This chapter looks at Palestinian doctors’ interactions with their Jewish counterparts as both a political and a professional rivalry. Jewish doctors treated Arab patients, and Jewish and Arab doctors worked together in government institutions, shared clinics, consulted each other, and fought common enemies of morbidity and mortality on the same land. The chapter examines Jewish-Arab interdependency and rivalry, bringing forward its articulations in the Arab and Hebrew press while underlining the effects of intercommunal violence on this encounter and attempts at direct cooperation. At the heart of this chapter is the mass migration of German-Jewish doctors to Palestine following the Nazi takeover, and the ways in which it affected relationships within the medical profession.

This chapter examines a group of anticolonial and anti-imperialist intellectuals of different political persuasions thinking on Palestinian anticolonial national liberation at key moments in Palestinian history. It argues that central to these thinkers in their analysis of Palestine is a collapse in distinction between 1948- and 1967-occupied Palestine in Zionist settler-colonial ambitions in Palestine; the umbilical relationship between Zionism and US–Euro imperialism; as well as the centrality of Arab ruling classes to Zionist hegemony in Palestine.

Who was God for Schoenberg? And what did Schoenberg believe was the necessary human response? Schoenberg’s spiritual and intellectual path was long and winding, often iconoclastic, shaped by antisemitism and personal losses, and always characterized by a deeply personal quest for a transcendent truth – an Ideal or Idea [Gedanke] – that was at the same time intuitively known but inexpressible by human means. The path ultimately led him to a passionate Zionism, an unshakeable belief in ‘one, eternal, all-powerful, invisible and unrepresentable God’, and a corresponding ascetic spirituality that survived both inward anguish and political persecution.

The chapter explores the meanings of the word “philosemitism” before the Holocaust (late nineteenth century to 1945) and since then. It states the book’s main argument: the valorization of Jews in European liberalism from the Holocaust to the present. The chapter also includes a discussion of the existing literature on philosemitism.

Islamophobic and anti-immigrant parties in the European Union also found benefits in philosemitism. Postwar Europe had until then resisted Judeo-Christian civilizational discourse, but Islamophobia precipitated this conversion. The antisemites of yesterday, joined by culturally progressive “Enlightenment fundamentalists,” yearned for a Jewish-Christian alliance against “Islamo-fascism” and Muslim immigrants. Muscular Israel now symbolized Western resistance against Islam: For illiberal philosemites, the Jewish state showed weak liberal Europe the path to its survival. In Germany, “remembrance culture” hardened into a key symbol of national identity during the long Angela Merkel chancellorship (2005–21). In the Federal Republic, the nationalization of Holocaust memory translated into permanent alert against “imported” antisemitism, shielded the Holocaust from comparability, and affirmed Germany’s commitment to Israel’s security in the name of “reason of state.”

This chapter documents the mutation of the most preeminent form of non-Jewish defense of Jews since the late nineteenth century. From mere disapproval of prejudice, anti-antisemitism evolved in 1945 into a singular struggle against Jew-hatred. Leftist parties in liberated Western Europe continued to oppose antisemitism in the name of universal antiracism. But in Britain and France, anti-antisemite pioneers such as the Labour MP Richard Crossman, the Anglican scholar James Parkes, and above all the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, reframed antisemitism as a special ill – the problem of “contaminated” non-Jewish society. From London, George Orwell offered the first postwar critique of this view. To single out the Jew as “a species of animals different from ourselves,” he wrote, could only “make antisemitism more prevalent that it was before.” The Parisian thinker’s decisive contribution to “philosemitic Europe,” however, was to turn the “war on antisemitism” into a politics of pro-Jewish solidarity – a progressive stance also accepting of Zionism until 1967 and beyond.

