Jewish Settlement Research Articles

Occupation, colonisation, and apartheid tourism in Israeli settlements in occupied palestine

ABSTRACT The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has classified Israel as an ‘apartheid regime’ for the first time in its history of documenting human rights violations in occupied Palestine, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The primary goal of this conceptual paper is to investigate Israel's exploitation of Palestinian tourism and international complicity by focusing on critical examples of international companies and businesses that contribute to the business of Israeli colonisation by confusing tourists and exploiting a lack of knowledge. The study finds that Israel abides by the concept of apartheid in international law, which involves inhumane acts carried out by one racial group to create and retain dominance over any other racial group of people and systematically oppress them.

War and peace within the Israeli Right (1970 - 1978): the path of a Hawkish party towards pragmatism

ABSTRACT Right-wing ethno-nationalist parties are conceived of as upholders of rigid foreign policy positions. But in what instances might a hawkish party pursue a peace-promoting policy? The present article seeks to examine this question through the case study of the hawkish-nationalist Right in Israel during the 1970s, which eventually led its leader Menachem Begin to sign a peace agreement with Egypt, entailing a commitment to a full Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and the evacuation of the Jewish settlements established in the area. The article examines the process which paradoxically led such right-wing hawkish leadership to signing—with determination and contrary to public expectations—an unprecedented political agreement in the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Contrary to the Israeli Right historiography which has, hitherto, focused on Menachem Begin’s persona and on his role in the political process—the article emphasizes those broad historical processes eclipsed by the limelight cast on its leader, underscoring the peace discourse evolving within the Israeli right political network, from party activists and supporters to parliamentary leadership. Rather than a personal initiative opposing his network’s policy—as considered in academic discourse—Begin’s peace project followed the exhortations of his political matrix.

Israel and covid-19: how will the history of the epidemic in this country be written in the future?

This article attempts to hypothetically reflect on how historians of science will write their research on the development of the covid-19 pandemic in Israel in the future, within a context that includes: the political crisis experienced by the country at that time; the history of the public health institutions established from the time of the first Jewish settlers in Palestine, at the beginning of the twentieth century, and slightly modified by a law of 1994; the conceptual schemes developed during the last decades by historians of public health and pandemics in general.

Islamic Feminist Ijtihad among Palestinians in Israel

This article explores the practice of Islamic feminist ijtihad (IFI), which is a critical feminist stance toward religious texts and is the leading approach of Palestinian Islamic feminist women in Israel. Ijtihad means to expand one's capacities and use them to the utmost. In particular, it embodies the effort to learn and undertake religious interpretation. This article analyzes the dual challenges of Israeli hegemony and the patriarchal interpretation of Islam in the complex political reality of Israel/Palestine today. It is based on semistructured interviews with activists from the Women and Horizons Association (WHA), an Islamic feminist organization that emerged under Israeli settler colonialism. The findings show that a critical view of religious texts contributes to constructing a feminist Islamic interpretation dedicated to improving women's status and furthering their struggle against the intersecting power structures of patriarchal Islam and Israeli policies designed to dismantle Islamic religious power and prevent its resurgence.

A Gendered Return

A Gendered Return

Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival

Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival

الدور األلماني في تشجيع الهجرة واالستيطان الصهيوني في فلسطين 4910-4812

The study sheds light on the German role in boosting immigration and building Zionist settlements in Palestine between (1860-1942). Since the acceleration of the German political, religious and cultural penetration in Palestine and the announcement of the emergence of a strict German religious fundamentalists in 1861, the first colonial settlement projects established in Palestine. In parallel with World War II, the political German perspective changed towards the Middle East region, and a new historical stage had begun in the German policy with Jewish issue. The study indicates the Christian-Zionist roots in Germany in which an ideological tendency of Jewish colonization in the Palestinian territories has appeared. German missionaries were sent to Palestinian territories, which supported and expanded the Jewish immigration and resettlement. Moreover, it detects the cooperation between the German government with the Zionist organization by providing the needed support and protection for settlers.

