Reconfiguring the “Mixed Town”: Urban Transformations of Ethnonational Relations in Palestine and Israel

Abstract

Identifying ethnonational mixed towns as an analytical and comparative category, we show how in Palestine and Israel such towns underwent six major historical transformations and how their history under Ottoman, British, and Israeli rule displays an emergent and bifurcated sociospatial configuration. On one level, they personify the political conflict over space and identity as it evolved from millet-based confessional communities to modernist nation-based collectives shaped by milestones of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. On another level, they form political and cultural arenas that defy the binary logic of ethnonationalism and urban colonialism. Avoiding the restrictive Manichaean conceptualizations of the colonial, the divided, and the dual city, we show how such towns embody segregation and exclusion while actively resisting them. Scrutinizing demographic diversification, cultural expansion, intercommunal relations, and the secularizing, modernizing effect urbanity has had in the region, our analysis, which emphasizes relationality, reconfigures the sociospatial history of Jewish–Arab mixed towns.

Cross‐border, cross‐ethnic, and transnational networks of a trapped minority: Israeli Arab citizens in Tel Aviv‐Jaffa

“…One can also see the various types of cross networks the members of the Arab minority formed, as revealed in the case studies using the typology, as a component of the relational perspective offered by Rabinowitz and Monterescu (2008). By initiating and using the various transverse networks (crossing as well as bridging), minority members functioned not as a passive ethno-national group marginalized by the state, but rather as a key, active agent in the historical making of Israeli society and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at large, creating in fact a multi-layered citizenship (Yuval-Davis 1999).…”

Reconstructed urbanity: The rebirth of Palestinian urban life in Haifa

“…Economic opportunity and an open social environment in these cities gave rise to a secular culture that survived the pressure of conservatism, enabling the emergence of local, nationalist, regional and, to some extent, ''globalized" figures (Tamari, 2009). Rabinowitz and Monterescu (2008) explore Palestinian urbanity in a "grey" zone where politically constructed ethno-territorial groups compete, but also where individuals and institutions on both sides often co-operate, for personal gain, communal perpetuation, and resistance to governmental power. Focusing on mixed Arab and Jewish cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they point out the links between modernity, the concept of the nation, and urbanity.…”

Invisible Palestinian Women

“…Jaffa is a mixed town: two-thirds of its inhabitants are Jews and a third are Arab (75 percent Muslim and the rest Christian). Among the Jews living in Jaffa there are the rich and the well-to-do alongside poorer individuals; whereas the Arab population is mainly poor, uneducated and disenfranchised (Rabinowitz and Monterescu, 2008). Following Komter's (1989) recommendation on the utility of Lukes' model for analysing micro and internal family situations, this research was grounded in Lukes' theoretical approach to power.…”