Israeli Culture On The Road To The Yom Kippur War

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While many scholars have tried to explain why Israel was caught unawares despite its sophisticated military intelligence services, Dalia Gavriely-Nuri looks beyond the military, intelligence, and political explanations to a cultural explanation. Israeli Culture on the Road to the Yom Kippur War reveals that the culture that evolved in Israel between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War played a large role in the surprise.

Gavriely-Nuri's analysis provides new and innovative insights into the relationship between culture and socio-political phenomena and security. Review: The vast corpus of data and Gavriely-Nuri's analytical multidisciplinary training provide an original description of the cultural and social undercurrents which have characterized the Israeli society during its transition from a state of euphoria into states of shock, guilt, and regret during the period between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.

Gavriely-Nuri is attentive to various kinds of cultural and communication codes, to military, security, and political perspectives as well as a vast range of cultural products and symbolic elements. The result is an original and complex book that explains the factors contributing to the surprise of the Yom Kippur War. -- Tamar Sovran, Tel Aviv University Gavriely-Nuri convincingly shows the power that culturally shared narratives can have in linking the personal and the political/military worlds.

Israeli Culture on the Road to the Yom Kippur War provides important lessons on the strong role that such narratives can play in how groups do and do not think and act. -- Alan Cienki, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and Moscow State Linguistic University This is a highly original and important work that develops and deepens Dalia Gavriely-Nuri's research on discourses of Israeli war and peace.

Analyzing an outstanding corpus of cultural texts -including plays, literature, and songs -both illuminates the cultural understandings of the Yom Kippur War and allows Gavriely-Nuri to examine the continued prominence, significance, and influence of the war in Israeli cultural life, particularly in terms of the unpredictability of attack.

The result is a skilled and sophisticated appraisal of the role that socially and culturally situated language use plays in normalizing, or contesting, war. -- John E. Richardson, Loughborough University Israeli Culture on the Road to the Yom Kippur War makes a central contribution to understanding war discourse in general and the normalization of war in Israeli post-1967 culture in particular.

It demonstrates how the Israeli war-normalization discourses established before and after the Six Days War developed into a dominant national narrative and conceptual framework, which led to (and was shattered by) the surprise of the Yom Kippur war. It convincingly relates the study of discourse with the analysis of political decision taking and ideological justification. -- Andreas Musolff, University of East Anglia