New Article: Dalsheim, Other Sovereignties in Israel/Palestine

Dalsheim, Joyce. “Other Sovereignties in Israel/Palestine: The Limited Imaginings of a Secular Age.” In Working with A Secular Age: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Charles Taylor’s Master Narrative (ed. Florian Zemmin, Colin Jager, and Guido Vanheeswijck; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016): 159-74.

 

Extract

Some people on the ground in Israel/Palestine have begun thinking and acting in ways that pose challenges to the “sovereignty” component of the episteme of people/territory/sovereignty that underlies the modern nation-state. These challenges are sometimes considered unconventional, sometimes crazy. Sometimes these kinds of actions are called visionary, but other times they are categorized as criminal or treasonous. I will focus on just three examples – each of which poses a different challenge to what is generally thought of as popular sovereignty. Those who pose these challenges fall outside the norms of the modern social imaginary Taylor represents, and outside the boundaries of conventional peacemaking. They pose threats to the moder order of nation-states in which peace is expected to take place and may therefore be considered “spoilers” of peace.

 

 

Toc: Conflict, Security & Development 15.5 (2015): Special Issue on Israel-Palestine after Oslo

Conflict, Security & Development 15.5 (2015)

Table of Contents

Israel-Palestine after Oslo: mapping transformations and alternatives in a time of deepening crisis

Mandy Turner & Cherine Hussein
pages 415-424

Articles

After Oslo, a paradigm shift? Redefining ‘peoples’, sovereignty and justice in Israel-Palestine

Virginia Tilley
pages 425-453

 

Analysis

The symbiosis between Palestinian ‘Fayyadism’ and Israeli ‘economic peace’: the political economy of capitalist peace in the context of colonisation

Tariq Dana
pages 455-477

Securitised development and Palestinian authoritarianism under Fayyadism

Alaa Tartir
pages 479-502

 

Articles

The demise of Oslo and Hamas’s political engagement

Tareq Baconi
pages 503-520

 

The single-state alternative in Palestine/Israel

Cherine Hussein
pages 521-547

 

Creating a counterhegemonic praxis: Jewish-Israeli activists and the challenge to Zionism
Mandy Turner
pages 549-574

Analysis

Organising the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement: the case of the ‘We Divest’ campaign

Suzanne Morrison
pages 575-593

 

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: Tesdell, Territoriality and the Technics of Drylands Science in Palestine and North America

Tesdell, Omar Imseeh. “Territoriality and the Technics of Drylands Science in Palestine and North America.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47.3 (2015): 570-573.

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0020743815000586

 
Abstract
At the turn of the 20th century, agricultural experts in several countries assembled a new agro-scientific field: dryland farming. Their agricultural research practices concomitantly fashioned a new agro-ecological zone—the drylands—as the site of agronomic intervention. As part of this effort, American scientists worked in concert with colleagues in the emerging Zionist movement to investigate agricultural practices and crops in Palestine and neighboring regions, where nonirrigated or rainfed agriculture had long been practiced. In my larger manuscript project, I consider how the reorganization of rainfed farming as dryfarming is central to the history of both the Middle East and North America, where it was closely related to modern forms of power, sovereignty, and territoriality. I suggest that American interest in dryfarming science emerged out of a practical need to propel and sustain colonization of the Great Plains, but later became a joint effort of researchers from several emerging settler enterprises, including Australia, Canada, and the Zionist movement. In contrast to a naturally ocurring bioregion, I argue that the drylands spatiality was engineered through, rather than outside, the territorialization of modern power.

 

 

Reviews: Weiss, Conscientious Objectors in Israel

Weiss, Erica. Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

 

Reviews

• Singeisen, David. “Review.” LSE Review of Books, August 2014.
• Shammas, Victor L. “Review.” Social Anthropology 22.4 (2014): 518-519.
• Stern, Nehemia. “Review.” American Ethnologist 42.1 (2015): 181-183.
• Aviram, Hadar. “Review.” Perspectives on Politics 13.2 (2015): 526-8.
• Linn, Ruth, and Renana Gal. “Review.” Israel Studies Review 30.1 (2015): 149-152.

