30.03.23

Editorial Note

The Center for the Study of the Holocaust Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (CHGCAH) at the City University of New York (CUNY) is “dedicated to the study and prevention of mass violence and its legacies.” Its mission is to “promote the exchange of ideas across disciplines and generations. Serving as a hub for a vibrant community of scholars from many fields with convergent interests, the Center is a forum for innovative research, graduate student mentoring, and public programming. Reaching beyond the university, the Center is enriched by linkages with NGOs, cultural institutions, and supra-national organizations.”

According to Prof. Deborah Dwork, its Director, CHGCAH is hosting a year-long virtual series on “The Marginalized and the Erased,” explaining that “The historical record is marked by voids: elided events; disappeared people; erased accounts; marginalized communities.” CHGCAH aims “to tackle a number of those blank spots.”

As part of this series, a conference titled “Beyond the Settler State: Anticolonial Pasts and Futures in Palestine/Israel,” will take place on Apr 27, 2023. The conference description states, “Born in the Bronx or Berlin, Jews of a certain age remember the justificatory slogan for the establishment of Israel, ‘A land without a people for a people without a land.’ Persuasive as this may have been at the time, it spoke and continues to speak today to a settler colonial policy of violent erasure. Erasure that the November 2022 Israeli election and subsequent ministerial choices promise to intensify. Looking forward, what futures beyond the settler state might there be? Please join a conversation between sociocultural anthropologist and Feminist Studies scholar Sarah Ihmoud (College of the Holy Cross) and Holocaust and Genocide Studies scholar Raz Segal (Stockton University) about possible paths toward anticolonial futures, particularly in light of anticolonial pasts, in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”

Interestingly, Prof. Raz Segal, Stockton University, published a paper, “Israeli Apartheid and Its Apologists” in 2022 and “Distorting the definition of antisemitism to shield Israel from all criticism” in 2019. Prof. Sarah Ihmoud of the College of the Holy Cross published a paper “Antiblackness and the Womb of Zionist Settler Colonialism” in 2021 and “Mohammed Abu-Khdeir and the Politics of Racial Terror in Occupied Jerusalem” in 2015.

These events are also supported by The Center for Jewish Studies, The Graduate Center—CUNY; CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, The Graduate Center–CUNY; The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University; The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University.

Two weeks ago, CHGCAH hosted “The Bedouin Village of Rah’ma: Toward Recognition and Beyond,” where, according to the invitation, “The Bedouin of the Negev desert have long sought legal recognition from the State of Israel. Without legal status, they are denied their basic rights as Israeli citizens: access to public health services, water, electricity, public transportation, is inadequate or unavailable. Rah’ma is one of the few unrecognized villages that has been promised recognition, yet that promise remains unfulfilled. Still: a school has been approved and built, public utilities have improved, and village residents see some hope. What makes Rah’ma different from other Bedouin villages in the Negev? What paved the way to the promise of recognition? What changes will recognition bring? And can Rah’ma be a model for Israeli-Bedouin relations going forward?”

The conference featured a discussion between Sliman Elfregat, Rah’ma school principal; Debbie Golan, co-founder and president of Atid Bamidbar; and Dvir Warshavsky, Ministry of Education project director. Chair and moderator: Eli Karetny, deputy director of the Ralph Bunche Institute.

Last month, CHGCAH organized a conference titled “Israel/Palestine: What the Archives Reveal and Conceal.” According to the invitation, “The story of the past calls for extensive use of archival documents. But, adducing risk to state security, Israeli archives, especially the state archives, block access to key collections that pertain to the state’s history in general and the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. Palestinian researchers who seek to tell the story of the Palestinian past using Palestinian personal papers and archival materials face additional, unofficial, obstacles.”

This event was chaired and moderated by Professor Amos Goldberg, head of the Avraham Harman Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. The speakers, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University and a 2022 Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar, and Yaacov Lozowick, a historian who served as Israel’s chief archivist from 2011-2018. The conference discussed the “role of archives in the power dynamics of the conflict.”

Clearly, the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, with its partners – have all lost their moral and academic compass. A conference’s use of the slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” is a cheap shot catering to the popular theory that the Jews were and are colonizers who had no historical connection or right to the land. No one in the Zionist movement, or anyone else, had any illusion that the Palestinians would disappear from the land. For much of its history, the Zionist movement has emphasized the need to share the land: the Jews accepted the 1947 UN Partition Proposal, which the Palestinians rejected. Right after the Six-Day War in 1967, the Palestinian and their Arab supporters gathered at the Khartoum Conference, the capital of Sudan. The resolution contained what became known as the “Three Noes”: “No peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel.” Even as recently as 2001, in Camp David II, Yasser Arafat rejected the Israeli proposal to return virtually the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, Hamas, supported by the Islamist regime of Iran, turned it into a launching pad for missiles and rockets against Israeli villages and towns.

