Teachers at the crossroads: Culture, empathy, and emotional regulation in Palestinian society in Israel

Teachers at the Crossroads: Culture, Empathy, and Emotional Regulation in Palestinian Society in Israel

Violence in Israel's Palestinian society: a cross-sectional study

The research dealt with intergenerational gaps in the use of digital technology in Palestinian society in Israel and its influence on relations between parents and their children. 120 parents from the center of the country participated in the study and one of the children (male or female) from each couple. Findings indicate the existence of inter-generational gaps in the ways in which the Internet is used between parents and children. Additionally, there are differences in the users’ self-perception of their technological capabilities; adults attribute greater familiarity with the Internet to children, while they are not amenable to and have negative consideration towards the Internet in contrast to the children’s views. This gap causes intergenerational tension harming the parents’ authority and consequently stimulating parents’ attempts to supervise the children’s use of the Internet. The children see the Internet as an intimate space for activity relatively free from parental supervision.

This article explores the relationship between the transformations and developments taking place in the Palestinian society in Israel and the representativeness of its political leadership. It explains the reasoning behind the success of the leadership, represented in recent years by the Joint List, in winning the legitimacy of the community it serves. It argues that the synergy of two factors, namely, the growing sociological differentiation of the leadership and its interactional behavior, is what stands behind its success to win the conditional support of its constituency. This support is won despite the remaining differences between the various components of the Joint List on the ideological and valuational levels. This does not mean that the Joint List is the only political mechanism, viable or possible, to represent the aspirations and interests of the Palestinian community in Israel. It has no intrinsic value, except through the people’s consent to it. In the event the parties that compose it do not act as expected, it is conceivable that they would lose the people’s trust even if the characteristics of their leadership reflect the influential social groups in the community.

This paper aims to shed light on a significant aspect of the Nakba and of Emile Habibi’s oeuvre that has received little if any attention. It examines the ways in which Emile Habibi systematically deals in his literature with the collective trauma of the Nakba as it was experienced by the Palestinians who became citizens of the state of Israel. Through his writings, Habibi seeks to translate his personal experiences into collective knowledge that might help the Palestinian society in Israel work through its traumas. The “Working through” process Habibi sought to instigate involved encouraging an acknowledgment of the reality of the trauma and the new situation it created, and mending the rift in individual and collective identity. Its end was to enable the Palestinian society in Israel to attain critical acclaim on the trauma, thus enabling it to learn from its experience and apply its lessons in the struggle for socio-political change.

Before the Nakba a significant process of urbanisation had occurred in Palestine, leading to substantial changes in gender relations and women's status. However, following the 1948 war, the existence of a vibrant urban social and gendered reality in Palestine was dismissed and erased, by both Palestinian and Zionist narratives; it was replaced by exclusively rural memory. This article analyses how Palestinian society in Israel accepted the Zionist version of history, according to which the modernisation of Arab society in Israel, especially gendered modernity, resulted from Jewish proximity and steps adopted by the state.

ABSTRACTThis paper offers an analysis of crime in the Palestinian society in Israel from the perspective of political relationships. It illustrates that the state of Israel is trying to define and identify crime through ideologies and narrow interests. This process is part of a mechanism of control, which intends to criminalize the daily life of the Palestinians. Discriminatory behavior against Arabs by police is more apparent and the records on crime are sometimes inaccessible, with a mania for secrecy, and view the whole Arab community as a security danger. The Israeli social control policy politicizes this community, with excess control in some areas and a lack of control in others. The paper concludes that no detailed arguments are needed in order to see the ineffectiveness of the Israeli control policy as long as the basic root of the political struggle is not answered.

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.

People living in intractable conflicts tend to adopt a rigid Ethos of Conflict (EOC), guiding their everyday attitudes and behaviors with regard to the conflict. Group-based emotions, as potent motivators, may account for much of the influence the EOC has on such reactions to intermittent events and information. Furthermore, because emotions are both powerful and changeable, in their regulation they may also constitute an important key to overcoming barriers to conflict resolution. Therefore, it is important to first of all understand emotional processes fully so as to understand the psychology of life in conflict. Nonetheless, it is even more important to understand how these processes are shaped by the EOC, an overarching ideological belief system pervasive within societies in conflict and a central element of this unique context. The present chapter focuses on emotions and emotion regulation and their appearance in Israeli society and proposes how Daniel Bar-Tal’s notion of an EOC may shape emotions and their regulation. Specifically, we examine three important ways in which the EOC may impact these emotional processes in intractable conflict: by shaping the emotions Israelis experience, by shaping the political outcomes of these emotions, and by guiding Israelis’ attempts to regulate the emotions they experience in light of the conflict.

