ToC: Contemporary Jewry 35.3 (2015)

Contemporary Jewry

Volume 35, Issue 3, October 2015

ISSN: 0147-1694 (Print) 1876-5165 (Online)

In this issue (11 articles)

1. Editor’s Introduction

   Harriet Hartman Pages 189-190

     

2. Russian Jewish Immigrants in the United States

   Barry R. Chiswick, Nicholas Larsen Pages 191-209

3. Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in Iran: The Effects of Identity, Threat, and Political Trust

   Rusi Jaspal Pages 211-235

    

4. Parochial or Transnational Endeavor? The Attitude to Israel of Adolescents in Australian Jewish Day Schools

   Zehavit Gross, Suzanne D. Rutland Pages 237-261

    

5. Karaite Stories: Narrating Subjectivity in a Marginal Moshav

   Inbal Ester Cicurel Pages 263-284

    

6. Deep Blue: Notes on the Jewish Snail Fight

   Gadi Sagiv Pages 285-313

    

7. Research Updates

    Helen Kim Pages 315-318

    

8. Book Review: Fran Markowitz, Stephen Sharot, and Moshe Shokeid (eds): Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel

   Myron J. Aronoff Pages 319-322 

9. Book review: Calvin Goldscheider: Israeli Society in the 21st Century: Immigration, Inequality, and Religious Conflict

   Bruce A. Phillips Pages 323-325

10. Book Review: Adam Ferziger: Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism

    Moshe Krakowski Pages 327-329

11. Book Review: Roberta Rosenthal Kwall: The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition

    Barry A. Kosmin Pages 331-332

     

Cite: Tawil-Souri, Politics of ID Cards in Palestine-Israel

Tawil-Souri, Helga. “Colored Identity. The Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel.” Social Text 29.2 (2011): 67-97.

 

URL: http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/2_107/67

 

 

Abstract

In Palestine/Israel, different colored identification cards are mandated by the Israeli state apparatus to Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and those who are citizens of Israel. The article traces the development of the bureaucracy of the Palestinian ID card since the establishment of Israel and suggests that modern-day ID cards in Palestine/Israel are physical and visible instruments of a widespread low-tech surveillance mechanism to control mobility and a principal means for discriminating, both positively and negatively, subjects’ privileges and rights. ID cards are both the spaces in which Palestinians confront, tolerate, and sometimes challenge the Israeli state, and a mechanism through which Palestinian spatiality, territoriality, and corporeality are penetrated by the Israeli regime. Vital in the control and differentiation of Palestinian populations, what makes ID cards unique in the Palestinian/Israeli case is that their materiality is one of their most important and resonant aspects. The article describes various representations of the ID cards, for example in poetry and in murals, to show how they also function as sites of remediation, spaces and moments of renegotiation for their bearers, subject to counter-hegemonic representations, interpretations, and uses. As a special kind of material object, ID cards are an effective and low-tech means of surveillance and differentiation and an important nexus of Israeli power, demonstrating the institutional materiality of the state apparatus’s constitution in subjects’ everyday life; but they have also become important because they allow a poetics of political resistance.