ABSTRACT
According to the bifurcation thesis that is presented in the onset of this book and further elaborated throughout it, in the global era of McWorld versus Jihad, Israeli society undergoes simultaneously two dialectically opposing yet complementing processes of “marketization” and of “tribalization.” Furthermore, in Israel's particular case this dialectical tension is expressed inter alia in a growing antagonism between its Israeli facet of civic identity and its Jewish facet of ethnic identity. Whereas the official Zionist ideology of Israel purports to depict it as a Jewish and democratic nation-state, this book documents and analyzes how globalization bifurcates the Jewish-democratic ostensible unison and splits up the “Jewish” and the “democratic” dimensions along opposing directions: a Jewish-Jihad trend—which is termed “neo-Zionism”—and an Israeli-McWorld trend—which is termed “post-Zionism.” Moreover, it is part and parcel of the bifurcation thesis of this book that this split is compatible to a significant extent with the new class polarization of Israeli society, in the sense that some portions of the winners of globalization tend to become more global whereas some portions of the losers of globalization tend to react more locally.
