Amir Goldstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 3684812 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amir Goldstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amir |
| FAMILY NAME | Goldstein |
| SIGNATURE | GOLDSTEIN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tel Hai Academic College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2566-4909 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 28 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The missing explanation behind the 1977 ‘Upheaval’
This article revisits the 1977 political ‘upheaval’ in Israel by focusing on a development within the right that has received limited attention: the emergence of a ‘social wing’ from the early 1960s to 1977. It argues that the rise of the right cannot be fully understood without considering a shift in its socioeconomic outlook. Drawing on archival sources, party records, parliamentary debates, and contemporary press, the article traces the consol…
Workers divided
Commentary
From Partnership to Revolt
This article offers a historically grounded contribution to the debate on the relationship between Zionism and settler colonialism. Rather than determining whether Zionism should be defined as a settler-colonial project, the study employs settler colonialism as an analytical lens to examine how Zionist actors – specifically the Irgun (Hebrew: Etzel, National Military Organisation) – experienced and conceptualised their position within the colonia…
When the Israeli Right turned Left
Immigrant communities, core group teachers, and their role in shaping the image of local education systems
This article unfolds a micro-historical analysis of the growth of educational systems in new migrant towns established in the Israeli periphery, in the mid-twentieth century. There are profound differences in the nature of the educational systems that took shape in Kiryat Shmona and Hazor HaGlilit – two nearby towns where most of their residents arrived in about the same period, mainly from Asian and African countries. These differences provide a…
From historical bloc to mediating party
From Contemptible Terrorists to National Heroes
The ‘fires of destruction,’ Warsaw, August 1938? On the posthumous invention of Jabotinsky’s well-known annihilation prophecy
Ze'ev Jabotinsky is one of the most fascinating figures among the leaders of the Zionist movement and founder of the right-wing political movement in Zionism. Many of his disciples and followers have attributed to him, and still do, a realistic assessment and even prophetic prediction of the Holocaust of European Jews during World War II. At the core of the pervasive cultivation of the myth lies a speech whereby the Zionist leader - it is claimed…
War and peace within the Israeli Right (1970 - 1978)
Right-wing ethno-nationalist parties are conceived of as upholders of rigid foreign policy positions. But in what instances might a hawkish party pursue a peace-promoting policy? The present article seeks to examine this question through the case study of the hawkish-nationalist Right in Israel during the 1970s, which eventually led its leader Menachem Begin to sign a peace agreement with Egypt, entailing a commitment to a full Israeli withdrawal…
Generational crossover
The ‘Movement for the Entire Land of Israel’, was formed by activist members of the Labour movement shortly after the June 1967 war. Its founders struggle for “Greater Israel” and espoused the establishment of settlements that would secure the Israeli hold on the territories occupied during the war. During the 1970s, however, the movement had effectively come to be spearheaded by Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), a newly-created religious-natio…
Tel Hai, 1920-2020
The Zionist pilgrimage to Tel Hai
The pilgrimage to Tel Hai, which was made by Zionist youth movements during the Mandate period, forged a dynamic and vibrant arena, fostering the encounter of youths with a national sacred site. This annual rite instantiates the two main approaches in the study of pilgrimage. The journey to Tel Hai and the participation in the commemoration ceremonies increased intra-movement fraternity and cohesion. Concomitantly, the sojourn in the holy site, a…
From reconciliation to confrontation
The Zionist-Israeli Right and the Kibbutz Movement have shared a longstanding and powerful historical rivalry, but their interrelationships were more complex than presented in historiography and recollected in public consciousness. This article seeks to systematically lay out, for the first time, the interfaces between Menachem Begin, the parties under his leadership and the kibbutzim. The discussion will focus on two periods: the first, which ha…
Menachem Begin and the question of the settlements
This paper has sought to examine Menachem Begin’s considerations on the issue of the settlements in the territories occupied by Israel in the decade prior to his becoming prime minister. In those years, the gap between what Begin defined as the role of his party—the gatekeeper against an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank—vis-à-vis its actual scanty settling activity was striking. The core of the article tackles the repeated attempts made by a…
Identification and alienation
This article focuses on Aliza Levenberg, an educator who taught at a Kiryat Shmona high school at the beginning of the 1960s. For three years Levenberg, a middle class Western European, travelled every week from her home in Tel Aviv to the poor town in the northern periphery of Israel, the inhabitants of which were mainly immigrants from Islamic countries. Levenberg was a productive writer. Her most famous book, Kiryat Shmona Chapters, tells of h…
The Roots of the Gallows Myth in the Revisionist Movement During the 1930s