Sytuacja edukacyjna, społeczna i ekonomiczna Żydówek w powiecie wałeckim (Prusy Zachodnie) w okresie od XVIII do początków XX wieku

In this article, I analyze the functioning of women in Jewish communities in the Wałcz County (Kreis Deutsch Krone), which was part of West Prussia until the end of 1945. This area, located initially between West Prussia and Pomerania and later between several Prussian provinces, was particularly conducive to Jewish settlement. As a result, for example in Miroslawiec (Märkisch Friedland), located in the Wałcz district, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Jewish population constituted as much as 55%. So far, few publications have been written about the Jewish communities functioning in that area. The text is of a historical nature; in the course of its preparation, I have made use of archival materials, the Jewish press of the time, and I have also referred to Prussian legal regulations. As a result, I have analysed the economic, legal and, in particular, educational situation of Jewish women living in the area, taking into account two types of factors that conditioned it – religious orders and Prussian legislation. I also discuss the changes and their causes, to which the functioning of women in these communities was subjected in the period from the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the gradual assimilation of the Jewish population, progressing until World War II, which put an end to the presence of Jews in this area.

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Settler Nostalgia: Colonizing Temporalities and the Genre of Coexistence

For Jewish Israelis in the West Bank settlement of Alfei Menashe, nostalgia for the early years of settlement entails a fantasy of coexistence with Palestinians. This fantasy responds to contemporary peacemaking discourses, reimagining the role of settlement from a practice engendering conflict to one that is an integral part of the peacemaking project. Settler nostalgia is thus a temporal orientation with important political consequences. Scholarly debates have focused on the universalizing, modernizing temporality of settler colonialism, but neither this nor the state-centered historicity of hegemonic accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be the only or even the most relevant temporal frames for contemporary Zionist settlement in the West Bank of Palestine. This article examines settler temporal strategies as a crucial part of how one settlement has not only survived but also has grown and flourished in the nearly forty years since its founding.

The Israeli elephant in the settler-colonial room

ABSTRACT This article presents a rationale to expand settler-colonial studies so as to conceptually fuse in the same proposition the question of settler-colonial permanence with that of the settler subject. Arguments are elaborated based on one particular case study, Palestine. This gap in the research in relation to Palestine not only has left unresolved the problem of how to explain the continuation of the Israeli settler regime beyond its unequivocal overt and superior mechanisms of legal and brute power but has also kept the concrete perpetrators in the shadows, away from public accountability. The article also lays out a number of potential dimensions to lead research into the conceptual nexus suggested here, for the specific case of Palestine. These dimensions, which I suggest form the emotional economy of Israeli settler-colonial subjectivity, comprise (1) the compensatory distributions of settler-colonial capture, (2) the historical formation of strata of subjectivation, (3) the avenues of socialization that cement the commitment to a militarized society, and (4) the ways by which settler learning and settler practice are conjoined in everyday training.

Slow urbicide: Accounting for the shifting temporalities of political violence in the West Bank

The article explores the conceptual affinities of slow violence and urbicidal policies in the context of the ongoing Israeli colonization of the West Bank. It investigates the processes of the systematic degeneration of Palestinian urban tissue, triggered by state-supported intentional developments connected to the Israeli settlement project. Building on recent scholarship on slow violence, on the one hand, and urbicidal policies, on the other, the article proposes the concept of “slow urbicide” to account for the shifting temporalities of urbicidal violence as much as for its reliance on, or activation of, human and more-than-human agencies and forces. Engaging briefly with scholarly work on urban trauma connected to dispossessions and deliberate destructions, the analysis also draws attention to the effects of slow urbicide. On a more general level, the article aims to contribute to enhanced understanding of problems situated at the overlap of urban studies and investigations of state-sponsored violence, focusing specifically on issues related to urban warfare. It suggests that the different speeds at which urbicide is perpetuated should be taken into consideration in order to better capture the character of violence against the built environment and to expose its complex multitemporal operations.

Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation by Fredrik Meiton

Reviewed by: Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation by Fredrik Meiton Xiaoyue Li (bio) Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation By Fredrik Meiton. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. 312. Whereas Thomas Hughes's seminal Networks of Power (1983) sets the tone for studying electricity in Western societies, Electrical Palestine offers new insight into this infrastructure in a non-Western and colonial context. Fredrik Meiton excellently demonstrates that the physical materials for electrification both embodied and enacted modern political power. Meiton thus pushes STS scholarship to rethink the critical role of infrastructure in ethnic conflict and nation-building. Although electricity networks were not the only infrastructure under-girding Israel, Electrical Palestine eloquently convinces readers that electricity was the foundational technology in two major ways. Meiton persuasively argues that electricity contributed significantly to the Jewish sector's rapid industrialization and exponential economic growth in the interwar period, while the Arab sector, unlit due to deliberate electric grid arrangements that bypassed it, remained unindustrialized and underdeveloped (p. 5). In addition, electrification functioned as an integral substrate for other heterogeneous infrastructure systems, such as electrified railways and Jewish settlements (p. 62, 71). Therefore, electrification was the infrastructure of all infrastructures and substrate of the modern Jewish economy and political power. In what is his major contribution to technology studies—also constituting his central arguments—Meiton positions his delicate and powerful explanation of the electricity infrastructure as a trinity of material technology, capital, and politics. He vigorously highlights Zionist engineer Pinhas Rutenberg's state-building agenda embedded within the apolitical and developmentalist languages of his technical proposals, strategies that Meiton [End Page 563] calls "politics of the non-politics" (p. 89, chs. 1–4). By skillfully using British and Zionist archives, as well as electricity company records, Electrical Palestine highlights how the material infrastructure of power plants and electric grids concretized and inscribed the Zionist movement's ideal nation-building ambitions. It thus reveals from a material perspective the founding myth of modern Israel. In the classic STS literature by Bruno Latour, Susan Leigh Star, and James Griesemer, "boundary work" seeks mutually recognizable objects, standards, or rules, laying the foundation for scientific collaboration (Star and Griesemer, Social Studies of Science, 1989; Latour, Reassembling the Social, 2005). Meiton showcases that "boundary work," in a colonial context, can be at once inclusive and exclusive. Rutenberg's apolitical and developmentalist outlook enabled him to forge an alliance with British officials, European capital, and Jewish settlers. In contrast with this inclusiveness, the next set of chapters demonstrate that Rutenberg excluded the Arab population in Palestine from enjoying equal access to electricity, resulting in widespread disillusionment among Arab communities and the subsequent mass revolt between 1936 and 1939 (chs. 5–7). Through the lens of Rutenberg's boundary work, the author diagnoses a root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict from an infrastructural perspective. Unlike an earlier monograph on this topic—Ronen Shamir's Current Flow (2013)—Electrical Palestine includes "Palestinian perspectives on electrification" (p. 10). Of note, the asymmetrical structure of political power is also fully reflected in the historical sources. Hebrew, English, and other European-language materials produced in Britain and Israel are used far more frequently in Shamir's work. In this respect, Meiton's meticulously researched project impressively excavates the Arabic municipal archives in Nablus, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and Haifa, revealing new perspectives of Palestinian elites that Shamir does not access. These uncovered Arabic sources shed light on the Palestinian elites' aborted attempts to restructure Zionist infrastructure. The municipalities of Jaffa, for instance, never opposed Rutenberg's electrification plan, and even sought to invest in and operate local electric grids (p. 97). Future research could adopt a non-elite perspective, investigating if historians can view illicit acts such as sabotage and electricity theft as "political leverage" of Palestinian nationalist leaders or as spontaneous, grassroots activities countering unfavorable conditions (p. 82, 93). In the Jewish and Arab communities' increasingly heroic nationalist narratives, how can histories account for the everyday experiences of non-elites, the segment who suffer directly from ever-rigid ethno-religious segregation and opposition? Anthropologist Nikhil Anand argues that the "banality of infrastructure" often makes people ignore...

