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Police guarding bulldozers during demolition of a Bedouin house, August 4, 2015 (Michal Rotem / Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality)
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Most scholars in the late 20th and early 21st century believed that cultic activity in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah was practiced in various temples that were scattered throughout the kingdoms. Still, a detailed study of the archaeological evidence on Israelite cult reveals that Israelite cultic buildings were extremely rare, both in absolute t...
Esta segunda edición reúne 5 ensayos y el listado de 338 reglamentos y otros documentos digitalizados sobre distribución de agua del Archivo General Agrario, los cuales se presentan en capítulos aparte de acuerdo al estado al que pertenecen. Estos se encuentran disponibles en línea.
1a edición: 2011 Palerm, Jacinta (coord.), Israel Sandré, Rocío Ca...
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... 49 Elsewhere, Yinon Cohen and I have characterised these 'invaders' as biocriminals, since they become criminals simply due to the mismatch between the race ascribed to them -Palestinian -and the race ascribed to the space they occupy: Jewish. 50 All of this is crucial background for understanding that Israel thinks of space and structures in racial terms, which helps, in turn, to make sense of how the military perceives civilian structures in the Gaza Strip and its drive to completely or almost completely destroy Palestinian space. ...
Both the actual use of civilians as human shields and Israel’s efforts to frame civilians and civilian structures as shields have played a central role in the application and justification of violence in Gaza at least since the 2008-2009 war. Yet, following October 7, 2023, Israel has introduced three novel processes related to human shielding: the first involves forcing Palestinian civilians to dress in military uniforms and sending them into underground tunnels as human shields; the second is the casting of practically all civilian structures as ‘shielding’ structures; and the third includes the invocation of the shielding provisions laid out in international humanitarian law to indict everyone and everything above ground in Gaza as legitimate military targets. Ultimately, all of these different forms of shielding and, more importantly, the accusations of shielding, have become tools for perpetuating genocide and for framing the genocide as legitimate.
... The particular expression of the elimination and the level of actual violence could vary and transform over time-dismantling or suppressing the natives' collective identity, forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide (Wolfe, 2006). From an early stage, the rigid boundaries of Jewish collective identity have precluded the assimilatory elimination, and therefore, demography and "biospatial politics" (Cohen & Gordon, 2018) have become major Zionist concerns. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen distinguished between settler colonial projects in which settler priviliges are highly institutionalized (for example, Northern Ireland) and cases where the institutionalization of privileges is low (for example, 1 On the genealogy of the concept in Israeli academia see (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022). 2 About the growing emphasis on collective rights since the 1990s see: (Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury, 2015). ...
... Since the beginning of the Zionist project the practices of land accumulation varied; even in current days they have different expressions in various segments of the Israeli control system. While before 1948 the accumulation of land was gradual and, with the absence of sovereignty relied mainly on a combination of ownership and presence (Kimmerling, 1977), since 1948 the historical trajectory begins with "the massive confiscation and Judaization of Palestinian land […] 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" (Cohen & Gordon, 2018). ...
This chapter argues that the settler-colonial context is crucial for understanding the 2018 Nation State Law, which provides explicit legal legitimacy for ethnically based discrimination, as well as a new momentum for the colonizing efforts. We contribute to the discussion about setter-colonialism in Palestine/Israel by showing how changes in the power-balance between the settler and indigenous communities affect the level or institutionalization of privileges for the settlers and exclusion of the natives. The law could be understood as the fruition of two interrelated long term historical processes in the relations between the colonizing and the colonized communities: The demographic trends that caused Jewish Israelis to lose their majority status in the territory under Israel’s control, and the reaction to the gradual and growing tendency of Palestinians in Israel to demand collective rights.
... The political scenario is a mix of challenges and progress: Although Arabs are represented in the Knesset (parliament) and local government, hurdles like the Nation-State Law (2018) and questioning of their loyalty have emphasised the need for greater inclusiveness and acknowledgement of Arab identity within the Israeli political landscape (Cohen and Gordon, 2018;Gharrah, 2018;Ali, 2019). ...