IAM, which has periodically dealt with CUNY, has uncovered the incessant focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Far from being “marginalized and disappeared,” there is a vast literature on Palestinians, probably more than on any other ethnic group.

There is a simple answer to the question as to why CHGCAH has deviated from its mission in researching the Holocaust, genocide and crimes against humanity. The false Palestinian narrative gives the activist Center a handy tool to bash Israel.

References

“Israel/Palestine: What the Archives Reveal and Conceal”

ORGANIZER

Center for the Study of the Holocaust Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

“Israel/Palestine: What the Archives Reveal and Conceal”

February 15 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Email:
info@chgcah.org View

Organizer Website

VENUE

Virtualbit.ly/3QVelvP
New York, + Google Map View Venue Website

DETAILS

Date:February 15Time:

12:00 pm – 1:00 pmEvent Categories:Archive, Events https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Ck1w1nSDTca0gVCrapV9IQ

The story of the past calls for extensive use of archival documents. But, adducing risk to state security, Israeli archives, especially the state archives, block access to key collections that pertain to the state’s history in general and the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. Palestinian researchers who seek to tell the story of the Palestinian past using Palestinian personal papers and archival materials face additional, unofficial, obstacles. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University and a 2022 Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar, and Yaacov Lozowick, a historian who served as Israel’s chief archivist from 2011-2018, will discuss what Israeli archives reveal and conceal. Please join for a challenging conversation that will range from the role of archives in the power dynamics of the conflict to the stories still to be told if access to the archives were unfettered. Chair and moderator: Hebrew University professor Amos Goldberg, head of the Avraham Harman Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry.

This event is hosted in association with:

The Center for Jewish Studies, The Graduate Center—City University of New York

CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, The Graduate Center–CUNY

The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University

The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University

===================================================

https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_u8Z9T44TTzCBmXHq4JQMdQ

Beyond the Settler State: Anticolonial Pasts and Futures in Palestine/IsraelDescription

Born in the Bronx or Berlin, Jews of a certain age remember the justificatory slogan for the establishment of Israel, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” Persuasive as this may have been at the time, it spoke and continues to speak today to a settler colonial policy of violent erasure. Erasure that the November 2022 Israeli election and subsequent ministerial choices promise to intensify. Looking forward, what futures beyond the settler state might there be? Please join a conversation between sociocultural anthropologist and Feminist Studies scholar Sarah Ihmoud (College of the Holy Cross) and Holocaust and Genocide Studies scholar Raz Segal (Stockton University) about possible paths toward anticolonial futures, particularly in light of anticolonial pasts, in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

This event is hosted by the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity in association with:

The Center for Jewish Studies, The Graduate Center—CUNY

CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, The Graduate Center–CUNY

The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University

The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York UniversityTime

Apr 27, 2023 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

===================================================

https://www.gc.cuny.edu/events/israelpalestine-what-do-archives-reveal-and-conceal

EVENTS
ISRAEL/PALESTINE: WHAT DO THE ARCHIVES REVEAL AND CONCEAL?

ISRAEL/PALESTINE: WHAT DO THE ARCHIVES REVEAL AND CONCEAL?

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

12:00 pm — 1:00 pm

Online

Open to the Public

A conversation about how archival materials about the state’s history in general and the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Israeli-Palestine conflict are blocked from public access.

HOSTED BY

Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies

ADMISSION PRICE

Free

REGISTER

CHAIR AND MODERATOR

Amos Goldberg, professor at Hebrew University, and head of the Avraham Harman Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry.

SPEAKERS

Yaacov Lozowick
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury

THIS EVENT IS HOSTED IN ASSOCIATION WITH

The Center for Jewish Studies, CUNY Graduate Center
CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, CUNY Graduate Center
The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University
The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University

======================================================

“Israel/Palestine: What do the Archives Reveal and Conceal?”

