DOCSLIB.ORG

Haifa Before & After 1948

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Haifa Before & After 1948 HAIFA BEFORE & AFTER 1948 NARRATIVES OF A MIXED CITY INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL JUSTICE AND RECONCILIATION SERIES Published under editorial responsibility of The Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation The Hague VOLUME 6 HAIFA BEFORE & AFTER 1948 NARRATIVES OF A MIXED CITY Edited by Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss DORDRECHT 2011 Cover design/ Illustration: Studio Thorsten Photograph: Getty Images/John Philips This book is printed on acid-free paper. This project has been sponsored by funding from the Ford Foundation, the Arcadia Trust, the Sigrid Rausing Trust and the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung The views in this book are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISSN 2211-3061 hardbound ISBN 9789089790910 paperback ISBN 9789089790927 © 2011 Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and Republic of Letters Publishing BV, Dordrecht, The Netherlands/ St. Louis, MO. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Republic of Letters Publishing has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and settles other permission matters. Authorization to photocopy items for personal use is granted by Republic of Letters Publishing BV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MO 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. TABLE OF CONTENTS Contributors Preface Catherine Cissé-van den Muijsenbergh ix Towards Mutual Historical Writing: An Introduction to the “Haifa Project” Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss 1 A Tale of Two Houses Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss 11 Arab-Jewish Architectural Partnership in Haifa during the Mandate Period: Qaraman and Gerstel Meet on the “Seam Line” Waleed Karkabi and Adi Roitenberg 43 Arabs and Jews, Leisure and Gender, in Haifa’s Public Spaces Manar Hasan and Ami Ayalon 69 Commodities and Power: Edible Oil and Soap in the History of Arab- Jewish Haifa Mustafa Abbasi and David De Vries 99 Historicizing Climate: Haifawis and Haifo’im Remembering the Winter of 1950 Dan Rabinowitz and Johnny Mansour 119 “Eraser” and “Anti-Eraser” – Commemoration and Marginalization on the Main Street of the German Colony: The Haifa City Museum and Café Fattush Salman Natour and Avner Giladi 149 Haifa Umm al-Gharib: Historical Notes and Memory of Inter-Communal Relations Regev Nathansohn and Abbas Shiblak 181 Bibliography 205 Index 217 CONTRIBUTORS EDITORS Mahmoud Yazbak is a professor of Palestinian History, head of the department of Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa. Served as the Chair of Adalah (2008-2011), and headed MEISAI (Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Association in Israel, 2008-2011). He publishes frequently on social history and issues concerning the modern Palestinian society. Yfaat Weiss is a professor at the department of History of the Jewish people and is the former head of School of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The scope of her publication covers German and Central European History, and Jewish and Israeli History. AUTHORS Mustafa Abbasi, is a lecturer at Tel Hai Academic College in Upper Galilee. His main fields of research are the Galilee towns Safad, Acre, Nazareth and Tiberias during the Mandate period (1918-1948). He publishes frequently on social history and issues concerning the modern Palestinian society in Galilee. Ami Ayalon is a professor of Middle Eastern history at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University. His research over the years has dealt primarily with aspects of Arab cultural history in modern times. David De Vries is professor at the Department of Labor Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University. His research interests are labor and business history and the social history of Palestine and Israel. Avner Giladi is professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern History, University of Haifa. His main fields of research and publication are Family History, History of Education and Childhood and Women’s and Gender History in medieval Islamic contexts. Manar Hasan is a lecturer of sociology at Zefat Academic College and the Program for Gender Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Her main research interests are; Urban and Space Sociology, Gender studies, Postcolonial and Colonial studies, collective memory and secular studies. Waleed Karkabi is head of the building conservation team in the Haifa municipality. He is specialized in building conservation during his CONTRIBUTORS second degree (Magister) in Architecture at The Faculty of Architecture of The Building Institute of Leningrad (St. Petersburg Russia). Johnny