Suchergebnisse

Israeli surveillance industries are well integrated in the global surveillance market. This incorporation is achieved through marketisation, labour processes and the circulation of capital. Even Israel has been considered by many as a successful securitising model. In this article, it is argued that this success is the outcome of several factors, including the shared premises of Israel's settler-colonial regime and neoliberal data-based globalised capitalism, which has become a leading sector in the current economic formation. Furthermore, it reflects the advent of the securitising states and concurrently the rise of the security-industrial complex in the US and, to a lesser degree, in Europe. Yet, the acceptance of Israeli-settler colonial surveillance methods and Weltanschauung as a model points to the erosion of hitherto cherished values such as privacy, trust, autonomy, care and solidarity.

The Nation State of the Jewish People's basic law, passed in July 2018, constitutes a landmark in the evolution of Israel's settler-colonial nationalism and self-presentation. The law underscores the shift Israel has made from aligning itself with the Western liberal order to embracing, even spearheading, a radical right-wing populist worldview. The Jewish exclusivity and racism that the law embodies, I argue, did not result from changes in Israel's political and demographic landscape in the last two decades. Rather their genesis could be traced back to the debates which took place soon after Israel's establishment. Since then the desire for Jewish exclusivity has not dwindled but had been masqueraded through ideas of Israel's inimitability. The article discusses the mutations of these debates and their legal and policy effects.

This article critically examines two key assumptions of the research on social protest. First, it explores the validity of the typologies of regime type that guide the literature on social protest and the presupposition that democracies are reasonably responsive to popular demands, including to those made through public contestation. Since citizenship rights are not evenly distributed among all citizens in these countries, it is argued that this assumption is unwarranted. Second, the article challenges the presupposition that protestors are driven by one form of rationality, namely instrumental rationality. In contrast, following Weber, it is argued that participants in public contestation may be directed by different rationalities. Specifically, protestors may seek to do more than simply influence policy outcomes. These arguments are developed with reference to the case of Palestinian citizens of Israel who initiated various forms of social protest under military rule, which lasted from 1948 to 1966.

The political marginalisation of the Palestinians inside Israel between 1948 and 1977 has been widely discussed in the literature. The Israeli Communist Party is often credited with being the sole political organisation which gave an outlet during this period to the critical and oppositional political, literary and artistic activities of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. The Party organs in particular have done their utmost to popularise this claim, which has also become an article of faith for many Arab left-wing intellectuals. The question tackled in this article is: why did the Israeli State grant a margin of freedom to the Communist Party during this period, while denying it to every single Palestinian organisation inside Israel? I discussed this question at a conference on the Left in Palestine held at SOAS in February 2010. While the reader will be spared here the details of the subsequent personal accusations levelled against me in the organs of the Communist Party, I argue here (as in my SOAS paper) that the Communist Party was given this freedom of action for a range of reasons and in particular those to do with the Soviet support for the establishment of Israel and the important pro-Zionist role played the Communist Party during the 1948 War for Palestine. Other reasons are related to the endorsement by the Communist Party of Zionism's tenets and claims in support of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, including the 'modernising' nature of the Zionist project.

AbstractAlthough Israel's constructed wall in the West Bank has been discussed in a voluminous literature, some basic questions have largely remained unanswered. This paper tackles two such questions: Firstly, what is the relationship between Zionism and the conception of the wall? This question follows an assumption that the wall's idea is neither new, nor was it solely triggered by immediate security considerations. Secondly, why do European countries (in addition to the U.S.) oppose the imposition of sanctions against Israel for breaching international law by building the wall? A post-colonial perspective has been employed to discuss the role that borders (particularly hard ones) have assumed in the colonial encounter in the stages of expansive and contraction colonialism. Moreover, through this perspective, the common experience of Israel and the European colonial heritage with regard boundaries is considered.

Although considerable research has been published on the Palestinian citizens of Israel, very little has been done to explore the methods of their incorporation into the Israeli state after 1948. This article analyses the changes in the modes of the Israeli governance of the Palestinians and the ways in which various methods of control have produced various types of Arab 'collaborators' and 'informants' in an ethnic Jewish state. Moreover, the article discuses methods of resistance employed by indigenous Palestinians to the different modes of state control, and the ways used by ex-collaborators to reclaim an 'honourable' status in their local communities after the end of their 'careers'.