CSHGCAH

Feb 16, 2023
The story of the past calls for extensive use of archival documents. But, adducing risk to state security, Israeli archives, especially the state archives, block access to key collections that pertain to the state’s history in general and the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. Palestinian researchers who seek to tell the story of the Palestinian past using Palestinian personal papers and archival materials face additional, unofficial, obstacles. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University and a 2022 Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar, and Yaacov Lozowick, a historian who served as Israel’s chief archivist from 2011-2018, will discuss what Israeli archives reveal and conceal. Please join for a challenging conversation that will range from the role of archives in the power dynamics of the conflict to the stories still to be told if access to the archives were unfettered. Chair and moderator: Hebrew University professor Amos Goldberg, head of the Avraham Harman Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry. This event is hosted in association with: The Center for Jewish Studies, The Graduate Center—City University of New York CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, The Graduate Center–CUNY The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University

===============================================================

Transcripts generated by Youtube

Introduction
2:33
Deborah Dwork: Hello. My name is Deborah Dwark, and I am the director of the Center for the study of the holocaust genocide and crimes against humanity at the graduate Center City University of New York.
2:50
Deborah Dwork: It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the force Deborah Dwork: of a year long virtual series on the marginalized and the erased.
3:02
Deborah Dwork: The historical record is marked by voids alighted, events
3:07
Deborah Dwork: disappeared. People Deborah Dwork: erased accounts, marginalized communities. This series tackles a number of those blank spots in history and in our own time.
3:24
Deborah Dwork: I thank our series partners, and why use Professor Emerita of Hebrew, and today studies Marion Kaplan and Stockton University. Professor Raz. Segal.
3:37
Deborah Dwork: I thank 2 Center associate, one as Avedo, and who’s help? I rely. Dr. Eli correct me. Deputy director of the Ralph Bunch Institute for his support and the DC’s. Terrific it people.
3:54
Deborah Dwork: Above all, I am grateful t0 0ur speakers and to everyone who has tuned in.
4:02
Deborah Dwork: Thank you for your engagement. Deborah Dwork: It is now my pleasure to introduce almost Goldberg the chair of our panel, and it is he who has the honor of introducing our speakers
4:18
Deborah Dwork: almost holds the Jonah Mac over chair in Holocaust Studies in the Department of Jewish History and contemporary jewelry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
4:30
Deborah Dwork: He heads the Abraham Armen Research Institute of Contemporary Jewelry at the same institution.
4:40
Deborah Dwork: An audacious scholar. Deborah Dwork: Amos’s Anna analyses of the past and of the present are as unflinching
4:52
Deborah Dwork: as they are erudite both qualities. Deborah Dwork: his encyclopedic knowledge and his steadfast honesty
5:04
Deborah Dwork: shine bright in his scholarship, public engagement, and teaching.
5:11
Deborah Dwork: I have learned from him over and over again his books push me.
5:18
Deborah Dwork: actually demand of me to rethink questions long held as settled
5:27
Deborah Dwork: not only what to think about the past. but how to think about the past.
5:35
I mentioned just 2 0f his works. Deborah Dwork: trauma in first person, dire rewriting during the holocaust.
5:42
Deborah Dwork: which probes the effects of violent oppression on the inner self
5:49
Deborah Dwork: and a co-edited volume with the sociologist and political scientist, Bashir Bashir.
5:57
Deborah Dwork: the Holocaust and the Nakba. Deborah Dwork: a new grammar of trauma and history.
6:05
Deborah Dwork: which brings us t0 0ur panel today. Deborah Dwork: which I hastened to say
6:11
Deborah Dwork: came into being, thanks to the generosity of our speakers, Arish and Yakov
6:20
Deborah Dwork: and our chair almost Deborah Dwork: Hamas. The floor is yours.
Israel today
6:30
Amos Goldberg: Thank you, the Bora very much for this very generous introduction of myself, and I really thank you and all
6:38
Amos Goldberg: the bora and all the institutions, sponsoring, and the individuals organizing this important event. You are
6:46
Amos Goldberg: an example of academic leadership. AIM Amos Goldberg: I. I will frame this a talk within what’s happening today in Israel.
6:57
Amos Goldberg: We are experiencing today in Israel a very dramatic and very frightening political moment. The constitutional basis of this country.
7:05
Amos Goldberg: the actual that actually lacks the constitution is, we made. The 3 classical branches of government are restructed to collapse into the executive branch. The government.
7:15
Amos Goldberg: in order to become an authoritarian regime. Amos Goldberg: I participated in some of the demonstration in Jerusalem, including the big one. Just 2 days ago. It was huge between 100,000 t0 360000 participant, and estimated to participate in Depends who, you ask.
7:33
Amos Goldberg: But there were very few Palestinians there. Amos Goldberg: They could not feel welcome within the sea of Israeli flags, while Palestinian slag were particularly both practically banned.
7:43
Amos Goldberg: Palestinians and liberal Jews tend to experience the events very differently. Pull or a poll and frightening.
7:51
Amos Goldberg: But why liberal Israel is 10 again. This is, of course, not cute, but
