Work In Palestine Research Articles

From Wax Cylinder to Metal Disc: Transplanting Robert Lachmann’s “Oriental Music” Project from Berlin to Jerusalem on the Eve of World War II

Of the multidisciplinary cohort of scholars associated with the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in its formative decades, it is Robert Lachmann (1892–1939) who, in his approach to fieldwork and the importance he attached to it, comes closest to adopting the methods of classic ethnomusicology. In April 1935, having been dismissed from his post in the Prussian State Library under the Nazi racial laws, he took up a temporary appointment at the newly founded Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a mission to create an Archive of Oriental Music. He brought with him copies of his entire collection of some 500 wax cylinder recordings held in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. Between 1935 and 1938, Lachmann made 956 recordings on metal disc documenting musical traditions of different "Eastern" communities of Palestine. His writings from this period, however, relied predominantly on research carried over from his Berlin years. The most substantial, and the first to be completed, is his monograph Jewish Cantillation and Song in the Isle of Djerba (Gesänge der Juden auf der Insel Djerba) based on his fieldwork in Djerba in 1929. In this contribution, I argue that Lachmann's pioneering study of this Tunisian Jewish community provided the methodological blueprint for much of his work in Palestine. I focus on his series of 12 radio programs, entitled "Oriental Music," transmitted by the Palestine Broadcasting Service between November 1936 and April 1937. The programs, which feature different groups living in or around Jerusalem, were illustrated by live studio performances by local musicians and singers, simultaneously recorded onto metal disc. In successive lectures, Lachmann presents fundamental ideas about the nature and evolution of musical practices and systems that are explored more fully in his Djerba monograph. Thwarted by inadequate finances and lack of institutional support, Lachmann's work was cut short by his premature death in May 1939 and it fell to his former student, Edith Gerson-Kiwi, to pick up the threads of his project. His collecting activities, together with the comparative vision that informed them, laid the foundations for the work of subsequent generations of ethnomusicologists.

Teaching English in Palestine: Building trusting relationships by centering humanity

As educators, we recognize the centrality of humanness above and beyond everything else in our professional practice. As such, the affective aspects of instructional engagement rest at the center of language learning and teaching. Through this paper, four educators from the US explore the ways the affective side of language learning and use shows up in their work in Palestine. Drawing from feminist epistemologies, critical race theory, and liberatory practices, the authors trace the trajectories of their professional practices, and explore the ways they learned to center the affective aspects of instruction, leveraging culturally sustaining practices, and highlighting various ways to engage in solidarity. Through four vignettes, set at four distinctly different Palestinian institutions of higher education, each contributor highlights a unique experience that exemplifies centering the affective aspects of language teaching and learning. / Keywords: Palestine, affective, relationships, solidarity, occupation

Community social work in Palestine: from resilience to national resistance

In the absence of a national Palestinian state and in response to the oppressive daily practices of the British Mandate government, the Israeli settlers’ colonial occupation and the Arab governments that ruled the West Bank and Gaza between 1950 and 1967, the Palestinian community has had to create and develop a set of indigenous resilience strategies. Muslih (1993) and Faraj (2017) refer to all these strategies as ‘A’mal Ejtima’y’, or ‘popular social work’, characterised by collectivism, public participation and non-hierarchical design, which has played a role in mobilising masses and facilitating youth engagement in the decolonisation process. Despite more than a century of existence of this form of social work in Palestine, it has received marginal or no attention from formal social work education and research. Recent years have witnessed some indications of the ‘resurrection’ of community social work in its very popular version.

A Relational Comparison: The Gendered Effects of Cross-Border Work in Palestine within a Global Frame

This article sets the gendered effects of low-wage, cross-border labor in Palestine within a global frame of uneven development. Drawing on fieldwork close to Checkpoint 300, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, we first provide an account that centers Palestinian women’s social reproduction as coconstitutive of male cross-border employment in the Israeli economy. Discussion then moves to consider gendered work in apartheid-era South Africa with the intention not to draw analogies but to explore how labor articulation situated South Africa within the power geometries of globalization. Returning with these analytical tools, we undertake a relational comparison to reconsider the cross-border as a global space. Cutting-edge security technologies and migrants from Thailand are some of the new objects, ideas, and people that coalesce and reshape Palestinian domestic life. The gendered effects of social reproduction are thus connected to both Israel’s military occupation and its location within global capitalism. The article makes three key contributions by (1) foregrounding women in discussion of cross-border labor, (2) explicating state–global relations in regimes of segregation, and (3) mobilizing relational comparison as a tool for understanding local exploitation within global structures.

