Introduction | Alexandra Kalev
This article traces the journeys and trips of residents of Mandatory Palestine and seeks to reveal the lifestyles in a region where borders mattered little. The article emphasizes the contribution of human mobility to the assemblage of both ethnospatial boundaries and geopolitical identities: recreation and trading travels of Arabs and Jews in the region illustrated Palestine as part of a regional mobility unit of the “Middle East”, and took part in the establishment of a temporal and delimited mutual Arab-Jewish livelihood. The travels of the Jews to their relatives in Europe, on the other hand, highlighted the European identity, though they also caused some tension with a few Zionist organizations. The article joins new studies on everyday life in Palestine and challenges dominant approaches in the sociology of tourism which consider tourism of that time as a western activity. The study is based on a variety of archival sources, both institutional and private, ranging from statistics of border crossing to family photos taken abroad.
Road as a Mobile Place: Road 31 and Arad Between Connection and Disconnection
Batya Roded, Avinoam Meir and Arnon Ben Israel
Roads are mostly dealt with in their transportation context of linear connectivity between places. However, according to the new mobility paradigm a road is also a place having emotional, experiential, symbolic and political dynamics and thus a geographical entity rich with meanings to its users and nearby residents. Based on interviews, survey and archival materials this paper examines how Road 31 in the peripheral eastern Negev is expressed in the local discourse of the town of Arad before and after its upgrade. We reveal that Arad’s marginal location and regional bi-ethnic reality generate a complex and conflicted discourse. We demonstrate how Arad’s residents, living within a space that is layered economically, culturally and ethnically, generate a road discourse containing a fabric of mixed emotions, inter-ethnic tensions locally and core-periphery tensions nationally. This discourse enriches the new mobility paradigm by offering a subjective local knowledge that accumulates through prolonged and intimate acquaintance with road space within a dynamic process. Such knowledge may facilitate better understanding of local experiences and needs, particularly within a marginal frontier town, and suggest opportunities for economic growth hidden to “above” spectators.
Multiple Bargaining Patriarchy: Perception of Fertility among Educated Arab Women in Israel
Khawla Zoabi and Yonathan (Jon) Anson
We consider fertility and childbearing as seen through the eyes and activities of a group of women on the ethnic and social margins of a patriarchal society in Israel. We locate the recent reduction in fertility at the point where women’s status meets patriarchal and ethnic political power. In the background, we identify the political, territorial, economic and demographic changes that Arab society has undergone in Israel, and in the Negev-Bedouin society in particular. Our starting point is bargaining theory, which argues that in coping with the constraints of patriarchy, women use a bargaining strategy in order to achieve the best they can in terms of social security and in other spheres of life. We suggest that women use a strategy of maximal bargaining, in which they bargain simultaneously for their place within the broader patriarchal order and within their own nuclear family. Based on our in-depth interviews with Bedouin women, we propose a conceptual framework for characterizing women’s bargaining strategies around issues of fertility. This framework is comprised of three intertwined motives: Disputing the traditions of patriarchal society; opposition to the model of mothers’ suffering; and striving for a high quality, modern life. Our results present the women not as helpless and passive victims but as active disputants operating on multiple levels as they face the agents of patriarchy. They oppose patriarchy but also tactically compromise with it while at the same time seeking a better future in the practice of their daily lives.
Homogamy in Marriage by Education among the Palestinian Population in Israel
The current article examines how educational attainment of Palestinian women in Israel is associated with their likelihood of entering into homogamy marriage, and the extent to which this likelihood has changed over time. Numerous studies from Western societies indicated that homogamy increased among the most educated and the less educated spouses. Studies from societies in transition, where women Abstracts 214 improved their educational attainment while patriarchal norms still exist, have received little scholarly attention. This study is based on data obtained from the population censuses conducted by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics in 1983, 1995 and 2008. The results suggest that homogamy among less educated has decreased, and homogamy among educated women did not significantly increase. The results show that educated women may face a ‘marriage squeeze’, preferring to marry downward than remaining single. The findings probably reflect structural changes in Palestinian-Israeli society that have taken place over the years and the fact that in recent years, women’s education has surpassed that of men, while the traditional social context continues to shape gender relations.
Changes in the Israeli Employment Structure: From Upgrading to Polarization
Alina Rosenfeld-Kiner and Tali Kristal
Several studies described the emergence of a relatively new phenomenon in western countries that is referred to as “job polarization” – expansion of employment in both good and bad jobs and contraction of employment in the center of the wage distribution. The current study offers a primary empirical analysis of the changes that occurred in Israel’s employment structure since the early 1970s. The findings demonstrate a period of job upgrading - relative expansion of high-wage jobs and decrease in the relative share of the low-wage jobs - during the corporatist era of the Israeli economy (1972-1983), in contrast to job polarization during the neoliberal period (1995-2008). The results emphasize the significance in analyzing job structure over the last decades for understanding the changes in employment opportunities in the Israeli labor market, and the role of the political economy in the shaping of employment opportunities.
Anti-Neoliberal Protest and Neoliberal Outcomes: The Appropriation and Translation of the “Tents Protest” by the Trachtenberg Committee | Yulia Shevchenko and Sara Helman
This article examines the ways in which the Trajtenberg Committee report diagnosed the causes underlying the 2011 protest (tents protest), the identity of its carriers, and the policy instruments it suggested to address the protesters’ claims. We use a critical discourse analysis method to disclose the policy paradigm – the construction of social problems, target population and policy instruments – that was used to give meaning to the demands of the protesters and to translate them into policy proposals (agenda setting). Our argument is that the Trajtenberg Committee appropriated the rhetoric of the protest, but it translated this rhetoric into policy proposals through a combination of a neoliberal economic and social policy that was softened at its margins with insights of the social investment model – a European policy aimed at strengthening the development of human capital in the context of the knowledge economy. We further suggest that the Trajtenberg Committee’s report reconstructed the Israeli hegemonic project in the neo-liberal era. Our analysis combines insights from the ideational turn in institutional analysis and the literature on the outcomes of social movements This combination makes it possible to understand: a) how social movements’ outcomes may contradict the protesters’ motivations; and b) how the knowledge and discourse deployed by state agents (underpinned by policy paradigms) play a central role in the dilution of the protesters’ demands and their demobilization.
Book Reviews:
On: Haredi Masculinities between the Yeshiva, the Army, Work and Politics: The Sage, the Warrior and the Entrepreneur / Yohai Hakak
On: Sweet Burdens: Welfare and Communality among Russian Jews in Germany \ Sveta Roberman
On: Crime and law enforcement: theory, policy, criticism \ Hagit Larnau
On: Zionism and Empires \ Yehuda Shenhav
On: The Return of Martin Buber: National and Social Thought in Israel from Buber to the Neo-Buberians \ Uri Ram
On: Israel and Africa: A Genealogy of Moral Geography \ Haim Yacobi
On: A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land: How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli \ Jackie Feldman
On: Autotopia: On the Suburban Intermediate Space in Israel \ Tamar Berger
On: From Philanthropy to Corporate Social Responsibility: The Case of Discount Bank \ Ricky Galia
On: Male body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy : images from musar literature and hagiography \ Yakir Englander
On: The Politics of Bereavement in Palestinian Society: Gender, Religion and Nationality \ Maram Masarwa
On: Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment \ Amalia Sa’ar