Colonizing emotions: Death and sociopoliticide in a besieged society

Mixing and segregation: a cross sectional study of violent and safe spaces for Palestinians in Israel

Palestinian citizens in Israel are part of the Palestinian nation that was scattered and divided during the 1948 War (Nakba, a catastrophe), amidst which Israel was founded. Today, Palestinian citizens in Israel are not part of the emancipatory movement of Palestinians outside of Israel. The primary question, then, that this book aims to address relates to understanding the transformation in Palestinian discourse, from that which spoke of national self-determination, to a discourse that is not coherently nationalist. The study of literature aims to provide a view ‘from within’ onto Palestinian discourse. Incorporating almost the entire corpus of Palestinian novels published in Israel between 1948 and 2010, the book aims to deal with the widest possible spectrum of representation. This choice aims to complement existing sociological and literary analysis on Palestinians in Israel. The book is divided to three chapters, corresponding to political periods in the life of Palestinians in Israel (1948−1967; 1967−1987; and 1987−2010). In the first period, Palestinians in Israel adapt to life under military rule, but they also undergo a process of modernization that aimed, so they believed, to facilitate their integration in Israeli society. Since the late 1960s, during the second period, Palestinians start to question the implications of modernization on their society, highlighting the ambivalence of their life in Israel. In the third period, Palestinians in Israel start to contemplate ‘solutions’ for this ambivalence, or alienation, bringing to the fore issues relating to their relationship with Israel as well as Palestinians across the border.

Reviewed by: National Minority, Regional Majority: Palestinian Arabs Versus Jews in Israel Paul Beran National Minority, Regional Majority: Palestinian Arabs Versus Jews in Israel, by Yitzhak Reiter. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009. 403 pp. $49.95. National Minority, Regional Majority is an ambitious book written by a scholar who has both academic experience and government service. He was the Israeli Prime Minster’s deputy advisor on Arab affairs from 1978 to 1987. The book provides insights into a variety of issues related to present-day Israel studies. Students of Israeli domestic policies concerning Palestinian citizens will be most served by it. The book is focused on providing an understanding of the dynamic relationship between Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel. It is organized in a fairly straightforward manner and provides useful conclusions on the topic. The study, in the words of Mr. Reiter, seeks to add a new dimension of analysis, interlocking conflict, to the body of work already engaged with the subject. The framework employed analyzes the relationship between Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel and the impact on it by the Israel-Palestinian conflict, [End Page 198] the Arab-Israeli conflict, and great power conflicts in the Middle East region (p. xiii). The chapters of the book are organized around two bookends. One is a historical narrative and the other some conclusions. Chapters in between, on individual Israeli governments and their treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel, make up the bulk of the study. The best chapter is number seven, “Peace and Affirmative Action,” which details the Oslo Process and the lead up to the Second Intifada. It is the most analytical chapter of the book. The final chapter in the study offers thoughtful suggestions for the way forward for Jewish and Palestinian Israeli relations. These are largely focused on how Israel can continue to be a self-professed Jewish and democratic state with a significant non-Jewish minority. From his analysis, Mr. Reiter maintains that the government of Israel needs to be more mindful of the needs of the Palestinian community if it hopes to avoid a full-scale reproach of the idea of being both Jewish and democratic. He implies that had Israel been more aware of the needs of Palestinian Israelis they would have been less inclined towards Land Day 1976 protests, a rallying cry now for equal rights by Palestinians in Israel, and solidarity with the first and second intifadas (p. 296). This conclusion is similar to one made concerning Israel’s occupational overreach in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Neve Gordon in Israel’s Occupation (2008). Unfortunately, the limitations of the book place it within a category of literature that is broadly defined as status quo. Reiter is clearly comfortable with government nomenclature. Calling Palestinian Israeli citizens Arabs and Israeli Arabs throughout the book is a case in point. Can Jews not be Arabs? Joel Benin (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, 2005), Reuven Snir (numerous), Salim Tamari (Mountain Against the Sea, 2008) and others have documented the important contributions of Arab Jews to contemporary Arab culture. Lumping together all Palestinian citizens of Israel who are not Jewish into the catch-all Arab category strikes me as contrary to this body of research. In many ways the central aim of the book, to advance the understanding of the dynamic relationship between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, is really a secondary topic when considered in the light of the data presented. A narrow focus on understanding this relationship misses the opportunity to tackle a larger and more fundamental concern, which is how the government of Israel relates to being both a self-professed Jewish and democratic state when 20+% of its population is not Jewish. A more direct focus on this topic would strengthen the contribution of this book to the academy. A conclusion of Mr. Reiter’s is that the Israeli government improves relations with its Palestinian citizens when it does not feel threatened. The data used in the study tells another story. Despite the blowing winds of threat— [End Page 199] which are documented—a vibrant Zionist project that secures land for exclusive Jewish use in Israel was shown to exist...

REBECCA B. KOOK, The Logic of Democratic Exclusion: African-Americans in the United States and Palestinian Citizens in Israel (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002). Pp. 231. 24.95 paper - Volume 37 Issue 4

(2006). Coffins on Our Shoulders: The Experience of the Palestinian Citizens in Israel. Journal of Palestine Studies: Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 76-77.

