Living in the Garden of Perhaps: Ordinary Life as an Obstacle to Political Change in Israel

This article explores how gender in part shapes the contours of small worlds or ‘elsewheres’ (Haraway 1992), constructed by Jewish Israelis as they pursue ‘ordinary lives’ in a context of conflict and sustained political violence. Situating as central the experiences, perceptions and behaviours of the dominant sector in Jewish Israeli society—middle-class Ashkenazi Jews living in Israel’s urban centres—the article appraises the work done by the production and maintenance of dual worlds, what lies at stake in their loss and their implications for political change. By building upon the work of feminist and queer theorists who consider the centrality of intimacy to politics, here relational ties binding communities of varying size and composition emerge as more important than the material trappings of newly created worlds. Drawing on the narratives of Jewish Israeli women and men living in West Jerusalem and its suburbs, this article demonstrates how gender intersects with geopolitical location, social class, religion, race and ideology to create intimate spheres whose maintenance ultimately becomes bound up in stasis

Militarisation as diffusion: the politics of gender, space and the everyday

Drawing together the work of five feminist scholars whose research spans diverse sociopolitical contexts, this themed section questions militarisation as a fixed condition. Using feminist methodologies to explore the spatialised networks and social mechanisms through which militarisation is sustained and resisted, ‘gendering’ militarisation reveals a complex politics of diffusion at work in a range of everyday power relations. However, diffusion acts not as a unidirectional movement across a border, but as the very contingency which makes militarisation – and transformation – possible. Through connecting the empirical and theoretical work on militarisation with feminist geographies, the authors in this collection highlight the influence of military thinking and institutions, not as static structures, but instead as productive sites

Border collapse and boundary maintenance: militarisation and the micro-geographies of violence in Israel–Palestine

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Drawing upon subaltern geopolitics and feminist geography, this article explores how militarisation shapes micro-geographies of violence and occupation in Israel–Palestine. While accounts of spectacular and large-scale political violence dominate popular imaginaries and academic analyses in/of the region, a shift to the micro-scale foregrounds the relationship between power, politics and space at the level of everyday life. In the context of Israel–Palestine, micro-geographies have revealed dynamic strategies for ‘getting by’ or ‘dealing with’ the occupation, as practiced by Palestinian populations in the face of spatialised violence. However, this article considers how Jewish Israelis actively shape the spatial micro-politics of power within and along the borders of the Israeli state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem during 2010–2011, an analysis of everyday narratives illustrates how relations of violence, occupation and domination rely upon gendered dynamics of border collapse and boundary maintenance. Here, the borders between home front and battlefield break down at the same time as communal boundaries are reproduced, generating conditions of ‘total militarism’ wherein military interests and agendas are both actively and passively diffused. Through gendering the militarised micro-geographies of violence among Jewish Israelis, this article reveals how individuals construct, navigate and regulate the everyday spaces of occupation, detailing more precisely how macro political power endures.This work was supported by the SOAS, University of London; University of London Central Research Fund