Mansour is a lecturer at the History Studies Department at Beit Berl Academic College, Israel. He has written on the philosophy of a two state solution and Palestinian local history. His interests and studies are specifically on the history and development of Haifa. Salman Natour is an author and playwriter. He is the writer of numerous novels, satires, short stories and articles covering cultural, political and social issues, and Arabic plays that have been performed in theaters across Palestine and the Arab World. Dan Rabinowitz is an anthropologist writing on ethnicity and nationalism, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the nexus between environment and society. He is a professor of anthropology at Tel-Aviv University and at Central European University in Budapest, Chair of the Israeli Association for Environmental Justice and Vice Chair of Greenpeace UK. Adi Roitenberg graduated from the Neri Bloomfield Acadamy of Design (“Witzzo”) in Haifa as an architectural practical engineer. She is part of the building conservation team of the Haifa municipality. Abbas Shiblak is a scholar and human rights advocate. He is a research associate at the International Development Centre at the University of Oxford. His main research areas are human rights, migration and minority status. Regev Nathansohn is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research focuses on genealogies of coexistence in Haifa, and deals with questions regarding ethnic and racial relations, the politics of history and memory in a multi- cultural society, and the relations between oral and visual representations. viii PREFACE The Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR) is pleased to present the publication Haifa, Before & After 1948, Narratives of a Mixed City. This unique publication is a result of a project that was initiated and implemented under the auspices of the IHJR. The IHJR was founded in 2004 by Elazar Barkan and Timothy Ryback, with the aim of dispelling myths and misconceptions of history. The IHJR believes that confronting and overcoming distortions of historical reality can provide for a better understanding and can contribute toward laying the groundwork for reconciliation. The project on the City of Haifa is an endeavor of 14 Israeli and Palestinian scholars and experts – Arabs and Jews –, mostly Israeli citizens, working in the fields of Middle Eastern history, social and economic history, anthropology, sociology and architecture. During meetings from 2008 to 2011 in Salzburg, Hamburg and Tel Aviv, the group collectively conducted research and engaged in the process of writing shared narratives. From the inception of the project, convening scholars and experts from different backgrounds – each with a special connection to Haifa – proved to be challenging. However, throughout its tenure several authors sought rapprochement and in some cases became friends. The development of these friendships became apparent when the group took the initiative to organize a tour along the neighborhoods described in this publication. The result of this project is a publication incorporating seven shared historical narratives on the economic, social, cultural and political life of Haifa surrounding the period of 1948. The study, Haifa, Before & After 1948, examines the liaisons between the Palestinian and Jewish communities in Haifa in an attempt to unravel not only the complicated relations in this mixed city, but also to underscore extensive periods of cohabitation. The authors explore the events surrounding 1948 on a micro-level, through the lens of architecture and the urban fabric of Haifa. Consequently, they aim at transcending boundaries and to foster a better understanding of the history of the region. This groundbreaking approach serves as an innovative model that could be applied to other mixed cities around the world, such as Sarajevo, Beirut, and Cairo, to name only a few. I wish to thank the authors for their dedication and continuing work on the project. In addition, I would like to extend my gratitude toward our funders the Ford Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Arcadia Trust and to Ulrich Bielefeld of the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, who Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Reproduction of Settler Colonialism in Palestine