7:56
Amos Goldberg: some kind of a was typology. Amos Goldberg: Israeli Jews tend to think of it in terms of revolution which turns inside from being a liberal democracy to become a totalitarian regime
8:08
Amos Goldberg: similar to Turkey or Hungary. Palestinians tend to see it again. Amos Goldberg: All Palestinians, but
8:14
Amos Goldberg: in terms of typology is a continuation of a long historical process and an almost inevitable outcome of the settler colonial setting of this country and its apartheid regime that it established since 1,948,
8:28
Amos Goldberg: I think more or less, is the same. Would be said the same could be said about the archives, which is our theme today.
8:36
Amos Goldberg: All agree that there are big problems in the Israeli archives. They conceal much more than they reveal.
8:42
Amos Goldberg: but only a small portion of the files are open to the public to see Amos Goldberg: the Mossad in the Shabbat. The 2 main secret services archives are completely sealed, and it is to the best of my loan, and I was told by Adam R. As another
8:57
Amos Goldberg: expert in archives. The Idf archive open only some 56,000 files out of 2 mill 12 million, which is half a percent.
9:06
Amos Goldberg: Nonetheless. Amos Goldberg: I think Palestinian scholars and liberal Israeli scholars tend to perceive the Israeli archives very differently, while many, again a technologically liberal Jews approach the archive for not adhering to democratic standouts. Many Palestinians see it as yet another hostile
9:25
Amos Goldberg: settler colonial institution, even if it could bring some benefit under some certain circumstances.
9:31
Amos Goldberg: and also the experience physically encountering the archivists, and and then in the archives themselves are very different.
9:39
Amos Goldberg: Today we have 2 very imminent scholars. Both are experts on Israeli archives.
9:46
Amos Goldberg: After I introduce to talk about these issues or other issues that they will choose to talk
9:51
Amos Goldberg: about Amos Goldberg: After I introduce them they will talk for about 15 min each. Then we will open the floor for questions. You are most invited to post your questions
10:01
in the Q. And a. Books Amos Goldberg: on the bottom ball. They already, during the talks, and not Don’t, wait for them to the end.
10:13
Amos Goldberg: so we will. Then we will have some 20 0r 25 min Talk a. Amos Goldberg: And Q. And a. And we will close in 1 h.
10:22
Amos Goldberg: First, we’ll speak. Dr. Yako Blasovic is a chief archivist. 20112018, and currently running research project into the history of Israel’s settlement project at the top center for Israeli. Start Israel studies at New York University.
10:35
Amos Goldberg: and he’s also proud Grandpa. Amos Goldberg: He will talk on Israel’s National Archives Online or bloke.
10:44
Amos Goldberg: Second, we’ll speak. Dr. Ariza, Bahouri, Senior Lecturer of Sociology, and on Topology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The research in Swiss line, Political and historical Sociology, Settler Colonialism memory, gender indigenous studies and critical to a social theory. A forthcoming book colonizing Palestine and Zion is left in the making of the Palestinian N. Akbar by Stanford University Press
11:09
Amos Goldberg: is coming soon, and it examines encounters between kibut settlers and palestinians inhabitants in northern Palestine Israel Valley before during and after 1,948
11:21
Amos Goldberg: she’s I would she’s a My person is on it. She is a proud mother.
11:27
Amos Goldberg: So Yakov please go ahead. Yaacov Lozowick: Thank you almost for the invitation. Thank you to Nora for the
Opening remarks
11:35
Yaacov Lozowick: greater invitation, and thank always what this once you come to listen to us this evening, it’s the evening
11:45
Yaacov Lozowick: I i’m speaking in 2 capacities between 2,011 and 2,018. I was ahead of the I was the State archivist, which means basically I was the head of the of Israel’s national archives and of race, other entities.
11:58
And then, at late in late, 2,018, I left that job and crossed the lines, and literally the next week
12:05
Yaacov Lozowick: became a major. one of the one of the major users
12:12
Yaacov Lozowick: of the archive system in a project in which we will get ordered
12:17
Yaacov Lozowick: millions of pages of documentation, and some of them we’ve gotten. Yaacov Lozowick: So i’m bringing 2 perspectives. So what about about the person running the archives and trying to keep the as good or possible as as good as possible service to the public.
12:34
Yaacov Lozowick: and then following on that a user who is much more aware of the failures of the system.
12:41
Yaacov Lozowick: So let me start with the good news. The good news Yaacov Lozowick: that for those of us who use archival documentation, and our kind of documentation is
12:50
Yaacov Lozowick: exceedingly important. If you want to understand all sorts of aspects of the past, not all of them, but many
12:56
Yaacov Lozowick: so for those of you. Thus us who use our kind of documentation, some of the archive of documentation of the state of Israel is actually very, very easily accessible.
13:06
Yaacov Lozowick: Let me start with the best place of all. The rest of the wall is the website of the Knesset. which has simply put up on its website just about
13:14
Yaacov Lozowick: all the protocols and the deliberations of the Yaacov Lozowick: plan them and of the committees
The Knesset website
13:21
Yaacov Lozowick: since the beginning of the State, and it’s all up there, maybe not all of it, but almost all of us up there, and what it is not yet is going on
13:29
Yaacov Lozowick: starting from 1,948 until until this morning. Any Any meeting or deliberation in the Knesset today will be online tomorrow with the
