Jewish Settlement Research Articles

Decolonizing Middle East anthropology

AbstractIn the anthropology of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), there is an effort underway to decolonize the field. This process is taking shape in academic writing, in academic institutions, in field practices, and among broader publics. It must arise from priorities in the region; it also builds on wider scholarship on race, indigeneity, and militarism. It requires an expansion of the bounds of politics, consideration of who can participate, and reconsideration of what the goals of political action are. It entails working toward liberations that are always plural. Decolonizing SWANA anthropology faces distinct challenges in the field, the university, and publication processes because scholars produce critiques that expose contemporary colonialisms, including those related to the long war on terror, Israeli settler colonialism, and other colonialisms in the region. Thus, scholars equip themselves with tools to confront and transform academic institutions. Collaborative research designed to produce change can be an important part of decolonizing anthropology, but such research is not possible across all settings.

Ideology, environment, and open space in conflict arenas: The discrepancies and harmonizing strategies of West Bank Israeli settlers

The natural environments of conflict arenas often embody invisible contexts for political analysis. This study questions how environmental agendas are framed and acted upon by mid-level environmental professionals engaged in land-focused conflict. Ideological attachment to contested land together with engagement in the polemics of conflict, facilitate unique engagements with environmental agendas, particularly regarding open space preservation. This engagement prioritizes conflict-related goals and thus creates discrepancies between environmental knowledge, attitudes, and actions. Our study focuses on Israeli West Bank settlers who serve as mid-level environmental professionals and share professional dilemmas. Mid-level environmental professionals, rather than high-level policy and decision makers, are “street-level bureaucrats” and therefore a potentially novel and revealing source of environmental positions within the settler community. Through interviews focused on Israeli environment-related policies in the West Bank, we reveal disparities between environmental knowledge and the positions grounded in this group’s political identity and loyalties and identify the three particular harmonizing strategies employed in narrating the realities of their professional initiatives and agendas. We expose a distinct dual agenda, one which acknowledges environmental values and concerns, and yet only selectively recognizes and engages in goals of open space preservation when these challenge settlement infrastructure and expansion. These environmental discrepancies can be interpreted as the cynical political manipulation of environmental values, yet we propose that at a mid-level professional level, they can serve as self-rationalization in resolving dual loyalties to both political and environmental agendas. Personal realities and life experiences of environmental professionals affected by the conflict are identified as significant to the design and support of the resulting selective environmental agenda.

Precarious Bureaucratic Waiting and the Measurement of Delay at the East Jerusalem Ministry of Interior

When Palestinian Jerusalemites refer to “the ministry” (al-dakhliya), they also refer to the sense of weightiness, lost time, frustration, exhaustion, and anxiety that accumulate to the Israeli Ministry of Interior located in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi al-Joz. Multiple pressures and limited access produce tedious and outright cruel conditions for Palestinians visiting the institution. This essay attends to the affective associations and meanings the institution represents to Palestinians in Jerusalem by drawing on the author’s own experiences there and while conducting ethnographic fieldwork, including conversations and interviews with interlocutors, journalistic reporting, fiction writing, and an examination of Google reviews of the ministry. It attempts to appreciate how the experience of delay at the ministry is configured as a tool of punishment within the context of ongoing Israeli settler colonialization.

The New (Dis)Order: The Evolving UAE-Israel Security Alliance

The normalization of relations between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel under the Abraham Accords is part of a long-standing security cooperation between the two regimes to monopolize regional power. Indeed, with the rapidly changing political and security landscape in the Arab world, the Abraham Accords have become central to understanding alliance formation in the region. The Accords have significantly enhanced the already existing security and military relations between Israel and the UAE, with heavy Emirati investment in advanced Israeli weapons systems and security technologies, military and intelligence sharing, as well as ­economic partnerships in strategic sectors. While the alliance is often portrayed as a defensive security arrangement aimed at countering the “Iranian threat,” a closer examination reveals that it is much more than that. Sponsored by the United States, the alliance entrenches Israeli settler colonialism and Arab authoritarianism as mutually inclusive pillars for the region, with the ultimate objective of reproducing US hegemony in the face of changing global dynamics.

