Hanna Herzog

Participatory destigmatization strategies among Palestinian citizens, Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahi Jews in Israel

Abstract This study examines how members of minority groups in Israel cope with stigmatization in everyday life. It focuses on working-class members of three minority groups: Palestinian Arabs or Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin) and Ethiopian Jews. It reveals the use of racial, ethnic and national markers in daily processes of social inclusion and exclusion in one sociopolitical context. Palestinians, a group with a fixed external identity and a limited sphere of participation, were found to use the language of race and racism when describing stigmatizing encounters. Ethiopian Jews, the most phenotypically marked group, strictly avoided this language. For their part, Mizrahi Jews perceived the very discussion of stigmatization as stigmatizing, while often using ‘contingent detachment’ to distance themselves from negative group identities. Despite differences between the communities and the powerful role of the state in establishing symbolic and social boundaries, members of all three groups expressed their intention to achieve or retain avenues for participation in the larger society.

‘Both an Arab and a woman’: gendered, racialised experiences of female Palestinian citizens of Israel

Following feminist and postcolonial discourses, this paper uses the concept of ‘everyday experience’ as a tool to trace the social world of educated Palestinian women in Israel. The term refers to the complex array of these womens experiences in racialised and gendered social sites, as well as within the class, religious, and ethnic contexts in the subordinated group and its relations with the dominant Jewish group. Based on 108 in‐depth interviews with Palestinian women citizens of Israel, the paper claims that educated Palestinian women are located in a ‘third place’ between cultural, gender, class, national and racial structures that generates a continual ambivalence. Within this marginal, ‘unhomely’ space women negotiate their own identities and challenge dominant social definitions. Women create various modes of interim spaces and multi‐dimensional, shifting identities for themselves. The ambivalent attitudes generated by the womens experiences expose the possibility of shedding categorising markers. The omnipresent existence of the gendered, racialised regime of knowledge makes every place a potential site of subversion and resistance.

Family-Military Relations in Israel as a Genderizing Social Mechanism

Does a blurring of the boundaries between civil society and the military lead to a redefinition of gender roles? This article examines the social meaning of the practices and rhetoric of parenthood in Israel through the prism of parents’ increasing intervention and involvement in the army between 1982 and 1995. The claim is made that parenthood practices have become a reconstituting mechanism of the gendered division of roles. More specifically, the article argues that the separation between military and family, and between public and private-domestic, remains unchanged despite family involvement in the military. The basic interpreting frames in military-family relations are constructed in terms of the family’s traditionally defined role. Paradoxically, the entrance of the family into the public sphere reiterates and reinforces basic assumptions about the nature of the family and its discursive boundaries, along with women’s taken-for-granted status in the private-domestic sphere, and men’s activities as representing the public sphere.

The Past s Promise: Lessons from Peace Processes in Northern Ireland and the Middle East*

Just as the Northern Ireland and Israeli–Palestinian peace processes appeared close to achieving lasting resolutions to conflict, both initiatives fell into crisis. This study combines power conflict and transaction cost approaches to analyze the strengths and the weaknesses of the Belfast Good Friday (BGF) and the Oslo peace processes. Dimensions that empower participants and increase certainty strengthen peace processes. Dimensions that are disempowering of participants and decrease certainty weaken peace processes. The two peace processes shared the strengths of including militant nationalists in negotiations and generating international pressure and support. Unlike the Oslo process, the BGF process benefited from greater constitutional certainty, minority safeguards, grass-roots legitimacy, effective responses to spoilers, and minority-supportive intervention by the US government. Unlike the BGF process, the Oslo process benefited from broad international participation in negotiations, leading to agreements that had clearly specified mechanisms for implementation. Shared weaknesses of the two processes included transgressing zero-sum game assumptions and identity boundaries, manipulation of popular fears by elites, and the marginal, if not negative, role played by civil society. In addition to pointing out ways that each peace process could benefit by appropriating the advantages of the other, the article offers several promising strategies for overcoming shared weaknesses, including challenging zero-sum assumptions, constructing more inclusive collective identities, grass-roots education regarding manipulative elites, strengthening non-sectarian segments of civil society, and breaking cycles of violence through reconciliation processes.

More than a Looking Glass Women in Israeli Local Politics and the Media

Part of a larger study on women and local politics in Israel between 1950 and 1989, this article focuses on media strategies. It claims that reporting by Israeli media on women in local politics, even if sympathetic, is shaped by the basic exclusionary social frames that rest on the dichotomous notion of masculine/public/political versus feminine/private/apolitical. Using textual strategies, such as compartmentalization, protective chivalry, and framing women in traditional womens roles, the press reproduces a gendered world and an exclusionary perception of politics. These findings are based on a qualitative analysis of press coverage of local women in three leading national newspapers and womens magazines and on local newspaper clippings.

