Yossi Yonah

Neo‐liberal reforms in Israel's education system: the dialectics of the state

This paper offers a reading of the Dovrat Report with the aim of assessing the convoluted and dialectical manifestations of the state – ‘the weak and the strong state’ – in the era of global neo‐liberalism. The Dovrat Report (Ministry Of Education 2005) includes a set of recommendations aiming to bring about structural and comprehensive changes in Israels education system. We argue that this report, like many other educational reforms implemented elsewhere in the world and articulated against neo‐liberal ideology, actually promotes a Janus‐faced political entity in the field of education (and similarly in other fields). Thus, while the state seemingly withdraws from educational affairs through decentralisation and privatisation policies, it increases its involvement in these affairs in dictating the goals of education; in setting uniform standards of scholastic achievements; in the cultivation of children possessing the values and skills required by neo‐liberal globalisation; and in imposing a national value system intended to render them loyal citizens of their patria. In promoting these contradictory goals, the state often operates indirectly; it develops a tight but elusive regulatory system operated from a distance. Thus, through a set of well‐defined activities, the strong state functions at the background of the weak state, challenging claims that the state crucially loses its power under the global order.

Identity and Political Stability in an Ethnically Diverse State: A Study of Bedouin Arab Youth in Israel

This study deals with the relationship between the state of Israel and its Arab minority, with a particular focus on the Bedouin Arabs of the Negev. This relationship has been problematic from the outset, given the discrepancy between the corporate national identity of Israel as a Jewish state, and the actual composition of its population (a 17 per cent non-Jewish minority). The Bedouin are one of the segments of the Arab population that the government attempted to separate from the others and transform into a de-Arabised group loyal to the interests and institutions of the state. This study examines the responses of Negev Bedouin Arab youth to questions regarding their individual and collective identities and their relationship to the state of Israel.

Pre‐vocational education: the making of Israel's ethno‐working class

This article deals with pre‐vocational education that was first implemented in Israels educational system in 1955 in 7th and 8th grades of elementary school. The purpose of the article is to examine the role that this education played in making Israels ethno‐working class. This role emerged, we argue, through conflicting dynamics involving two opposite rationales: universalistic and particularistic. On the one hand, pre‐vocational education was perceived as an integral component of both a pedagogic conception and a national worldview that viewed vocational training, respectively, as crucial for the development of every child and for ‘economic equilibrium’ in the country. Yet, on the other hand, from the beginning of the programs implementation the universalistic rationales were abandoned or collapsed as growing importance was attributed to particularistic rationales. In other words, pre‐vocational education came to be seen primarily as a means by which to ensure the ‘integration’ of Mizrahi children (i.e., children of Asian and African background) into Israels social and economic life, thus contributing significantly to creating Israels ethno‐working class. Presenting the dynamics leading to this result, we proceed to offer the reasons that led the particularistic rationales to gain the ascendancy over the universalistic rationales. We argue that these reasons owe to the dynamics characterizing of the nation‐building processes in general. That is, the particularistic rationales are implicitly embedded within the universal and homogenizing logic of these processes, processes that tend to suppress this logic from within. Whereas the inherent internal logic of the modern nation‐state appears to necessitate equality of opportunities, it was that same logic, we argue, that constructed certain groups that are ‘incapable’ of benefiting from that equality, because they are ostensibly unable or unwilling to adopt the basic values of modernity.

The Politics of Lands and Housing in Israel: A Wayward Republican Discourse

Being a settler society — a society dominated by a non-indigenous settler group — Jewish Israel has always been intensely preoccupied with issues of land and housing. These matters have, in consequence, had important ramiecations for the very construction of Israel’s national identity and its deenition of citizenship, alongside the practices of national exclusion and ethnic marginalisation they necessarily entail. The Zionist movement had a penchant for elevating the issue of land and its redemption to mythological heights, to ‘an idyllic process’, transcending other, more earthly, worries and concerns. 1 This is the fertile ground that gave rise to many of the common myths surrounding the implementation of Zionist ideology. Notorious among them is the myth asserting that Zionism emerged at a unique and propitious moment in history when, through sheer luck, a people without a land encountered a land without a people, this latter being a land to which the Jewish people have always yearned to return. Terrestrial matters were always on the mind of Zionism’s early leaders; Yoseph Weiz, who played an essential role in the acquisition of pre-state lands from Palestinians, and who later became Director General of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), gave a succinct expression to their awareness in this regard: What was clear to us since the inception of Zionism is that without land no state can endure, even not for one hour. Our existence, our life and our struggle are entirely grounded in this principle: the land that is under [our] feet. (1950, p. 54)

Israel's immigration policies: the twofold face of the ‘demographic threat’

