The global-local encounter has spawned a complex polemic between ‘homogenizers’ and ‘heterogenizers’. Does globalization lead to universal cultural uniformity, or leave room for particularism and cultural diversity? This article proposes shifting the ground of the debate from the homogeneous-heterogeneous dichotomy to a structural-symbolic construct. It is argued here that while both homogenization and heterogenization occur, they do so at different societal levels: homogenization occurs at the structural-institutional level; heterogenization at the expressive-symbolic. This approach is illustrated by a case study of the ‘McDonaldization’ of Israeli society. Encounters between McDonald’s and the Israeli national habitus and national ideology are examined.

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This paper discusses the relations between secularism, religion and nationalism in Israel and offers a thesis about the failure of secularism there. The papers adopts Michael Mann's view of "religion" as a private case of ideological network of power and suggests a typology of four possible heuristic modules of political legitimacy, which are composed of different blends of nationalism and religionism (the suffix "ism" is added to underline Mann's view of religion as an ideology). These modules are constructed by the crosscutting of two axes: the axis of nationalism, which taps "weak" to "strong" nationalism, and the axis of religionism, which taps "weak" to "strong" religion (wherein the ultimate case of "weak religion" means secularism). The four modules are the following: strong nationalism/weak religionism: this is the case of a dominant and energetic secular nationalism. Strong nationalism/strong religionism: this is the case of a fusion between strong nationalism and strong religionism, which creates a kind of indissoluble mesh of "religious nationalism". Weak nationalism/weak religionism: this module represents a polity which is not founded upon strong pre-political "primordial" or ascriptive, national or religious, communal identity, but is rather constitutionally or "contractually" oriented. Weak nationalism/strong religionism: historically, this combination represents pre-modern and thus pre-national cultures, in which religion was pervasive as a communal identity. Presently, this combination can represent a type of communal "post-nationalism" or a transnational fundamentalism. The paper explains how Israeli political culture had moved from the type of strong nationalism/weak religionism to the type of strong nationalism/ strong religionism, which is inimical to secularism.Keywords Israel . Nationalism . Religion . Secularism This paper discusses the relations between secularism, religion, and nationalism in Israel and offers a thesis about the failure of secularism there; a failure "in the last instance," so to speak, because in the "first instance," say 60 years ago, observers tended to assess that Int J Polit Cult Soc (2008) 21:57-73

This study analyses national ways of forgetting. Following the eminent British Anthropologists Mary Douglas, I relate here to "forgetting" as "selective remembering, misremembering and disremembering" (Douglas 2007: 13). The case study offered here is that of the Israeli-Jewish forgetting of the uprooting of the Palestinians in the war of 1948. This paper discusses three facets of the collective forgetting: In the first subchapter I analyze the foundations of the Israeli regime of forgetting and discern three mechanisms of removing from memory of selected events: narrative forgetting: the formation and dissemination of an historical narrative; physical forgetting: the destruction of physical remains; and symbolic forgetting: the creation of a new symbolic geography of new places and street names. In the second subchapter, I look at the tenacious ambiguity that lies in the regime of forgetting, as it does not completely erase all the traces of the past. And finally, in the third subchapter, I discuss the growth of subversive memory and countermemory that at least indicates the option of a future revision of the Israeli regime of forgetting.

Observers of Israeli society are struck by the turmoil it has evinced in the 1990s. This study proposes a new perspective for the analysis of Israel based on the opposition of the global and the local. The study advances in three steps: i) it presents in outline the concepts of "post-nationalism" and "neo-nationalism"; ii) it applies these concepts schematically to the case of Israel; and iii) it explores in particular the two polar positions of the new terrain of identity within the dominant group in Israel: neo-Zionism and post-Zionism. On the Concepts of Post-Nationalism and Neo-NationalismBroadly speaking, post-nationalism is a phenomenon of the late twentieth century, just as nationalism was a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century. In order to elaborate the concept of post-nationalism, two pairs of seminal terms may be of use: one comes from the theoretical arsenal of the last fin-de-siècle, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft; the other is taken from the theoretical arsenal of our own time, the local and the global. (Both pairs are obviously ideal typical poles in a conceptual continuum; "reality" exposes many mixed and blurred combinations.)As the founders of sociology grappled with the Great Transformation, associated with industrialization, commodification, state-and empire-building, as well as with secularization, differentiation, and rationalization, they came to see all these related phenomena as part of a general process of modernization; their general conclusions about its significance were condensed in the conceptual pair, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. This seminal terminology came of course from the pen of Tönnies, but Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, each in his own terms and with his specific accent, shared this general view. The Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft distinction underlies the overarching dichotomies of classical sociology, such as Marx's feudalism vs. capitalism, Durkheim's mechanic vs. organic solidarity, and Weber's traditional vs. rational legitimation. Similarly, the collective sociological wisdom concerning the Great Transformation which is underway today, associated with economic post-industrialization and cultural post-modernization, may be condensed under the overarching conceptualization of the local vs. the global, or what Benjamin Barber calls Jihad vs. McWorld. 1 These two pairs of concepts frame the trajectory of nationalism between the late nineteenth and the late twentieth century. To put it bluntly, in the late nineteenth