ABSTRACTOver the last three decades, Palestinian society in Israel has undergone numerous changes, reflected in the rising numbers of families headed by single mothers. This article is based on a study conducted between 2007 and 2011 among 24 divorced, separated, and widowed Palestinian single mothers in Israel. I analyze this emerging family configuration, focusing on these women’s experiences as mothers and on how they accord new meaning to motherhood. My analysis will deal with the diverse ways these women ‘do motherhood’ and negotiate with different familial players. It will extend beyond the discourse on motherhood to shed light on the current changes in power and gender relations taking place in Palestinian-Israeli society.

This study examines what motivates an organization representing a religious-national minority to provide social services. The case study for examining this issue is the Islamic Movement in Palestinian society in Israel, and specifically its social activities in the town of Kafr Qassim. The article analyzes the factors leading to the development of the movement’s various services in the town by tracing their historical development and current offerings. This case study analysis is informed by two theoretical bodies of knowledge: the development of NGOs and the development of faith-based organizations. The data is based upon 17 semi-structured in-depth interviews with the heads of all the social services, social activists and municipality representatives in Kafr Qassim, where the movement was established. Some of the interviews also include tours and observations of actual services provision. Additional sources include archival documents, such as the organization’s regulations and work plans. The findings identify three main factors in the development of minority religious organizations: government failure in providing services (necessary factor) and religious ideology and mobilization of political support as secondary factors. All three are grounded in the ongoing conflict between the Palestinian minority group and the state.

There are no accurate data on the prevalence of polygamy in Palestinian society in Israel, but many estimates indicate that polygamy is about 20/36 percent of Bedouin households. Moreover, in the past three decades, there has been a consistent increase in the number of polygamous marriages in the Arab Bedouin sector. Under international law, polygamy is perceived as discriminatory and is associated with all forms of harms to women: physical, mental, sexual, reproductive, and economic. Under the Israeli law, according to the punitive code, polygamy is a criminal offence. However, under the Sharia law, that governs family laws for Muslims in Israel, polygamy is permitted. As a consequence, due to the fact that the state does not enforce the punitive code for the Bedouin citizens, polygamous marriage is valid and practiced. This ambivalence of the Israeli legislature and the legal system violates the human rights of Arab Bedouin women and creates a situation in which they are excluded from the law by the different legal systems: criminal law, the Shari’a and customary law. It raises significant questions about Arab Bedouin women’s citizenship and human rights and about the role of family laws in the Zionist-Jewish state, i.e., a state that segregates Bedouin society by supporting the traditional tribal system and by condoning practices such as polygamy. The analyses of these issues, which illustrate the strength of the “fortress nation” at the global era, constitute the main axis of this paper.

