Davis, Uri

Uri Davis

Apartheid Israel: a critical reading of the Geneva Accords

1 April 2004Feature Uri Davis

In the face of the lack of progress in any official “peace process” in Israel/Palestine, there have recently been some unofficial proposals prepared - by peace campaigners or by less entrenched politicians on each side. The highest profile of these initiatives, the Geneva Accords, came from a group including former Israeli and Palestinian Authority ministers last November.

The aim was to provide a tangible demonstration that, contrary to Israeli claims, a partnership for Israeli-…

Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender And Nation

1 December 2002Review Uri Davis

(Sage Publications, 1997 (Reprinted 1998), ISBN 0 8039 8664 5 157pp)

Nira Yuval-Davis' Gender and Nation is presented by the author as the culmination of her work in the areas of gender and ethnic studies beginning with her work in the 1980s on gender relations in Israel and the ways they have related to the Zionist settlement project and the Israeli-Arab conflict through to the Women, Citizenship and Difference conference at the University of Greenwich in 1996.

The book is organized in six chapters ("Theorising Gender and Nation"; "Women and the…

Martin Buber's Paths in Utopia. The Kibbutz: an experiment that didn't fail?

1 March 2002Feature Uri Davis

The first Jewish co-operative agricultural settlement was established in Palestine in 1909. The founders of what was to become the kibbutz movement believed they were laying the basis for a new society for the Jews, one based on cooperation, equality and communal living. One of the ideologues of the movement was the philosopher Martin Buber. In his book Paths in Utopia, which remains one of the most powerful critiques of authoritarian socialism, he claimed that this movement was one example of a non-authoritarian, libertarian or "utopian" socialism that had not failed. Uri Davis challenges this understanding of the kibbutz movement and draws parallels with the failure of Buber himself to live by the ethic he endorsed.

It is important to note at the outset that my own intellectual and moral development was profoundly influenced by Martin Buber's writings. Buber's article “What is to be done” in Pointing the Way represents a milestone in the process of my ideological radicalisation. (Uri Davis, Crossing the border)

This, then, is a personal account of a critical Buber disciple. Buber did not live to witness the 1967 war and the cruelty and the violence of the Israeli occupation of…