13:39
Yaacov Lozowick: it’s not for a searchable. It’s you have to know what you’re looking for in order to find it. But if you know what looking for, you can find it.
13:48
Yaacov Lozowick: and just this morning not in connection with this meeting I had a discussion with the head of the woman who runs their archive, and she was telling me, among other things, about the project they have now of
14:00
Yaacov Lozowick: of constructing a very intelligent search engine capacity that they don’t yet have and hold. She hopes at some some point in the near future, they will have that and make the material even more accessible. So that’s the
14:15
Yaacov Lozowick: at the opposite end of the because it is almost mentioned. The intelligence agencies. There’s no Assad in the in the in the in the Shabbat.
14:23
Yaacov Lozowick: Some of those, some of the intelligence agencies of the military are basically sealed. For all practical purposes those materials are not going to be open in our lifetime.
14:33
Yaacov Lozowick: For better or for worse. Yaacov Lozowick: it can be explained, it could be justified. It’s not a particularly good thing. It’s a fact.
State and military archives
14:41
Yaacov Lozowick: However, those agencies produce only a very small percentage of the archival records of the state of Israel and the government in the
14:49
Yaacov Lozowick: so the fact that it’s all is sealed is problematic. But doesn’t affect the broader picture
14:55
Yaacov Lozowick: and a broader picture. There are 2 major archives legally in the same archive, but in reality there are 2 archives, the State archive and the military outcome.
15:04
Yaacov Lozowick: Theoretically a military archive is subordinates. The stay in Archive and as part of it. Yaacov Lozowick: but in reality it doesn’t work that way, and the stair are kind of has very little influence over what happens in the
15:16
Yaacov Lozowick: military archive when I was a state archives they were always very respectful and different to me as long as I did exactly what they wanted. In other words, if I was the front
15:25
Yaacov Lozowick: for there, for for whatever they were doing. Then they gave me all the respect to somebody who’s Who so, who has a high position and and represents them.
15:35
Yaacov Lozowick: The moment that I tried not to to, to to their line, I found that I had absolutely no power whatsoever.
15:42
Yaacov Lozowick: and the State archive. The State archive is probably the largest in so depending how you measure it, and the State archive is contains all of the documentation of the government of the state of future, of meaning the Government Ministries.
15:57
Yaacov Lozowick: There is material there from from the Presidents, the ministry which is actually not ministry. There’s some material from the from the military agencies.
16:06
Yaacov Lozowick: and there’s a lot of material which are not from ministries at all, but from various other agencies in the, in, the in, the in, the in the general administration.
State archives online
16:20
Yaacov Lozowick: about 10 years ago. Yaacov Lozowick: we, the Government, a cabinet in a, you know, in a process of which I was very proud to participate, decided to put what for archives are very large sums of money, and hundreds of millions of dollars
16:35
on to pour them on to the state archives in, or that the State archives g0 0nline. Yaacov Lozowick: And to the best of my knowledge, even today the state of Israel is one of the few countries in the world. I know of 2, but there could be another one or 2 that i’m not aware of. The United States is not one of them.
16:53
Yaacov Lozowick: Where there is the intention to put the entire archival record online.
16:59
Yaacov Lozowick: everything Yaacov Lozowick: online for free and online for use by anybody where wherever they are, and whenever they are, and when there’s a lockdown because of Covid and the archives remain open because they
17:12
Yaacov Lozowick: that was the attempt, and between the moment the Government made that decision until I left in 2,018, we made significant strides in achieving that goal
17:23
Yaacov Lozowick: such that today. I don’t. I don’t i’m not there anymore, and I try and stay away from them.
17:29
Yaacov Lozowick: I don’t know the number today, but I would. My estimate is that there are 50 0r 60 million pages
17:36
Yaacov Lozowick: of documentation online at the website of the usual. Say Archive, and they’re there, and anybody can go and use them.
17:44
Yaacov Lozowick: The archive is continuing to put online materials according to their own reports.
17:50
Yaacov Lozowick: to the tune of about let’s say 40 0r 50,000 files a year times a 100, so it will give you 400. They’re putting on a couple of more 1000000 0f pages every every year.
18:05
Yaacov Lozowick: and so that’s that’s the good news, if what you’re interested in is has already been opened. It’s a smallish percentage, but it’s not tiny.
18:15
Yaacov Lozowick: If what you just use has already been open, then it’s there, and if what you’re interested in has not yet been open, you can order it.
18:22
Yaacov Lozowick: and they will open it for you free of charge and put it online for you in favor of everybody to see it. And that’s the end of the bit of the good news. Now it’s going to
18:31
Yaacov Lozowick: the bad news is that far more documentation is not online than his online.
18:37
Yaacov Lozowick: And the raids of opening. I said 40 0r 50,000 Yaacov Lozowick: files a year is actually smaller than the rate of documentation which becomes which should be going online according to the law documentation, which is 15 years old, should be online.
18:55