Settler-Colonialism and the Diary of an Israeli Settler in the Golan Heights: The Notebooks of Izhaki Gal

In 1967 the Golan Heights saw a dramatic change: a hundred villages were destroyed and replaced by new Israeli settlements. We study the beginning of this settlement through the lens of settler-colonialism, using documents of the time. The settlers claim to be ‘original natives’, ‘returning’ to the land and, like other colonial settlers elsewhere, bringing culture and civilisation to a terra nullius. To justify the settlement, they create a ‘deep’ narrative that combines the ancient past and the new settlement, erasing the in-between Arab past. The settlement — and the destruction — are on-going processes. The settler appears as a young, heroic figure, who patronises the ‘Others’ as weaklings (tourists, women, etc.) and is oblivious to the tragedy of the displaced Syrian inhabitants of the Golan Heights.

Jews and the Farm-Business Complex in the Southern British Mainland Colonies and Beyond

Jews and the Farm-Business Complex in the Southern British Mainland Colonies and Beyond Mark K. Bauman (bio) In 1733, Abigail Minis sailed across the Atlantic with her husband, Abraham, as part of the first contingent of Jews from England to Savannah, Georgia. She juggled raising a family while helping Abraham conduct business. He gave Abigail legal control of his enterprises when he died, and they flourished under her leadership as never before. Because Abigail never remarried, she maintained her agency. She expanded the land holdings she inherited from her husband exponentially. She also ran a popular tavern that served as an important meeting place for businesspeople and political figures. The tavern used products from her plantations, and the plantations also provided building materials for her urban real estate investments. A patriot during the American Revolution, she fled to Charleston while the British occupied Georgia. Yet her political and business contacts shielded her property in Georgia from confiscation. Informed by the important role of women in the family economy over generations, her blending of agriculture and business is an important illustration of key themes in this essay: in a region dominated by a cash-crop farming economy, the Jews who pursued agriculture did so almost always in line with their regular commercial activities. MODELS AND VARIATIONS When historians of transatlantic Jewry discuss Jewish plantation ownership in South America and the Caribbean, they define "plantation Jews" like the Minis family as a social type.1 Before about 1800, Jews in the Caribbean hailed largely from Portugal or descended from Portuguese [End Page 143] Jews. Many brought their experience with sugarcane from their earlier sojourn in Dutch Recife, Brazil and pioneered and served as leaders of sugarcane production in their new home. The Inquisition had previously forced them to convert (New Christians) or outwardly practice Catholicism while secretly remaining Jews (crypto-Jews). The latter frequently renewed their identities as Jews when freed from fear of the Inquisition. They could nonetheless face substantial religious and even racial discrimination as they did in Jamaica, unlike in the American South, where antisemitism was limited. This Portuguese Nación maintained religious, family, and business ties across the globe. Links with Bayonne and Holland proved especially strong, although connections with London increased from the mid-eighteenth century. Although most of these individuals conducted local and international trade, a few not only owned sugarcane plantations but also conducted international trade in products derived from the cane and other merchandise. Some did both and others did one or the other. Still, as Stanley Mirvis observes of Jamaica, "this study of Jews is an urban history of a colony with a largely rural population." Jewish merchants abounded in Port Royal and other Caribbean cities. Mirvis describes a "more nuanced reality that 'merchants' and 'planters' were often one and the same…." As in the American South, only a small number of Jews owned plantations, although far more did so in the islands than in the South. Variations thus exist in the model of plantation Jewry.2 Jews in the American South both conformed to and diverged from this model and its variations. They often immigrated after first undergoing [End Page 144] an adjustment period in England, had more diverse backgrounds, and did not have associations with Bayonne or prior experience in Brazil. None owned sugarcane plantations during the colonial era, and few did so thereafter. Thus Jews in the American South were far from quintessential plantation Jews. So few Jews worked as farmers, for example, that historians of Charleston Jewry assumed that the earliest Jewish settlers purchased plantation land only to qualify for full political rights because they made their livelihood as merchants.3 Yet, in both the Caribbean and America, Jews gravitated to cities; participated in international trade using ethnic, religious, and familiar connections; participated and benefited from slave-based plantation economies; and mixed agricultural with business endeavors. In contrast to Jews in the Caribbean, only a small number of Jews in the American South farmed, and virtually all of these integrated their agriculture and business ventures. Whereas Jews in the Caribbean and South America owned plantations and ran businesses, these enterprises do not appear to have been conjoined in...

