Jewish Network for Palestine Zoom Webinar
The IDF and the Israeli Arms Trade
Dr. Shir Hever and prof. Haim Bresheeth-Zabner discuss their books on the topic and react to audience queries.
Date: 5th December, 17:00 London Time, Chaired by David Cannon, JNP
Join: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86552523773?pwd=VmpXaG9CZUFnU3ErQlF2eEJvZWJPUT09
Meeting ID: 865 5252 3773
Shir Hever
Dr. Shir Hever is an independent economic researcher and journalist based in Germany, and is a graduate of the Freie Universität in Berlin. His second book: Privatization of Security in Israel, was published by Pluto Press in 2017. He is a board member of the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East.
On Privatization of Security in Israel (Pluto Press, 2017)
Israel’s security industry transformed between 1994 and 2014 to become one of the most extreme examples of privatized security in the world. The Privatisation of Israeli Security explores the reasons for this transformation, and explains how it reflects a deep crisis of the Israeli security elite. The Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation, US military aid and the neoliberal wave struck at the collectivist and militaristic nature of Israeli security and pushed military, police and intelligence officers to the private sector, while the actual use of violence in the daily reaffirmation of racist discrimination is stripped of its veneer of professionalism, outsourced and decentralized. The emergence of the Palestinian Authority as a subcontractor of the occupation during this period undermined the monopoly of the Israeli security forces in maintaining colonial order and cracked the hegemony of the generals in the political sphere.
Haim Bresheeth-Zabner
Professor Haim Bresheeth-Zabner is a filmmaker, photographer and a film studies scholar. His books
include the best-selling Introduction to the Holocaust (with Stuart Hood), also published in Turkish, Croatian and Japanese. His edited volumes include The Gulf War and the New World Order, (with Nira Yuval-Davis) published in 1992 by Zed Books, His films include the widely shown State of Danger (1989, BBC2) and London is Burning, (2012).
On An Army Like No Other: How the IDF Made A Nation. (Verso, 2020)
The Israeli army, officially named the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), was established in 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, who believed that “the whole nation is the army.” In his mind, the IDF was to be an army like no other. It was the instrument that might transform a diverse population into a new people. Since the foundation of Israel, therefore, the IDF has been the largest, richest and most influential institution in Israel’s Jewish society and is the nursery of its social, economic and political ruling class. In this fascinating history, Bresheeth-Zabner charts the evolution of the IDF from the Nakba to wars in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and the continued assaults upon Gaza, and shows that the state of Israel has been formed out of its wars. He also gives an account of his own experiences as a young conscript during the 1967 war. He argues that the army is embedded in all aspects of daily life and identity. And that we should not merely see it as a fighting force enjoying an international reputation, but as the central ideological, political and financial institution of Israeli society. As a consequence, we have to reconsider our assumptions on what any kind of peace might look like.
