Israel Middle East

Engineer Arielle drives a train in Jerusalem, just like her great-great-grandfather, Engineer Ari. Except she drives a light rail train, and today is a special day. It's Israel's Independence Day! Arielle works all day taking people to their holiday destinations - but how will Arielle celebrate? Her brother Ezra, a pilot in the Israeli Air Force, has something special in mind.

Improbable, if not impossible. How could a people who’d been scattered for two millennia reestablish a homeland on their ancient soil? Against all odds, an irresistible desire to return grew in courageous Jewish men and women who set out to rebuild their decimated homeland. Help came first through Great Britain’s pledge to restore Palestine to the Jews. Britain, however, nearly reneged on that promise just as the Jews faced the Nazi Holocaust.

In David Ben-Gurion and the Foundation of Israeli Democracy, Nir Kedar offers a poignant study of the primary national founder of the State of Israel and the first prime minister of Israel. Kedar provides an explication of the making of Israeli democracy in terms of its institutional-legal structures and social-cultural underpinnings. David Ben-Gurion and the Foundation of Israeli Democracy connects the formal structures of democracy to the fundamental principles that they were constructed to serve—human freedom and dignity.

Based on three case studies from the Middle East, The Land beyond the Border advances an innovative theoretical framework for the study of state expansions and state contractions.