Yaacov Lozowick: and unless it’s diplomatic or Yaacov Lozowick: classified secret to a certain extent, in which case it with 25 years, or 3 years or 50 years, and there’s some issues of privacy that capability keep it sealed even longer. But privacy issues, for example, from very rarely will keep a file sealed, because, since it’s all digital lines all online.
19:15
Yaacov Lozowick: The archive is figured out wasn’t Very hard to do is figure out a way of redacting names in such a way that the entire file can g0 0nline without minus the names.
19:25
Yaacov Lozowick: So Yaacov Lozowick: the the archives have a tremendous backlog, and the back of is growing every year.
19:33
Yaacov Lozowick: There’s more material that comes of age and should be online. That is open. The second thing is that even when you do all order something, and and as a general rule in most cases, what the archive does is it opens what’s being ordered? In other words.
19:48
Yaacov Lozowick: they would like to have enough resources t0 0pen systematically entire part segments of the archive, but they don’t have those resources.
19:57
Yaacov Lozowick: and in reality most of what is open every year is what the public has ordered.
20:03
Yaacov Lozowick: and from my own personal experience. I can tell you that when you order material that you sometimes will get it within a week it will come online for you, and sometimes it takes 3 0r 4 years.
20:12
Yaacov Lozowick: And why does it sometimes take 3 0r 4 years? Well, this is a big and tough question, and I’m give the very, very few minutes. I mean this that I have here. I’m not going to delve into it in any great depth.
20:24
I will say that there are Yaacov Lozowick: basically a number of motivations for slowing down the process of opening
20:31
Yaacov Lozowick: the archival material. Yaacov Lozowick: The largest motivation is that the archive does not have the budget and the funds, and the resources to deal with the with the problem.
20:42
Yaacov Lozowick: But, on the other hand, it’s also not doing its best to utilize the resources that it does have. Yaacov Lozowick: and the possibilities that it does have. So that is an excuse which they love to use, but which I find only partially convincing. There’s something to it.
20:56
Yaacov Lozowick: but it’s not as convincing as they would like you to believe when they say we don’t have the resources to be.
21:02
Yaacov Lozowick: The second reason is that there’s material in there. They don’t want that. They don’t want you to see. But here, actually, the reality is that this is not a major issue. The archives the only have their act together, and they’re working much slower than they ought to be, but it’s not primarily, because they’re trying to keep
21:20
Yaacov Lozowick: so so specific things secret. And the proof of that is in the fact that you look at what they have opened.
21:27
Yaacov Lozowick: and you will find that in the 50 for 60 million pages that they’ve opened there is endless amounts of damning and incredibly incriminating things that do not like, make the state of Israel, and his policies look particular and particularly nice.
21:41
Yaacov Lozowick: And yet the archives are not. Yaacov Lozowick: They’re not blocking that material for that reason, according to the law, they’re not allowed to use that reason. In other words, embarrassing findings are not a legal reason that you’re allowed to
21:56
Yaacov Lozowick: to it so. Yaacov Lozowick: But the fact is that that is not generally what’s going on. What’s going on is
22:05
Yaacov Lozowick: sometimes a broader interpretation of what might harm the States
22:11
Yaacov Lozowick: security and foreign relations, then in reality is justified. Those are the 2, the the 2 principles that they’re allowed to use. If opening something will harm either the the the foreign relations, or the security of the state of Israel and the archivist are allowed not t0 0pen it.
22:30
Yaacov Lozowick: As I said, embarrassing material is not doesn’t. Fall under that.
22:36
Yaacov Lozowick: but they do at times use those interpretations in a broader way than
22:41
Yaacov Lozowick: and then then they should be, and there’s no political oversight, and there’s no public oversight. It’s very opaque. You can’t. You can’t see what it is and what it is that there that there’s not opening because they’re not opening it. There’s no way of
22:54
Yaacov Lozowick: of, of of of supervising their their their internal processes.
22:59
Yaacov Lozowick: So that is one part of what’s going on, and the second part of what’s going on is bureaucratic inertia and non-interest. The current administration of the archives
23:11
Yaacov Lozowick: is very excited about adapting AI to archival material, which is indeed a very fascinating topic.
23:18
Yaacov Lozowick: and they’re putting a lot of effort into that. And they’re doing all sorts of other things which are interesting to them into the system around the matter which are not particularly interest. I’m. Interested in public, which means that even the resources they do have.
23:30
they do not Yaacov Lozowick: puts as much effort int0 0pening material as they ought to.
23:36
Yaacov Lozowick: And the bottom line is that a lot of what the public by law should be allowed to see? It cannot see, or it can see only if it’s. If If researchers are willing to to put pressure on them and to and also to have a lot of patients. And Indeed, i’m talking from personal experience. There’s material that I ordered 4 years ago, which is not yet built.
24:04
Yaacov Lozowick: Finally, my last comment. Yaacov Lozowick: The reality is that at the moment in the entire state of Israel, and over the entire globe there are fewer than 5 people in the entire world.
No public pressure
24:15
Yaacov Lozowick: We know enough about the laws of archives in Israel, and care enough. and are willing to stand up to the archives to make a fuss. One of the reasons that the archives allows itself not to.