In the Excess of Splintering Urbanism: The Racialized Political Economy of Infrastructure

ABSTRACT This intervention discusses the relevance of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in the study of splintering urbanism, as an uneven socio-spatial process that simultaneously produces dispossession and racial differentiation. Reflecting on our work in Palestine and South Africa we grapple with what leaks in processes of splintering urbanism and we propose “excess” as a provisional analytical space to focus on the racialized political economies of infrastructure. We argue that excess is a generative concept: to render legible the often-silenced histories, geographies, and experiences produced and managed through infrastructure; to reflect on the way stratified social relations materialize in and through urban networks; and to speculate on liberating horizons. In doing so, we consider infrastructure as an archive, a lively ethnographic repository where modern histories of excess live, and where the contested material relations of racialized political economies unravel.

Digital feminisms in Palestinian hip hop

Hip hop is central to the Palestinian ‘alternative’ (badila) music scene. Recently, some rappers in the scene started making feminist tracks and sharing them using video-sharing and social media platforms. In this article, I analyse artists’ music videos as well as interviews with musicians to examine what happens when hip hop gets feminist and goes online in the Palestinian context. My argument is twofold. First, I suggest that rappers circulate songs and videos on social media that transgress gender and sexuality norms. Second, however, while these productions do critical identity work in Palestine, they also often iterate liberal ‘solutions’ to structural asymmetries. I therefore conclude that Palestinian hip hop mediates contradictory feminisms as it travels online. Neither dystopic nor utopian, digital culture makes room for gendered critiques that coexist and compete with depoliticized ideas about liberal personhood and individual agency.

“Creatively in Coalition” from Palestine to India: Weaving stories of refusal and community as decolonial praxis

AbstractColonialism and coloniality constitute the backbone of modernity. Colonial structures/systems are predicated on recurring patterns of domination and violence. Decolonial movements are rehumanizing and abolitionist projects guided by Global South peoples’ reimagining and reclaiming of what it means to be human. Decolonial praxes therefore require transnational efforts to decenter Whitestream academic institutions as hubs of knowledge production. In light of this, we question the boundaries of what we consider to be research in psychology as we walk in the legacies of struggle and survival—of our grandmothers and grandfathers, and so many ancestors who never used the word “decolonial”. Weaving together stories of refusal and community grounded on our work in Palestine and India, we demonstrate how our decolonial strivings require us to continuously rediscover ways of being present, being in struggle, and being human together as we work ‘‘creatively in coalition’’ with our communities. Through our stories of accompaniment, and bringing them into conversation with each other, we disrupt violent, colonially‐configured borders. In our world‐making coalitions and the writing of this article, we turn to a praxis that allows for the revisioning of justice as irresistible and interlinked, ungovernable and in defiance of borders and walls.

Difficulties Of Learning And Practicing The Profession Of Social Work In Palestine From The Viewpoint Of Social Workers And The Ways To Overcome Them