The article examines the background to that defining moment in the history of the Revisionist Movement – the hanging of Shlomo Ben-Yosef by British-Mandatory authorities in Palestine in the summer of 1938. I will focus on the analysis of the cognitive processes that accompanied it, and argue that the myth of the gallows preceded the gallows. The myth of the Zionist gallows was born out of conceptual, social, and identity permutations which took p…
On collective assertiveness and activism during the immigration process
This article focuses on the ways in which over 200 families of Yemenite immigrants, who founded the city of Kiryat Shmona, the development town situated at the edge of Israel's Northern District, functioned as a group during the immigration process. This case study coincides with the trend – within research of mass immigration to Israel – that relates the historical narrative through the perspective of the immigrant and settler groups, rather tha…
The Creation of the Likud and the Struggle for the Identity of the Alternative Party
This article demonstrates how the process that eventually led to the founding of the Likud party in the fall of 1973, alongside the goal of creating an effective alternative to the Labor movement, was actually a failed attempt to diminish the influence of Begin and Herut within the Likud. Herut’s new and old partners wished to effect—through the creation of the Likud—a change in the identity and character of the alternative party. Contrary to exp…
Haaretz newspaper, the capitalist agenda and Menachem Begin’s political legitimacy
During the 1960s, the Haaretz newspaper was a staunch supporter of the key political decisions made by Menachem Begin, thus playing a significant role in reinforcing his legitimacy and that of his Herut movement. On the one hand, this support was motivated by the desire to transform Israel’s socialist economy into a freer and less government-controlled market. On the other hand, it stemmed from the aspiration to democratise Israel’s political lif…
The End of Evolutionary Zionism—Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian Pogroms
The final years of the First World War and the new world order that followed became a transitional period in the life of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940). During those years he came to transcend the boundaries of Russian Zionism and rose from being a key Zionist activist in Imperial Russia to becoming an acknowledged Zionist leader. This period also confronted him with the bloodbath that swept Jewish communities in Eastern Europe—his home gr…
Who represented the Israeli middle class? The crystallization of the General Zionists from 1948 to 1949
The establishment of the State of Israel was a watershed moment in the history of the General Zionists movement. The ending of the British Mandate – characterized by its responsiveness to private enterprise – symbolized the denouement of a regulatory strategy era as an exclusive modus operandi for the general organizations. The transfer of power to a participatory Jewish democracy, whereby independent institutions drew on electoral support, requi…
Partial establishment – Menachem Begin, Gahal and the Black Panthers
This paper aims to shed further light on the response of Israeli society to the rise of the Black Panthers in 1971 by examining the attitude adopted by Menachem Begin and Gahal to the emerging Mizrahi protest movement. After discussing in detail Begin’s response to the Black Panthers’ protest, this paper analyses the factors that contributed to the divide between the Panthers and Israel’s leading opposition party at that time, and the criticism l…
Menachem Begin and Gahal in the run-up to the June 1967 war
This article discusses the causes and processes that drove Menachem Begin and his Gahal party into the Israeli cabinet during the three-week waiting period preceding the June 1967 war (or Six Day War as it is commonly known). A close examination of Begin’s behaviour reveals a calculated political move aimed at exploiting deep processes within the Israeli political establishment in general, and its right-wing factions in particular. This sheds fre…
The Kibbutz and the Development Town
The article examines the socio-economic interaction between the kibbutzim of the Upper Galilee and Kiryat Shmona during the first decade of the town’s existence. The main consideration behind the support of most Upper Galilee kibbutzim for the establishment of Kiryat Shmona was the urgent need for laborers to help dominate the new extensive areas belonging to Arab villages in the Hula Valley. The completion of the draining of the Hula swamp a dec…
The Roots of the Gallows Myth in the Revisionist Movement During the 1930s
The article examines the background to that defining moment in the history of the Revisionist Movement – the hanging of Shlomo Ben-Yosef by British-Mandatory authorities in Palestine in the summer of 1938. I will focus on the analysis of the cognitive processes that accompanied it, and argue that the myth of the gallows preceded the gallows. The myth of the Zionist gallows was born out of conceptual, social, and identity permutations which took p…
The Zionist pilgrimage to Tel Hai
The pilgrimage to Tel Hai, which was made by Zionist youth movements during the Mandate period, forged a dynamic and vibrant arena, fostering the encounter of youths with a national sacred site. This annual rite instantiates the two main approaches in the study of pilgrimage. The journey to Tel Hai and the participation in the commemoration ceremonies increased intra-movement fraternity and cohesion. Concomitantly, the sojourn in the holy site, a…
On collective assertiveness and activism during the immigration process