Israel’s ‘Nationality Law’: Reconsidering Settlement, Citizenship and Ethics in the Context of Occupation

In 2018, the State of Israel enacted a new constitutional law: ‘BASIC LAW: ISRAEL-THE NATION STATE OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE’. The Law reflects diverse Zionist ideologies which were nevertheless all ‘land-centered’ rather than state-centered from an early stage; it reformulates that intellectual tradition, however, promoting Jewish settlements in conditions of occupation and celebrates, for the first time, settlement as the prime and exclusive goal of the state. Partly to facilitate this goal, and to further blur borders, the law also contracts the meaning and status of Palestinians’ citizenship in Israel, thus at least symbolically narrowing the (still significant) political-legal gap between these citizens and the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Finally, the Law seems to vacate the state from its ethical dimension and commitments as defined by its Declaration of independence (1948) — including its commitments to the democratic principles of political liberty for all and equality — thus manifesting the influence ruling and subjugating others through military government is having on Israel’s constitutional framework.

Linguistic Landscape in the West Bank: Road Signs as Manifestations of Occupation

This study investigates road signs put in place by Israel in Area C in the occupied West Bank. It discusses how language on road signs in the West Bank serve as tool that enforces Israeli dominance over the area and blurs the Palestinian existence. This dominance is reflected in the excessive placement of signs referring to Israeli settlements compared to signs referring to Palestinian communities, transliteration of Arabic names of sites into Hebrew, and deletion of Arabic, a language associated with the Palestinian identity, from road signs. In addition, this paper demonstrates how the exclusion of Arabic from road signs, especially brown signs referring to tourist attractions, serves as a barrier that aims at limiting Palestinians’ access to some parts of the West Bank and shows Israeli discriminatory practices against Palestinians. Moreover, this paper explains how warning signs at Israeli checkpoint construct the concept of the “Palestinian islands” by dividing the West Bank into disconnected enclaves surrounded by an ocean of Area C making the idea of establishing an independent Palestinian state seem impossible. Finally, this study records instances of Palestinians’ resistance to Israel through vandalism of signs that were placed by the Israeli authorities in Area C.

British interwar airspace in the Middle East: The forgotten airport of Lydda

Airports provide an essential infrastructure for the production of airspace by facilitating networks of aero mobility. This study considers the case of Lydda airport in Mandatory Palestine. Promoted in the 1930's as a hub for British civil aviation on its India route, Lydda airport is largely absent from the inter-war history of civil aviation although the site would become the location of the present-day Ben-Gurion International Airport. The study finds that while British decision-makers initially trumped the attempts of Jewish settlers to locate the country's inter-continental airport in Tel-Aviv rather than at Lydda, sustained pressure and an anti-colonial Arab Revolt compromised that decision. The tension between imperial trans-continental priorities and domestic ambitions were translated in Palestine into two separate and partially competing neighbouring airports.

Discussion of Palestinian-Israeli Conflict in British Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee (2014)

The authors analyze the debates on the problem of the Middle East settlement in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British Parliament, which took place in connection with the start of the American peace initiative in 2013-14. A general description of the discussion of the Middle East issues at committee meetings during the government cadence of D. Cameron (2010-2016) is given. Particular attention is paid to the positions of the parties to the conflict, stated at the meeting by the diplomats of Israel and Palestine. The key issues of the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation are considered: issues of permanent status (borders, refugees, Israeli settlements, the status of Jerusalem) and security issues discussed at the negotiations held under the auspices of John Kerry. It is proved that the positions of the conflicting parties remained irreconcilable. It is noted that at this historical stage, none of the leading powers of the world had sufficient influence for an effective and successful settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time the documents of the British Parliament were introduced into scientific circulation in order to analyze the prospects for a Middle East settlement. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains a source of tension in the Middle East, continuing to influence the situation in the region and the policies of the leading world powers.