Chapter I explores traditionally ‘non-hegemonic’ attributes as inherent to militarised masculinities in contemporary Israel, examining embodied compliance and submission to a higher order as a normalised means of ascending the ‘hierarchy of bodies’ that bolsters and undergirds the Zionist project from its outset. Exploring basic training, punishments, military hierarchy, friendship, camaraderie and death, I argue that the conscious performance of embodied submission (with enthusiastic consent) is as much valued within conscripted military masculinities as militarised domination in this context. Indeed, I suggest that the conscripted combat soldier – the archetypal national and masculine hero – must be both visibly dominant over the indigenous Palestinian ‘Other’, while simultaneously malleable and submissive to the goals of the Israeli state. As such, I explore both polarities of domination and submission as demanded within the parameters of idealised military masculinity – illustrating the gendered tensions that punctuate normative binaries in this militarised setting.

This chapter examines the legacy of the Holocaust in all dimensions of Israeli life. It considers the evolving policy landscape, including decisions regarding commemoration, education, and the prosecution of collaborators. It also traces the evolution of the cultural and political status of “survivors.” Initially, resistance fighters were treated as heroes, while ordinary survivors were viewed as passive weaklings unable to defend themselves. Both stances were part of a Zionist understanding of Israeli identity. Over time, especially in the 1960s with the Eichmann Trial and in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, a more nuanced, mournful view took hold that acknowledged the importance of survival itself as essential for Jewish identity in a precarious world.

Zionists wanted to reshape Jewish culture in the spirit of modern nationalism. They based their national vision on Jewish history and Jewish tradition but gave both a thoroughly modern interpretation. Instead of hiding their difference to ease their assimilation into the greater, non-Jewish society, they emphasized Jewish difference by giving it a distinct cultural character. They began by writing modern literature in Hebrew, their ancient language, and eventually turned Hebrew into a spoken language, the vernacular of their emerging national community. They organized the land they bought and settled in Palestine in new ways that expressed their revolutionary social and communal values and built new kinds of houses on it. Their new occupations as farmers, builders, and then soldiers reshaped their bodies, the clothes they wore, and the way the carried themselves. They renewed their festival calendar to celebrate and commemorate their innovations, and they developed new aesthetic sensibilities in visual art and music that expressed their cultural revolution in more abstract ways.

For nearly two centuries after the French Revolution, papal attitudes towards Judaism remained rooted in theological notions of the Jews as deicidal “others” whose salvation would only be achieved through repentance and conversion to Catholicism. Enlightenment notions of religious freedom and tolerance offered Jews an emancipation based on secular citizenship and assimilation, a development which repudiated the Church’s theological and eschatological views of Judaism. As a result, papal attitudes towards the Jews hardened through the nineteenth century, as popes associated emancipated Jews with liberalism, freemasonry, socialism, and democracy, the very ideologies which had undermined papal authority. It was not until the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) that the Church definitely repudiated its negation of the Abrahamic Covenant and the Jewish people. The council document Nostra aetate disavowed anti-Semitism in all forms and recognized Judaism as the wellspring from which the Church emerged, creating a template of interfaith kinship and cooperation which the modern papacy has embraced and expanded upon.

This chapter describes historical and contemporary advocacy and activism movements in Israel. The first of these movements was the push to revive the Hebrew language, transform it from a literate language into a vernacular, and make it a dominant and ideologically unifying tool for Jewish immigrants to Palestine (later Israel) throughout the twentieth century. Strong advocacy movements mobilized to achieve this goal, which eventually succeeded in achieving official status for the language from the British Mandate and forcing individuals to switch their home languages to Hebrew. While Hebrew is indeed a strong, vital and powerful force in Israel today, a new movement is taking place today whereby the language repertoires of individuals are being expanded, the home languages of immigrants are maintained and used, and a new multilingual educational policy is being developed and implemented. Descriptions of these advocacy movements and their activist workings will be analyzed in the context of the history of the nation.

The chapter analyzes the situation of Jews, Jewish organizations, Zionism, anti-Semitism, and the development of racist ideologies.