Commuting for rights: Circular mobilities and regional identities of Palestinians in a Jewish-Israeli town

Blatman‐Thomas, Naama

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.11.007

Cited by 17 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…When Israeli-Palestinians move further away from their hometowns, they may experience disconnection from their communities that may be translated to a loss of identity and belonging (Pullan & Yacobi, 2017). Furthermore, there is evidence that in spite of the growing geographical proximity in the new locations, Israeli-Palestinians retain high social segregation from their Jewish neighbors (Goldhaber, 2007;Blatman-Thomas, 2017). The growing presence of Palestinians in Israeli Jewish and mixed cities has prompted negative reactions from local Jewish residents who fear the loss of domination and the decline in housing prices (Falah, 1996;Monterescu, 2016).…”

Section: Palestinian Migration To Jewish Localitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The urban geopolitics of neighboring: conflict, encounter and class in Jerusalem’s settlement/neighborhood

Shtern

Yacobi

2018

Urban Geography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines a unique, yet paradigmatic, case study of a colonial neighborhood in East Jerusalem that is undergoing a significant demographic transformation. 1 The French Hill neighborhood, built in 1971, was one of the first settlements in East Jerusalem. Initially, it was populated primarily by upper-middle class secular-Jewish residents. This group has been steadily diminishing as two other distinct new groups moved into the neighborhood: Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Palestinians. This volatile social mix has caused intense inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic collisions. Based on qualitative and quantitative studies, we argue that the juxtaposition of colonial and neoliberal logics of space reveals a shared, yet fragile, middle-class identity. We suggest that this new geopolitical space of neighboring calls for a discussion of political conflict, housing and current colonial conditions that brings class back to our understanding of the production of contested space. (ibid, table III/5). Correspondingly, within the Jewish population, the Haredi groups has grown substantially and become the largest Jewish sub-community in the city (ibid, III/19). These changes have transformed the demographic characteristics of several Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem, including FH. While the veteran residents have emigrated from the neighborhood, middle class Palestinians, especially those with Israeli citizenship, 5 and Haredi Jews have been drawn to FH due to low housing prices, good infrastructure and services, as well as proximity to, respectively, Palestinian and Jewish Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) parts of the city. FH became the only residential area in Jerusalem which is cohabited by these three distinct and, until recently, highly segregated communities of the city, namely secular Jews, Haredi Jews and Palestinians (Rosen & Shlay, 2014). Another phenomenon has simultaneously contributed to the changes in the neighborhood: Palestinians from the neighboring villages in East Jerusalem-Issawiya, a-Tur and Shuafat began to make frequent use of the playgrounds, amenities and commercial center in FH (Yacobi & Pullan, 2014). This was observed in recent years as well in some other Jewish areas in East and West Jerusalem (Shtern, 2016; Nolte & Yacobi, 2015; Rokem & Vaughan, 2017). The growing presence of both Haredi and Palestinian residents and transients alike has provoked considerable opposition among the long-term residents of FH. Driven by the fear of demographic transition, local 5 Palestinian citizens of Israel are graduates of the Israeli educational system; thus, they speak very good

show abstract

Section: Palestinian Migration To Jewish Localitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The urban geopolitics of neighboring: conflict, encounter and class in Jerusalem’s settlement/neighborhood

Shtern

Yacobi

2018

Urban Geography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Palestinian citizens of Israel have faced a persistent and rapid shrinking of their lands since Israel's establishment in 1948 (Falah, ) due to a premeditated settler colonial policy aimed at converting land from ‘Arab’ to ‘Jewish’ (Yiftachel and Kedar, ; Forman and Kedar, ). Consequently, Palestinian lands are diminishing, and Palestinian towns are immensely overpopulated, underserviced and underplanned (Falah, ; Yiftachel, ), forcing many to seek alternatives in the structurally privileged Jewish towns (Hamdan, : Blatman‐Thomas, ). For Hasna and Ibrahim, Karmiel is only partially their place of living: their familial ties, work and Arabic‐language school for the children are all located in their hometowns.…”

