New Book: Feldman, A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land

Feldman, Jackie. A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land. How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.

 

 

For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practicing their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than three decades, Jackie Feldman—born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, now an Israeli citizen, scholar, and licensed guide—has been leading tours, interpreting Biblical landscapes, and fielding questions about religion and current politics. In this book, he draws on pilgrimage and tourism studies, his own experiences, and interviews with other guides, Palestinian drivers and travel agents, and Christian pastors to examine the complex interactions through which guides and tourists “co-produce” the Bible Land. He uncovers the implicit politics of travel brochures and religious souvenirs. Feldman asks what it means when Jewish-Israeli guides get caught up in their own performances or participate in Christian rituals, and reflects on how his interactions with Christian tourists have changed his understanding of himself and his views of religion.

 

Table of Contents

• 1. How Guiding Christians Made Me Israeli
• 2. Guided Holy Land Pilgrimage—Sharing the Road
• 3. Opening Their Eyes: Performance of a Shared Protestant-Israeli Bible Land
• 4. Christianizing the Conflict: Bethlehem and the Separation Wall
• 5. The Goods of Pilgrimage: Tips, Souvenirs, and the Moralities of Exchange
• 6. The Seductions of Guiding Christians
• 7. Conclusions: Pilgrimage, Performance, and the Suspension of Disbelief

 

JACKIE FELDMAN a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is author of Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity. He has been a licensed tour guide in Jerusalem for over three decades.

 

 

 

New Article: Rettig and Avraham, Intergovernmental Organizations and the West Bank Separation Barrier

Rettig, Elai, and Eli Avraham. “The Role of Intergovernmental Organizations in the ‘Battle over Framing’: The Case of the Israeli–West Bank Separation Barrier.” International Journal of Press/Politics (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1940161215613060

 

Abstract

Current studies focusing on the media’s coverage of international conflicts have largely overlooked the important role that intergovernmental bodies may play in their framing. Still missing is an examination of how and to what degree do actions performed by such bodies help define the way journalists report on ongoing conflicts. We claim that in the absence of credible state actors to rely on for information during conflict, journalists will turn to statements made by international bodies as alternative sources of authority to shape their reporting. This study uses framing theory to examine how the United Nations General Assembly and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) became the primary definers for the international media during its coverage of the Israeli–West Bank separation barrier. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis, we examine the major news items related to the barrier that appeared between the years 2002 and 2011 in four leading newspapers in the United States and the United Kingdom (New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, and the Times). We determine what main media frames were being used during coverage of the barrier and point to the drastic change that occurred in their dominance following actions performed by the ICJ.

 

 

New Article: Stadler and Luz, Two Venerated Mothers Separated by a Wall

Stadler, Nurit, and Nimrod Luz. “Two Venerated Mothers Separated by a Wall: Iconic Spaces, Territoriality, and Borders in Israel-Palestine.” Religion and Society 6.1 (2015): 127-41.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/arrs.2015.060109

 

Abstract

This article explores the role of sacred places and pilgrimage centers in the context of contemporary geopolitical strife and border disputes. Following and expanding on the growing body of literature engaged with the contested nature of the sacred, this article argues that sacred sites are becoming more influential in processes of determining physical borders. We scrutinize this phenomenon through the prism of a small parcel of land on the two sides of the Separation Wall that is being constructed between Israel and Palestine. Our analysis focuses on two holy shrines that are dedicated to devotional mothers: the traditional Tomb of Rachel the Matriarch on the way to Bethlehem and Our Lady of the Wall, an emergent Christian site constructed as a reaction to the Wall. We examine the architectural (and material) phenomenology, the experience, and the implications that characterize these two adjacent spatialities, showing how these sites are being used as political tools by various actors to challenge the political, social, and geographical order.

 

 

New Book: Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom

Kotef, Hagar. Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

 

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

• Introduction
• 1. Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine / Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir
• 2. An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads—On Freedom and Movement
• 3. The Fence That “Ill Deserves the Name of Confinement”: Locomotion and the Liberal Body
• 4. The Problem of “Excessive” Movement
• 5. The “Substance and Meaning of All Things Political”: On Other Bodies
• Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

HAGAR KOTEF is based at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.