Distance from human settlements favors wild‐type appearance of feral cats (Felis catus) in Mediterranean woodland

AbstractCamouflage is a common trait enabling animals to avoid detection by predators and prey. Patterns such as spots and stripes are convergent across carnivore families, including felids, and are hypothesized to have adaptive value through camouflage. House cats (Felis catus) were domesticated thousands of years ago, but despite artificial selection for a wide variety of coat colors, the wild‐type pattern of tabby cats is very common. We aimed to determine whether this pattern grants an advantage over other morphs in natural environments. We collected cat images taken with camera traps in natural areas near and far from 38 rural settlements in Israel, to compare the habitat use by feral cats of different colors. We tested the effect of proximity to villages and habitat vegetation (normalized difference vegetation index, NDVI) on the probability of space use by the tabby morph compared to the others. NDVI had a positive effect on site use in both morphs, but non‐tabby cats had a 2.1 higher probability of using the near sites than the far sites, independent of NDVI. The wild‐type tabby cats' probability of site use were equally likely to be unaffected by proximity, or have an interaction of proximity with NDVI whereby the far transects are used with increasing probability in sites of denser vegetation. We hypothesize that the camouflage of tabby cats, more than other colors and patterns, confers an advantage in roaming the woodland habitats for which this pattern evolved. This has both theoretical implications as rare empirical evidence of the adaptive value of fur coloration, and practical implications on managing the ecological impact of feral cats worldwide.

REBELLION AND REJECTION OF HERITAGE IN MODERN HEBREW POETRY

This research deals with the image of rebellion and the rejection of heritage in modern Hebrew poetry. Poetry is considered a type of literature and one of its important basic forms. One of the literary genres, poetry has played an important role in shaping the cultural identity of nations throughout ancient and modern times. Where the Jewish writers distinguished themselves in this genre as one of the forms of social awareness, which occupies an important place and occupies an e ssential space in mobilizing societies and peoples and enlightening them to struggle for their liberation and crystallizing their revolutionary and civilizational awareness, in addition to the aesthetic function of poetry as an artistic value added to life. The phenomenon of rebellion and the rejection of the heritage emerged in Hebrew poetry in Israel and the departure from the official line of the ruling establishment in the wake of the wars that Israel waged with neighboring countries, the continuation of the occupation, the control of Jewish settlers over the Palestinian lands, and the increase in violence and injustice against the Palestinians. And the outbreak of the Palestinian uprisings since (1987-1993) and (2000) and Israel launched a war on Lebanon in 2006. All of this uttered cries of rebellion and rejection, and then expressed it in many poems. As a result, the phenomenon of rebellion and rejection poetry expanded in recent years. Hence, it can be said that the emergence of the literature of rebellion and rejection in Israel and the refusal of some Jewish writers to politicize literature and recruit it is tantamount to protesting and rebelling against the government and its institutions because they are trying to impose political dictates on their literary and intellectual writings... We will explain in this study the image of rebellion and the rejection of heritage by Jewish poets to the situation The ruling political and repressive practices in Israel and their impact on many poets as fertile material that poets derived and expressed in their poems

From Thieves to Martyrs: The Story of Two Jews from Early Modern Moravia

This paper focuses on the story of two Jewish men who were convicted of theft and executed in Prostějov, Moravia, in the spring of 1684. Although the two were offered a pardon in exchange for converting to Christianity, they resolutely refused. Their story was recorded in a contemporaneous Yiddish song that serves as the basis for the current case-study. The informative layer of the text portrays an event that can be contextualized within the campaign to proselytize Jews in the Bohemian lands at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Likewise, it indicates the great significance that Jews and Christians alike attributed to public conversions—or the lack thereof. From the formative perspective, the text crowns the two Jews as martyrs who died sanctifying God’s Name, disregarding their undenied legal culpability. Accordingly, this paper traces developments in the Ashkenazic ethos of martyrdom from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. It also highlights the shared cultural legacy that bound the larger early modern Ashkenazic communities, such as those in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Frankfurt, or Prague, to smaller Jewish settlements, like those of Moravia. Besides its hagiographical function, this historic song also imparts didactic and moralizing messages. It censures those who are too lenient vis-à-vis their children’s education as well as criticizing the habit of gambling, practices that may lead to criminal activities and push those involved to the margins of Jewish society.