The Arab population in Israel is an ethnic, national, Indigenous minority experiencing discrimination and inequality, especially in education, health and welfare. This population’s constant societal change is coupled with social problems such as violence, crime, unemployment and poverty. These characteristics pose many challenges to social workers, particularly those empowered by the Youth Law (Care and Supervision), 1960, known as child protection officers (CPOs). Besides the usual challenges CPOs face, additional challenges stem from the Arab population’s being a traditional, collective society with a mistaken view of the CPO’s role and also from the state’s discriminatory policy. This exploratory qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews, of thirty Arab CPOs in Israel revealed challenges related to the role and to CPOs’ representation in the Arab population, namely, as having power backed by the law and being closely linked to the national establishment and institutions. Additional challenges include the lack of community-based treatment facilities, the absence of Indigenous knowledge in training and treatment and the lack of a mechanism to protect Arab CPOs from burnout and dropout. The findings are relevant to societies with minority populations.
... About Us). In other words, its mandate is to ensure that the government continue to fulfill a central component of the Zionist hegemonic project, including the "Judaization of land" (Falah 1989;Cohen and Gordon 2018). In a previous research project, Nicola Perugini and I (Perugini and Gordon 2015) showed how Regavim has adopted a series of strategies to help Judaize land including the ongoing surveillance of land, monitoring Palestinian development, and filing scores of petitions to Israel's High Court of Justice and other courts so that they, in turn, will instruct the executive branch to evict Palestinians from their lands or demolish their homes. ...
For decades, human rights organizations have exposed egregious abuses carried out by states across the globe. Yet, simultaneously, other national and transnational civil society actors have waged war on these human rights organizations to shield rights-abusive states from accountability. These assaults have increasingly resulted in the normative claims of human rights organizations being sidelined while rights-abusive laws and policies gain further ground. This article uses Israel as its primary case study to interrogate these civil society wars and their effects on human rights. Examining the work of Israeli and pro-Israeli civil society actors in bolstering apartheid and shielding the state from criticism, I highlight three strategies—native dispossession, lawfare, and advocacy—that civil society actors use to enable
apartheid. I go on to show how these actors adopt liberal tactics to protect, reproduce, and facilitate apartheid and to attack human rights defenders. By way of conclusion, I argue that the dominant paradigm informing human rights NGOs needs to be modified and their remit needs to be extended to include civil society actors that contribute to the perpetuation of social wrongs.
... 'Politics of planting' has been mobilized by both Jews and Palestinians to underline their belonging in particular areas. 27 A policy of renaming towns, sites and regions, as well as of inventing their new genealogies -known as the strategy of de-Arabization -has been undertaken to establish the Jewish character of the territory, 28 symbolically accentuating Jewish presence there. The ideologyinfused project of 'making the desert bloom' -consisting in heightening human presence and effective management of the chaotic 'counter-space' 29 of the desert -has relied on representations of Jewish community as progressive and hardworking 30 as contrasted with the backward and undeveloped practices of Arab populations in the region. ...
This article engages with the material geographies of colonialism in Israel/Palestine by looking at the site-specific cultural activities in Iqrit (Israel), a Christian-Arab village depopulated during the 1948 war in the region. We investigate the importance of material infrastructure-and material, bodily encounters with the site-as a basis for the place-based activist memory-work, as well as exposing the ways in which such activities contribute to the advancement of 'the politics of presence', understood as a manifestation of a continuous resilience vis-à-vis the discriminatory policy of the state. Our argumentation focuses on the importance of physical presence in specific geographical areas, shedding light on how place-based activities may contravene the expressed state policy by increasing the fluidity of the territory, creating spaces of contestation in which the traditional understandings of state authority partly dissolve. It also explores how the material reconfigurations of the place, and emotional-bodily investment in it, contribute to the semantic instability of the site, turning the place-based memory-work into a future-oriented project with important political aspirations.
... The land classified politically as 'Area C' (plain grey colour in Figure Since the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, the main aim of all the Israeli governments and the civil administration was to increase the establishment of Jewish settlements and limit the expansion of Palestinian cities and villages (Stockmarr, 2012;Cohen and Gordon, 2018 Habitat, 2015). Compared with 'Area A' and 'Area B', 'Area C' has a more restricted socioeconomic development and fewer amenities and institutions. ...
