Review of Nitzan and Bichler's "The Global Political Economy of Israel"

FROM THE REVIEW: "It is easy to get trapped in the web of silk threads that Nitzan and Bichler interweave in this fascinating manuscript on international politics and national-global capitalism. . . . 'The Global Political Economy of Israel' is one of the most important books on political-economics. It presents a critical and coherent picture of Israel's development from the 'national' phase to the global and manages to derive insights on the forms of making a ruling class. For that reason, the book is not only for Israeli readers. The book can be addressed to researchers and students of political and social geography all over the world, who are interested in state theory and in processes of accumulation and globalization – mainly in relation to the intensification of multi-national corporations and transnational capitalism"

Academic discourse on making new towns in Israel: three approaches in social science

This paper places the making of twenty-eight new development towns in the Israeli periphery at the junction of political ideologies, spatial policy, and academic discourse. The objective of the paper is to delineate the policy of making the development towns and the reasons explaining their relatively disadvantaged state against the backdrop of three master approaches in the social sciences in the 20th century: the modernist – functionalist approach, particularly the planning perspective within this approach; the neo-Marxist approach; and the colonial approach. Each places the planning and establishment of the new towns within a wider political context and sociospatial structure, hence suggesting different explanations for the backwardness. Yet, combining the approaches yields a comprehensive picture of the towns. Finally, the juxtaposition of these master approaches with the making of new towns elucidates the contribution of geography and public policy to the general discourse in social science. That said, it also exposes the weaknesses of the modern and rational approaches, and portrayed public policy and spatial planning as ingredients of multilayered control and domination, which are expressed in cultural (ethnic), geographical, and economic terms.