Reviewed by: Politics and sociolinguistic reflexes: Palestinian border villages by Muhammad Hasan Amara Stuart Davis Politics and sociolinguistic reflexes: Palestinian border villages. By Muhammad Hasan Amara. (Studies in bilingualism 19.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp. xix, 261. Palestinian society in Israel and in the West Bank has faced social upheavals during the past half century that have included migration, forced divisions, modernization, a growing urbanization, and increased contact of various sorts with both the larger Arab world and Israeli culture. Political upheavals have included the split of the Palestinian population after 1948 into the West Bank (under Jordanian control), Israel, and the Gaza Strip (largely under Egyptian control), the Israeli hegemony over these groups of Palestinians since 1967, and the Palestinian uprising (the Intifada) against Israeli rule in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The work under review investigates the sociolinguistic manifestations of the political and social changes that have affected the Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. In particular, the author focuses his study on two (Muslim) Palestinian border villages—Zalafa and Barta’a. Both are in the Ara Valley on the border between Israel and the West Bank. Zalafa is an Israeli Palestinian village while Barta’a is a divided village. Western Barta’a is in Israel (within the ‘Green Line’, i.e. the Israeli border that emerged out of the 1948 war), but Eastern Barta’a is in the West Bank. Physical barriers were erected after 1948 separating Western Barta’a under Israeli control from Eastern Barta’a under Jordanian control. How have the different social and political realities of the past half century affected the sociolinguistic [End Page 387] patterns of these Palestinian border villages? In the first chapter the author lays out the background and scope of his study, previewing for us some of his major findings. The author’s work is a product of ten years of fieldwork (from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s) that he along with some colleagues undertook in the villages. The book brings together findings from his own previous work (including his dissertation from Bar-Ilan University) as well as his collaborative work with Bernard Spolsky and others regarding the sociolinguistic situation of contemporary Palestinian society. Chs. 2–6 lay out the political, historical, social, economic, and educational differences between Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank. An important difference is the orientation toward Israel of the Israeli Palestinians as opposed to the orientation toward Jordan among the West Bank Palestinians. This is seen for example in the different educational systems and is manifested by a knowledge of fluent Hebrew among most Israeli Palestinians. Politically, West Bank Palestinians were active in the Intifada, risking arrest by the Israeli authorities for their action, while Israeli Palestinians did not directly participate in the Intifada although many offered moral and financial support. The author suggests that the reactions of the Israeli Palestinians to the Intifada reflect a growing double identity (a ‘double consciousness’, we might say): Israeli with respect to politics, economy, and certain sociocultural aspects, but Palestinian with respect to identity and cultural uniqueness. Chs. 7–13 are the sociolinguistic heart of the book. Language information in the border villages was gathered through recorded observations, structured interviews, tasks involving reading passages, word lists and picture naming, questionnaires about language identity and attitudes, and language diaries kept by secondary students in the border villages under the author’s guidance. (Details of these are provided in the appendices.) Given the number of people recorded and interviewed, the author amassed a large database on which to establish his findings. For example, structured interviews were carried out with 81 people from the village of Zalafa, 40 from Eastern Barta’a and 41 from Western Barta’a. The interviewees from each sector were matched for gender, education level, occupation, religious observance, and amount of contact with Israeli Jews. The specific linguistic variables that the author looked at were various features of the rural Palestinian dialect shared by the villages and the use of Hebrew lexical items in their Arabic speech. The variables of the rural vernacular dialect that the author examined involved features of pronunciation—the use of [č] for standard Arabic /k...

This article presents a coping path currently available to Palestinian women in Israel—the vocation of traditional healing. Traditional healing is, by and large, considered as an acceptable vocation in the Palestinian society in Israel, even as a women’s vocation. It is identified with folk culture and local ethnicity, with common theories of disease and medicinal herbs that are part of the local landscape. The traditional women healers are considered by most of their community members as experts of the accepted values— collectivism and patriarchy—and are crowned as agents of socialization and acculturation for younger women. Although traditional healing is identified, in many ways, with the past, with conservatism and authenticity, for Palestinian women in Israel, it comprises a coping path also in the current, liberal and global reality. This path utilizes a culturally accepted way for Palestinian women to realize exceptional independence, influence and power. On the individual level, the vocation of traditional healing provides the women healers a route to self-realization, personal power, and enhanced self-esteem. On the social level, it provides the women healers with authority and influence among their families, their patients and to a certain extent, among the community at large. The current article examines the coping means which the vocation of traditional healing offers to Palestinian women in Israel. It commences with a description of traditional healing among Palestinians in Israel, of the coping paths available to Muslim women in the Middle East and a methodological survey. Subsequently, the article presents the coping means that traditional healing provides women while distinguishing between

This study delves into the dynamic interplay between the Arab political elite 1 and education within Palestinian society in Israel, addressing the way educational experiences shape political culture. Looking at Arab society’s leading politicians, the article explores their unique political perspectives and roles in a distinctive sociopolitical landscape. The findings reflect a nuanced view of politics, transcending ideological confines to encompass social and educational endeavors; they also highlight the Arab political elite’s dual focus: fostering social solidarity and shaping representative political organizations. Crucially, education emerges as a pivotal force in cultivating political identity and influence, underpinning efforts toward sociopolitical change. This study offers profound insights into the symbiotic relationship between education and political culture in a context marked by its quest for representation and influence.