    JPR The Reproduction of Settler Colonialism in Palestine Marcelo Svirsky Abstract: Critical scholarship on Palestine/Israel tends to focus on conceptualising the settler colonial practices that characterise this conflict but have failed to account for how these practices are reproduced and sustained over time. To address this gap, rather than focusing on Israel’s quantifiable strengths such as military might, the use of law, the economy, and diplomacy, this article investigates the reciprocal relations between the formation of Israeli modes of being or subjectivities, on the one hand, and the generation and distribution of settler colonial surplus, on the other. The examination of the processes of subjectivity formation in their settler colonial register on the side of the coloniser allows understating how the circuits of settler colonial power endure. Keywords: Israel, Palestine, settler colonialism, subjectivity Introduction mages of Israeli aggression abound in the media: reports, photographs and video clips of Israeli soldiers and police officers beating and shooting unarmed Palestinians; airplanes indiscriminately bombing cities and towns in the Gaza Strip; Israelis uprooting Palestinian Iolive groves in the West Bank; army tractors using their blades to flatten Palestinian villages; Israeli politicians announcing new discriminatory laws against the Palestinian citizens of Israel, or threatening a new attack on Gaza or the West Bank; everyday harassment occurring at checkpoints; interviews with Israeli passers-by shouting out their
    [Show full text]
  • Ethnicity and Education: Nation-Building, State-Formation, and the Construction of the Israeli Educational System
    ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION: NATION-BUILDING, STATE-FORMATION, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE ISRAELI EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM GAL LEVY A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR PHD DEGREE THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 2002 2 ABSTRACT The dissertation is about the ethnicisation of social relations in Israeli society and its reflection and manifestation in education. My main aim in this study is twofold: first, to offer a critical account of the development of ethnic relations in Israeli society and to examine the role ethnicity has played in the processes of nation-building and state-formation; and, second, to propose a history of the educational system in Israel which accounts for the role of education in creating and perpetuating ethnic identities. The first part of the dissertation consists of a critical reading of existing analyses of ethnicity in Israel. Its aim is to bring the state into the analysis of ethnic relations and demonstrate that such an approach is vital to the understanding of ethnic relations and identities. In the following part, I trace back the processes of nation-building and state-formation demonstrating how governments and major political actors became involved in the formation and re-production of ethnic boundaries within Israeli society. In these two parts, I am arguing against both functionalist and critical accounts of ethnicity in Israel, which tend to ‘essentialise’ ethnic categories and thus deny the political nature of ethnicity and its power as an organising basis for political action. In the third and major part of the dissertation, I seek to re-construct the history of the Israeli educational system within an understanding of ethnicity as a structural feature of state-society relations.
    [Show full text]
  • The Mcgill Undergraduate Journal of Jewish Studies Volume 17
    DOROT The McGill Undergraduate Journal of Jewish Studies Volume 17 - 2018 DOROT: The McGill Undergraduate Journal of Jewish Studies iii DOROT: The McGill Undergraduate Journal of Jewish Studies Published by The Jewish Studies Students’ Association of McGill University Volume 17 2018 iv Copyright © 2018 by the Jewish Studies Students’ Association of McGill University. All rights reserved. Printed in Canada. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the authors included. They do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Jewish Studies or the Jewish Studies Students’ Association. Cover Image: Creative Commons ISSN 1913-2409 This is an annual publication of the Jewish Studies Students’ Association of McGill University. All correspondence should be sent to: 855 Sherbrooke Street West Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T7 v EDITOR IN CHIEF Lauren Kranc EDITORS Quinn Halman Leora Alcheck Hannah Srour Clay Walsh vi vii Table of Contents Preface ix Introduction xii Felix Mendelssohn: How Assimilation led to Association Keira Kenny 1 Evaluating the Role of the Superpowers in the Outbreak and Aftermath of the Six Day War Naomi Santesteban 7 Jewish Environmental Ethics: Tensions and Evolutions Isabelle Shi 20 Hear Me Sing: The Sound of Zionist Nationalism in the Early Twentieth Century Na’ama Freeman 27 A Backward Approach: Mizrahi Resistance in the Face of an Oppressive Zionist Absorption Strategy in the 1950s Julian Binder 38 Author Profiles 54 Editor Profiles 56 viii PREFACE Again, it is a pleasure to celebrate a publication run entirely by our students and reflecting a wide variety of interactions with the many subjects taught in our department.
