Israel Palestine And The Politics Of Race

As the situation in Israel/Palestine seems to become ever more intractable and protracted, the need for new ways of looking at recent developments and their historical roots is more pressing than ever. Bearing this in mind, Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan discuss the historic and contemporary dynamics in Israel/Palestine, and their international reverberations, from the unique vantage point of 'race', racialization, racism and anti-racism. They therefore offer close analysis of the 'idea' of Israel and the 'absence' of Palestine by examining the concepts of race and identity in the region. With fresh coverage of themes relating to gender, Idigeneity, the environment , surveillance and the war on terror, Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race will appeal to scholars in political science, sociology and Middle East studies.

"As the situation in Israel/Palestine seems to become ever more intractable and protracted, the need for new ways of looking at recent developments and its historical roots is more pressing than ever. Bearing this in mind, Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail Bakan discuss the historic and contemporary developments in Israel/Palestine, and their international reverberations, from the unique vantage point of 'race', racialization, racism and anti-racism. They therefore offer close analysis of the 'idea' of Israel and the 'absence' of Palestine by examining the concepts of race and identity in the region. With fresh coverage of themes relating to gender, indigeneity, the environment , surveillance and the war on terror, Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race will appeal to scholars in political science, sociology and Middle East studies."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Understanding Israel/Palestine contains a historic review of the conflict, an assessment of competing intellectual and political frameworks (Israeli self-defense, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing) for understanding it, and a moral argument in favor of human rights as the basis for resolving it.

This book explores the extent to which race and racialisation offer us an explanatory framework to study the contemporary politics of identity in the Middle East today. Most studies of the Middle East commonly presume that the race signifier is reserved for the juxtaposition of 'Black' and 'White' identity to which the Arab, Persian and Turkish world counts itself as exterior. Up until now, few works on the Middle East have discussed race as central to their analysis. This book works to remedy this shortcoming by extending the critical scholarship on race and racial subordination to the region's states and societies. Crucially, how does race interact with and confront other categories of identity, such as gender, religion, sect and nationality? What can a consideration of racialisation reveal about structures of oppression in the Middle East and evolving forms of belonging and dispossession? Adopting race as the focus of enquiry allows us to unpack what we are really talking about when we talk about difference in the region: the reproduction and resilience of power and the insidious, harmful mutations of identity-based discrimination in unequal societies. The Politics of Race and Racialisation in the Middle East is a significant new contribution to racial and ethnic studies, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of sociology, politics, history, social anthropology, political and cultural geography. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the longest, ongoing hot-and-cold war of the 20th and 21st centuries. It has produced more refugees than any current conflict, generating fully one quarter of all refugees worldwide. Everyone knows that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is important itself, and is also fueling tensions throughout the Middle East. Yet most people shy away from this conflict, claiming it is "just too complicated" to understand. This book is written for people who want a point of entry into the conversation. It offers both a historic and analytic framework. Readers, whether acting as students, parishioners, neighbors, voters, or dinner guests will find in these pages an analysis of the most commonly heard Israeli positions, and a succinct account of the Palestinian voices we seldom hear. I argue that human rights standards have never been used as the basis on which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be resolved and that only these standards can produce a just and sustainable resolution. This book will be useful for classes in Middle East studies, peace and conflict studies, Middle East history, sociology of race, and political science. It can be helpful for church groups, labor groups, or other grass roots organizations committed to social justice, and for all readers who wish to be informed about this important topic. "Professor Spangler's ... quest for historical and political understanding takes us on a brave and intimate journey into the consequences of Jewish privilege and Jewish victimhood, the agendas of imperial superpowers, and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination." Alice Rothchild, MD, author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience, and producer and director of documentary film, Voices Across the Divide "[A] sharp, poignant, well-documented dossier [that] provides readers with all the most-needed facts to grasp the conflict and get involved." - Sam Bahour, co-editor of Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians and business development consultant and activist based in Palestine "[T]his one is exceptional! It recounts a historical tale; it provides theoretical underpinnings; it does comparative work; it examines all the details and aspects of ongoing debates; and it brings all to life with real-life stories ... the wonder of this book is its insistence on hope - not a naive, idealistic hope, but one accompanied by a tool-box for concrete action that might right the wrongs of this tragic tale." Anat Biletzki, Professor of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University and Albert Schweitzer Professor of Philosophy, Quinnipiac University; Chairperson of B'Tselem, 2001-2006"

Women in Israel provides a fresh, gendered analysis of citizenship in Israel. Working from a framework of Israel as a settler-colonial regime, this important, insightful book presents historical and contemporary comparative approaches to the lives and experiences of Ashkenazi, Mizrahi and Palestinian Arab women citizens. Nahla Abdo shows that no solution to the problems of the region can be found without changing existing racial and gender boundaries to citizenship.

This book offers an analysis on contemporary Israeli democracy, examining in particular society and politics from the perspectives of the different ethnic groups outside of the Ashkenazi mainstream. The book explores the political expressions of the secondary groups in Israel (Mizrahim, Religious, Russians and Palestinian-Arab) and how these groups where treated by the Ashkinazim as a threat to its hegemony over the state. Looking at the instability created by the struggle of these marginal groups against the state, and the discrimination policy practiced by the Ashkenazi 'hegemonic ethnic state' regime against the other, non-Ashkenazi, groups, the book illustrates how this has contributed to the failure to establish an ‘Israeli people’. Ethnic Politics in Israel will be of great interest to students and researchers in the fields of Middle East, Palestinian, Arab, Jewish and Israeli studies, political science, sociology and psychology.

Positioning race front and centre, this book theorizes that political violence, in the form of a socio-political process that differentiates between human and less-than-human populations, is used by the state of Israel in racializing and ruling the citizens of occupied Palestine. Lentin argues that Israel's rule over Palestine is an example of Agamben's state of exception, Goldberg's racial state and Wolfe's settler colony; the Israeli racial settler colony employs its laws to rule besieged Palestine, while excluding itself and its Jewish citizen-colonists from legal instruments and governmental technologies. Governing through emergency legislation and through practices of exception, emergency, necessity and security, Israel positions itself outside domestic and international law. Deconstructing Agamben's Eurocentric theoretical position Lentin shows that it occludes colonialism, settler colonialism and anti-colonialism and fails to specifically foreground race; instead she combines the work of Wolfe, who proposes race as a trace of settler colonialism, and Weheliye, who argues that Agamben's western-centric understanding of exception fail to speak from explicitly racialized and gendered standpoints. Employing existing media, activist, and academic accounts of racialization this book deliberately breaks from white, Western theorizations of biopolitics, exception, and bare life, and instead foregrounds race and gender in analysing settler colonial conditions in Israel.