هدفت الدراسة إلى التعرف إلى صعوبات تعلم وممارسة مهنة الخدمة الاجتماعية في فلسطين من وجهة نظر الأخصائيين الاجتماعيين، ولتحقيق الهدف تم تطبيق أداة الدراسة بعد التحقق من صدقها وثباتها على عينة مكونة من (80) أخصائيا اجتماعيا تم اختيارهم من (12) مؤسسة للخدمة الاجتماعية في قطاع غزة بطريقة العينة المتيسرة. وأشارت النتائج إلى المستوى المتوسط لصعوبات تعلم وممارسة مهنة الخدمة الاجتماعية بنسبة (62.5%). بالإضافة إلى إشارة النتائج إلى ست ملاحظات أساسية: أولهما الصعوبات المتعلقة بمتغير التعليم حيث كانت (68.62%)، والثانية في الصعوبات المتعلقة بمتغير التدريب بنسبة(67.0%)، علاوة على الملاحظة الثالثة التي أشارت إلى الصعوبات المتعلقة بمتغير البحث العلمي بنسبة (61.58%) والملاحظة الرابعة التي أشارت إلى الصعوبات المتعلقة بمتغير التطوير بنسبة (59.42 ) وأيضا الملاحظة الخامسة التي أشارت إلى الصعوبات المتعلقة بمتغير التوظيف بنسبة (55.84%) ثم الملاحظة السادسة التي أشارت إلى وسائل التغلب على هذه الصعوبات من وجهة نظر الأخصائيين بنسبة (59.2%)، واشتملت على احتياجاتهم لبرامج الرعاية الذاتية بنسبة (63.25%) والتي تتم من خلال عمل أيام ترفيهية لجلب الراحة والهدوء لهم ،بالإضافة إلى الحاجه إلى تواصل الجامعات مع الخريجين فيما يتعلق بالتوظيف ودورات التطوير بنسبة (62.5%). علاوة على ذلك الحاجة إلى إمداد الجامعات بالمتخصصين في الخدمة الاجتماعية بنسبة (62.0%)، وأخيرا أشارت النتائج إلى أن الأخصائيين الاجتماعيين في حاجه ماسة للتطوير المستمر والى أيام رعاية وظيفية من خلال فكرة مساعدة المساعد لتطوير مهاراتهم في مجال الخدمة الاجتماعية.

Discrimination against refugees in the Palestinian labor market

PurposeThis paper examines the level and structure of the wage inequality between nonrefugee and refugee workers in Palestine and the extent to which such wage gap reflects any marginalization and discrimination against refugees. It also investigates how the disparities in distribution to individual worker characteristics contribute to the wage inequality in Palestine.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use both Oaxaca and Blinder (OB) (Oaxaca, 1973 and Blinder, 1973) and Fortin et al. (2011) unconditional quantile decomposition approaches to measure the size of the wage gap along with the wage distribution and to decompose the wage differences into productivity (i.e. explained or the composition effects) and wage structure effects (i.e. unexplained or discrimination effects).FindingsResults indicate that most of the wage gap between refugees and nonrefugees is attributed to the wage structure effect (possibly explained by discrimination) against refugees in the Palestinian labor market. The wage gap between refugees and nonrefugees is not uniform throughout the wage distribution and supports the “sticky floor effect.”Practical implicationsThis work introduces important policy implications for the policymakers in the Palestinian labor market. It reveals the economic and social factors, individual worker characteristics as well as labor market characteristics contribute to the wage inequality in Palestine.Social implicationsThis research reveals a crucial social challenge in the Palestinian society, represented by the wage discrimination against refugees in Palestine. This is despite the denial of such discrimination from official bodies, local institutions and many other policymakers. It also captures gender inequality between men and women.Originality/valueThis is the first empirical work in Palestine that contends with a very sensitive issue in the Palestinian society, that is, the discrimination against refugees in the Palestinian labor market. Most of the existing studies have approached this issue from a humanitarian view in order to show the deterioration of social and economic situations in the refugee camps.