This article focuses on the ways in which over 200 families of Yemenite immigrants, who founded the city of Kiryat Shmona, the development town situated at the edge of Israel's Northern District, functioned as a group during the immigration process. This case study coincides with the trend – within research of mass immigration to Israel – that relates the historical narrative through the perspective of the immigrant and settler groups, rather tha…
Who represented the Israeli middle class? The crystallization of the General Zionists from 1948 to 1949
The establishment of the State of Israel was a watershed moment in the history of the General Zionists movement. The ending of the British Mandate – characterized by its responsiveness to private enterprise – symbolized the denouement of a regulatory strategy era as an exclusive modus operandi for the general organizations. The transfer of power to a participatory Jewish democracy, whereby independent institutions drew on electoral support, requi…
Menachem Begin and Gahal in the run-up to the June 1967 war
This article discusses the causes and processes that drove Menachem Begin and his Gahal party into the Israeli cabinet during the three-week waiting period preceding the June 1967 war (or Six Day War as it is commonly known). A close examination of Begin’s behaviour reveals a calculated political move aimed at exploiting deep processes within the Israeli political establishment in general, and its right-wing factions in particular. This sheds fre…
Olei Hagardom
This article examines the interaction between official memory and popular memory through the case study of Olei Hagardom – Jewish underground fighters executed by the British in Mandatory Palestine. Studies of collective memory usually maintain that the ruling elite, with its control of state resources, dominates collective memory formation. However, the case of Olei Hargardom demonstrates the potentially limited power of institutional commemorat…
Immigrant communities, core group teachers, and their role in shaping the image of local education systems
This article unfolds a micro-historical analysis of the growth of educational systems in new migrant towns established in the Israeli periphery, in the mid-twentieth century. There are profound differences in the nature of the educational systems that took shape in Kiryat Shmona and Hazor HaGlilit – two nearby towns where most of their residents arrived in about the same period, mainly from Asian and African countries. These differences provide a…
Identification and alienation
This article focuses on Aliza Levenberg, an educator who taught at a Kiryat Shmona high school at the beginning of the 1960s. For three years Levenberg, a middle class Western European, travelled every week from her home in Tel Aviv to the poor town in the northern periphery of Israel, the inhabitants of which were mainly immigrants from Islamic countries. Levenberg was a productive writer. Her most famous book, Kiryat Shmona Chapters, tells of h…
The Creation of the Likud and the Struggle for the Identity of the Alternative Party
This article demonstrates how the process that eventually led to the founding of the Likud party in the fall of 1973, alongside the goal of creating an effective alternative to the Labor movement, was actually a failed attempt to diminish the influence of Begin and Herut within the Likud. Herut’s new and old partners wished to effect—through the creation of the Likud—a change in the identity and character of the alternative party. Contrary to exp…
Haaretz newspaper, the capitalist agenda and Menachem Begin’s political legitimacy
During the 1960s, the Haaretz newspaper was a staunch supporter of the key political decisions made by Menachem Begin, thus playing a significant role in reinforcing his legitimacy and that of his Herut movement. On the one hand, this support was motivated by the desire to transform Israel’s socialist economy into a freer and less government-controlled market. On the other hand, it stemmed from the aspiration to democratise Israel’s political lif…
The End of Evolutionary Zionism—Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian Pogroms
The final years of the First World War and the new world order that followed became a transitional period in the life of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940). During those years he came to transcend the boundaries of Russian Zionism and rose from being a key Zionist activist in Imperial Russia to becoming an acknowledged Zionist leader. This period also confronted him with the bloodbath that swept Jewish communities in Eastern Europe—his home gr…
Partial establishment – Menachem Begin, Gahal and the Black Panthers
This paper aims to shed further light on the response of Israeli society to the rise of the Black Panthers in 1971 by examining the attitude adopted by Menachem Begin and Gahal to the emerging Mizrahi protest movement. After discussing in detail Begin’s response to the Black Panthers’ protest, this paper analyses the factors that contributed to the divide between the Panthers and Israel’s leading opposition party at that time, and the criticism l…
The Kibbutz and the Development Town
The article examines the socio-economic interaction between the kibbutzim of the Upper Galilee and Kiryat Shmona during the first decade of the town’s existence. The main consideration behind the support of most Upper Galilee kibbutzim for the establishment of Kiryat Shmona was the urgent need for laborers to help dominate the new extensive areas belonging to Arab villages in the Hula Valley. The completion of the draining of the Hula swamp a dec…
Half-heartedly