    [Show full text]
  • Reflexive Coexistence and the Discourse of Separation by Regev
    Living in a Mixing Neighborhood: Reflexive Coexistence and the Discourse of Separation by Regev Nathansohn A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) in The University of Michigan 2017 Doctoral Committee: Professor Stuart Kirsch, Chair Associate Professor Carol B. Bardenstein Associate Professor Damani J. Partridge Associate Professor Amalia Sa’ar, University of Haifa Regev Nathansohn [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7236-4722 © Regev Nathansohn 2017 DEDICATION In memory of Juliano Mer–Khamis (1958–2011), an inspiration that knows no bounds. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I love Anthropology. But loving anthropology is not enough for guaranteeing that one will be able to show their love in the form of a completed research project. It always takes more than that. It is thanks to many people who are mentioned here, and many more that I cannot mention here by name, that I am able to present this dissertation. The completion of this dissertation comes ten years after I started crafting my research proposal, first as a PhD student at Tel Aviv University (TAU) before moving to the University of Michigan (U-M). During that period I met many people who helped me in various ways to develop and improve my research and writing. Some of them had a major role in several critical junctions, but the final decisions, whether successful or not – were always mine. Of the people who shared with me their time, wisdom, kindness and bread I particularly wish to thank Stuart Kirsch, the chair of my dissertation committee, who always pushed me to go beyond what I imagined are my intellectual limits.
    [Show full text]
  • Mo(Ve)Ments of Resistance
    ——————————————————— Hebrew Terms ———————————————————— mo(ve)mentS OF RESISTANCE Lev Luis Grinberg — 1 — ——————————————————— Hebrew Terms ———————————————————— Israel: Society, Culture and History Series Editor: Yaacov Yadgar, Political Studies, Bar-Ilan University Editorial Board: Alan Dowty, Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Notre Dame Tamar Katriel, Communication Ethnography, University of Haifa Avi Sagi, Hermeneutics, Cultural Studies, and Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University Allan Silver, Sociology, Columbia University Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Ethnicity, London School of Economics Yael Zerubavel, Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University — 2 — ——————————————————— Hebrew Terms ———————————————————— mo(ve)mentS OF RESISTANCE Politics, Economy and Society in Israel/Palestine 1931-2013 Lev Luis Grinberg Boston 2014 — 3 — Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book as available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved Effective February 13, 2018 this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. Open Access publication is supported by: ISBN 978-1-936235-41-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-618110-69-5 (electronic) ISBN 978-1-618117-90-8 (open
    [Show full text]
  • Wallach-Rethinking-The-Yishuv.Pdf
    This is the version of the article accepted for publication in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies and published online by Taylor & Francis on 3 November 2016. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2016.1246230 Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/22699/ RETHINKING THE YISHUV: LATE-OTTOMAN PALESTINE'S JEWISH COMMUNITIES REVISITED Yair Wallach, SOAS University of London This article argues for a significant revision in the understanding of Jews in late- Ottoman Palestine: from a model of a singular community (the yishuv) to a model of multiple communities, embedded within local, regional and global networks. The conceptualization of Palestine‘s Jewry is reappraised, from the Jerusalem School to recent literature. Despite acknowledging their ethnic and linguistic diversity, the historiography has long portrayed Palestine‘s Jews as sui-generis community, a Jewish microcosm united in its unique attachment to the Eretz Israel. It was studied as part of Jewish history, in isolation from its Middle Eastern context. In contrast, recent Relational Studies stressed Jewish connections to the Arab and Ottoman environment in Palestine. The article examines the self-perception of Jewish communities as plural and heterogeneous, through a survey of early Hebrew press. It traces the genealogy of the term yishuv, from an ideological project of revival and colonization in the 1860s, to an imagined pan-Jewish national community after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. This shift was boosted not only by Zionism and Jewish diaspora influence, but also by Ottomanism. Even then, Jewish communities in Palestine continued to operate separately in a highly fragmented manner well into the British Mandate.