Background: Features of the urban environment can support human health as well
as harm it. Evidence has accumulated for the links between different place-based
characteristics and physical and mental health. However, this evidence stems
primarily from highly developed countries. The extent to which it is generalisable
to other locations, such as the Middle Eastern Arab region, which has unique
political, socio-cultural, and climatic environments, is not clear.
Aims and setting: This thesis aims to investigate health in relation to the urban
environment in the twin cities of Ramallah and Albireh in the occupied Palestinian
territory. Specifically, it will examine the associations between the risk of chronic
illness and: a) politically created area disadvantage (refugee camps and 'Area C’);
b) urban green space. It will also explore the interaction between these area-level
features and age, sex, and household assets in their association with chronic
illness.
Methods: Area-level variables were linked with individual respondents to the 2017
census using a Geographic Information System. The analytical sample was 54693
individuals living in 228 residential areas. The outcome variable was the
presence/absence of chronic illness. The area-level variables were the politically
created disadvantage indicated by Refugee camps and political land classification
‘Area C’ (controlled by Israel); the proportion of mixed trees, crop trees and open
space with little/no vegetation; Individual-level variables included twelve
demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Multi-level logistic regression
models examined associations and interactions between individual and area-level
variables and the probability of chronic illness risk.
Results: On the political dimension, living in the context of a refugee camp was
associated with greater odds of chronic illness (OR 1.91 CI [1.17-3.09]). This
association was attenuated and rendered non-significant when adjusting for green
space. The proportions of ‘mixed’ trees in residential areas had an independent
iii
inverse association with chronic illness (OR 0.96 CI [0.95-0.97]). There was
no/weak evidence for an association between the context of ‘Area C’ and the
proportion of crop trees and open space with the risk of chronic illness. A
statistically significant interaction was found between sex and living in refugee
camps. Females living outside refugee camps have a significantly lower risk of
chronic illness compared to males but not for those living inside refugee camps;
females inside refugee camps had a higher risk of chronic illness compared to
males (though not a significant difference). There was no/weak evidence for
interactions between the other area characteristics and age, sex, and household
assets.
Conclusion: This is the first study in the Palestinian context, and among the few
from the Arab World, to investigate links between the urban environment and
health. As expected, living in the disadvantaged context of refugee camps is
associated with a higher likelihood of chronic illness. Not all greenspace types
were associated with improved health outcomes, but mixed trees were, and the
green environment appeared implicated in the association between refugee camps
and poor health. These results from a Middle Eastern Arab setting add to the
evidence, largely from Western countries, that mixed trees in urban environments
benefit health. Researchers and policymakers interested in reducing health
inequalities should give more attention to refugee camps and green typologies,
especially to females living in the disadvantaged contexts of refugee camps who
may gain greater benefits. Research with a broader scope is needed to investigate
the impact of political land classification on health.
... For the Jawlanis, rejecting the municipal elections was also a political affirmation of their own community structures, notably the long-established village khalwas, the Druze congregation houses, which have assumed increased political significance since annexation by serving as a vehicle for popular mobilization (Fakher Eldin 2019: 81-83).The settler colonial skewing of market and political logics in the Golan Heights may suggest conditions more severe, and therefore far removed, from the economic and bureaucratic processes claimed by Habermas to drive lifeworld colonization in European capitalist states. As with other instances of Israeli military conquest(Cohen and Gordon 2018), the seizure of resources and ethno-racial classification of land seem to bear little if any resemblance to the liberal market systems governed by Western democracies. However, Israeli settler colonialism is a major historical variant of whatInce (2018) calls the constitutive violence of capitalist market relations -a structural property not captured by the lifeworld colonization model, which analyses a late stage of European capitalism detached from its bloody genesis in colonial expansion and racial domination. ...
... A statistical anomaly in the country's racially segregated territory and society (Cohen and Gordon, 2018), 'mixed cities' are towns with a majority Jewish population and a substantial Palestinian minority, estimated at over 10%, but at times much higher (Monterescu and Rabinowitz, 2007;Blatman-Thomas, 2018). 8 Despite their demographic composition, these cities' classification as 'mixed' is bitterly disputed for its contribution to the enduring erasure of Palestinian urbanism in general and the histories and identity of Historic Cities in particular. ...