This article seeks to add another dimension to the growing and extensive research on right-wing Zionism, by returning to an era when the Likud was first created. I will examine the major difference between processes that have led to the two key landmarks in the formative years of the Right in Israel: the establishment of Gahal in April 1965 and the founding of the Likud in August–September of 1973. While Gahal's establishment was a product of a p…
Olei Hagardom
This article examines the interaction between official memory and popular memory through the case study of Olei Hagardom – Jewish underground fighters executed by the British in Mandatory Palestine. Studies of collective memory usually maintain that the ruling elite, with its control of state resources, dominates collective memory formation. However, the case of Olei Hargardom demonstrates the potentially limited power of institutional commemorat…
The kibbutz and the ma’abara (transit camp)
This article examines the relations between the kibbutzim of the Upper Galilee and the Khalsa (Kiryat Shmona) transit camp in its early years. This test case represents a microcosm of the encounter between veteran pioneers and new immigrants, between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, between those who regarded themselves as the avant-garde of the Labor Zionist movement and new immigrants whose fate symbolized the mass aliyah. The kibbutzim played a decisi…
Partial establishment – Menachem Begin, Gahal and the Black Panthers
This paper aims to shed further light on the response of Israeli society to the rise of the Black Panthers in 1971 by examining the attitude adopted by Menachem Begin and Gahal to the emerging Mizrahi protest movement. After discussing in detail Begin’s response to the Black Panthers’ protest, this paper analyses the factors that contributed to the divide between the Panthers and Israel’s leading opposition party at that time, and the criticism l…
Menachem Begin and Gahal in the run-up to the June 1967 war
This article discusses the causes and processes that drove Menachem Begin and his Gahal party into the Israeli cabinet during the three-week waiting period preceding the June 1967 war (or Six Day War as it is commonly known). A close examination of Begin’s behaviour reveals a calculated political move aimed at exploiting deep processes within the Israeli political establishment in general, and its right-wing factions in particular. This sheds fre…
The Kibbutz and the Development Town
The article examines the socio-economic interaction between the kibbutzim of the Upper Galilee and Kiryat Shmona during the first decade of the town’s existence. The main consideration behind the support of most Upper Galilee kibbutzim for the establishment of Kiryat Shmona was the urgent need for laborers to help dominate the new extensive areas belonging to Arab villages in the Hula Valley. The completion of the draining of the Hula swamp a dec…
Half-heartedly
This article seeks to add another dimension to the growing and extensive research on right-wing Zionism, by returning to an era when the Likud was first created. I will examine the major difference between processes that have led to the two key landmarks in the formative years of the Right in Israel: the establishment of Gahal in April 1965 and the founding of the Likud in August–September of 1973. While Gahal's establishment was a product of a p…
The Creation of the Likud and the Struggle for the Identity of the Alternative Party
This article demonstrates how the process that eventually led to the founding of the Likud party in the fall of 1973, alongside the goal of creating an effective alternative to the Labor movement, was actually a failed attempt to diminish the influence of Begin and Herut within the Likud. Herut’s new and old partners wished to effect—through the creation of the Likud—a change in the identity and character of the alternative party. Contrary to exp…
Haaretz newspaper, the capitalist agenda and Menachem Begin’s political legitimacy
During the 1960s, the Haaretz newspaper was a staunch supporter of the key political decisions made by Menachem Begin, thus playing a significant role in reinforcing his legitimacy and that of his Herut movement. On the one hand, this support was motivated by the desire to transform Israel’s socialist economy into a freer and less government-controlled market. On the other hand, it stemmed from the aspiration to democratise Israel’s political lif…
The End of Evolutionary Zionism—Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian Pogroms
The final years of the First World War and the new world order that followed became a transitional period in the life of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940). During those years he came to transcend the boundaries of Russian Zionism and rose from being a key Zionist activist in Imperial Russia to becoming an acknowledged Zionist leader. This period also confronted him with the bloodbath that swept Jewish communities in Eastern Europe—his home gr…
Who represented the Israeli middle class? The crystallization of the General Zionists from 1948 to 1949
The establishment of the State of Israel was a watershed moment in the history of the General Zionists movement. The ending of the British Mandate – characterized by its responsiveness to private enterprise – symbolized the denouement of a regulatory strategy era as an exclusive modus operandi for the general organizations. The transfer of power to a participatory Jewish democracy, whereby independent institutions drew on electoral support, requi…
The Roots of the Gallows Myth in the Revisionist Movement During the 1930s
