Dan Rabinowitz

• Tel Aviv University

The mass demonstrations that took place in 2011 in major cities worldwide, dubbed here Contemporary Metropolitan Protest (CMP), varied in terms of the issues tackled and the political efficacy attained, but featured similarities in style, mobilization patterns and the use of traditional and social media. The similarities explain the tendency among...

Mainstream thought on environmental justice emphasizes disparities between populations in terms of their exposure to environmental risks. Climate change has recently shifted attention from vulnerability to responsibility, with much of the research and dissemination of results accentuating differential contributions on the part of various groups to...

Research on common pool resources (CPR), which began with a focus on rural communities and their defining agricultural practices, shifted recently also to the urban context, looking at community gardens, city parks and other recreational facilities. This article extends the use of CPR theory to residential complexes. Courtyards, lawns, lobbies, cel...

Environmental justice is primarily concerned with uneven distribution of environmental harms and with the consequences such inequality often has for individual and community well-being, development, and growth. Recent expansion in quantity and improvement in quality of data on current and historic greenhouse gas (GHG) emission levels by country has...

This essay identifies four different modes of ethnographic engagement with Palestine since the nineteenth century: biblical, Oriental, absent, and poststructural. Focusing on the epistemic and political dynamics in which the recent admissibility of Palestine as a legitimate ethnographic subject is embedded, we highlight two conditions. One is the d...

Elinor Ostrom, joint winner (with Oliver Williamson) of the 2009 Nobel prize in economic sciences, was quickly recognized by anthropologists as an honorary member of the tribe, and as someone whose achievements are a tribute to the discipline (see Baumard 2009; Wutich and Smth 2009). A political scientist by training, Ostrom was not formally traine...

Two themes are explored. The first is junctions whereby personal interests contradict dominant values. The Israeli residents of Natzerat Illit, a new town in Galilee, conform with mainstream Zionist narratives when they view the presence of Palestinian residents in their town as unacceptable. At the same time, selling properties to incoming Palesti...

Studies of Middle Eastern urbanism have traditionally been guided by a limited repertoire of tropes, many of which emphasize antiquity, confinement, and religiosity. Notions of the old city, the walled city, the casbah, the native quarter, and the medina, sometimes subsumed in the quintessential "Islamic city," have all been part of Western scholar...

Identifying ethnonational mixed towns as an analytical and comparative category, we show how in Palestine and Israel such towns underwent six major historical transformations and how their history under Ottoman, British, and Israeli rule displays an emergent and bifurcated sociospatial configuration. On one level, they personify the political confl...

The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village. Susan Slyomovics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. xxv. 294 pp., maps, illustrations, references, index.

The co-existence field in Israel is a rather loose array of NGOs and government sponsored organisations. Its main trajectory since the 1980s was structured meetings between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel at intermediate and secondary school levels. It is, ostensibly, a mutual affair, enabling actors on both sides to experience e...

A comprehensive, just and viable settlement of the tragedy of Palestinian refugees that will enjoy wide support within the Palestinian and the Israeli publics is a sine qua non for a sustainable peace settlement. Most on both sides, however, perceive the issue as an existential zero sum game in which the losing side might have its entire national p...

Modern urban spaces are, by definition, mixed socio-spatial configurations. In many ways, their enduring success and vitality lie in the richness of their ethnic texture and ongoing exchange of economic goods, cultural practices, political ideas and social movements. This mixture, however, is rarely harmonious and has often led to violent conflict...

This chapter continues the sociohistorical analysis of the Palestinian citizens of Israel in Chapter 1, demonstrating that the Stand-Tall Generation was preceded by two earlier ones. It focuses on the first of the two, the generation of survivors—Palestinians who, in the aftermath of the dramatic war of 1948, found themselves trapped in a state the...

This chapter sketches the profile of the Stand-Tall Generation in light of recent events and uses this historical perspective to offer a different vision for Israel's future. Israel' s main dilemma concerning its Palestinian citizens is whether to include or control them. The discussion includes the eruption in late September 2000 of Intifadat al-A...