 

 

New Article: Barker, Confronting Imperialism and Colonialism in Israel and Canada

Barker, Adam J. “No Walls, No Borders: Confronting Imperialism and Colonialism in Israel and Canada.” Social Movement Studies (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2015.1070340

 

Abstract
Review essay of two books, Anarchists against the Wall, edited by Uri Gordon and Ohal Grietzer, and Undoing Border Imperialism
, by Harsha Walia.

 

 

New Article: Solomon, From the Barrier to Refugee Law

Solomon, Solon. “From the Barrier to Refugee Law: National Security’s Transformation from a Balancing Right to a Background Element in the Realms of Israeli Constitutionalism.” International Journal of Human Rights 19.4 (2015): 447-64.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2015.1027063

 

Abstract

Mapping cardinal cases of the Israeli Supreme Court, the article will demonstrate how, in the Israeli constitutional experience, the concept of national security came to be transformed from a balancing right to a background element. Along these lines, the article will argue that while Israeli constitutionalism indeed awarded national security parameters a decisive role in the realms of the human rights balance judicial discourse, it equally embarked on a procedure of delineating the existence of national security as an autonomous consideration, in cases where national security exigencies ceased to be obvious in the Israeli reality. Compelling the examination of a national security debate under the human rights lens, the Israeli Supreme Court aligned its jurisprudence with that of other supreme courts as well as with the international thematic constitutionalism model, aspiring to interpret the different fields of laws and various provisions under the concept of the right to dignity.

 
 
 
 

New Article: Reynolds, Palestinian Agriculture and the Israeli Separation Barrier

Reynolds, Kyra. “Palestinian Agriculture and the Israeli Separation Barrier: The Mismatch of Biopolitics and Chronopolitics with the Environment and Human Survival.” International Journal of Environmental Studies 72.2 (2015): 237-55.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207233.2014.991546

Abstract

Academic scholarship on Israel’s Separation Barrier has focused upon its legality and political impacts. United Nations agencies and Non-Governmental Organisations have been left to document its other actual/potential infringements. The natural environment has been secondary to higher profile issues, such as the intentions behind the structure and its implications for any future peace agreement. Yet, since environmental impediments can have serious long-term implications for natural resources and human subsistence, it is necessary to examine the barrier’s impacts after a decade of existence. This paper focuses upon the main human-environment system of agriculture. A multi-method approach reveals that the impacts constitute much more than the ‘population here, natural resources there’ thesis that has dominated narratives about the barrier’s environmental impediments. In fact, the barrier appears to be having dramatic and perhaps unexpected socio-ecological consequences.

New Article: Dibiasi, Changing Trends in Palestinian Political Activism

Dibiasi, Caroline Mall. “Changing Trends in Palestinian Political Activism: The Second Intifada, the Wall Protests, and the Human Rights Turn.” Geopolitics (early view, online first)

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2015.1028028

 

Abstract

This paper asks where and why Palestinian protests take place and how particular manifestations of territorial dislocation affect the dynamics of Palestinian political activism. Political, social and territorial transformations over the Oslo period had resulted in the fragmentation of Palestinian resistance, a development that had become most evident during the second intifada through the absence of mass-based non-violent protest. Israel’s complex control over Palestinian territory and mobility has been a key factor in driving this fragmentation. In contrast to checkpoints, forbidden roads, and closures, the construction of the Separation Wall had a very different impact, and amid the continuation of a violent and fragmented uprising, it presented a focal point for cohesive organised non-violent local protest. This paper examines to what extent the construction of the Wall has engendered a different type of protest, conception of activism and new forms of cooperation, that break the trend of the second intifada.

New Article: Bishara, Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank

Bishara, Amahl. “Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The Politics of Disorientation and the Routes of a Subaltern Knowledge.” American Ethnologist 42.1 (2015): 33-54.