24:27
Yaacov Lozowick: To. To. To hit the schedule and not to do things in a satisfactory way is because they know that nobody is going to complain that it doesn’t make any difference when I was a State, or I ever said I would use to say, the public demands this to be open. Everybody would look at me, and they would as if I was crazy, and they would say, Yaku! If there’s no public they want it t0 0pen. There may be an individual researcher, but even the individual researcher is not going to make this team.
24:51
Yaacov Lozowick: and they were Basically, right. Yaacov Lozowick: There are almost no users of the archives who stand up to them, face them, demand
25:01
Yaacov Lozowick: from knowledge what the rules really are, and demand that their material be open; and since there’s no public pressure on them like any other bureaucracy. There’s no public pressure on that, and there are other things that they’re more interested in, and so they don’t do it.
25:16
Yaacov Lozowick: And my final comment to that is that my experience has been that when I do
25:22
Yaacov Lozowick: argue with them, first of all, they open more material than otherwise. Yaacov Lozowick: and secondly, when they have redacted parts of a file, and I point out to them, if this doesn’t make any sense in about 25% of the cases that I say that
25:37
Yaacov Lozowick: they eventually agree with me in the open the full they open the full file. I mean 75 0f the cases they don’t, but it does mean that when you face them they will back down 25% of the cases
25:49
Yaacov Lozowick: roughly Yaacov Lozowick: so My request and suggest is that if any of you out there want to join us, instead of there will be, instead of our being 4 0r 5 people putting pressure on them. If we could be 50 0r 500 it would probably make a difference.
26:04
Yaacov Lozowick: And with that I finished with this.
26:09
Amos Goldberg: Thank you very much. A cold, knowing it from within and from without. And now, Orange, go ahead.
26:18
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Hi, everyone! Thank you all for the introduction, and of course thank you with the border for the organization. I’m grateful for the invitation to speak today on this important panel.
26:30
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: and to share my insight as a sociologist who has long been working with Israeli and Palestinian archives. My historical sociological findings derive from field work in numerous archives in Israel.
26:45
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Local Kibbut’s archive of Hashemer had Sahar’s settlement movement especially in Mar, Haymek, Hazoria, and the Gizral Valley, which intensively documented interactions with the ultimately displaced neighboring Palestinian villages
27:01
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: and 5 national archives. Yet the Ii research and Documentation Center, and has to be on Institute for Labour Movement Research, Hagana Historical Archives is real estate archives, and the central same archives
27:15
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: dedicated to the history of the Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: my years of archival mining engaged systematic analysis of
27:25
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: protocols, interview files, photographic collections, correspondences, memoirs, theologies, books
27:34
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: that the Kibu team and other historians produced on their own initiative and recurring newsletters.
27:43
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I reconstruct the sediment processes on the frontier between 36 and 56, the zenith of the process of Zionist Colonization and Palestine and Palestinian resistance, using also post hoc recollections
28:00
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: recorded between sixties and the Ninetys, and preserved in the archives through my field work in Kibbut’s archives, tracing ruler named
28:11
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Occupation, and take over, I transformed my relationship from one of Positivists
28:19
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: extraction t0 0ne of ethnographic participant observation. Realizing that these archives can be useful in explicating the informational mechanisms of settler colonial rule and the Palestinian past.
28:35
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: In this talk I speak to how the Zionist left during the British mandate, and following the Israeli State establishment, archived as means of appropriating land, and ultimately eliminating neighbouring Palestinians
28:51
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: from desired space, and in doing so preserved both a history of indigenous presence and of settler colonial violence.
29:02
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I describe this process as archives of apprehension. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: by which I mean information gathering on the indigenous as as a. As a reconnaissance and ethnographic practice of settler, colonial conquest and apprehension As an effective state of anxious
29:22
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: archival subjects concerned with the reversibility of settler territorial sovereignty.
29:29
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: He puts archives during the British mandate period, and shortly after we’re organized as a practice of colonization.
29:38