This essay puts forward a theoretical framework for Palestinian Indigenous urbanism. It argues that the specific and diverse expressions of this urbanism are partly an outcome of the fact that Palestinian cities—as a modern urban form—predate the Zionist settler colonization of Palestine. We centre the longue durée of Palestinian urbanism as a constitutive mode for contemporary experiences of Palestinian citizens in Israel and link it to Israel's persistent attempts to erase the urban landscapes of Palestine, symbolically and materially. We discuss how the de‐urbanization of Historic Palestinian cities in Israel since the beginning of the Nakba has drastically changed the urban and rural landscapes of these cities, ultimately leading Palestinians to adapt, develop and create new forms of urbanism in and around cities. Although Palestinians live in very different types of cities today, Palestinian urbanism broadly manifests as a presence of the absence, namely as the recursion of pre‐1948 urban life. Thus, in this essay we provide a new lens through which to understand Indigenous urbanism as a recursive and relational anti‐hegemonic structure that predates and can outlive settler‐colonial violence.
... Likewise, John Calmore (1993Calmore ( : 1233 argues that racial (spatial) segregation debases those who are its victims, those who victimize, and those who are mere accessories. Another way of theorizing the racialization of space, with specific reference to Israel's land-grabbing occupation practices and demographic classifications, is Yinon Cohen and Neve Gordon's (2018) argument that Israel's bio-spatial strategies, separating between (occupying) Israeli Jews and (occupied) Palestinian Arabs, and using statistics to racially categorize the Palestinians, construct space itself as a racialized category. ...
Since November 1999, people arriving in Ireland to seek asylum have been dispersed throughout the country and confined in Direct Provision (DP) accommodation centres. Though initially meant for a six-month stay, by May 2020 7,700 people were living in 85 DP and emergency accommodation centres, many of them for up to nine years. The centres are operated by for-profit private companies who have been paid 1.6 billion euros since 2000, and are mostly sited in remote locations outside cities, on the periphery of society. The confinement of asylum seekers has been disavowed by state and society and continues the disavowal by Irish state and society of the coercive confinement of unwed mothers and poor children in church-run institutions, where women and children were confined and enslaved until late in the twentieth century.
This article is based on interviews with and publicly available testimonies of asylum seekers in Direct Provision and on public and social media statements by the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI). It theorizes the DP centres as racialized zones of nonbeing (Fanon 1967: 8) and the DP regime as racialized state violence. The segregation and racialization of asylum seekers in Direct Provision were poignantly demonstrated by asylum seekers’ inability to observe social distancing in overcrowded DP centres during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to a considerable number of them being infected.
... However, due to mixed marriage and the lack of spatial segregation between these ethnic groups (Lewin-Epstein & Cohen, 2019), many Jewish Israelis can identify as belonging to both. In addition, the Israeli ethos, perpetuated by a national hegemonic discourse, denies the existence of ethnic stratification within the Jewish population (Biton, 2011;Cohen & Gordon, 2018;Sasson-Levi & Shoshana, 2013;Shoshana, 2016). With regard to the Modern-Orthodox society, some of the differences between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim refer to the ancient customs and religious practices adopted by each group in each diaspora, such as differences in the texts and melodies used during services of prayer, customs of foods served, and even additional festivals. ...
The aim of this study is to test changes in ethnic identity from two points of view, focusing on Marcia's identity status model and the ethnic identity literature. Based on 135 participants who completed the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) questionnaires at two-time intervals, stability was found at the mean level, while stability, progression and regression were found at the individual level. Transitions from moratorium into achievement were found more than to diffusion and status changes derived mainly following changes in the commitment component. In line with Erikson's theory, the results highlight the effect of the sociocultural context on the identity formation process and the need to examine changes in identity formation processes over time, both at the mean level and the individual level. These findings could be relevant to other countries that are going through similar processes of demographic changes in which the minority challenges the hegemony of the majority.
