Place Identity of the Israeli Kibbutz

Place identity of the kibbutz in Israel is shaped by its collective identity which is reflected in the landscape. The individuality of a kibbutz member is expressed in a single landscape element: private gardens in front of the family residences. The kibbutz center is regarded as sacred space; concentrated in it are all the communal institutions including the most important and conspicuous structure, the dining hall. Behavior circuits strengthen the ties between man and the public center. Everyday interaction and identification with the kibbutz is reinforced by the symbolic importance inherent in the center and in peripheral symbols which act as the loci of the kibbutz ideals of socialism and zionism. The landscape of the kibbutz reflects elements of ideals such as conquering the land through hard labor, farming as a way of life and defense.     

Voices from the Kibbutz: Four Mothers,New Profile,and Women in Black

If there is any social organization that has provided a powerful illustration of the permeable boundaries between social politics—defined by Stephen M. Buechler as “forms of collective action that challenge power relations without an explicit focus on the state”—and social movements, and the role of collective identity in transforming either, as defined for women by Betty Friedan—it would be the Israeli kibbutz movement. The research presented here on grassroots Israeli women activists, a significant proportion of whom had grown up or had lived in a kibbutz, suggests that the social politics of everyday life on a kibbutz facilitated women's participation in larger social movements for peace, but also placed constraints on their activism. Many of these women had left or were in the process of leaving the kibbutz between 1989 and 1999, when this research was conducted. Those who had already left, and anchor women who organized urban demonstrations, saw the kibbutz as a conservative anti-woman force. Nonetheless, evidence gathered from qualitative interviewing with them suggests that the kibbutzim supported women who were politically active on national issues. Several women-led social protest movements illustrate how the kibbutz geared its members to think about the interplay of the moral and social orders in the small spaces of everyday life.     

Bonding,bridging and ethnic minorities in the Netherlands: changing discourses in a changing nation

ABSTRACT. The discourse on the integration of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands has undergone profound changes over the past few decades. This article analyses how discourses in politics and academia have revolved around changing emphases upon the social capital processes of ‘bonding’ of individuals within groups and ‘bridging’ of individuals to the wider society. Four episodes of discourse and policy may be distinguished: denial of being a country of immigration until the 1970s; the Minorities Policy in the 1980s; the Integration Policy of the 1990s; and the rise of a more assimilationist discourse after the turn of the millennium. The country thus began in the post‐war period with a pluralist perspective toward integration rooted in the traditional religious and ideological ‘pillarisation’ of society, shifting first to a multicultural perspective, then to an integrationist and, finally, in the new millennium, to an assimilationist perspective.     

On the service frontline: Israeli Arab-Palestinian men in a call-center

Intersectionality is applied to gender-occupation-minority inconsistent hierarchies, to as to explore the workplace-experience of Israeli Arab-Palestinian men service workers and unveil the multiple-geographies it contains. In-depth semi-structured interviews with 24 suchlike men emphasize complexity as the key feature of their intersectional experience. Whereas masculinity and Israeli-Palestinianess are forged against the feminine and Israeli-Jewishness Others, service work is de-feminized and restructured as a welcome modern development whose traditional Other is cherished. The disadvantages of their national-minority status are compensated by cross-national amity and routine occupational practices in the modern workplace, whereby some of their Othering markers are prized. The national difference appears as a multiple-discursive resource which mainly separates the ethnic component from the political one by which the effects of gender, modern work and class structure, weaken. Four geographies, periphery, home-work links, the sociability of the place of work and the MENA world-region are identified, suggesting that geography is integral to the intersectional experience.     

Israeli historical geography and the Holocaust: reconsidering the research agenda

The case of the Israeli historical geography demonstrates how nationalism affects academic research agenda. As in many other cases of nation-building, Israeli geographers have played an important role in the manipulation of landscapes and places to form a modern Jewish Israeli national identity. Their role in the construction of national consciousness expanded following the development of a territorial national conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Despite the eighteen centuries of the pre-Zionist Diaspora, and the fact that more than a half of the Jews in the world live outside Israel, Israeli historical geographers almost totally neglect Diaspora lifestyles and spatialities and ignore the impact of the geographical imagination of Diaspora Jews on the (re)construction of Zionist territorial concepts and space. Following five decades of a Palestine/Israel-centered agenda, it is time for Israeli historical geographers to turn to the research of different spatial aspects of the Jewish Diaspora. This move should begin with the research of the spatial aspects of the concentration and annihilation of Jewish European communities during the Holocaust, and to more general spatial aspects of Nazism, as well as to the political and cultural geography of the Holocaust remembrance.     

The changing role of evaluation methods in a changing planning environment: Some Dutch experiences

This paper reviews the role of ex ante evaluation methods in Dutch planning practice in the past decades. It is illustrated that the improvement of the evaluation methodology is to a large extent based on a learning process. Many innovations were evoked by criticism and limitations disclosed in practical applications. Since the planning environment as well as the professional skills and attitudes are also constantly changing, this demands a high degree of flexibility of the evaluation methodology. A shift of interest can be witnessed from the quality of the decision towards the quality of decision‐making. It is argued in this paper that in Dutch planning practice currently at least four different situations can be distinguished with respect to the use (or non‐use) of formal ex ante evaluation methods. In planning situations with a hierarchical power structure evaluation methods are regularly used, whereas in situations with a mixed power structure evaluation methods are only used ‘in disguise’ (e.g. hidden in geographical information systems studies, market analysis).     

A Needle Assemblage from a Roman Shipwreck off the Israeli Coast

Underwater excavation of a shipwreck‐site off Hof Carmel, south of Haifa, Israel, yielded numerous artefacts associated with a ship and cargo dated to the 3rd century AD. Among them were eight sewing needles: six of bronze, one of copper and one of brass. This article describes the needles including their chemical composition, discusses comparable finds from nautical and domestic contexts, and their possible uses and roles aboard a Roman ship.