The way in which each protagonist defines the Palestinian/Israeli conflict has created a series of different grassroots responses towards a resolution. That is, the dynamics of occupied and occupier, majority versus minority, powerful and powerless, victim and perpetuator remain central to understanding the reaction of grassroots organisations and their attempts at peace building. Within Israeli society, grassroots efforts operate under the banner of either ‘coexistence’ or ‘peace’. Coexistence work deals with relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, while peace activity is defined in terms of relations between Israelis and Palestinians living in the lands occupied after 1967. Palestinian citizens of Israel were initially partners to coexistence activity but political developments within that community have created new forces acting against the ‘Jewish’ notion of coexistence. For Palestinians from the territories, peace amounts to ending the occupation, and civil society (the grassroots) has acted as a functionary towards this end through ‘out administering’ the enemy. This chapter will examine the dynamics, the politics and the impact of the peace process on the Israeli and Palestinian grassroots.

The football stadium has become an arena for protest: political, ethnic, nationalistic, etc. In Israel, certain groups of fans use the stadium’s stands to give vent to their anti‐Arab sentiments. ‘Death to the Arabs’ has thus become a common chant in football stadiums. Though the phenomenon is not very new, it has become more popular over the last decade. This phenomenon can be explained using Simmel’s concept of the ‘stranger’. This concept is intertwined with the ongoing Israeli‐Palestinian conflict. Many Israelis consider the Israeli Arabs to be ‘Conditional Strangers’, that is, temporary citizens. Numerous Israelis refuse to accept the presence of Arab citizens in Israel – they want them out of the country. This essay presents the findings of a study of football fans in Israel. The particular issue of this essay is a group of fans (a vociferous minority) who oppose participation of Arab football players on ‘their team’. Contrary to conventional expectations, these fans are not unsophisticated rowdies, but middle‐class political‐ideological right‐wingers, whose rejection of Arab football players on their team is based on a definitive conception of Israel as a Jewish (Zionist) state.

The scholarship on republicanism has moved away from perfectionist and communitarian to neo-Roman interpretations of the tradition, but the scholarship on citizenship in Israel has taken a different turn: republican citizenship has come to be identified with an unusual, ethnicized conception of it, sometimes described as ‘ethnorepublicanism’. This article critically discusses the ethnicization of the concept of republican citizenship in Israel Studies. The first part reconstructs how the concept of ethnorepublican citizenship, originally used to criticize the unequal status of Palestinian citizens in Israel, has morphed into an ideological justification of unequal citizenship. The second part argues that ethnorepublicanism rejects the republican commitment to the equal liberty of citizens and thus constitutes a perverse form of republicanism. The development of Israeli ethnorepublicanism illustrates the worrying potential of republican citizenship to be integrated into agendas of exclusionary nationalism and calls for further work on republicanism in multi-ethnic societies.

NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives 107 ERIC CHEYFITZ The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict There has been a turn, for many people, in recognizing that Manifest Destiny was a horror, and the supposed “exceptionalism” or “idealism” of American “foreign” policy—these first inhabitants from whom the land was stolen were long not treated as having American “rights,” as foreigners—will not survive this evidence. We have come to a turning point in our society, where we might recognize the truth of what was done and resolve to go forward, as best we can, as a serious, multiracial society in which the stories of each person are acknowledged and the dark history which still afflicts us rejected. —ALAN GILBERT, JOHN EVANS PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DENVER, 2014 But it’s hard sometimes, letting go of the stories you think you know. —PAMELA J. OLSON, FAST TIMES IN PALESTINE: A LOVE AFFAIR WITH A HOMELESS HOMELAND (2013) My initial interest in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict comes from the fact that I am a Jew and one of my daughters and three of my grandchildren are citizens of Israel. But this personal connection is deeply embedded with my intellectual , scholarly, and political interest in the conflict. In this last connection, I am a member of both the American Studies Association (ASA) and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and a supporter of the resolutions published by both groups, following that of the Asian American Studies Association (AAAS), in solidarity with the 2005 call by Palestinian civil society for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education .1 These nonbinding resolutions, it should be stressed, are focused not on individual scholars, but on Israeli academic institutions because of the complicity of these institutions with Israel state policies in Gaza; the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; and the Golan Heights. These policies, which impose martial law on the Palestinian territories and are in violation of international law, interdict the academic freedom and human rights of the Palestinians. As the title suggests, this essay focuses neither on American nor Israeli exceptionalism per se but on how the intersection of the two narratives results in the historical denial by both nation-states of the actual history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—the way in which American exceptionalism reinforces that of Israel is a particular focus. As I argue, this denial, which Eric Cheyfitz NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 108 erases the Palestinian narrative of the conflict, makes a just resolution of the conflict impossible. We should remember in what follows that nations are narratives that rationalize, or idealize, the material force of the state. That is what is implied in the formation of the nation-state, a synthesis of rhetorical and material power. The state, then, requires the narrative of the nation to cover its tracks. The nation is the state’s alibi. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been continual, at least in the formal sense, since 1917. In that year the Balfour Declaration was proclaimed in a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour to Lord Rothschild: His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by the Jews in any other country.2 The Declaration is manifestly a colonial document. Edward Said notes, That is the declaration was made (a) by a European power, (b) about a non-­ European territory, (c) in flat disregard of both the presence and the wishes of the native majority resident in that territory, and (d) it took the form of a promise about this same territory to another foreign group, so that this foreign group might, quite literally, make this territory a national home for the Jewish ­people.3 The British transferred their colonial project in Palestine to the UN in 1947, which, without the agreement of the over 700,000...

