations behind doing military service. The fact that the majority of Israeli teens still consider military service a vital constituent of Israeli civic identity and national membership reveals the moral boundaries that continue to be derived from civic republicanism and ethno-nationalism that comprise the experience of being in the army and Jewish democracy as a whole. Through the attitudes of Jewish Israelis and the IDF towards draft avoidance and conscientious objection one is able to appreciate how the ethnic and civic forms of citizenship that constitute the experience of military service establish certain contours of national belonging. This provides a contemporary understanding of Jewish Israelis‟ engagement with civic-republicanism and ethno-nationalism, showing the ways both the state and Jewish Israelis expect other Jewish nationals to show commitment to the Israeli state. My ethnography on state rituals illuminates how official state narratives converge with subjective national experiences. As well as trying to reinforce particular forms of nationalism, individuals take part in state rituals for their own reasons revealing the emotional aspect of nationalism and hence the fresh ways people interpret national discourses.

This thesis is the result of ethnographic research carried out in an Israeli academic institution, located in the West-Bank of Israel/Palestine. Focusing on the social science department, the research examines the content and context of the study of social anthropology in this institute namely, The Academic College of Judea & Samaria ('The ACJS'), and analyses the ways in which Israeli identity is being understood and imagined by its students. Part One of the thesis examines the broad academic and geo-political context of the study of social anthropology in The Academic College of Judea & Samaria (The ACJS). This part includes three chapters: The first chapter presents an historical analysis of 'Israeli Social Anthropology' as a (Zionist) national tradition of ethnographic research. The second chapter is an introduction to the research of citizenship in Israel/Palestine and to the related concept of Israeliness as a 'culture of citizenship'. It includes an analysis of the West-Bank of Israel/Palestine as a disputed geo-political entity and a (political) no man's land within the international system of nation-states. The third chapter is an outline of the Jewish-Israeli settlement project in the West-Bank of Israel/Palestine, and also introduces the reader to the WB settlers. Part Two of the thesis is ethnographic and includes three chapters. The first chapter is ethnography of the West-Bank settlement-town where the ACJS is located, Ariel 'Settlementown'. This chapter incorporates a new descriptive method in political anthropology or, in the 'anthropology of the political', that of ‘sensing the political’ (Navaro-Yashin, 2003). The second and third chapters of the ethnographic part describe and analyze 'everyday life' in the ACJS itself, focusing on its social sciences department. It examines the way in which social anthropology is taught in the ACJS, and the ways in which Israeli identity is imagined and understood by its students. The summary of the thesis includes a triple hierarchical model of Israeli citizenship, based on this research, as well as suggestions for further research in the field of political anthropology and the anthropology of citizenship. The analytical focus of this research is Israeli citizenship and the concept of Israeliness as a 'culture of citizenship'. The research set itself as a search for the ways in which Israeliness was expressed and practiced in the 'everyday life' of people in the ACJS, and especially among its social science students and faculty. Studying Israeliness as a culture of citizenship implies adopting a new and different way of conceptualizing and understanding Israeli identity. Instead of adopting the Zionist political image of a (Jewish) national community, a view which, as has been the situation also in Israeli Social Anthropology, excludes non-Jewish citizens of Israel, the concept of Israeliness as a 'culture of citizenship' offers a new image of an Israeli political identity/community, one that includes all citizens of the State of Israel, regardless of their ethnic/religious identity and belonging. Thus, it is intended that the main contribution of this thesis will be to 'Israeli Social Anthropology' in filling these methodological and theoretical Lacunae, and in showing a way out of what appears to be a conceptual dead-end which it had reached concerning the interpretation and representation of Israeli identity. This intention seems even more advisable in the particular case of Israel/Palestine, where an adoption of the more inclusive discourse of 'citizenship' might contribute towards ‘Peace Education’, so much needed today as part of the long-term efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This thesis provides an explanation of why Israel in the years between 1988 and 1994 decided on what might be termed a path to peace with both the Palestinians and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It argues that, in Israel, peacemaking that entails any form of territorial concession is largely an issue that can be best understood in terms of domestic politics. Accordingly, at the heart of this thesis lies the assumption that the key to explaining Israel's road to peace lies in an appreciation of the dynamics of Israel's domestic politics. Part at least of this story is an understanding of certain key moments in the formation of Israeli thinking about movement towards a peace with the Palestinians. The thesis therefore examines the impact of the Intifada on Israeli thinking as well as detailing crucial turning points in domestic politics, not least Labour's electoral victory in 1992 and the subsequent formation of the most dovish government in Israel's history. The thesis also pays attention to the politics of personality and the role of key figures, such as Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, in the politics that permitted Israel's move to peace. To facilitate such an understanding, the study employs some analytical concepts from what might be described as the 'middle-range' theories, for example the so-called Bureaucratic Politics Model but its judgements are also fundamentally informed by both interview and primary source material. Hence, overall the thesis looks at the internal dynamics of Israeli peacemaking and demonstrates that, although external factors are certainly, as the last chapter argues an important part of the story, the decision to make peace was also rooted in the dynamic complex domestic politics of Israel.

Thesis advisor: Eve Spangler / This work explores how Israel uses LGBTQ issues as a rhetorical device (pinkwashing) in its self-presentation and examines how American college students perceive the claim that Israel is a ‘gay haven.’ Understanding the Israel/Palestine conflict from a human rights approach, I deconstruct the racial and gendered implications of the pinkwashing campaign by analyzing literature about homonationalism, pinkwashing, and queer activism. Interviews with fifteen student leaders from Zionist, pro-Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, and LGBTQ organizations reveal how students engage with LGBTQ issues and the Conflict, as well as the institutional, cultural, and interactional factors that influence how organizations program. Interview analysis demonstrates that when pinkwashing occurs, some students use media, protests, and conversations to provide an alternative discourse. In conclusion, the findings demonstrate that pinkwashing does happen on college campuses, and anti-pinkwashing activism occurs most often in the form of queer anti-Occupation organizing. Anti-Occupation activism necessitates an intersectional approach if it is to gain human rights for all Palestinians. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Sociology.