The ethnocratic shikun: housing discourse in support of nation-building

Abstract

ABSTRACT This research critically analyses the Israeli housing block (‘shikun’) discourse, as presented in cultural representations during 1948–1961, and its contribution to the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The study argues that the discursive exclusion of the shikun from Israel's socio-political history of planning and development is a central part of Israel's ethnocracy and has an essential role in exacerbating the conflict. It maintains that the shikun's exclusion is a reduction of its consequences, namely the Mizrahi population's dispersion through the shikun, which stands as one of the main foundations of the Israeli ethnocratic regime. Subsequently, I identify the shikun anew as the ‘ethnocratic shikun’, and suggest that it can be a better conceptualisation to reveal how ethnic oppression, by discursive and architectural means, affects national land regimes, and thereby exacerbating regional violent conflicts. This research has two main goals. First, achieving a better understanding of Israeli society and politics by delving into a crucial component of human existence – housing, and analysing its ‘disappearance’ from public debates regarding the Middle-Eastern geopolitics. Second, the research aspires to make a methodological contribution that goes beyond Israeli housing discourse, by adding another novel layer to the Cultural Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis.