Normalizing Occupation

Essays that analyze the integration and segregation processes that are an integral part of the broader historical trends shaping Israel/Palestine. Controversy surrounds Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the radical national and religious agendas at play there have come to define the area in the minds of many. This study, however, provides an alternative framework for understanding the process of “normalization” in the life of Jewish residents. Considering a wider range of historical and structural factors in which the colonization of the West Bank developed, it allows placing its origins and everyday reality into a wider perspective. The works collected consider the transformation of the landscape, the patterns of relationships shared by the region’s residents, Palestinian and Jewish alike, and the lasting effects of Israel’s settlement policy. Stressed in particular are such factors as urban planning, rising inequality and the retreat of the welfare state, and the changing political economy of industry and employment. Contributions by Lee Cahaner, Honaida Ghanim, Ruthie Ginsburg, Daniel Gutwien, Assaf Harel, Miki Kratsman, David Newman, Amir Paz-Fuchs, Wendy Pullan, Yael Ronen, Erez Tzfadia, Hadas Weiss and Haim Yacobi “The settlements are studied in their full diversity and heterogeneity, shattering a common prejudice to look mainly at the religious-nationalist, ideologically driven among them. The authors show in detail how the colonization project involves communities and agents coming from all sectors of Israeli society.” —Ariella Azoulay, author of Potential History

Global building and construction cultures are hard-wired to constructing too much, too badly, with major social and ecological consequences. Rob Imrie calls us to build less and to build better as a pre-requisite for enhancing welfare and well-being.

Examines how young Jewish Americans’ fundamentally Jewish values have led them to organize in solidarity with Palestinians Unsettled digs into the experiences of young Jewish Americans who engage with the Palestine solidarity movement and challenge the staunch pro-Israel stance of mainstream Jewish American institutions. The book explores how these activists address Israeli government policies of occupation and apartheid, and seek to transform American Jewish institutional support for Israel. Author Oren Kroll-Zeldin identifies three key social movement strategies employed by these activists: targeting mainstream Jewish American institutions, participating in co-resistance efforts in Palestine/Israel, and engaging in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns. He argues that these young people perceive their commitment to ending the occupation and Israeli apartheid as a Jewish value, deeply rooted in the changing dynamics of Jewish life in the twenty-first century. By associating social justice activism with Jewish traditions and values, these activists establish a connection between their Jewishness and their pursuit of justice for Palestinians. In a time of internal Jewish tensions and uncertainty about peace prospects between Palestine and Israel, the book provides hope that the efforts of these young Jews in the United States are pushing the political pendulum in a new direction, potentially leading to a more balanced and nuanced conversation.

An on-the-ground account of the design and evolution of West Bank settlements, showing how one of the world’s most contested landscapes was produced by unexpected conflicts and collaborations among widely divergent actors. Since capturing the West Bank in 1967, Israel has overseen the construction of scores of settlements across the territory’s rocky hilltops. The settlements are part of a fierce political conflict. But they are not just hotly contested political ventures. They are also something more everyday: residential architectural projects. In the Land of the Patriarchsis an on-the-ground account of the design and evolution of West Bank settlements. Noam Shoked shows how settlements have been shaped not only by the decisions of military generals, high-profile politicians, and prominent architects but also by a wide range of actors, including real estate developers, environmental consultants, amateur archeologists, and Israelis who feel unserved by the country’s housing system. The patterns of design and construction they have inspired reflect competing worldviews and aesthetic visions, as well as everyday practices not typically associated with the politics of the Israeli occupation. Revealing the pragmatic choices and contingent circumstances that drive what appears to be a deliberately ideological landscape, Shoked demonstrates how unpredictable the transformation of political passion into brick and mortar can be.

This book stimulates discussions on cultural and educational exchanges between rival states and societies, raises awareness of the potential positive and negative impacts of such exchanges, and serves as a basis for future research and program design. Cultural and educational exchanges in various forms have existed for millennia. Yet it was not until the unprecedented human devastation of two world wars catalyzed a sense of urgency around the world that a new era of cultural and educational exchange programs emerged as a means of easing tensions between rival states and societies. This book is motivated by the need for critical research that can contribute to building a more comprehensive understanding of the issues at stake. It begins with a historical overview of cultural and educational exchanges between rival societies, an assessment of their positive and negative impacts, and a review of some of the most prominent theories in relevant fields. It then presents a diverse set of case studies, in which authors consider not only the real or expected benefits of such exchanges but also the potentially negative impacts, challenges faced along the way, and broader effects on the rival societies at large. The states and societies considered include North Korea and the West, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel and the Palestinian territories, India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, Cuba and the US, and China and the US. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate that exchanges have observable impacts on the individuals and institutions involved. Moreover, they reveal that exchanges have the capacity, in some cases, to affect broader social and political change at the family, community, society, or state level, but these impacts are indirect and typically require long-term concerted efforts by those involved.