Squaring the circle: Settler colonialism, the international law of occupation and the separation barrier

The Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) is highly invested in maintaining a façade of adherence to International Law (IL) in Israel's continuous occupation of the West Bank, and in mitigating the contradictions and complexities in Israel's implementation of this law. Our paper proposes a unique legal-geographical perspective to the analysis of this dynamic, while anchoring the critique of the HCJ's work within an understanding of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as a settler colonial project. Empirically, we focus on the Court's evolving jurisprudence in relation to the inclusion of expansion plans for the Jewish settlements in the routing of the separation barrier. Through a close reading of the legal texts, we demonstrate how the Court strove to subject the settler colonial logic of permanent spatial transformation and settlement expansion into the IL's imperatives of temporality and conservation. Through this case-study we propose a nuanced empirical and methodological approach to the study of contemporary settler colonial legalities. This approach focuses on the intertwinement of everyday professional practices of space and law in order to unravel the weaving of settler colonial logics into contemporary imperatives.

Muḥammad in Zion

Abstract This article discusses the ways in which Hebrew writers in late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine interacted with the history of early Islam and the relations between Muslims and Jews of the Arabian Peninsula and the political, cultural, and social functions their reconstruction fulfilled in the critical junctures of Hebrew culture in the East. The article argues that these Hebrew works reflected the development of Hebrew culture in Palestine and masqueraded the advancement of Zionist tenants among Jewish settlers on the land. Those Zionist ideals encompassed: the revival of Hebrew, the physical and cultural return to the Orient, the demonstration of the cultural and material profits Zionists might bring to the indigenous population of Palestine through underscoring a Jewish influence on Islam, and finally, to promote aspects of Jewish heroism and sacrifice by focusing on the early confrontation between Jews and Muslims.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ISRAEL'S WAR CRIMES DURING HEZBOLLAH-ISRAEL WAR OF 2006

The following research work has given a comprehensive elaboration of questions vis-àvis crucial legal aspects of the Second Lebanon war of 2006. The history of Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian lands and their activities after occupying and declaring sovereignty over these lands against Arab countries and Hezbollah has been given in the initial pages to understand the background of this conflict. These questions are closely related to ‘jus ad bellum’ which is the body of law that provides justifications for a state’s transition from peace to use of armed force and 'jus in bello’ which defines and describes code of conduct and liabilities of hostile and neutral nations along with individuals that are involved in armed conflict with each other. Most importantly, events leading to the second Lebanon war and questions regarding the assessment of this war under UN charter &interpretations of “use of force” and “armed attack” by ICJ along with analysis of Israel’s right of self-defense against Hezbollah’s actions during this ordeal will be mentioned in considerable detail as well in the latter part.

Oslo: Three Decades Later

Abstract Contrary to the commonly held belief that the 1993 Oslo Accord was a peace treaty, this article shows that it was an imbalanced interim agreement that unsurprisingly failed. Three decades later, the Israeli-Palestinian reality is marked by a massive expansion of Israel's settlement project, a gradual erasure of the Green Line, a symbiosis between Israeli security forces and the settlers, and an authoritarian and divided Palestinian leadership, with the Palestinian Authority acting as Israel's sub-contractor. Israel's regime of control also separates between Palestinian groups, with each group given a different set of limited rights. While the Oslo process had the potential to transform a predominantly ethnic struggle into a conflict over land and borders, the ramifications of the one single regime that has replaced the Oslo order cannot be underestimated. After describing these developments, the article introduces the contributions to the special issue, which add new perspectives to the still ongoing debate on the genesis, interpretation, and implications of Oslo.