Skill-less Tricks: A score for moving through walls

In the current context of restricted movement due to COVID-19, I have found myself reflecting upon my connection to friends and collaborators in Palestine. This article proposes my use of a performance score - ‘Skill-less Tricks’ - as a method of cultivating an ongoing connection with those friends and collaborators. As many western nation states have spent much of the last year policing their borders in ways anathema to the freedom of movement expected by global tourism, my time and relationships in Palestine have been brought into sharp relief. This article begins with a discussion of my connection to Palestine and how I came to be regularly working with communities in the West Bank. It explains the personal and political impulse for crossing the wall between Israel and Palestine, and the bodily experience of ‘what it takes to cross a border’ (Noeth 2019). The main reason for my ongoing work in Palestine is due to working with the SkatePal charity in the West Bank who build skateparks and teach children to skateboard. This article reflects on the role SkatePal take within this specific political context. The history and current context of the Palestine/Israel conflict have been well documented in numerous sources including Elizabeth Matthews’s edited collection with David Newman and Mohammed Dajani Daoudi (2011). This source presents a range of viewpoints on central aspects of the conflict from sixteen contributors and offers a balanced introduction. Instead of repeating work that has been done elsewhere, this article reflects on aspects of the current state of the conflict from my own personal perspective captured in journal entries, which are scattered throughout the main body of the text. This selection of journal entries is - more or less - as they were written during the three weeks I spent with SkatePal in the summer of 2015. I have selected material from my journal that is most directly associated with experiences of the wall, of crossing checkpoints and borders and about expressive movement practice. The decision I made to journal my experience was inspired by reflective practice in performance and dance broadly as a research method, and by anthropologist Michael Taussig’s own reflections and experience of Palestine in his article, ‘Two weeks in Palestine’ (2013). Finally, the article discusses the creation of my score, Skill-less Tricks - its origination as part of my Ph.D. research, its adaptation for this new use, its translation from English into Arabic and my intentions for using this as the basis for the continuation of an informal remote exchange. © 2020 Intellect Ltd Article.

The Sound of Danger: Voice, Noise and Risk in Building Material Production in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine

This article offers an analysis of the vernacular auditory cultures of safety and risk in construction material production in early twentieth-century Palestine. It examines the qualitatively different understandings and uses of sounds, from workers’ singing to heavy machinery, which characterized dangerous work in Palestine’s rural limekilns and its then sole industrial cement factory. The article suggests that in order to understand the ‘sound of modernity,’ we need to expand the geographic and thematic scope of our studies: looking beyond those for which sound became obsession or profession and the cultural sensibilities of elites, and incorporating the ways in which indigenous and colonial working classes in the colonized world made sense and use of the auditory.

TVET and decent work in Palestine: lessons learned for fragile states

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the role of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) in Palestine through an economic and social development lens, and identifies the lessons learned. The paper discusses the effect of TVET on employment within the notion of decent work, poverty reduction, and empowerment of youth, within a context of marginalization, extracting lessons learned and policy implications to ensure equity and inclusion in TVET and labor markets. The paper also illustrates the effect of TVET on marginalized communities. The case and experience of Palestine can be of value to other countries from various perspectives. The analysis of the marginalized groups engaged in TVET could present a framework of measurement of the effect of TVET on these different groups within a marginalized context that could be of benefit to fragile and conflict-affected states elsewhere.

Community-Based Preventive and Remedial Measures to Prevent Violent Extremism: A Human Security Approach to Help Transform Conflicts, Improve Social Cohesion and Improve Local Security

AbstractThis article, presented as part of a panel on “Community-based preventive and remedial measures” at a conference on Responses to Female Migration to ISIS, is on ways in which local communities are able to strengthen social cohesion and prevent growing polarization, especially in areas where radicalization to violent extremism takes place. The analysis is based on the Human Security Collective (HSC)’s work in Palestine, Libya, Tunisia and the Netherlands where we support local communities and the professionals who work with them on addressing systemic causes that lead to exclusion, alienation and possibly radicalization leading to violent extremism. We have learnt that approaches to prevent the attraction to violent extremism networks require methods and processes akin to those developed for conflict transformation. Some of the characteristics of this approach include the inclusion of different stakeholders, local ownership in defining problems and seeking solutions, the building of trusted relationships, the mentoring of young women and men who take on a peer-model role, and the development of innovative small-scale community activities that can then be taken up by the wider community. HSC and its partners connect these local community initiatives to policymakers at municipal, national and international levels. Through the process of facilitated dialogue we aim to create “safe spaces” where persons from different backgrounds and with different interests are able to meet and exchange practices and policies. In this way, policies are validated by lived realities and citizens become aware of the way that policies that influence local security are developed and executed. This dialogue leads to a mutual understanding of and improvement in security-related policies.

