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This paper offers an analysis of crime in the Palestinian society in Israel from the perspective of political relationships. It illustrates that the state of Israel is trying to define and identify crime through ideologies and narrow interests. This process is part of a mechanism of control, which intends to criminalize the daily life of the Palestinians. Discriminatory behavior against Arabs by police is more apparent and the records on crime are sometimes inaccessible, with a mania for secrecy, and view the whole Arab community as a security danger. The Israeli social control policy politicizes this community, with excess control in some areas and a lack of control in others. The paper concludes that no detailed arguments are needed in order to see the ineffectiveness of the Israeli control policy as long as the basic root of the political struggle is not answered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the complex identity of Kessoch immigrants in Israel. One group of Kessoch is regarded as ‘young’ and the other as ‘old’. These are two ‘invisible’ groups, which cope in their own way with their social and cultural marginality. They are delegitimized within both Israeli society and the religious establishment. Among the older Kessoch, the authors differentiated between those who have found new meaning for their life in Israel, while attempting to preserve significant ‘scraps of identity’, and those who are disconnected from their present-day life materials and find little meaning in them. In contrast, the younger Kessoch, 1.5-generation immigrants, express varied behaviour patterns of daily resistance to the host society. Their personalities and leadership patterns also indicate selective adoption of significant bits of reality that suit them. Their intelligent use of ‘scraps of identity’ serves their social integration processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does granting certificates of ‘business clean of Arab workers’to owners of shops, stores, and Jewish businesses who prove they are not employing Arab workers shape identity? Identity development involves making sense of, and coming to terms with, the social world one inhabits, recognizing choices and making decisions within contexts, and finding a sense of unity within one's self while claiming a place in the world. Since there is no objective, ahistoric, universal trans-cultural identity, views of identity must be historically and culturally situated. This paper explores identity issues among members of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel. While there is a body of literature exploring this subject, we will offer a different perspective by contextualizing the political and economic contexts that form an essential foundation for understanding identity formation among this minority group. We argue that, as a genre of settler colonialism, ‘pure settlement colonies’ involve the conquering not only of land, but of labor as well, excluding the natives from the economy. Such an exclusion from the economy is significant for its cultural, social, and ideological consequences, and therefore is especially significant in identity formation discussed in the paper. We briefly review existing approaches to the study of identity among Palestinian Arabs in Israel, and illustrate our theoretical contextual framework. Finally, we present and discuss findings from a new study of identity among Palestinian Arab college students in Israel through the lens of this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper falls within the paradigm of postcolonial, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study. It discusses the assimilative/integrative policies that shape the history curriculum for 1948-Palestinian Arabs as a minority ethnic group in Israel and promotes emancipatory measures for the history curriculum, within the postcolonial multi-ethnic minority/majority context. This paper challenges mono-ethnic thinking concerning history teaching and marginalized voices. It proposes recommendations for ethnographers, educators and policy makers to produce a history curriculum that acts as a vehicle for peaceful coexistence between the 1948-Palestinian Arabs in Israel and the Jews in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a democratizing world, where increasing numbers of protracted conflicts are being addressed via negotiations, governments’ ability to construct ‘toleration policy’—a set of discursive relationships between collective identities, national interests and peacemaking—plays a crucial role in their capacity to elicit popular legitimacy and implement their peace policy. The paper traces the effects of changes in Israel's toleration policy on changes in its peace policy following Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. Focusing on the political struggles after the assassination and their effect on public opinion, the paper offers an alternative, socio-cultural, explanation to the breakdown in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following feminist and postcolonial discourses, this paper uses the concept of ‘everyday experience’ as a tool to trace the social world of educated Palestinian women in Israel. The term refers to the complex array of these women’s experiences in racialised and gendered social sites, as well as within the class, religious, and ethnic contexts in the subordinated group and its relations with the dominant Jewish group. Based on 108 in-depth interviews with Palestinian women citizens of Israel, the paper claims that educated Palestinian women are located in a ‘third place’ between cultural, gender, class, national and racial structures that generates a continual ambivalence. Within this marginal, ‘unhomely’ space women negotiate their own identities and challenge dominant social definitions. Women create various modes of interim spaces and multi-dimensional, shifting identities for themselves. The ambivalent attitudes generated by the women’s experiences expose the possibility of shedding categorising markers. The omnipresent existence of the gendered, racialised regime of knowledge makes every place a potential site of subversion and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper extends recent studies of national character – suggesting that the Israeli case revolves around a set of deep cultural codes which constitute various empirical manifestations. Broadening on this re-emerging paradigm, the study provides a specific case study of a major trait of Israeli national character, namely existential anxiety and fear of annihilation. It does so while advancing the idea that cultural trauma sets a context for Israeli national character. The analysis shows that Israelis constantly reference persistent and endemic existential fears of annihilation. They do so while tying together four levels: the mythological predicament, historical evidence, contemporary threats and future risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An observer of the debates conducted amongst Palestinian intellectuals over the one-state solution in Palestine/Israel, will have perceived a surge of interest in these discussions in recent years. This article investigates the reasons for the mounting interest, and attempts to introduce a number of distinctions and parameters into the debate in order to create some order within it – an increasingly imperative task if these discussions are to proceed in a constructive manner. In the first section of the paper, the author seeks to ascertain the source of the impetus for a revival of the one-state solution (OSS); the article also outlines a typology of the arguments commonly evoked in favor of the OSS, exploring its allure for Palestinians. The second section aims to determine what, if the OSS is indeed ‘the solution,’ is the problem that it purports to solve, and in what sense it constitutes a solution to that problem. In this section, the author claims that many of the arguments deployed in support of the OSS are misplaced and