Faultline Citizenship: Ethnonational Politics, Minority Mobilisation, and Governance in the Israeli “Mixed Cities” of Haifa and Tel Aviv-Jaffa

Abstract

Belfast, Jerusalem, Brussels, Montreal, Sarajevo and Nicosia are among the most oft-mentioned examples of ethnically divided cities, situated in a wider context of ethnonational conflict (to varying degrees of intensity). At the same time there are other cities where ethnic and cross-community tensions are significant, but which have not occupied sufficient academic interest. In the Israel/Palestine context, the cities of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa represent such cases. They both contain a minority of Israeli-Palestinians whose patterns of political mobilization and interaction with local state institutions have rarely been explored. Yet the interaction between urban governance actors and Palestinian activists in these cities reveals much about the nature of contemporary ethnopolitics in Israel/Palestine. The aim of the paper is to provide an analysis of the ways through which the different mobilization strategies of Israeli-Palestinians in these cities are shaped by altercations between local governance mechanisms, and the internal and external intricacies of ethnic movement politics. The paper develops a relational approach to the study of citizenship in ethnically polarized cities. It suggests that powerful insights into patterns of claiming citizenship can be gained by incorporating dynamic institutional approaches to local minority mobilization with the important roles of symbolic urban politics and the politics of place. The constellation of those factors provides for a rich picture of the subtleties of minority strategies and the governance of ethnically fractured cities.