This chapter sketches the profile of the Stand-Tall Generation in light of recent events and uses this historical perspective to offer a different vision for Israel's future. Israel' s main dilemma concerning its Palestinian citizens is whether to include or control them. The discussion includes the Supreme Court's precedent-setting ruling of March...

This highly original historical and political analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict combines the unique perspectives of two prominent segments of the Middle Eastern puzzle: Israeli Jews and the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Written jointly by an Israeli anthropologist and a Palestinian family therapist born weeks apart to two families from Haifa,...

This paper focuses on the troublesome relationship between nationalizing projects and environmental and social sustainability. Its first part highlights the gap that currently exists between critical appraisals of nationalism and the debate on sustainability. Since nation and state- building are socio-political processes that shape development, res...

This essay looks at the central role played by the proximity of Arabs—as individuals, as an essentialised culture and as a political entity—in the formation and consolidation of an idealised Israeli identity. Informed by recent theoretical preoccupations with genealogies of Othering (Baumann 2002; Gingrich 2002), and by notions connecting national...

Israeli culturalism, like Israeli identity at large, is premised on a two-pronged negation-that of the Jewish diaspora and that of the Arab East. Its emergence was assisted, directly or indirectly, by academic anthropology. The formative cohort of Israeli anthropology, mainly male researchers who came of academic age in the 1960s and 1970s, display...

Members of a low-status Arab group in Galilee, said to be of Bedouin origins and known by neighboring Palestinians as Ghawarna (sing. Ghorani), recently tend to play down this affiliation, some to the extent of denying that a group called Ghawarna ever existed. This phenomenon is evaluated against the better-known tendency in Arab cultures to embel...

This article is an ethnographic account of the two-year siege by Muslim activists of the plot adjoining a shrine in Nazareth, and the ensuing efforts by a variety of local, regional and national players to bring the crisis to a peaceful resolution before the historic visit of Pope John Paul II in March 2000. It documents the efficacy of the consecr...

Elastic, adaptable and vibrant, minorities often stretch across state borders in ways traditional concepts of states and nations fail to acknowledge, let alone theorize. The discourse of transnationalism helps to dislodge the study of minorities from the analytical straight-jacket of the state. The concept of 'trapped minority', developed herein fr...

The expected renewal of peace negotiations between Syria and Israel is likely to bring up again an issue that has been the central component of territorial conflict between the two since 1948: sovereignty in what were, between 1949 and 1967, three demilitarized zones (DMZs) declared on the Israeli side of the Syrian–Israeli frontier. The DMZs, the...

A sophisticated and engaging ethnographic account of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the first since the 1970s, Overlooking Nazareth examines specific situations of friction, conflict and co-operation in Natzerat Illit. This Israeli new town is built on formerly Palestinian land, just outside the biblical town of Nazareth, and has a populat...

Palestinians tend to imagine themselves primarily as a community of loss and deprivation. The role of this key idiom in political mobilization is examined through a study of the performance of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the 1988-89 municipal election campaign in Natzerat Illit, a predominantly Israeli new town in Galilee. While not of the ho...

Jewish Israelis tend to regard Palestinian Arabs, including those who are citizens of the state of Israel, as threatening and malicious. Nevertheless, personal interactions between Jews and Arabs in commerce, industry, government and in relations between professionals and clients often involve explicit and implicit ad hoc or minimal trust. Two case...

The Jewish inhabitants of Natzerat Illit, a mixed development town in Galilee, are united behind the stance that the Arab presence, now approximately 10% of the population, is detrimental to the town. They react differently however to Arab presence in different parts of town. This spatial variance is not unique to Natzerat Illit, and is found in ot...

Writers analyzing recent economic change among the Bedouin of South Sinai have not yet investigated institutions and events beyond the limits of their informants' memories. Marx, Perevolotsky, and Ben David refer, quite rightly, to the period following the Second World War as a time of economic change in Sinai. They note that in that period tribesm...