    [Show full text]
  • Arab Citizens Behind Barbed Wire
    Haaretz | Thursday, May 28, 2020 11 WEEKEND Arab citizens behind barbed wire Documents in Israel's State Archives reveal disturbing truths about the military restrictions imposed on Arab city dwellers during the War of Independence Adam Raz had worked hard, in the face of serious limitations imposed by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, to improve the situ- he curfew and lockdown im- ation of the Arabs who remained in the posed in Israel during the country, nonetheless found itself shut coronavirus epidemic may down in the middle of 1949. Additional have begun to feel like a documentation of great importance in faded memory, but few know the Israel State Archives and the Israel Tthat many of the country’s citizens en- Defense Forces and Defense Establish- dured a similar situation in the past. ment Archive is still sealed. Then, however, the approach was quite In other documents and papers from aggressive, with the use of barbed-wire the period, which were declassified over fences and the demarcation of zones the years, we sometimes encounter con- that were called ghettos and concentra- temporary attempts to conceal and fil- tion camps. ter various remarks that would grate on The imposition of a curfew and the Jewish ears. These attempts are recent, sequestration of the country’s Arabs and not related to security issues: Cen- began immediately after Israeli forces, sorship is being resorted to solely for during the 1948 War of Independence, propaganda purposes. conquered cities that were either Arab or mixed (Arab-Jewish) in their makeup. The battles left thousands of urban Arab Hard-to-swallow term residents under Jewish control.
    [Show full text]
  • 'Any Name That Has Power': the Black Panthers of Israel, the United
    ‘Any Name That Has Power’: The Black Panthers of Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States, 1948-1977 by Anne-Marie Angelo Department of History Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ William Chafe, Supervisor ___________________________ Tina Campt ___________________________ Sarah Deutsch ___________________________ Adriane Lentz-Smith ___________________________ Rebecca Stein Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013 ABSTRACT ‘Any Name That Has Power’: The Black Panthers of Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States, 1948-1977 by Anne-Marie Angelo Department of History Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ William Chafe, Supervisor ___________________________ Tina Campt ___________________________ Sarah Deutsch ___________________________ Adriane Lentz-Smith ___________________________ Rebecca Stein An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013 Copyright by Anne-Marie Angelo 2013 Abstract The US Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an organization of the Black Power Movement, a cultural and a political nationalist movement central to the history of the African-American Freedom Struggle. The Black Panthers’ anti-imperialist politics, militant visual style, grassroots strategies, and community programs appealed within and beyond the United States. Between 1967 and 1972, people of color struggling under class and ethnic oppression in six countries outside the United States formed Black Panther Parties inspired by the US Panthers. In the United Kingdom, West Indians, West Africans, and South Asians formed a Black Panther Movement in 1968 and in Israel, a group of Mizrahi (Arab) Jews founded a Black Panther Party in in Jerusalem in 1971.
    [Show full text]
  • City of Haifa
    City of Haifa Intercultural Profile 1. Background1 A common saying in Israel is that ‘Jerusalem prays, Tel Aviv plays and Haifa works’. This undoubtedly derives from the years of the British Mandate when Haifa was developed rapidly as the Levantine coast’s major port, oil refinery and a leading rail hub. In more recent years it also acknowledges the presence in Haifa of two of Israel’s leading universities, and their association with many high-tech enterprises and spin-off companies in the area. But this rather does Haifa an injustice as it is far from being the dourest or most ascetic of Israeli cities today, and is in fact a relatively relaxed and urbane place. But it may also have been the industriousness of its recent history which has contributed to its reputation as Israel’s most ethnically mixed city. Today, the city is a major seaport located on Israel's Mediterranean coastline in the Bay of Haifa covering 63 square kilometres. It is located about 90 kilometres north of Tel Aviv and is the major regional centre of northern Israel. Two respected academic institutions, the University of Haifa and the Technion, are located in Haifa in addition to the largest k-12 school in Israel, The Hebrew Reali School. The city has an important role in Israel's economy and is home to Matam, one of the oldest and largest high-tech parks in the country. Haifa Bay is a centre of heavy industry, petroleum refining and chemical processing. Haifa was formerly the western terminus of an oil pipeline from Iraq via Jordan.