This article deals with the discursive practices employed in various public sites of Israeli society to support and legitimise the immigration policy towards prospective immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) from 1989 to 1990. During those years Israeli society witnessed one of the countrys biggest immigration waves. However, like many state policies, Israels immigration policy towards prospective immigrants from the FSU has not been carried out uncontested. There were vibrant and often heated public disputes concerning this policy. The purpose of the article is to reveal the racist attitudes of Israeli society expressed in the discursive practices that have been employed to support immigration from the FSU in these public disputes. Assuming an inextricable combination of old and new racism, these practices — involving processes of adverse racialisation of Arabs and Mizrahi Jews — have portrayed them as a demographic threat to Israeli society, a threat that can be forestalled by the admission of prospective immigrants from the FSU. However, the fact that these processes are not directed only against Arabs but also against Mizrahi Jews discloses some of Zionisms inner tensions and ambivalence. It challenges the thesis advanced by Lustick, for instance, that the exclusive goal of Israels immigration policies is to marginalise and to contain the Palestinian minority by allowing the entrance of non‐Jews to Israel as long as they are not Arabs. Not disputing the immensely significant role that the goal of Palestinian containment plays in Israels immigration policies, I intend to show that this goal exists alongside a perception of Mizrahim as a ‘demographic threat’ to Israels ‘European character’.

De-Arabization of the Bedouin: A Study of an Inevitable Failure.

This paper offers an assessment of the efforts to de-Arabize the Bedouin Arab youth of the Negev. We show that despite the extensive efforts to achieve this goal, they have become pronouncedly alienated from the State of Israel, and are increasingly perceiving themselves as an integral part of Israel’s Palestinian Arab national minority. The findings of our research illustrate the futility of the policy to de-Arabize the Bedouin and to instill in them the unfounded belief that they are full and equal citizens of the State of Israel. We argue that the failure of the policy in this regard is inevitable primarily for the following reason: Israel’s national identity is constructed in a manner that leaves no room for Arab culture and heritage and this identity provided the legitimization for discriminatory policies against the Bedouin, as well as against other Arab groups. Thus, the shift toward Palestinian national and cultural identity found among Bedouin youth, can be partly explained as a result of their growing awareness of this political reality and their decreasing readiness to accept it. But then again, this shift is nothing but another manifestation, albeit a sobering one at that, of the challenge facing Zionist ideology since the pre-state era, more than 50 years ago. To put it succinctly, the challenge is this: if Israel aspires to be judged as a liberal democracy and to ensure its legitimacy and political stability, it must make significant changes in its basic governing principles. It must either incorporate the culture and collective aspirations of its Arab citizens within the national identity, and/or allow them some form of political autonomy.

The Palestinian minority in Israel: when common core curriculum in education meets conflicting national narratives

This paper starts with a brief survey of how the Israeli education system has handled the issue of the existence of an Arab community in Israel’s collective identity, and how this was affected by reforms that were initiated in the education system throughout the years. The second part of the paper examines various possibilities regarding how the inclusion of the Arab collective identity can best be accommodated in the education system and its curricula.

‘Flexible Control’: Towards a conception of personal autonomy for postmodern education

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‘Family Structure’: Intractable Eurocentric Fantasies in Contemporary Israel

This article offers a critical study of the iteration and reiteration of Israel’s national identity. Thus this study falls within a well charted research terrain. And like many studies falling within its purview, it is also intended to do more than just describe attempts to impose uniform collective identity on obdurate social and cultural diversity. It is intended to examine the national project as ‘a form of cultural elaboration’ entrapped within an insoluble predicament.While aiming at molding a homogeneous national collective out of social and cultural diversity, this project generates intricate dialectics involving practices of social inclusion and exclusion. These dialectics take on board often racial myths. We examine these dialectics and the racial myths associated with them vis-à-vis the iteration and reiteration of Israel’s national identity. Aside from inculcating the belief among Israeli Jews that their identity is reflective of a common cultural heritage that reaches back to times immemorial, these myths also register a yearning to reconnect Israel with its lost European, ‘Judeo-Christian’ heritage. Conveying these aspirations, either covertly or overtly, these myths support and reconfirm existing social and racial hierarchies in Israeli society.

Reclaiming Diaspora: The Israeli State, Migration, and Ethnonationalism in the Global Era

This article offers an analysis of Israel’s migration policies toward Soviet Jews and argues, based on patterns it reveals, that “the compression of relations of time and space” characterizing the global era do not necessarily render the nation-state weaker, let alone idle or irrelevant. It discusses Israel’s attempts to construct these potential Jewish migrants, while they were still in the Soviet Union, as its conationals, and to facilitate their arrival in Israel. Israel’s migration policies and practices vis-à-vis this particular population provide a case study of the nexus connecting the nation-state, globalization, diaspora, migration, and ethnic belonging. The article shows that while during the 1970s and 1980s the patterns of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union were less rigid and considerably defied the wishes of the Jewish nation-state, from the end of the 1980s through the 1990s, at a time of accelerating globalization, the patterns of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union heeded the dictates of the nation-state more rigidly. The changing patterns of emigration from the USSR and immigration to Israel provide a compelling case showing that the nation-state may exert more power under global conditions than it was supposed to exert before the ascendance of hyper-globalization that is alleged to dominate the world today. This article contributes to accumulating research on “the state of the state” under global conditions, and argues that the state does not necessarily become weaker in this era—as many contend—but may even grow stronger, at least with respect to some important affairs within its sphere of governance.