 

 

New Article: Alroey, The Idea of a Jewish State in Western Africa, 1907-1913

Alroey, Gur. “Angolan Zion. The Jewish Territorial Organization and the idea of a Jewish state in Western Africa, 1907–1913.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14.2 (2015): 179-98.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2015.1006009

 

Abstract

This article traces the attempts in 1907–1913 by the Jewish Territorial Organization to set up an autonomous Jewish entity in West Africa. The Territorialists laid down three criteria for the choice of a territory: (1) A tract of land that must be large enough in size to allow for the absorption of mass Jewish migration. (2) A fertile territory that could provide a livelihood for the Jews who went there. (3) A sparsely populated territory so that no ethnic tensions would be created between the Jews settling there and the local residents. One likely territory was Angola, which at the beginning of the twentieth century was under the protection of the Portuguese government. The plan failed. However, the importance of the “Angola Plan” was to highlight the position of the Territorialists towards Africa in general and Angola in particular.

 

New Article: Wheatley, Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations

Wheatley, Natasha. “Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New International Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations.” Past and Present 227 (2015): 205-48.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtv020

 

Extract

Where did the edifices of Paris, 1919, crumble? Scholars of the topic have traditionally based their histories on high diplomacy, hanging narratives around the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 or the Munich crisis of 1938. Yet the creeping lapse of the League’s laws and treaties played out in other forums and registers as well.

Approaching the League’s order from below, it is clear first that the ‘new world order’ of 1919 spawned new reading publics for international law and a new culture of international hermeneutic activism. The League’s legal articulation of legitimate colonial rule and theoretical dilution of sovereignty turned the text of the Mandate for Palestine itself into the terrain of politics. Petitioners’ probing exploration of this terrain broadened the cast of characters invested in questions of international order. Secondly, shifting strategies of appeal reflected altered understandings of the nature and authority of the text and its keeper, the League. If a positivist style of claim-making dominated the mid 1920s, with petitioners looking to leverage the projected power of the mandate text, then the crisis that began in the late 1920s engendered a change in that style, as petitioners communicated scepticism about the text, and the League’s policing of it, in their interpretative constructions. The fragility and precariousness ascribed to the law indicated the fraught nature of its operation on the ground. While the text became less plausible as law to the disfranchised Palestinian Arabs, devoid of the characteristics that make law useful, Zionist petitioners clung insistently and creatively to this increasingly brittle enunciation of their national rights, even as they, too, hedged their bets in the invocation of alternative sources of right.

To be sure, petitioning reflected rather than caused that decline in the League’s legal usefulness: the ignoble fate of the Mandate for Palestine was driven by the dialectic of discriminatory policy and violence, and to some extent by the PMC’s handling of the case, just as the broader story of the League’s enfeeblement was shaped by forces beyond the mandate system. But if petitioners shaped the development of the PMC’s jurisdiction, they were also progenitors of a style of international legal politics that would only grow in importance as the twentieth century progressed.

This style juxtaposed the pieties of international law with the denial of rights that characterized European colonialism. With the subsequent 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this mode of politics expanded into a global debate about the application of such rights in Europe’s colonies. In the case at hand, petitioners compared the declared nature of the League’s order with the facts of British rule. Taking up the ‘political name’ ascribed to them in the mandate system, petitioners tested out the reality and scope of the rights announced in the covenant and in mandate law. The difference between the rights proclaimed and their limited sphere of operation was not only ‘a sign of disjunction proving that the rights are either void or tautological’, as the philosopher Jacques Rancière argued regarding the non-universal subjects of ‘the rights of man’. Rather, that difference worked as a space in which political subjectivities were formed: ‘political names are litigious names, names whose extension and comprehension are uncertain and which open for that reason the space of a test or verification’. Building cases for verification, petitioners confronted ‘inscriptions of rights’ with ‘situations of denial; they put together the world where those rights are valid and the world where they are not’. ‘Putting together’ a world of rights and one of rightlessness, petitions capture the League as a forum for international, non-diplomatic politics in which the acquisition and recognition of rights across colonial distributions of power were routinely probed and challenged. In their litigious interpretations, petitioners combined those two worlds together in the fabric of the law, in the knot of syntax, grammar and sense.

