Suchergebnisse

This article examines the geopolitical landscape organised by the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain under US sponsorship, by exploring their namesake's status as the common ancestor of Jews/Israelis and Muslims/Arabs through his sons Isaac and Ishmael. I begin by presenting the background and significance of the Accords, and show how despite its US-Christian origins, their nomenclature was enthusiastically received by Israeli and Emirati signatories thanks to its appeal to genealogy. Utilising anthropological theory, I then trace the legend of Abraham and his progeny from Genesis, through ancient and medieval debates between monotheists, arriving finally at the modern discourse of patrilineal cousinage and 'Abrahamism' as semi-official ideology. Other Abrahamisms may be possible, but in the form embedded in the Accords, I argue that this ideology promotes not sustainable peace but patriarchy, territorial homogeneity and violent marginalisation of those deemed 'not to belong' to the family.

AbstractAgricultural settlement geared to capitalist commodity production and accompanied by massive ecological interventions has historically been central to the Zionist colonial project of creating a permanent Jewish presence in the "Land of Israel." The hyperarid southern region known as the Central Arabah is an instructive edge-case: in the 1960s, after the expulsion of the bedouin population, cooperative settlements were established here and vegetables produced through "Hebrew self-labor," with generous assistance from the state. In the 1990s the region was again transformed as the importation of migrant workers from Thailand enabled farmers to expand cultivation of bell peppers for global markets. But today ecological destruction, depletion of water resources, and global warming cast doubt over the viability of settlement in this climatically extreme region. I locate the settlements of the Arabah within the historical political ecology of the Zionist movement, arguing that their current fragility exposes the essential precarity of capitalist colonization.

In a 2013 Facebook post, Israel's then Minister of Economy Naftali
Bennett (2013; my translation) wrote: 'If an Israeli employer knows that he has to pay every worker the minimum wage, give him one day off a week, pay overtime and produce pay slips – he just won't employ infiltrators and foreign workers. He will choose an Israeli worker. This is how we dry the main fuel which sets fire to the problem of infiltrators in south Tel Aviv and across the country, and at the same time do justice to workers who are exploited in substandard conditions.' Bennett posits the equal protections of labour law as primarily informed not by a universalist concern for the welfare of all workers but by a desire to exclude both documented 'foreign workers' and undocumented 'infiltrators' from the labour market. A document – the pay slip – serves in Bennett's plan as an icon of legality and a tool in the hands of this policy of exclusion through egalitarianism.

Comprised of twenty-seven interviews with leading researchers, intellectuals, artists, and activists, Critical Voices explores the ways in which power and popular mobilizations manifest in the contemporary region, as well as the representation of key dynamics, experiences, and figures. Through their own unique perspectives and possibilities, the interviewees and interviewers challenge the ways in which the region is studied, discussed, and represented. - Contributors: Awad Abdel Fattah, Sarah Al Abdali, Talal Asad, George Azar, Asli Bali, Nar Photos Collective, Angela Davis, Wael Gamal, Justin Gengler, Nigel Gibson, Nile Green, Ahmad Habib, Bassam Haddad, David Harvey, Jim House, Sonallah Ibrahim, Matan Kaminer, Leila Khaled, Nancy Kricorian, Driss Ksikes, Haytham Manna', Nabeel Rajab, Eastern Province Revolution, Ella Shohat, Zaid Shuaibi, Tariq Tell