2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, History A provocative examination of how the U.S. military has shaped our entire world, from today’s costly, endless wars to the prominence of violence in everyday American life. The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global U.S. empire. Drawing on historical and firsthand anthropological research in fourteen countries and territories, The United States of War demonstrates how U.S. leaders across generations have locked the United States in a self-perpetuating system of permanent war by constructing the world’s largest-ever collection of foreign military bases—a global matrix that has made offensive interventionist wars more likely. Beyond exposing the profit-making desires, political interests, racism, and toxic masculinity underlying the country’s relationship to war and empire, The United States of War shows how the long history of U.S. military expansion shapes our daily lives, from today’s multi-trillion–dollar wars to the pervasiveness of violence and militarism in everyday U.S. life. The book concludes by confronting the catastrophic toll of American wars—which have left millions dead, wounded, and displaced—while offering proposals for how we can end the fighting.

A study of Palestine-Israel through the unexpected lens of nature conservation Settling Nature documents the widespread ecological warfare practiced by the state of Israel. Recruited to the front lines are fallow deer, gazelles, wild asses, griffon vultures, pine trees, and cows—on the Israeli side—against goats, camels, olive trees, hybrid goldfinches, and akkoub—which are affiliated with the Palestinian side. These nonhuman soldiers are all the more effective because nature camouflages their tactical deployment as such. ​Drawing on more than seventy interviews with Israel’s nature officials and on observations of their work, this book examines the careful orchestration of this animated warfare by Israel’s nature administration on both sides of the Green Line. Alongside its powerful protection of wildlife biodiversity, the territorial reach of Israel’s nature protection is remarkable: to date, nearly 25 percent of the country’s total land mass is assigned as a park or a reserve. Settling Nature argues that the administration of nature advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement and the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space.

Colonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef traces the cultural, political, and spatial apparatuses that enable people and nations to settle on the ruins of other people's homes. Kotef demonstrates how the mass and structural modes of violence that are necessary for the establishment and sustainment of the colony dwell within settler-colonial homemaking, and through it shape collective and individual identities. She thus powerfully shows how the possibility to live amid the destruction one generates is not merely the possibility to turn one's gaze away from violence but also the possibility to develop an attachment to violence itself. Kotef thereby offers a theoretical framework for understanding how settler-colonial violence becomes inseparable from one's sense of self.

Globalizing Organic focuses on the globalization of a culture of "eating for change" and the ways in which local meanings attached to the production of foods embed ecological and social values. Rafi Grosglik examines how organic agriculture was integrated in Israel—a state in which agriculture was a key mechanism in promoting Jewish nationalism and in time has become highly mechanized and technologically sophisticated. He explores how organic food, which signifies environmental protection and social equity, has been realized in a country where environmental issues are perceived as less pressing compared to inner political conflicts, the Israeli-Arab conflict, and recurrent wars. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and analysis of historical documents and media, Grosglik traces how alternative food movements are affected by global and local trends. He covers a wide range of topics, including the ethos of halutzim ("pioneers," Zionist ideological farmers and workers), the utopian visions of the Israeli kibbutz, indigeneity that is claimed both by Palestinians and Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, biblical meanings that have been ascribed to environmental and countercultural ideas, the Americanization of Israeli society, and its neoliberalized economy.

How can irregular political situations, which impact the lives of millions, become normalized? Specifically, within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how can 50 years of Israeli control over the Occupied Territories become accepted within Israeli society as a normal, possibly even banal phenomenon? Conversely, how can such a situation be estranged from daily reality, denied any relation to who "we" are? This volume explores these questions through the lens of two central discourses that dominate the Israeli debate regarding the future of the Occupied Territories: 1) Occupation Normalization Discourse, which portrays Israeli control of the territories as a "normal" part of life; 2) Occupation Estrangement Discourse, which portrays this situation as distant from Israeli reality. In addressing these discourses, the authors develop a new methodological tool, Dialectic Discourse Analysis, which examines discourse as a process of perpetual positing and synthesis of oppositions through the discursive construction, differentiation and mediation of self and other. Through this approach, the authors illustrate that these discourses are dialectically constituted in opposition to one another, feeding off one another, each enabling the other to exist. This dynamic has resulted in a fixed discourse, preventing any progress towards a synthesis of oppositions.