Peripheral Nationhood: Negotiating Israeliness from the Margins of the State

Abstract

Like many development towns that were established in the aftermath of Israel's founding, Kiryat Shemona is situated on the demographic and geographic margins of the state: it sits on the border with Lebanon, and is in the Galilee region that has historically been a major center of Israel's Palestinian population. Particularly in moments of cross-border violence, Kiryat Shemona becomes a central margin, a place that is crucial to imagining the Israeli nation. For this reason, its inhabitants are imagined by others and often by themselves as steadfast and strong—qualities said to be at the center of Israeliness. At the same time, like other development towns, Kiryat Shemona's residents are mainly Mizrahim who were pushed to populate these marginal regions, and who constitute a majority of the Israeli Jewish population but also in many respects constitute an underclass vis-à-vis the historically Ashkenazi elite. Mizrahim, in such development towns, are thus marginal to the center of power, and vulnerable to the insecurity and poverty associated with these towns. While inhabiting precarious borderlands, they are crucial to the imagining of a bounded Jewish Israeli nation that must defend itself. This article demonstrates how Mizrahim strived to move themselves symbolically from the margins of exclusion to the center of inclusion by calling upon the nation and cosmopolitan connections. In everyday life, mizrahim marked ethicized boundaries against differentiated others, thus reinforcing the ethnoreligious logic of Israeli nationalism that historically pushed them to the margins of the state.