New Book: Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion

Rovner, Adam L. In the Shadow of Zion. Promised Lands before Israel. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

URL: http://nyupress.org/books/9781479817481/

 

Table of Contents (click for PDF)

Preface

Introduction: They Say There Is a Land . . .

1. Noah’s Ark on the Niagara: Grand Island, New York (1818–1848)
2. Greetings from the Promised Land: Uasin Gishu, East Africa (1903–1905)
3. Angolan Zion: Benguela Plateau (1907–1914)
4. The Lost Jewish Continent: Madagascar (1933–1942)
5. New Jerusalem, Down Under: Port Davey, Tasmania (1940–1945)
6. Welcome to the Jungle: Suriname (1938–1948)

Epilogue: Go to Uganda

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

 

Abstract

From the late nineteenth century through the post-Holocaust era, the world was divided between countries that tried to expel their Jewish populations and those that refused to let them in. The plight of these traumatized refugees inspired numerous proposals for Jewish states. Jews and Christians, authors and adventurers, politicians and playwrights, and rabbis and revolutionaries all worked to carve out autonomous Jewish territories in remote and often hostile locations across the globe. The would-be founding fathers of these imaginary Zions dispatched scientific expeditions to far-flung regions and filed reports on the dream states they planned to create. But only Israel emerged from dream to reality. Israel’s successful foundation has long obscured the fact that eminent Jewish figures, including Zionism’s prophet, Theodor Herzl, seriously considered establishing enclaves beyond the Middle East.

In the Shadow of Zion brings to life the amazing true stories of six exotic visions of a Jewish national home outside of the biblical land of Israel. It is the only book to detail the connections between these schemes, which in turn explain the trajectory of modern Zionism. A gripping narrative drawn from archives the world over, In the Shadow of Zion recovers the mostly forgotten history of the Jewish territorialist movement, and the stories of the fascinating but now obscure figures who championed it.

Provocative, thoroughly researched, and written to appeal to a broad audience, In the Shadow of Zion offers a timely perspective on Jewish power and powerlessness.

 

 

Visit the author’s website: http://www.adamrovner.com/

New Book: LeVine and Mossberg, eds. One Land, Two States

LeVine, Mark and Mathias Mossberg, eds. One Land, Two States. Israel and Palestine as Parallel States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

 

 

Abstract

One Land, Two States imagines a new vision for Israel and Palestine in a situation where the peace process has failed to deliver an end of conflict. “If the land cannot be shared by geographical division, and if a one-state solution remains unacceptable,” the book asks, “can the land be shared in some other way?”

Leading Palestinian and Israeli experts along with international diplomats and scholars answer this timely question by examining a scenario with two parallel state structures, both covering the whole territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, allowing for shared rather than competing claims of sovereignty. Such a political architecture would radically transform the nature and stakes of the Israel-Palestine conflict, open up for Israelis to remain in the West Bank and maintain their security position, enable Palestinians to settle in all of historic Palestine, and transform Jerusalem into a capital for both of full equality and independence—all without disturbing the demographic balance of each state. Exploring themes of security, resistance, diaspora, globalism, and religion, as well as forms of political and economic power that are not dependent on claims of exclusive territorial sovereignty, this pioneering book offers new ideas for the resolution of conflicts worldwide.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword: Two States on One Land—Parallel States as an Option for Israel and Palestine
Álvaro de Soto

