Sharon Weinblum

Conflicting Imaginaries of the Border: The Construction of African Asylum Seekers in the Israeli Political Discourse

ABSTRACT Between 2005 and 2013, around 50,000 migrants from Sudan and Eritrea crossed the Egyptian border to seek refuge in Israel. While some of them were originally perceived as survivors of genocide entitled to claim asylum, border crossing has quickly become an object of concern and technologies obstructing it have been deployed (including a 250 kilometer-long fence, detention centers, and criminalization of unauthorized border crossing). Against this backdrop, this article analyzes the competing political narratives that have underpinned these policies of containment and bordering towards African migrants and asylum seekers. Based on the study of political debates, political speeches, and several months of fieldwork, it investigates the discursive construction of these newcomers’ entry into the territory, focusing on the role of the border in this construction. The article shows that the dominant political narrative has resorted to securitizing discursive strategies involving the notions of threat, flood, and crime which have enabled the formulation of exclusionary policies framed as tools of border and boundaries control and protection. The analysis further reveals that a more marginal counter-narrative has attempted to challenge the dominant securitizing strategies but has failed to articulate an effective alternative discourse.

Religion in the Israeli parliament: a typology

Because religion has been a constant source of social divisions and political conflicts, the role of Judaism in Israel is very often studied through the prism of a rigid religious–secular cleavage.Without denying the contentious character of religion in the political and social arenas, I suggest in this study that a closer look at the usages of religion in Israeli politics offers a more nuanced picture of the role of Judaism in Israel. In order to uphold this thesis, I identify the main usages of Judaism in the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) and scrutinise the extent to which these different mobilisations overlap or crosscut the secular–religious cleavage. This analysis leads to a typology of three usages of religion: religion as a source of authority, religion as a marker of identity and nation, and religion as a source of values. On this basis, I demonstrate that the role of religion in Israel and especially in the Israeli Parliament cannot be reduced to the divide between religious and secular groups. If in its first usage, the religious–secular cleavage indeed predominates, the use of religion as an identity marker does not necessarily lead to a conflict with secular members, while in its final form, religion is mobilised as a resource by members of both groups.