do not truly represent an answer to the actual problems facing the Palestinians. The author's main line of reasoning is that the existing criticisms of the Oslo Accords and its perceived failure should not inexorably lead the Palestinians to abandon the two-state solution (TSS) and adopt the OSS, as this solution is not necessarily more just (although it might be), nor is it incontrovertibly more realizable. The third section argues that support of the OSS nevertheless represents a compelling option for the Palestinians, but for reasons other than those usually put forward by its advocates. Its value lies not in the disputable fact that it is a better ‘solution’, but rather in that it provides the means for altering present relations between Palestinians and the Israeli state, empowering Palestinians and supplying them with tools for their struggle. Understood in this way – as a means rather than a final solution – the OSS has the potential to change the fundamental parameters of the problem, reformulating the present by perceiving it through the prism of an imagined future. The evocation of the OSS shifts the Palestinian position from a struggle unto death against the Israelis to a master-slave dialectics with them. This shift turns Palestinian weakness into strength, puts limits on Israeli power, and furnishes the Palestinians with a plan and agenda for struggle, which they currently lack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper, based on interviews, follows something of the process by which a group of Palestinian social workers came to 'stand tall' as Palestinian citizens of Israel. The process began with their acute discomfort both with blending into Jewish Israeli society and with being singled out for exclusion or harsh treatment as Palestinians. These feelings set in motion a process of self empowerment that was marked first by resistance and protest and then by the simultaneous embracing of and reflection on their identity as Palestinian citizens of Israel. Parallels are drawn between the historical development of the identity of the Palestinian collective in Israel that has been charted in the literature and the identity development of individual Palestinians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the phenomenon of the return of Bedouin and Druze women from studies in Israeli universities to their homes and culture, focusing on the perspective of the psychological changes they experienced in their identity. Entering the university, located in the Jewish-Israeli space (in central cities in Israel), constitutes entry into a new and different cultural world that exposes these women to values and norms different from those of their culture of origin. The identity formed as a result of their encounter with and exposure to a world that was unfamiliar to them and the return thereafter to their villages entail changes in gender identity. Not only are they 'different' from the way they were before they left; they often feel like 'internal immigrants' within their own culture. A deeper understanding of these effects would enhance comprehension of the emotional processes and identity changes undergone by women from non-Western cultures who obtain higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we adapt political philosopher Charles Mills' notion of the racial contract to consider the fraught context of Israel/Palestine and its interface with other states, particularly Canada. Specifically, we argue the racialization of categories commonly considered to be race-neutral - including: religion; nationality; citizenship; democracy; security; historic claims to or denial of claims to land; and interpretation, implementation or circumvention of international law - must be explicitly recognized in the exercise of power. To illustrate this we address how anti-Semitism, Orientalism and Islamophobia are key historic components of the racial contract in Canada and internationally. We consider how the racial contract has defined the state of Israel since 1948, and how the international racial contract assigns a common interest between the state of Israel and international political allies, including Canada. This process depends upon absenting Palestinians as simultaneously non-white, the subjects of extreme repression, and stateless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars consider ‘identity’ and ‘identity politics’ to be among the most important means for cultural minority groups to challenge a discriminatory reality. Others caution that these processes might result in the polarisation of differences, potentially fuelling hatred, harsh conflict, exclusion and even violence. The tension between these two views is presented in this article through an examination of the way young Ethiopian Jews whose parents immigrated to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s have developed their own particular identity precisely in the course of and as a result of the encounter with Israeli society and its mechanisms of exclusion, discrimination, and control. The state declared a policy of assimilation, but in practice relegated the new arrivals to a status of inferiority and marginality. As a result, young Ethiopian Jews reconstructed a new, complex and hybrid Israeli identity, in which blackness is one important element. This unique identity is presented in the paper as a crucial response by the youths to a discriminatory reality of cultural racism. However, the essay also raises doubts concerning their success in minimising their subjugation and in ‘de-racialising’ Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article moves beyond the discussion of police racism to a broader account of the militaristic racism of policing in Israel. The highly permeable boundaries between the military, society and the political conflict all affect how violence against women is policed. Focusing on case studies of police officers' perceptions of abused Palestinian Israeli women — members of an ethnic and indigenous minority — this paper considers key features of the policing of violence against women in a militaristic context and during a continuous political conflict. Police officers' philosophies and actions in law enforcement concerning violence against women are critically scrutinised. The findings indicate that while some aspects of cultural difference between the indigenous ethnic group and the majority are relevant to policing, focusing predominantly on the ‘cultural characteristics’ or ‘ethnic traditions or rituals’ of the policed population and denying the effect of the political conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as a factor in the militarisation of policing can reinforce rather than ameliorate ethnic prejudice, racism and discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state educational system in Israel functions effectively to maintain the cultural, socioeconomic, and political subordination of Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens through the imposition of aims, goals and curricula to which the students cannot relate, and the substandard and discriminatory provision of educational resources, programmes and services; all of which result in markedly poorer levels of educational achievement and lower rates of students qualified to enter higher education. As with every other aspect of the education system in Israel, these inequitable outcomes are not a matter of chance, but rather a matter of policy. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which racially derogatory attitudes towards the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel have been translated into discriminatory practices in the state-run educational system. I will examine the mechanisms by which these practices have placed Palestinian Arabs on an unequal footing with regard to their social, economic and political development vis á vis the Israeli Jewish majority, and have led to the institutionalisation of an education system that perpetuates racist attitudes and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]