The article examines the background to that defining moment in the history of the Revisionist Movement – the hanging of Shlomo Ben-Yosef by British-Mandatory authorities in Palestine in the summer of 1938. I will focus on the analysis of the cognitive processes that accompanied it, and argue that the myth of the gallows preceded the gallows. The myth of the Zionist gallows was born out of conceptual, social, and identity permutations which took p…
On collective assertiveness and activism during the immigration process
This article focuses on the ways in which over 200 families of Yemenite immigrants, who founded the city of Kiryat Shmona, the development town situated at the edge of Israel's Northern District, functioned as a group during the immigration process. This case study coincides with the trend – within research of mass immigration to Israel – that relates the historical narrative through the perspective of the immigrant and settler groups, rather tha…
Menachem Begin and the question of the settlements
This paper has sought to examine Menachem Begin’s considerations on the issue of the settlements in the territories occupied by Israel in the decade prior to his becoming prime minister. In those years, the gap between what Begin defined as the role of his party—the gatekeeper against an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank—vis-à-vis its actual scanty settling activity was striking. The core of the article tackles the repeated attempts made by a…
Identification and alienation
This article focuses on Aliza Levenberg, an educator who taught at a Kiryat Shmona high school at the beginning of the 1960s. For three years Levenberg, a middle class Western European, travelled every week from her home in Tel Aviv to the poor town in the northern periphery of Israel, the inhabitants of which were mainly immigrants from Islamic countries. Levenberg was a productive writer. Her most famous book, Kiryat Shmona Chapters, tells of h…
Generational crossover
The ‘Movement for the Entire Land of Israel’, was formed by activist members of the Labour movement shortly after the June 1967 war. Its founders struggle for “Greater Israel” and espoused the establishment of settlements that would secure the Israeli hold on the territories occupied during the war. During the 1970s, however, the movement had effectively come to be spearheaded by Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), a newly-created religious-natio…
Tel Hai, 1920-2020
The Zionist pilgrimage to Tel Hai
The pilgrimage to Tel Hai, which was made by Zionist youth movements during the Mandate period, forged a dynamic and vibrant arena, fostering the encounter of youths with a national sacred site. This annual rite instantiates the two main approaches in the study of pilgrimage. The journey to Tel Hai and the participation in the commemoration ceremonies increased intra-movement fraternity and cohesion. Concomitantly, the sojourn in the holy site, a…
From reconciliation to confrontation
The Zionist-Israeli Right and the Kibbutz Movement have shared a longstanding and powerful historical rivalry, but their interrelationships were more complex than presented in historiography and recollected in public consciousness. This article seeks to systematically lay out, for the first time, the interfaces between Menachem Begin, the parties under his leadership and the kibbutzim. The discussion will focus on two periods: the first, which ha…
War and peace within the Israeli Right (1970 - 1978)
Right-wing ethno-nationalist parties are conceived of as upholders of rigid foreign policy positions. But in what instances might a hawkish party pursue a peace-promoting policy? The present article seeks to examine this question through the case study of the hawkish-nationalist Right in Israel during the 1970s, which eventually led its leader Menachem Begin to sign a peace agreement with Egypt, entailing a commitment to a full Israeli withdrawal…
From Contemptible Terrorists to National Heroes
The ‘fires of destruction,’ Warsaw, August 1938? On the posthumous invention of Jabotinsky’s well-known annihilation prophecy
Ze'ev Jabotinsky is one of the most fascinating figures among the leaders of the Zionist movement and founder of the right-wing political movement in Zionism. Many of his disciples and followers have attributed to him, and still do, a realistic assessment and even prophetic prediction of the Holocaust of European Jews during World War II. At the core of the pervasive cultivation of the myth lies a speech whereby the Zionist leader - it is claimed…
When the Israeli Right turned Left
Immigrant communities, core group teachers, and their role in shaping the image of local education systems
This article unfolds a micro-historical analysis of the growth of educational systems in new migrant towns established in the Israeli periphery, in the mid-twentieth century. There are profound differences in the nature of the educational systems that took shape in Kiryat Shmona and Hazor HaGlilit – two nearby towns where most of their residents arrived in about the same period, mainly from Asian and African countries. These differences provide a…
From historical bloc to mediating party
The missing explanation behind the 1977 ‘Upheaval’
This article revisits the 1977 political ‘upheaval’ in Israel by focusing on a development within the right that has received limited attention: the emergence of a ‘social wing’ from the early 1960s to 1977. It argues that the rise of the right cannot be fully understood without considering a shift in its socioeconomic outlook. Drawing on archival sources, party records, parliamentary debates, and contemporary press, the article traces the consol…
Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (24 works) · Political science (22 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Politics (15 works) · History (13 works) · History (13 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (12 works) · Political economy (9 works)