 

URL: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12114/abstract

 

Abstract

Israel’s system of closure divides Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians of the West Bank. For members of both categories, road journeys spur political analysis, explicitly stated or implicitly packed into jokes or offhand comments. If, in liberal traditions, political knowledge is idealized as disembodied, abstract, and dispassionate, Palestinian knowledge gained while driving is none of these things. Yet it can provide important insights into the operations of Israeli power less easily represented in more formal outlets. Because the road system is an everyday site at which its users come into contact with the work of the state, driving is an important practice through which to examine popular conceptions of politics. Still, these two communities of Palestinians face obstacles in communicating about shared understandings of space and politics. In examining everyday political knowledge of subaltern people, we must attend to varieties of subalterneity to examine how these differences can perpetuate marginalization.

New Book: Meydani, The Anatomy of Human Rights in Israel

Meydani, Assaf. The Anatomy of Human Rights in Israel. Constitutional Rhetoric and State Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

 

 

Why is there such a large gap between the declarations that countries make about human rights and their imperfect implementation of them? Why do states that have enacted laws and signed treaties about human rights choose to not enforce these laws in daily life? Why have activists failed to achieve the goals of ensuring human rights domestically and internationally? This book examines the issue of human rights in the Israeli domestic arena by analyzing the politics and strategies of defending human rights. To do so, it integrates the tools of social choice theory with a unique institutionalist perspective that looks at both formal and informal, and local and international factors. The book offers an analysis explaining the processes through which Israel is struggling to promote human rights within a specific institutional environment, thus determining the future of Israeli democracy and its attitude toward human rights.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Institutional theory and social choice studies: understanding the anatomy of human rights
3. Human rights between constitutional rhetoric and state practice
4. Structural and cultural variables favoring a short-term orientation
5. The right to be free from the threat of torture in light of structural and cultural complexity
6. The right to equality: gender segregation on ultra-orthodox buses following the Israeli High Court of Justice ruling on the ‘segregation lines’ in 2011
7. The right to enjoy a decent lifestyle: the case of the Laron law – national insurance law (amendment no. 109, 2008) encouraging the disabled to work
8. The human rights commission in Israel that never was
9. Property rights – the issue of designing policy about the separation fence – the High Court of Justice case: Beit Sureiq Village v. the State of Israel, 2004
10. The right to human dignity and liberty: the organ transplant law, 5768 (2008)
11. Policy evaluation: analyzing the reality for human rights.

URL: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/law/human-rights/anatomy-human-rights-israel-constitutional-rhetoric-and-state-practice

 

 

New Book: Peters and Newman, eds. The Routledge Handbook on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Peters, Joel and David Newman, eds. The Routledge Handbook on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

 

URL: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415778626/

Abstract

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most prominent issues in world politics today. Few other issues have dominated the world’s headlines and have attracted such attention from policy makers, the academic community, political analysts, and the world’s media.

The Routledge Handbook on the Israeli- Palestinian Conflict offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of the most contentious and protracted political issue in the Middle East. Bringing together a range of top experts from Israel, Palestine, Europe and North America the Handbook tackles a range of topics including:

• The historical background to the conflict
• peace efforts
• domestic politics
• critical issues such as displacement, Jerusalem and settler movements
• the role of outside players such as the Arab states, the US and the EU

This Handbook provides the reader with an understanding of the complexity of the issues that need to be addressed in order to resolve the conflict, and a detailed examination of the varied interests of the actors involved. In-depth analysis of the conflict is supplemented by a chronology of the conflict, key documents and a range of maps.

The contributors are all leading authorities in their field and have published extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict/peace process. Many have played a leading role in various Track II initiatives accompanying the peace process.

 

Table of Contents

Part 1: Competing Nationalisms

1. The Origins of Zionism Colin Schindler

2. The Palestinian National Movement: from self-rule to statehood Ahmad Samih Khalidi

Part 2:Narratives and Key Moments

3. Competing Israeli and Palestinan Narratives Paul Scham

4. The 1948 War: The Battle over History Kirsten E. Schulze

5. The First and Second Palestinian Intifadas Rami Nasrallah

6. The Camp David Summit: a Tale of Two Narratives Joel Peters

 

Part 3: Seeking Peace

7.The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process: 1967-1993 Laura Zittrain Eisenberg

