Unionizing Discourse among Israeli Hi-Tech Workers 2014–2018
The Israeli labor market has recently witnessed an unprecedented trend of unionizing in the high-tech sector. Based on field research, which examined high-tech unionizing between 2014 and 2018, we seek to underscore how these workers articulate the rationale for their action and their demands. Drawing on Luc Boltanski's sociology of critique, we argue that high-tech unionizing signifies a new model of critique of capitalism, which synthesizes elements from the social critique with that of the artistic critique. High-tech workers, who were bred on the ethos of the artistic critique, protest the suppression of creativity and the lack of authentic personal expression prevalent under capitalism and now seek to resurrect the social critique, which protests inequality, exploitation, and economic insecurity. The resurrection of the social critique engenders an interesting dynamic of protest discourse, since to a large extent the social critique contradicts the artistic critique – responding to one is invariable linked with ignoring the other. An analysis of high-tech workers' unionizers in seven leading firms uncovers the return of the social critique, its tension with the artistic critique, and the attempt to synthesize these two sets of critique, which can shed light on workers' struggles in other sectors.
Sexuality and Ethnicity: Homo-Mizrahi Subjectivity and Queer Tourism to Tel Aviv
Gilly Hartal and Orna Sasson-Levy
Tel Aviv is becoming a hotspot for gay tourism through the support of municipal and national forces. The city is marketed as a Middle Eastern gay utopia, drawing tourists due to its location, LGBT nightlife and Oriental flavour. Meanwhile, local Israeli LGBT individuals strive to produce themselves as Western, both performatively and politically. This paper discusses how the Tel Aviv municipality, the state, commercial actors and LGBT individuals utilize Israeli ethnicities. We argue that the dissonance between Orientalist images and Westernization processes, which are particularly noticeable in the marketing of gay tourism to Tel Aviv, maintains a twofold construction of Tel Aviv as both Middle Eastern and a global city. Reinforcing the differentiation from the Middle East and other Arab countries, while embracing Orientalist images and tastes under the guise of authenticity, this particular kind of pinkwashing also differentiates the city as other than the rest of Israel. This in turn creates new nuances of ethnic Israeli gayness illustrated by an emerging gay Mizrahi culture.
Daniel DeMalach and Lev Luis Grinberg
The article discusses the Zionist colonization of the Lower Galilee during 1908–1914 using an "eventfull sociology" perspective. It analyzes the emergence of a new colonization pattern, the "confrontational settlement", characterized by the settlers' use of physical power for defending themselves and displacing the local population. This pattern was encouraged by the World Zionist Organization (WZO) as part of an effort to lay the basis for Jewish autonomy by achieving control over most of the land in the area. The WZO therefore established "conquest groups" in Degania, Merchavia, Hittin, and elsewhere. The new colonization model, which developed through a process of trial and error, was more harsh than the JCA approach and more effective in forcing the local population off the land. Its implementation was followed by a cycle of violent struggles that became a key factor in the formation of collective identity among the Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine.
Israel’s Biospatial Politics: Territory, Demography and Effective Control
Yinon Cohen and Neve Gordon
Using Israel’s land-grabbing practices alongside its demographic classifications as a conceptual lens, this article advances two claims: one about biospatial strategies, including the construction of space as a racialized category, and the other historical. The article shows that the particular biospatial scaffolding underlying Israel’s colonial project has deployed similar strategies of dispossession and settling across the entire territory located between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Simultaneously, it draws a connection between these strategies and statistical classifications and techniques of enumeration to delineate Israel’s efforts to racialize the appropriated space. Historically, the article identifies a boomerang trajectory, beginning with the massive confiscation and Judaization of Palestinian land in the wake of the 1948 war, then extending and duplicating many of the practices originally developed inside Israel to the West Bank in 1967, and finally turning back inward to solidify the racialization of land within Israel.
In Search of the Holy Grail: Indigenous Wines, Science and the Colonial Politics of Local Identity
Ariel Handel and Daniel Monterescu
As a settler colonial space, Israel/Palestine is a site of struggle between definitions of indigeneity and settlerness. With the release of the first Palestinian “indigenous wine” in 2008, we witness the “indigenous turn” in the local wine field. This article analyzes the struggle over authentic indigeneity in Israel/Palestine through a political biography of the indigenous grape and the network of actors around it. We follow the agency of indigenous varieties such as the Marawi/Hamdani, which enable the Israeli and Palestinian wine industries to claim their place in history in an era in which terroir, or the ideosyncretic place, defines economic and cultural value. From a theoretical position that foregrounds the interface between human and non-human agents, we show how the indigenous grape underwent a metamorphosis in recent years due to the combination between genetics, enology and history. This transformation is part of a global process of a search for place-based authenticity, but also a local process whereby two collectivities struggle over the title of indigeneity in an uneven context of settler colonialism.
"Here Intermingled Loneliness and Togetherness": The Kibbutz Dining-Hall as a Disciplined Space
The kibbutz dining-hall has functioned over the years as a social and cultural hub for kibbutz life, and was one of its most prominent icons. In this article I examine the role of the dining-hall in the kibbutz's social control mechanism and ask how it functions as a disciplined space by analyzing the interrelationship between the built space and daily practices and patterns of use. The theoretical framework of the study, which is based on an architectural analysis, and on the perspective of the users through narrative interviews and a selection of designated text segments, relates to space as an active player in the field, which operates beyond the narrative of representation. The findings show that the dining-hall functioned as a disciplined arena, reflecting both social positions and relations, while simultaneously acting beyond them, producing meanings and relations. An examination of the relationship between architecture of organized space and mechanisms of stratification shows that, contrary to the common perception that supervision acts uniformly on all subjects, in the dining-hall supervision acted differentially to individuals in different social positions.
The Invisible: Women and The Palestinian Cities \ Manar Hasan
David De Vries, Arees Bishara and Chen Misgav
Book Reviews:
On: With Us More Than Ever: Making the Absent Rebbe Present in Messianic Chabad \ Yoram Bilu
Michal Kravel-Tovi
On: Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood \ Iddo Tavory
On: The bonnet and the flag: counter-nationalism in Eastern Harediism \ Nissim Leon
On: From the heroism of the spirit to the sanctification of power: power and heroism in religious Zionism between 1948 and 1967 \ Dror Greenblum
On: “And Thus a Homeland is Conquered": Planning and Settlement in 1950s Lakhish Region \ Smadar Sharon
On: Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel \ Fran Markowitz, Stephen Sharot, and Moshe Shoked (Eds.)
On: Return to Casablanca: Jews, Muslims, and an Israeli Anthropologist \ André Levy
On: Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel: Studies in Legal History \ Assaf Likhovski
On: Thank You for Dying for Our Country: Commemorative Texts and Performances in Jerusalem \ Chaim Noy
On: Pets in the family: the visible, the hidden and what is in between - the therapeutic connections \ Rachel Gilstrum
On: Single motherhood in Palestinian society in Israel \ Tal Meller
On: Studies in Food Law \ Aeyal Gross and Yofi Tirosh (Eds.)