Re/visioning the women's movement in Israel

Current literature on the womens movement argues that in recent decades, a schism based on the politics of identity has divided women and led to the weakening of the movement. This process, intersecting with the escalation of neoliberal trends and the ‘NGOization’ of civil society, has resulted in the depoliticization of the womens movement and the waning of its influence as a political force. The present paper seeks to examine whether this argument is consistent with the situation in the Israeli womens movement of the early twenty-first century. Based on the history of the womens movement in Israel, the paper posits a twofold argument: (a) the womens movement in Israel has not disappeared but has been restructured as a result of its NGOization; (b) despite criticism of the movement in the literature and on the part of activists as the result of its NGOization, the movements political messages have remained intact and even expanded to embrace questions of social justice, including novel thinking on matters of peace and security.

Living with Contradictions: The Taken-for-Granted in Israeli Political Discourse

Two apparently contradictory ideas are closely linked in Israeli political discourse: Israel is powerful and independent and Israel is vulnerable and dependent. This study used content analysis and focus groups, as well as existing survey data analyzed by others, to explore how this paradox has been reflected in newspapers and conversations during six different time periods from 1948 to 1996. The goal was not to explain the paradox but to examine its consequences for Israeli perceptions of U.S. policy in the Middle East—and, in the process, to explore Israeli self-images. The nature of U.S. strategic interests was originally treated as problematic and in need of political discussion, but in the past 25 years these interests have become taken for granted. Surprisingly, even after the end of the Cold War, a critical discourse moment in which a reexamination of U.S. interests in the Middle East would seem inevitable, the U.S. role remains taken for granted and largely unexamined. The strong/vulnerable paradox explains this absence of discussion: Examining U.S. interests too closely upsets the delicate balance that keeps the sense of vulnerability in check.

Men's Bargaining with Patriarchy The Case of Primaries within Hamulas in Palestinian Arab Communities in Israel

This article expands Kandiyotis concept of patriarchal bargaining to include mens negotiations. It analyzes how marginalized groups within a dominant sociocultural knowledge regime strategize to advance change while trying to maximize security and optimize their life options. The case study analyzes primaries held within kin-based groupings— hamulas (clans) among Palestinian Arabs in Israel—to determine the candidates for municipal elections. Based on interviews and analysis of newspaper articles, the authors claim that the turn to primaries by hamulas was an attempt to resolve disputes that were undermining the patriarchal system. The primaries provided entry to those of lower ranking in the hierarchy of hamula political leadership (e.g., younger men, higher education graduates, members of marginal segments of the clan), while retaining the exclusion of women from the political sphere. Thus, while bargaining with patriarchy, gender identities and hierarchies are contested, re/produced, and negotiated as both a political means and an anchor for social identities.

The political embeddedness of managerial ideologies in pre‐state Israel: the case of PPL 1920‐1948

The study of managerial ideologies focuses exclusively on the emergence of American models and their dissemination in other societies. Argues that the a‐political, scientific and rational facade on which these models are premised is often incommensurate with the industrial experience of “non‐western” societies. Based on the historical case study of Palestine Potash Ltd (PPL), this study explores the development of managerial ideologies within the political and cultural context of pre‐state Israel in its formative stage (1920‐1948). While elaborating on the undocumented management history of Israel, demonstrates that American managerial ideologies were indeed imported, but their logic and casting were subordinated to national objectives. Furthermore, shows that Socialist‐National, idiosyncratic political ideology became a dominant ideology of employment management ‐ even in capitalistic firms ‐ allowing managers to acquire legitimation, control workers and increase profits of industrial enterprises.

Racism and the politics of signification: Israeli public discourse on racism towards Palestinian citizens

Abstract This paper explores the phenomenology of racism using the Israeli situation as a case study to examine if, when and how the concept of ‘racism’ is employed in local media discourse on policy towards Palestinian citizens. Our central argument is that racism, as a signifier of policy, can be located in the dialectic between denial and affirmation of the category of race, while we link the scope and meanings of practices marked by the media as ‘racism’ to contingent cultural, social and historical conditions. The article proposes the periodization of the relevant discourse into three primary phases: from 1949 to the late 1970s, when the category of racism was ‘prohibited’ in Israeli discourse in the aftermath of the Holocaust; the mid-1980s, when this taboo was broken and the phenomena included in the category of racism expanded accordingly; and the 1990s to 2000, during which racism became an institutionalized, all-encompassing discursive term.