Uri Ram - The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem

GLOBALIZING REGIONS

Globalizing Regions offers concise accounts of how the nations and regions of the world are experiencing the effects of globalization. Richly descriptive yet theoretically informed, each volume shows how individual places are navigating the tension between age-old traditions and the new forces generated by globalization.

Australia by Anthony Moran

Global Hong Kong by Gary McDonogh and Cindy Wong

On Argentina and the Southern Cone by Alejandro Grimson and Gabriel Kessler

The Koreas by Charles Armstrong

China and Globalization: The Social, Economic, and Political Transformation of Chinese Society by Doug Guthrie

Morocco by Shana Cohen and Larabi Jaidi

Global Ireland: Same Difference by Tom Inglis

The Netherlands by Frank J. Lechner

Forthcoming:

Global Iberia by Gary McDonogh

Global Indonesia by Jean Gelman Taylor

Global Iran by Camron Michael Amin

The Philippines by James Tyner

Turkey by Alev Cinar

Brazil and Globalization by Fiona Macaulay and Mahrukh Doctor

The Globalization of Israel

McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem

URI RAM

Published in 2008
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The front-cover photo depicts the new business district in Tel Aviv, along the Ayalon Highways, which is walking distance from where I live. The initial reaction of the Routledge staff to the photo was somewhat disapproving, because, as I was told, the photo is not particularly recognizable as Israel and looks to us like it could be any city. I was delighted. I couldn't have phrased a better motto for a book that shows Israel to be a capitalist society in the global era. Of course there are things that are recognizable as Israel in the book, but it argues, on the whole, that they inexorably take the shape of any city in our globalizing world.

Globalization of Israel offers a new paradigm for the study of contemporary Israeli society. It argues, in a nutshell, that under the impact of globalization, Israel is being bifurcated into two polar oppositescapitalism versus tribalism, or McWorld versus Jihadthat contradict and abet each other dialectically. It argues, furthermore, that this bifurcation overlaps to a significant extent with socioeconomic divisions on one hand and with political-cultural divisions on the other hand. The winners and the losers of globalization render their distinct class experiences into divergent cultural identities, and neoliberal economics and neonationalist politics grow simultaneously, if contradictorily.

The book is a culmination of a long period of my grappling with questions that emerged in the 1990s, when the consequences of globalization began to be sensed in Israel, though the theory of globalization was barely familiar there. What puzzled me most was the dichotomous nature of the changes that swamped Israel: postmodernity in Tel Aviv versus neofundamentalism in Jerusalem; high-tech industrial parks in the center versus sacred sites of veneration in the peripheries; an exclamation of constitutional revolution versus an adherence to ethnonationalistic principles. During the 1990s the Israeli economy underwent an informational revolution and a neoliberal turn, Israeli society underwent deep class polarization, Israeli popular culture underwent McDonaldization, Israeli political culture underwent Americanization, and Israeli national ideology became a bone of contention between die-hard Zionists and radical critics. All the while Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accord; Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's prime minister, was assassinated; a second Palestinian intifada broke out; and the Oslo Accord crumbled. The analytical challenge I undertook was to weave all this into a systemic comprehensive sociological account. Globalization of Israel, with the bifurcation model at its core, is the fruition of this endeavor. On a normative level, the book also represents my anxiety as an Israeli in the face of the moral quandary of my society, which results from the growing discrepancy between the country's democratic posture and its ethnonationalist practice. This issue is tackled head-on by the concept of post-Zionism that is articulated throughout the book.

was aided by a grant from the Burda Center for Innovative Communications at Ben Gurion University (2000). I am grateful to the United States Institute for Peace, in Washington, D.C., for a generous grant that enabled a year of research and writing (20002001). The content of this book and the opinions expressed in it do not necessarily refect those of the United States Institute for Peace or any of the other institutions mentioned previously. I want to extend my gratitude also to Yitzhak Binyamini and Idan Zivoni, editors at Resling Publishers in Tel Aviv, whose enthusiastic welcoming of a former Hebrew version of this book (2005) helped me with the compilation of the distinct parts of my research into an integrated book. Finally I want to thank the editors at Routledge who accepted the manuscript and accompanied its production into the final product that it is.

Some of the chapters of this book are revised and updated versions of articles that had been previously published in scholarly journals, and I thank the publishers for their permission to return to these texts and rearticulate them in this book. The detailed list of acknowledgments appears after the preface. An article that I published in the journal