The Need for Legal Framework to Regulate Franchising in Palestine

Franchising has become one of the premier vehicles for international business expansion and the fastest growing way of playing a crucial role in international commercial transactions. Franchising is already practiced in Palestine; however, there is an ambiguity as to the legal nature of franchising work in Palestine and it is not directly regulated by the Palestinian legislature. This article examines the need for a coherent legal regulation of franchising work in Palestine.

Resilience of nurses who work in community mental health workplaces in Palestine.

People in Palestine live and work in a significantly challenging environment. As a result of these challenges they have developed resilient responses which are embedded in their cultural context. 'Sumud', in particular, is a socio-political concept which refers to ways of surviving in the context of occupation, chronic adversity, lack of resources and limited infrastructure. Nurses' work in Palestine is an under-researched subject and very little is known about how nurses adjust to such challenging environments. To address this gap in the literature this study aimed to explore the resilience of community mental health nurses (CMHNs) who work in Palestine. An interpretive qualitative design was chosen. Fifteen face-to-face interviews were completed with participants. Thirty-two hours of observations of the day-to-day working environment and workplace routines were conducted in two communities' mental health centres. Written documents relating to practical job-related policies were also collected from various workplaces. Thematic analysis was used across all data sources resulting in four main themes, which describe the sources of resilience among CMHNs. These sources are 'Sumud and Islamic cultures', 'Supportive relationships', 'Making use of the available resources', and 'Personal capacity'. The study concludes with a better understanding of resilience in nursing, which draws on wider cultural contexts and social ecological responses. The outcomes from this study will be used to develop the resilience of CMHNs in Palestine.

R. A. S. MACALISTER: A Retrospective after 100 Years

R. A. S. Macalister, a pioneer archaeologist who excavated in Palestine in the early part of the twentieth century on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund, is a controversial figure in the annals of the historiography of the period. A workshop was held in Jerusalem in December 2012 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the appearance of his magnum opus, The Excavations at Gezer I–III. Should Macalister's work in Palestine be viewed as a success or a failure? The various opinions expressed by several experts in the workshop on this subject are presented in this article.

Making of the Zionist Woman

The majority of scholarly debates on varieties of Jewish nationalism focus on the Jewish man’s role in the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland and his body in the regeneration of the Jewish nation. This article discusses Zionism’s gender politics surrounding the Jewish woman’s body and selfhood in this rebirth process and the formation of a modern Jewish identity in interwar Poland. It explores Jewish patriarchal structures and the discursive power and reach of Zionist ideology. Jewish women engaged not only in the ideological rebirth of the Jewish nation, they also initiated the physical rebirth of the Jewish Woman who was deemed too urban and thus degenerate (the modern Jewish woman was viewed as possessing next to no ideological consciousness and physical strength). Therefore, Zionist female ideologues argued that the bodily rebirth of Jewish women would lead to the strengthening of their Jewish identities and inevitably the Jewish stock. While still in the Diaspora, women had to work on developing strong healthy bodies, inasmuch as Zionist men were expected to make themselves into strong muscular Jews to be able to immigrate to Palestine and work there productively. Besides being able to work in Palestine alongside Jewish men, nationalist Jewish women had to be strong and healthy for one more reason: they had to be able to give birth to healthy children, which in the Zionist context meant giving birth to a healthy Jewish nation.

Music Teachers as Missionaries: Understanding Europe's Recent Dispatches to Ramallah

In this article I address ideas underpinning the teaching of western classical music by European and North American musicians on Palestine's West Bank. I introduce the establishment and growth of this teaching movement since the mid-1990s as a product of broader international investment in the region, and suggest that it can be approached tellingly through the lens of mission. My extensive interview material has indicated ideational echoes with nineteenth-century Protestant interventions into ‘the Holy Land’, and exposed how Orientalist tropes about social difference, western music's beneficence and regional violence continue to underpin the thinking of foreign workers in the region. It has also revealed a structural similarity to earlier missionary impulses: foreign musicians in residence focus on their music-aid work in Palestine, yet—just as were nineteenth-century missionaries—they are most often there as a result of perceived problems in their homelands.