SETTLER SUBURBIA IN THE NEGEV/NAQAB: THE START-UP PIONEER IN THE DESERT

ABSTRACT Within the recognized borders of Israel, in the shadow of the West Bank settlement enterprise, a new frontier is in the making. Central planning has designated the space as a burgeoning metropolitan region, and, in a parallel process, a network of Jewish-only settlements has been established. This study asks how the settlement push is narrated to the Israeli public, and thereby adds the Naqab to previous studies exploring the link between colonial settlement and suburbia, and more specifically with the community-settlement model. It analyzes audiovisual material produced by two Zionist organizations and finds that the new frontier is narrated as a space for reenactment of the mythic pioneer trope, and that this ideal is mediated in relation to the new neoliberal ethos of Israel as the “start-up nation.” The study moreover expands on the interplay of geographic scales, thus adding an important contribution to scholarly understanding of contemporary settler-colonialism.

Israel's spatial and a-spatial strategy of dispossessing the Jordan Valley's Palestinian Inhabitants.

The Jordan Valley's territorial extent is defined for this study as an elongated stretch of border area, located west of Jordan's boundary with the West Bank, Palestine. This region along with the West Bank was conquered by the Israeli Army during the June 1967 War and has been held by Israel since. Almost 88% of its 200,000 Palestinian population then living in the region were expelled and turned overnight into refugees in Jordan and elsewhere. In the subsequent 56years since, the region, declared by Israel as a highly militarized zone, has often been discursively publicized as the front line of Israel's eastern defense. This paper seeks to refute such a notion that indirectly gave Israel justification to subject the remaining Palestinian inhabitants residing there (currently numbering ca. 60,000) to a harsh discriminatory regimen of surveillance and control under military occupation. At the same time, the Israeli government has over decades privileged the ca. 10,000 incoming Jewish settlers, now living in some 30 Israeli Jewish settlements in the Jordan Valley. Employing a grounded theory approach in our study provided an opportunity for the local Palestinians to have their voices heard, shedding needed analytical light on their difficult situation on the ground.

The Possession of History and the Dispossession of Silwan’s Palestinians

Since 1967, the slogan “restoring Jerusalem to its Jewish glory” has served as a rallying cry for the further colonization of the occupied eastern part of the city by the Israeli government and settler organizations alike. Jewish settlement in Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods invokes moral claims to Jewish sovereignty based on biblical history and material claims to pre-1948 properties of Jews in these neighborhoods. This essay examines Jewish settler groups’ utilization of Israel’s political-legal infrastructure to advance their colonization projects at the very heart of Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem. More specifically, it examines an area of Silwan where Ateret Cohanim, through its representatives, has initiated eviction lawsuits against dozens of Palestinian families in the Israeli magistrate court, alleging trespass of Jewish-endowed waqf land established in the 1880s. As elsewhere in East Jerusalem, some of the targeted families in Silwan were originally displaced either from areas that became Israel after 1948 or from the Old City in 1967.

Violence and State Attribution: The Case of Occupied Palestine

Israel, as an occupying power, has the obligation to protect Palestinians against all acts of violence. This article examines Israeli settler violence from the lens of this obligation and of the law of state responsibility. In doing so, it first provides examples of settler attacks against Palestinians, with particular emphasis on acts of violence that are backed up or facilitated by state security forces. Second, in an analysis of these acts of settler violence, it argues that these belong to the category of state-backed crimes. Third, it outlines what constitutes state responsibility for wrongful acts, as codified in international law, and demonstrates that acts of settler violence are crimes that are attributable to the state, which trigger state responsibility. Settler violence against Palestinians, which is often lethal and always injurious, is not and has never been a matter of domestic law enforcement.