The Palestinians in Israel are those Palestinians who remained on their land during the Nakba in 1948, and later became Israeli citizens. The political discourse of Palestinians in Israel has moved during the last two decades, since the Oslo agreement, from the individual achievements level to the politics of rights on the collective level, and to the politics of identity. This discourse is considered of utmost importance in the politics of indigenous marginalized groups within colonial entities. Similarly, it represents a change in the evolution of the political discourse of Palestinians in Israel throughout the last two decades. In the following article we will analyze the main political changes that occurred among the Palestinian minority in Israel since 1948 and the main challenges that they raise for the Palestinians in facing the “Jewish state”.

The paper aims to trace the evolvement of the Israeli citizenship, and the civic discourse, by focusing on the relation of the Jewish state with its Palestinian citizen. As such it reads this development by focusing on the dynamics of the rhetoric of sameness and difference, citizenship and identity, the individual and the collective, the past and the future, the particular and the universal. Read in this way it could viewed as an exercise in exploring the limits of the liberal rights discourse in general. The point of departure of the paper is the Zionist concept of the "negation of exile" as a constitutive element in Jewish national identity and the impact of this concept on the formation of the concept of Israeli citizenship. The paper claims that due to several factors, the concept of the "negation of exile" among them, the Israeli citizenship was born crippled and deformed, and within the early years after the establishment of the state, the concept of Israeli citizenship was rather almost meaningless. The paper moves to trace some major political and economical transformations within the Israeli society between the late 1960's and the 1980's. These transformations lead at the same time to two different kinds of discourses: One was the emergence of civic discourse and civil rights and a gradual separation of civil society from the state, the other was the development of religious national discourse. While these discourses has been always part of the debates within Zionism, this time the debate is located within the Israeli state itself and as such bringing the tensions together within a unity. The paper will rather focus on the civic discourse and will try to extrapolate the categories and the concepts that lie in the basis of this discourse, and try to find out their potential effect on the Palestinian citizens of Israel. To do that the paper will draw the attention to some of the particularities of the status of the Palestinians in Israel, and how do these fit within the emerging model of citizenship that was in the process of evolvement during the 1990's. The question will be how can the Palestinians in Israel locate themselves within such discourse and whether such a discourse can "capture" their historical case.

Over the last decade, a new trend has been developing among the Palestinian citizens of Israel—an attempt to instrumentalize Israeli conditional citizenship and the civic opportunities offered by the political regime to advance the local affairs of Palestinians and improve their living conditions. What can be called ‘the local civic discourse’ finds its expression in various contexts, such as in support for joining governmental coalitions, enlisting in the national or civil service, or integrating into other civil institutions. The development of this discourse is an instance of bargaining for colonial conditional citizenship or for a kind of rational acceptance of conditional citizenship. However, attempting to use the opportunities offered by the governing structure does not signify inherent acceptance of the state’s ideological base, identification with its values, or voluntary acceptance of its Jewish character. This is a process of selective civil integration minus any identification with, or recognition of, the legitimacy of the current sovereign state.

This volume presents new perspectives on Israeli society, Palestinian society, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on historical foundations, it examines how Israel institutionalizes ethnic privileging among its nationally diverse citizens. Arab, Israeli, and American contributors discusses the paradoxes of democratic claims in ethnic states, as well as dynamics of social conflict in the absence of equality. This book advances a new understanding of Israel's approach to the Palestinian citizens, covers the broadest range of areas in which Jews and Arabs are institutionally differentiated along ethnic basis, and explicates the psychopolitical foundations of ethnic privileges. It will appeal to students and scholars who seek broader views on Israeli society and its relationship with the Arab citizens, and want to learn more about the status of the Palestinian citizens in Israel and their collective experience as both citizens and settler-colonial subjects.

Israeli law is an important medium that maintains, perfects, and facilitates the fragmentation of Palestinians. Israeli citizenship figures in this structure of fragmentation as an exceptionalizing legal status that blurs “colonial difference” between Palestinian citizens in Israel and Jewish Israelis. The May 2021 uprising and its aftermath not only highlighted the counter-­fragmentary forces present among Palestinians across different legal ­statuses, it also brought into clearer view a rule of “colonial difference” that crisscrosses the Israeli legal system and pertains to all Palestinians under its control. This essay explores the concept of “colonial difference” as applied to Palestinians through the law, and how this rule has been employed in the context of the May 2021 uprising against Palestinian citizens in particular.

Triage and the Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Case of Medical Tourism