““Palestine's Best””: The Jewish Agency's Press Relations, 1946––1947

Against the background of the currently contentious issue of attitudes towards Israel and Zionism in the international media, this article sheds light on the Jewish Agency's press and propaganda work in Palestine and abroad during two crucial years leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel. Previously unexplored, the Agency's media activity, mainly directed towards the Anglo-American press and run by a group of exceptionally talented individuals, was eventually regarded as a most effective propaganda tool in Palestine and abroad during the Zionist political and insurgent conflict with the British Government and mandatory authorities. External circumstances and appropriate Jewish Agency policies overall, also contributed significantly to the success of the press work in gaining international legitimacy and media support during that period.

Zionism, and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918 by Derek J. Penslar

830 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE excite the interest of historians and open doors of inquiry into the neglected subject of public works management. Michael C. Robinson Dr. Robinson serves as the historian for the Mississippi River Commission/Lower Mississippi Valley Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He has published widely in the fields of public works and environmental history. Zionism, and Technocracy: The Engineering ofJewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870-1918. By Derek J. Penslar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii + 210; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00. To redesign a nation after decades of colonial domination is hard enough. To create a nation that has not existed for two millennia except in the hearts and minds of descendants spread over the globe is a daunting challenge indeed. Dreams and ideals have to grapple with intractable realities. Limited occupational directions and prefer­ ences have to diversify in order to include every skill demanded of a modern nation-state. For those Jewish people determined to reclaim their homeland, the major occupational gap was that of farming. Since they were usually prevented from owning land and had emerged from centuries in ghettos, they had no significant peasant tradition. This impediment to nation building was recognized early by Zionist leaders. I had heard of kibbutzim, the type of communal settlements where earnings are shared and all property is held in common. On my first visit to Israel in 1991,1 was given the address ofdistant relatives living in Nahalal in the Galilee and learned of Nahalal’s seventy years of existence as the first moshav, a cooperative smallholders’ settlement of a kind now very widespread in Israel. In these, some buildings and equipment are owned communally, but earnings are not shared. My relatives told me of their decision in the early 1930s while still in Germany to train as farmers for their future work in Palestine. What held my attention immediately on seeing Derek Penslar’s Zionism and Technocracy was the set of circular diagrams on the dust jacket—blueprints for a cooperative settlement. Nahalal too was laid out on a circular pattern, each family farming one pie slice outward from the circle of homes, with communal buildings in the center. Whereas it is widely believed that the inspiration for Jewish settle­ ments came from Eastern Europe, Poland and Russia, in the central section of the book, Penslar points to the powerful German and central European scientific, technocratic planning input, particularly in the period 1897—1909, into what later became the state of Israel. The dust-jacket blueprints were in German. Unfortunately, I could find no explanation for them in the text. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 831 Beginning even before the German domination of the settlement movement, the author identifies a French period, 1870—1909, during which paternalistic French philanthropy, predominantly Rothschild, financed settlement experiments. One motive in this period arose from the realization that Palestine, viewed traditionally as a sacred subject, was coming to be seen by an ever-increasing flow of tourists as a “degenerate object,” eliciting pity rather than veneration. Part 3 of the book, “The Eastern European Period,” points to the powerful stimuli provided by dedicated utopian idealists eager to realize their dreams in Palestine. Their communal, ultrademocratic aims often conflicted with those of the technocratic planners who were using models from Prussia’s settlements in its eastern marshes and from Italy’s “occupational cooperatives” to make its wastelands productive. Surfacing at the end of the 19th century, the Zionist movement sought to avoid the ills of industrial society. Parts of the movement were caught up in the idealism that led to communism in the Soviet Union. The Jewish tradition led many to hope that the new country could be a “light unto the nations.” Yet what made the experiment succeed was the technocrats’ ability to combine idealism and pragma­ tism, to use the latest technical agricultural findings in the service of their high goals. On the way they had to learn that women were to be recognized as the equals of men and that Arab practices in the region had much to teach them. At one point, in despair of finding a...