In Defense of a Just Society: Buber Contra Gandhi on Jewish Migration to Palestine

Much has been written on Martin Buber’s public response to Mahatma Gandhi’s article “The Jews”, which had been published in the newspaper Harijan in 1938, just after the Nazi pogrom against the Jews known as “Kristallnacht”. I wish to examine more closely Buber’s conception of God’s command to the Jewish people to settle the land of Palestine in a manner that expresses love for their Arab neighbors, seeks harmony and peace in the land, and serves not only the common good among Jews and Arabs but the good of the land itself—that it would be fruitful for all. Central to Buber’s conception of the state of Israel in Palestine—and Jewish settlement more generally—was God’s ancient command that the Jews must establish a just society. The Jews must be faithful, Buber contended, to build a community and state that obeys God’s calling and aligns with their mission to reflect God’s justice in the world. Thus, understanding and harmony between the Jews and Arabs must be integral to the Jews’ approach to Arabs in Palestine, not peripheral to their mission. Buber’s response demonstrates his desire to relate directly and personally to Gandhi, to reveal falsehoods and misunderstandings, and to facilitate a greater awareness of the richness of the Jewish tradition that may be used to benefit the land of Palestine and its peoples. This vision for the Jewish mission deserves more attention in the historiography.

Factors influencing the location of the early Zionist settlements in Ottoman Palestine: 1880–1915

Most of the first Jewish rural settlements established in Ottoman Palestine in the late nineteenth century have something in common that has not yet been systematically analyzed. This common factor is their physical location: on low or high ground. Most of the first Jewish settlements were established in plains and valleys for several reasons, while Arab rural settlements were located in the hills and mountains. The article discusses how Palestinian notables (effendis) who purchase or leased the usufruct rights to state land after the promulgation of the Ottoman Land Code in 1858, subsequently sold all or part of their landholdings in the valleys and plains of Late Ottoman Palestine to Jewish purchasers until the British conquest of Palestine in 1917.

Between familiarity and strangeness: Russian Jews in Josep Sabah’s letters from the coast of Entre Ríos

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the correspondence exchanged between Josep Sabah, a teacher originally from the Ottoman Empire, and the leaders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Colonization Association, institutions that had sent him to Argentina to found a network of Jewish schools in several towns in the province of Entre Ríos, from 1894 to 1922. In the first place, we focus on the contradictory ways through which this cultured Jew, educated in French and Sephardic schools, represents the new settlers sent from Russia to Argentina by the Jewish Colonization Association. Second, we focus on the self-rendering of this teacher in his letters, and on the tensions between the expectations of his employers, the demands of the settlers and the gradual disenchantment with the conditions of life in his adopted country.

‘When you come to Ariel, you come to serenity’: Affect, Aesthetics and Normalisation of Colonial Domination in Israeli Settlements

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the normalisation of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank on the part of their inhabitants. Focusing on the so-called ‘non-ideological’ settlements that evolved from ideological outposts into middle-class suburbs over the last three decades, this study engages spatial politics in Israel/Palestine in general, and the transformations of the settlement project in particular. Based on ethnographic research in the region, I argue that the acceptance and normalisation of the settlements among Israelis is closely related to their affective and aesthetic experiences. I focus on the co-production of space/territory, affect and aesthetics to show how physical transformations of the settlements since their establishment have turned many of these key nodes of the Israeli occupational apparatus into family-friendly communities, thus erasing the violence of the Israeli control over the Palestinians from settlers’ lives. I further demonstrate that these notions are not disrupted even by one of the most prominent symbols and technologies of the occupation, the fence/wall. This study thus contributes to understanding of how the interplay of spatial, territorial, aesthetic and affective practices works to normalise colonial conquest and domination by making their manifestations seemingly natural and even appealing on the part of the privileged segments of the society.

The Use of ‘Frontier’ and ‘Periphery’ as Symbolic Capital in the Political Campaign to Determine Israel's Settlement Map

Abstract The shape of Israel's settlement map in the first two decades of independence was the outcome of formative political, economic, and social mechanisms. This article focuses on settlement in the mountain region through an examination of the failed settlement efforts in Biranit. We address settlement programs for the mountain region as a reflection of the contest to control the state's bureaucratic character and shape the character of its institutions. From this perspective, efforts to settle the mountain region represent the political contest between state and Zionist bodies over their roles in the transition from Yishuv to state. Special attention is drawn to the use of the terms ‘frontier’ and ‘periphery’ to mobilize political and economic resources both in and outside Israel.