    [Show full text]
  • Israel's Mizrahim
    Israel’s Mizrahim: “Other” Victims of Zionism or a Bridge to Regional Reconciliation? Franklin Hugh Adler It may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with Israeli society, and especially those who have been led to believe it primarily com- posed of European Jews who settled in the Middle East, that roughly half of Israel’s Jewish population is made up of Jews who for millennia were deeply rooted in the region and summarily expelled from Arab states after Israel was founded in 1948. In fact, this Arab Jewish popu- lation exceeds in number those Palestinians who were displaced, and it possessed substantially greater property that was confiscated without compensation upon expulsion.1 The purpose of this essay is not to illuminate the so-called “silent exodus” that went largely unnoticed in the West and remains stub- bornly unrecognized by Arab nationalists today insofar as they focus only on the legitimate rights of the Palestinians, neglecting the Jews, an organic part of Arab communities, who suffered a similar fate at their own hands. I seek neither to compare nor equivocate between competing victimizations, nor still less to suggest that mistreatment of one group in any way normatively justifies mistreatment of the other. By now, such arguments strike me as futile, although obviously the two cases cannot be historically severed, one from the other, as they unfolded in the same region and at the same time. My focus rather will be on the relationship of the Arab Jews, or Mizrahim, to Zionism and to the future of the Middle East. I seek to explore a certain orientalist, anti-Arab blindness embedded in Zionism, a blindness which Mizrahi Jews may help rectify, while at 159 Macalester International Vol.
    [Show full text]
  • Objective Possibility As Urban Possibility: Reading Max Weber in the City1 Authors: Meirav Aharon Gutman and Moriel
    This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Urban Design on 3 October 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13574809.2017.1377065 Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/31014 Objective Possibility as Urban Possibility: Reading Max Weber in the City1 Authors: Meirav Aharon Gutman and Moriel Ram Abstract By employing Max Weber’s (1949) concept of objective possibility, this article offers a theoretical conceptualization of a methodological approach to studying roads not taken in divercities. The article incorporates Weber’s insight from the realm of socio- historical analysis into an analysis of urban environments. In search of ‘other’ possibilities of planning, the article presents a case study of the informal synagogues set up in Israel by members of Judeo-Arab communities. In this case, the possibility that was not actualized is ‘intimate publicness,’ which encompasses new forms of organizing the relationship between private and public spaces. 1 This fieldwork-based study could not have been carried out without the trust and generosity of the founders of the synagogues and their families, who are striving to maintain their family heritage. The authors are grateful to them for allowing them to enter the intimate public spaces they created. The authors would also like to thank Haim Singer, who is responsible for photography in the Technion’s Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, and Yelena Landau, for her assistance with the architectural analysis of the materials. 1 Introduction For some time now, scholars of urban studies have been striving to document processes of erasure, population displacement, and spatial destruction (Staples 1999; Slyomovics 1998).
    [Show full text]
  • “We Built This Country”
    “We Built This Abstract This article explores the experiences Country” of Palestinian citizens in Israel’s construction industry in the twenty-five Palestinian Citizens in years following the Palestinian Nakba Israel’s Construction and the establishment of Israel. The article relies primarily on the narratives Industry, 1948–73 of thirteen Palestinian individuals who were construction workers, foremen, Nimrod Ben Zeev contractors, organizers, and activists, as well as their family members, interviewed by the author in October 2018. The article utilizes these narratives alongside archival and secondary sources to examine four primary issues: 1) the conditions and considerations that drove Palestinian citizens to effectively become migrant workers in the Israeli job market, specifically in the construction industry; 2) workers’ attempts and experiences of creating spaces of safety and intimacy away from home with their peers and, at times, with their employers; 3) the pressures workers felt to conceal themselves in Jewish spaces because of their racialized hyper-visibility, alongside their experiences of the social invisibility which made their exploitation possible; and 4) how workers and their communities made use of the knowledge, skills, and resources they gained in an industry into which many of them were driven through necessity, to rebuild and reimagine their own communities in the wake of catastrophe and to resist the state’s stranglehold on their development. Keywords Labor; oral history; construction; political economy; race; gender
    [Show full text]