Preface
Mathias Mossberg and Mark LeVine

1. One Land—Two States? An Introduction to the Parallel States Concept
Mathias Mossberg

2. Can Sovereignty Be Divided?
Jens Bartelson

3. Parallel Sovereignty: Dividing and Sharing Core State Functions
Peter Wallensteen

4. Security Strategy for the Parallel States Project: An Israeli Perspective
Nimrod Hurvitz and Dror Zeevi

5. Palestinian National Security
Hussein Agha and Ahmad Samih Khalidi

6. An Israel-Palestine Parallel States Economy by 235
Raja Khalidi

7. Economic Considerations in Implementing a Parallel States Structure
Raphael Bar-El

8. Parallel Sovereignty in Practice: Judicial Dimensions of a Parallel States Structure
Various authors, compiled by Mathias Mossberg

9. Religion in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: From Obstacle to Peace to Force for Reconciliation?
Mark LeVine and Liam O’Mara IV

10. The Necessity for Thinking outside the Box
Hiba Husseini

11. Parallel Lives, Parallel States: Imagining a Different Future
Eyal Megged

Contributors
Index

 

New Book: Weiss, Conscientious Objectors in Israel

Weiss, Erica. Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

 
URL: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15212.html

 

In Conscientious Objectors in Israel, Erica Weiss examines the lives of Israelis who have refused to perform military service for reasons of conscience. Based on long-term fieldwork, this ethnography chronicles the personal experiences of two generations of Jewish conscientious objectors as they grapple with the pressure of justifying their actions to the Israeli state and society—often suffering severe social and legal consequences, including imprisonment.

While most scholarly work has considered the causes of animosity and violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Conscientious Objectors in Israel examines how and under what circumstances one is able to refuse to commit acts of violence in the midst of that conflict. By exploring the social life of conscientious dissent, Weiss exposes the tension within liberal citizenship between the protection of individual rights and obligations of self-sacrifice. While conscience is a strong cultural claim, military refusal directly challenges Israeli state sovereignty. Weiss explores conscience as a political entity that sits precariously outside the jurisdictional bounds of state power. Through the lens of Israeli conscientious objection, Weiss looks at the nature of contemporary citizenship, examining how the expectations of sacrifice shape the politics of both consent and dissent. In doing so, she exposes the sacrificial logic of the modern nation-state and demonstrates how personal crises of conscience can play out on the geopolitical stage.

Erica Weiss teaches anthropology at Tel Aviv University.

 

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.

Reviews: Waisman, Body, Language and Meaning in Conflict Situations

 

Waisman, Orit Sônia. Body, Language and Meaning in Conflict Situations. A Semiotic Analysis of Gesture-Word Mismatches in Israeli-Jewish and Arab Discourse. Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics,62. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010.

 

 

URL: http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/sfsl.62/main

 

Reviews

• Kuśmierczyk, Ewa. “Review.” Discourse Studies 14.6 (2012): 807-808.

Cite: Ashkenazi, Zionism and Violence in Einstein’s Political Outlook

Ashkenazi, Ofer. “Zionism and Violence in Albert Einstein’s Political Outlook.” Journal of Jewish Studies 63.2 (2012): 331-55.

—

URL: http://www.jjs-online.net/toc.php?subaction=fullcontent&id=063_02_331_1&type=article&review

—

Abstract

This article examines Albert Einstein’s reaction to the violent clashes between Jews and Arabs in Palestine in 1929. During the 1920s, Einstein had become a prominent advocate of two seemingly incompatible causes, pacifism and Zionism. A close reading of his writings following the 1929 riots shows that he perceived both Zionism and pacifism as practical methods to counter the lure of modern nationalism and the political structure it entails, the unlimited sovereignty of the state. What he perceived as a nationalist turn within the Zionist camp prompted him to contemplate alternative strategies for the restriction of state power. In this respect, the formation of a peaceful Arab-Jewish symbiosis was a test case for his views. The bilateral rejection of his solution for the conflict was the first in a series of developments that caused him to shift his support from abolishment to regulation of violence.