8. Peace Plans: 1993-2012 Galia Golan

Part 4: Issues

9.Palestinian Refugees Rex Brynen

10. Jerusalem Michael Dumper

11. Territory and Borders David Newman

12. Water Julie Trottier

13. Terrorism Magnus Norell

14. Religion Yehezkel Landau

15. Economics Arie Arnon

16. Unilaterlaism and Separation Gerald M. Steinberg

17. Gaza Joel Peters

Part 5: Domestic Actors

18.The Palestine Liberation Organization Nigel Parsons

19. The Palestinian Authority Nigel Parsons

20. Hamas Khaled Hroub

21. Palestinian Civil Society Michael Schulz

22. Gush Emunim and the Israeli Settler Movement David Newman

23. The Israeli Peace Movements Naomi Chazan

Part 6: International Engagement

24. Palestinian Citizens of Israel Amal Jamal

25. The United States: 1948- 1993 Steven L. Spiegel

26. The United States: 1993-2010 Steven L. Spiegel

27. Russia Robert O. Freedman

28. Europe Rosemary Hollis

29. The Arab World P. R. Kumaraswamy

30. The Jewish Diaspora and the Pro-Israel Lobby Dov Waxman

Chronology Steve Lutes

New Article: Gould, Israel’s Apartheid Wall in an Age of Globalization

Gould, Rebecca. “The Materiality of Resistance. Israel’s Apartheid Wall in an Age of Globalization.” Social Text 32.1 (2014): 1-21.

 

URL: http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/32/1_118/1.short

 

Abstract

This essay examines the graffiti that covers the portion of the West Bank’s segregation wall that traverses Bethlehem. That the majority of the representations covering the wall are intended for international rather than local consumption complicates the prevalent tendency in the literature on this wall to align these representations homogenously with resistance. More than resisting a specific regime, many of these images enter into global conversations about the circulation of power. Images of resistance scripted and consumed by those who observe suffering from afar are juxtaposed to Palestinian engagements with the wall, which is frequently represented allegorically or not represented at all.

Cite: Busbrisdge, Colonial Sovereignty and the Israeli ‘Separation’ Wall

Busbridge, Rachel. “Performing Colonial Sovereignty and the Israeli ‘Separation’ Wall.” Social Identities, online preview, 2013.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504630.2013.835514

 

Abstract

As a structure that does not mark an actual border and is constructed primarily on occupied territory, the Israeli ‘separation’ wall is a unique space that functions as both border and borderlands. Here, I explore the wall as a performance of sovereignty which simultaneously constructs and de-constructs imaginings of the Israeli nation-state. On the one hand, I contend that the wall is a colonial production that draws a psychic line between a ‘civilised in here’ and ‘uncivilised out there’, fulfilling the double function of forging a perceived bounded, protective national enclosure at the same time as buttressing the necessity of controlling territory beyond the bounds of that enclosure. On the other hand, I argue that the complex relationship between settler and state materialised in the wall points to a blending of theology and politics in Israel, which threatens to empower a God-sanctioned politics that undermines state. In addition to promoting anxiety of the Palestinian ‘out there’, then, the wall is understood as also fostering an anxiety increasingly turned inward to the structures of the Israeli state itself.

Cite: Lloyd, Negotiating Israel’s Security Barrier

Lloyd, Robert B. “On the Fence: Negotiating Israel’s Security Barrier.” Journal of the Middle East and Africa 3.2 (2012): 198-214.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21520844.2012.741039

 

Abstract

This article examines the issues, conflicts, and negotiations that occurred among Israelis and Arabs that led to Israel’s decision to implement a “separation formula” by constructing a security barrier in the West Bank. The structure represents a growing political consensus that in the face of terrorist attacks in the two intifadas, Israeli security requires a policy of “Taking Gaza out of Tel Aviv.” The separation barrier has been successful in thwarting terrorist incursions but has faced international criticism for inflicting hardship on Palestinians in the West Bank and unilaterally imposing an Israeli border on the West Bank side of the 1949 armistice lines. The barrier’s effectiveness in reducing attacks against Israel originating from the West Bank has helped move the conflict to a state that is painful but endurable for all parties. Thus, it is unlikely that final status negotiations will include complete Israeli withdrawal from all West Bank territory won in the 1967 War.