Jewish "Iron Rangers": Jewish Settlement on Minnesota's Iron Range

Jewish "Iron Rangers"Jewish Settlement on Minnesota's Iron Range Marilyn J. Chiat (bio) I. Introduction A small red brick building stands on the corner of 4th Avenue and 5th Street South in Virginia, Minnesota. On the day of its dedication, April 8, 1910, the front page of the local newspaper, The Virginia Enterprise, featured a photo of the building and an article describing it as a beautiful, well-built temple that cost approximately $10,000, a goodly sum for the time.1 Constructed for the town's small Jewish community, the temple was given the name B'nai (sons of) Abraham. Beautifully restored and rededicated in 2010, the building, now known as the B'nai Abraham Cultural Center and Museum, is used for a variety of community events and houses a permanent display of photographs, artifacts, and other material documenting the history of the Iron Range's once-vibrant Jewish community. The recipient of a Minnesota Preservation Award in 2019, B'nai Abraham is the only surviving visual evidence of the Range's Jewish settlers who, in the face of many challenges, were able to maintain their faith and its traditions, while adapting to life as "Iron Rangers." At one time the Range was home to over one thousand Jews who organized congregations in four towns: Chisholm, Eveleth, Hibbing, and Virginia. This essay traces the history of their founders who established homes and opened shops on the Range's developing main streets. It recounts the challenges facing them, including their interactions with their neighbors in what was and still is Minnesota's most diverse religious and ethnic region. The uncertain economy of the Range also had an impact on the Jewish community. As the demand for iron ore began to diminish in the 1950s, so too did the region's population. Many young people left to seek [End Page 1] their fortune elsewhere, including Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan, whose maternal great-grandparents, Lyba and Benjamin Edelstein, were among the Range's earliest settlers. The departure of members of Dylan's generation spelled doom for the Jewish community and its synagogues. By the 1980s only one synagogue survived, B'nai Abraham, and its doors closed a decade later. Jews no longer have a presence on the Range.2 Long before iron ore was discovered in northeastern Minnesota, the land was covered with a verdant forest of white pine and home to Native peoples living off its bounty. By the early nineteenth century, as the nation began to expand westward, cities like Chicago and St. Louis were developing, and lumber was needed for construction. Fifty years after timber cruisers first discovered the region's vast forest, the land was reduced to tree stumps, revealing the red earth that lay below its surface.3 Minnesota's pine forests were gone, but the region soon contributed a second natural resource to the building of America, iron ore. Geologists were aware of the region's lode, but it was not until the development of the modern blast furnace in the 1850s that iron could be economically transformed into steel. Soon after, speculators and explorers began to stake out claims for mining rights, first on the Vermillion Range, opening in 1882, and ten years later on the larger and more productive Mesabi Range. Laborers, skilled and unskilled, were needed. Among the first to arrive were experienced mine operators, often Scandinavians, and Cornish miners from the mines of Michigan. Recruiters in impoverished regions of eastern and southern Europe found a ready supply of unskilled laborers seeking a ticket to the "promised land." By 1910, the Range's total population was 77,655, representing twenty-five different ethnic and/or national groups, each carving out a place in the region, in hopes it would be their "bridge of gold" to a better life. Finns were the dominant nationality, then Slavs and Italians, and following them, Swedes, Norwegians, and a diversity of others including Jews.4 The Iron Range was representative of the nation's "mosaic" celebrated in a speech delivered by former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in 1972: "Some see the United States as a vast melting pot where our particular ethnic traditions...