Section: An Urban Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the market value of property was surely subordinated to Jewish ethnonational and settler colonial objectives at the time of Israel's establishment (property was not exchanged with Palestinians but generally emerged as an object within a purely Jewish real estate market), this is often no longer the case—particularly in cities. As studies from Israel demonstrate, Palestinian citizens are gaining greater access to individual Jewish‐owned properties precisely due to the increasing influence of neoliberal logics (Rabinowitz, ; Yacobi and Pullan, ; Blatman‐Thomas, ; Totry‐Jubran, ). While these dynamics are far less pronounced in non‐urban communal settlements (Abreek‐Zubeidat and Ben‐Arie, ), and although they are met with considerable push‐back on the part of Jewish residents and municipal officeholders who contest the exchange of property as incommensurate with the national interest (Shafir, ), they nonetheless point to the increasing potency of property as object in Israel/Palestine.…”

Section: Property As Objectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities

Blatman‐Thomas¹,

Porter²

2018

Int J Urban Regional Res

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.

show abstract

“…14 Blatman-Thomas considers how the boundaries between urban and rural are made much more porous by Indigenous mobilities, and highlights the specificities of Indigenous urban histories and what they reveal about the settler-colonial urban dynamic. 15 Similarly, Perera shows how the colonial city is often quietly 'indigenized' through daily urban practices and appropriations, 16 and Avni and Yiftachel illustrate the manner in which Indigenous urban citizenship is advanced through the gaps of colonial cities, by using a variety of informal and semi-formal tactics. 17 Recent work is also providing more concrete analyses of the ways spatial rights are accumulated and allocated through different kinds of urban land and planning regimes, 18 and how these can be read as new ways that the settler state secures circuits of capital and vital infrastructure networks.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Urbanizing settler-colonial studies: introduction to the special issue

Porter

Yiftachel

2017

Settler Colonial Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Urban settlement has been central to the making of European settler-colonial societies since their inception. Settlement, or more sharply invasion, is given material presence and organizational shape through processes of urbanization. The establishment of towns and cities are synonymous with 'development' and 'progress' in the colonialist endeavor, and constitute a distinct activity literally building the settler-colonial nation. The process and materiality of urbanization continues to be a primary mechanism operationalizing the spatial and economic dispossession of colonized peoples. Further, the racist imaginary deployed by colonizers of Indigenous peoples has worked to render the urban as a place not Indigenous, profoundly spatially and temporally disconnected from Indigenous histories and geographies, despite the obvious fact in settler-colonial societies that most cities and settlements sit on unceded territories. Cities in settler-colonial contexts, then, occupy a paradoxical kind of site in relationships between colonizer and colonized. They occupy Indigenous lands and form a central component of the settler society, yet at the same time render Indigeneity profoundly out of place. The settler city is often portrayed as a symbol of a 'new world', a space of liberalism and democracy, a hub of globalization, a magnet for international migration, or a center of investment and corporate powerall dominant discourses that conceal their ongoing colonial nature. Such cities are symbols of the profound displacement, erasure and often destruction of Indigenous histories and geographies and are at the same time precisely the form that keeps that displacement hidden. Cities barely register as the actual locations of claimed lands in global land rights struggles, and yet contain the very sites where the actions of those struggles, on the streets, in Parliaments and courtrooms, materialize. The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring the context and process of the city more explicitly into conversation with the dynamics of settler-colonial power and Indigenous struggle. It is somewhat surprising that critical urban theory, which has developed since the 1970s into a major field of research, has generally overlooked the skewed dynamics of power in settler-colonial contexts as a key dimension for theorizing contemporary cities. Like much of the social sciences, urban studies have been focused on the global Northwest, and have tended to theorize from that vantage point, focusing on the major categories of inequalities produced through capitalism, globalization, citizenship, gender and immigration. These studies have consistently overlooked the perceptions, logic and mobilizations of Indigenous people as apparently irrelevant to contemporary forms of

show abstract

Commuting for rights: Circular mobilities and regional identities of Palestinians in a Jewish-Israeli town

Cited by 17 publications

References 36 publications

The urban geopolitics of neighboring: conflict, encounter and class in Jerusalem’s settlement/neighborhood

The urban geopolitics of neighboring: conflict, encounter and class in Jerusalem’s settlement/neighborhood

Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities

Urbanizing settler-colonial studies: introduction to the special issue

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About