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

Making cheaper labor: Domestic outsourcing and development in the Galilee

Middle Eastern Studie

Privatisation, outsourcing and employment relations in Israel

This chapter focuses on the effect that outsourcing, as a subset of privatization, has had on employment relations in Israel. In particular, chapter highlights the adverse, and perhaps counter-intuitive, effects that the law has had on the plight of Israeli contract workers. Israeli governmental agencies and local councils have turned to outsourcing as a means to circumventing post limits and due to the Ministry of Finance’s pressures to increase ‘flexibility’ in the civil service. Intriguingly, paradoxically, and tragically, the law’s effort to regulate this growing phenomenon has led employers resorting to tactics which have redefined agency workers (teachers, nurses, etc) as workers subject to the “outsourcing of services” (teaching, nursing, etc). This has moved such workers into a legal void, depriving them of rights and protection

Gershon Shafir: The First Half-Century of Israel’s Permanently Temporary Occupation

This talk raises the two burning questions in this 50th anniversary of the 1967 War. First, "Is the presence of Israel’s military and settlers in the West Bank an occupation?" The search for an answer leads us to both international and domestic legal conundrums and the everyday life experience of Palestinian inhabitants. Second, "Is the Israeli settlement enterprise reversible?" As part of a feasibility study of the two-state solution, Gershon Shafir focuses on such issues as the percentage of land taken up by Israeli settlements and their layout, the demographic ratio of Israeli Jews to Palestinians, etc. Instead of viewing the settlements as a single-minded undertaking, Shafir highlights and examine the paradoxes, legal inconsistencies, and conflicting interests that weaken the settlers\u27 hold and leave the settlement enterprise itself vulnerable to challenge

The First Half-Century of Israel’s Permanently Temporary Occupation

This talk raises the two burning questions in this 50th anniversary of the 1967 War. First, “Is the presence of Israel’s military and settlers in the West Bank an occupation?” An answer leads us to both international and domestic legal conundrums and the everyday life experience of Palestinian inhabitants. Second, “Is the Israeli settlement enterprise reversible?” As part of a feasibility study of the two-state solution, I focus on such issues as the percentage of land taken up by Israeli settlements and their layout, the demographic ratio of Israeli Jews to Palestinians, etc. Instead of viewing the settlements as a single-minded undertaking, I highlight and examine the ramifications of their diverse character. About the Lecturer: Gershon Shafir is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, and the founding director of its Human Rights Program. He has served as President of the Association for Israel Studies and is the author or editor of ten books, among them Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914; Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (co-authored with Yoav Peled), -- winner of the 2002 Middle Eastern Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Award, and Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel (co-editor with Mark LeVine)

Land, labor and the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 1882-1914

Gershon Shafir challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise. He argues that it was not the imported Zionist ideas that were responsible for the character of the Israeli state, but the particular conditions of the local conflict between the European "settlers" and the Palestinian Arab population

FROM OVERT TO VEILED SEGREGATION: ISRAEL'S PALESTINIAN ARAB CITIZENS IN THE GALILEE

AbstractThis article's geographical focus is the Galilee, Israel's only region with a Palestinian Arab majority. Its sociological focus is the drive to Judaize this region, the mirror image of its de-Arabization, which I anchor in Israelis’ morbid fear of settler colonial reversal. Although direct legal discrimination—restriction of movement under a military government and exclusion from publicly administered land—was banned by the government and the High Court of Justice respectively, new modes of discrimination against Israel's Arab citizens have replaced the older forms. I demonstrate how policies that limit Arab middle-class citizens’ upwardly mobile migration into the Judaized spaces of communal settlements (or overlooks) and towns endure. I compare gatekeeping exercised by national-level indirect legal discrimination operating through the admission committees of communal settlements with the institutional discrimination practiced by municipalities of emerging mixed towns against new Arab residents’ public presence. Finally, I highlight the linkages between instances of Judaization across the Green Line, which make the unwinding of segregation, in all of its forms, that much harder

Being Israeli : the dynamics of multiple citizenship

A timely study by two well-known scholars offers a theoretically informed account of the political sociology of Israel. The analysis is set within its historical context as the authors trace Israel's development from Zionist settlement in the 1880s, through the establishment of the state in 1948, to the present day. Against this background the authors speculate on the relationship between identity and citizenship in Israeli society, and consider the differential rights, duties and privileges that are accorded different social strata. In this way they demonstrate that, despite ongoing tensions, the pressure of globalization and economic liberalization has gradually transformed Israel from a frontier society to one more oriented towards peace and private profit. This unexpected conclusion offers some encouragement for the future of this troubled region. However, Israel's position towards the peace process is still subject to a tug-of-war between two conceptions of citizenship: liberal citizenship on the one hand, and a combination of the remnants of republican citizenship associated with the colonial settlement with an ever more religiously defined ethno-nationalist citizenship, on the other