Fortress Israel PDF Download

Author: Patrick Tyler
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374281041
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
In the late 1940s, David Ben-Gurion founded a unique military society: the state of Israel. A powerful defense establishment came to dominate the nation, and for half a century Israel's leaders have relished continuous war with the Arabs with an unblinking determination.

Author: Simon Dunstan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1846038154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
The Bar Lev Line along the Suez Canal was born out of the overwhelming victory of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in the Six Day War of 1967. Devastated by their defeat, the Egyptian army bombarded Israeli positions, causing many casualties. Accordingly, the IDF Chief of Staff, General Haim Bar-Lev, ordered the construction of a series of fortified positions named the Bar Lev Line. Each position was surrounded by barbed wire and minefields and virtually immune to strikes by artillery shells and even 500kg bombs. On 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur, the positions were manned by just 436 reservists when the Egyptian Second and Third Armies launched a massive offensive along the Suez Canal. The positions were quickly cut off from the supporting elements, and the Israeli defenders paid a high price with a casualty rate of almost 50 per cent. Despite these losses, it was not the Bar Lev Line that failed but Israel's military and political establishment, which realised Arab intentions too late.

Author: Samuel Rocca
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1782005218
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
This book provides a detailed study of the fortifications of the founders of ancient Israel from the time of their first settlement in the Middle East, through the periods of the united and divided kingdoms, until the sack of Jerusalem in 586 BC. It begins in the period of Israelite settlement in the First Iron Age period (1200–1000 BC). The extensive fortifications created by the famous kings Saul, David and Solomon are covered, including Gibeah, Jerusalem, Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer, which are described in the Bible. The period of the Divided Monarchy saw the creation of two separate political entities: the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The enemies the two kingdoms faced in this period included Moab, Edom, and the Arameans as well as the mighty empires of Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt. This book is a must-have for fans of warfare in the ancient Middle East.

Author: Robert R. Wilson
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451417456
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Using comparative anthropology to get at the social dimensions of prophetic activity, Robert Wilson's study brings the study of Isrealite prophecy to a new level. Looking at both modern societies and Ancient Near Eastern ones, Wilson sketches the nature of prophetic activity, its social location, and its social functions. He then shows how these features appear in Israelite prophecy and sketches a history of prophecy in Israel.

Author: Rolf Rendtorff
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451417661
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The Old Testament is a collection of writings which came into being over a period of more than a thousand years in the history of the people of Israel and which reflect the life of the people in this period. Therefore, there is a reciprocal relationship between the writings or "books" of the Old Testament and the life of Israel in its history. The understanding of the texts presupposes insights into the historical context and the development of the life of Israelite society, while at the same time the texts themselves are the most important, indeed for the most part the only, source for it. This "Introduction" attempts to take account of this reciprocal relationship. The first part deals with the history of Israel. However, its approach differs from most accounts of this history. It takes the Old Testament texts themselves as a starting point and first of all outlines the picture of historical developments and associations which the texts present. An attempt is then made, on this basis, to reconstruct historical developments by introducing material from outside the Bible. This method of working leads to close connections between the second and third parts, because it has to take account of the nature and original purpose of the texts and their function within the biblical books as they are now. The second part attempts to present the texts collected in the Old Testament as expressions of the life of Israel. The third part discusses the books of the Old Testament in their present form.

Author: Nachman Ben-Yehuda
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299148335
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
In 73 A.D., legend has it, 960 Jewish rebels under siege in the ancient desert fortress of Masada committed suicide rather than surrender to a Roman legion. Recorded in only one historical source, the story of Masada was obscure for centuries. In The Masada Myth, Israeli sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda tracks the process by which Masada became an ideological symbol for the State of Israel, the dramatic subject of movies and miniseries, a shrine venerated by generations of Zionists and Israeli soldiers, and the most profitable tourist attraction in modern Israel. Ben-Yehuda describes how, after nearly 1800 years, the long, complex, and unsubstantiated narrative of Josephus Flavius was edited and augmented in the twentieth century to form a simple and powerful myth of heroism. He looks at the ways this new mythical narrative of Masada was created, promoted, and maintained by pre-state Jewish underground organizations, the Israeli army, archaeological teams, mass media, youth movements, textbooks, the tourist industry, and the arts. He discusses the various organizations and movements that created “the Masada experience” (usually a ritual trek through the Judean desert followed by a climb to the fortress and a dramatic reading of the Masada story), and how it changed over decades from a Zionist pilgrimage to a tourist destination. Placing the story in a larger historical, sociological, and psychological context, Ben-Yehuda draws upon theories of collective memory and mythmaking to analyze Masada’s crucial role in the nation-building process of modern Israel and the formation of a new Jewish identity. An expert on deviance and social control, Ben-Yehuda looks in particular at how and why a military failure and an enigmatic, troubling case of mass suicide (in conflict with Judaism’s teachings) were reconstructed and fabricated as a heroic tale.

Author: Theodore Hiebert
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195092058
Category : J document (Biblical criticism)
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
In this book Theodore Hiebert re-examines these assumptions, and offers a new understanding of the role of nature in biblical thought.

Author: Martin Connolly
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1526737167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
A chronological history of the Jewish people—from the earliest attempts to establish a homeland during Biblical times to the creation of Israel. More than seventy years ago in 1948, the State of Israel came into being amidst great controversy. How did the state arise? What led to the founding of Israel? This book sets out to give a chronological journey of the Jewish people from the time Abraham came out of the land of Ur three thousand years ago, until six million of them died in the horror of the Holocaust under Hitler and his Nazi regime. It recounts the many expulsions from the land in which they lived, the suffering under Babylonians, Greeks, Persians, the destruction of their temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, and finally, genocide and the expulsion by the Romans in 132 AD creating a diaspora across the world. The Jews would be charged with killing God and throughout the following centuries would be expelled from countries, burned alive after being locked in synagogues or at the stake, have all their property seized, and get herded into ghettoes. All of this until that fatal Holocaust, which attempted to wipe them from the face of the earth. This book recounts their story to achieve a homeland, using a wide-range of historical documents to tell the story of humiliation, suffering, poverty, and death. It tells of religious persecution that would not let them rest, and as their journey enters the twentieth century, gives a behind-the-scenes look at how governments manipulated the Middle East and exacerbated divisions.

Author: Nathaniel Deutsch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300258372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
The epic story of Hasidic Williamsburg, from the decline of New York to the gentrification of Brooklyn "A rich chronicle of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg. . . . This expert account enlightens."—Publishers Weekly “One of the most creative and iconoclastic works to have been written about Jews in the United States.”—Eliyahu Stern, Yale University The Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups of people in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a group of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely opposed the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg’s Hasidim rejected assimilation while still undergoing distinctive forms of Americanization and racialization, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.

Author: Jodi Magness
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216770
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The dramatic story of the last stand of a group of Jewish rebels who held out against the Roman Empire, as revealed by the archaeology of its famous site Two thousand years ago, 967 Jewish men, women, and children—the last holdouts of the revolt against Rome following the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple—reportedly took their own lives rather than surrender to the Roman army. This dramatic event, which took place on top of Masada, a barren and windswept mountain overlooking the Dead Sea, spawned a powerful story of Jewish resistance that came to symbolize the embattled modern State of Israel. Incorporating the latest findings, Jodi Magness, an archaeologist who has excavated at Masada, explains what happened there—and what it has come to mean since. Featuring numerous illustrations, this is an engaging exploration of an ancient story that continues to grip the imagination today.