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Local examples from Hashemer had saire the allegedly radical lift as faction within the Zenous settlement movement, and other forms of apprehension, such as the Hagana village files project in the forties. Mandatory Palestine show how archives of apprehension include what colonization s0 0ften aims to eliminate.
30:02
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: even as lift the stainless archives reflect a selectivity around terms of perpetuation and guilt. They document encounters with and observation of the indigenous, whose resistance shaped inclusion, and exclusion in the archives.
30:23
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: This talk emerges in response to an epistemic context in Israeli social science and history in which the critical archival theories, long in play, in the study of transatlantic slavery and settler colonialism in the Americas and Antipodes have only recently trickled into the historical study of Palestine. Israel
30:48
generally, by way of cultural studies Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: as positivism, largely rains in historic historiographic methods. Archives of apprehension can partially recover histories of Palestinian villages and their inhabitants, especially regarding records of life on the frontier.
31:09
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: A populated rural zone, marked by a collision over land between Jew settlers Palestinians and British forces.
31:19
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I argue that these archives of apprehension can reconstruct the historicity of a protracted colonization otherwise and preserved
31:31
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: in the case of Palestine Israel archives have often been treated as repositories for extracting contempt on territorial conflict.
31:43
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Most scholars have relied on and continue to rely on elite sources in national Israeli British and Arab archives, and therefore depict a macro political account of 1,948 war based on details, of battles and war maneuvers.
32:04
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: diplomacy elite decisions and planning, or demographic and geographic accounts of transformation. This approach sidelined ambivalences, contingency and local variations wherever it neglects constitutive interactions between settlers one
32:23
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: and the indigenous that preceded the watershed moment of the 1,948 to grasp micro and meso-level processes. It is beneficial. Consider
32:36
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: to consider the resources produced in settler colonial archives, instrumentalizing such archives for historical sociological work, in tales, examining archival forms and processes of meaning, making
32:51
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: alongside, attempting to historically situate their functions in the constitution of settler sovereignty.
32:59
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Settler colonial archives are conflict archives, in which political violence, physical and epistemic, is seen chronically documented and encoded these partial and fragmented archives vitally disclose otherwise unknowable aspects of indigenous life
33:18
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: on the frontier, and ultimately of settler colonial governance, including mechanism of classification and contribution attribution. In preserving phenomenological moments of the past. This archive became central to colonize their self-understanding
33:37
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: as they work to displace indigenous sovereignty and ensure the irreversibility of settlers accumulations
33:47
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: archive of apprehension, should be formulated and reconstructed a set of tools to trace colonization practices and to potentially reappropriate indigenous historicity
34:01
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: prior to the israeli founding in 4 in 48 Zionist colonial Nikolai in the populated frontier, prepared for land purchase by gathering detailed information about the Palestinian villages.
34:17
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: geography, typography, demography, political activity, customs, and culture, a strategy that in able design is move movement, albeit minimal initial foothold. In late Ottoman and mandatory Palestine.
34:32
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: The same is colonies among these those of Hashomer had Sair came to constitute pockets of a semi-sovereign rule listed within British Imperial view.
34:43
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: the archival institution and ethnographic practices of apprehension that appears through our design. This movement contributed to a colonial information, and Field used to entrench surveillance and control.
34:59
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: The goal was to a certain to rhetori at every visibility in the rural frontier. and to consolidate continuous presence outside urban centers. These archives, then.
35:13
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: would merge the history of the settler colonizer and the indigenous as dialectically intertwined, especially on the constitutive violence enacted against the indigenous population and practices of land control and resistant to replacement.
35:31
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: He boots settlers first fare faced a question of how to frame the story of the existence and ultimate disappearance of the Palestinian villages nested. Besides him.
35:47
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I want to share a screen showing. I hope I can share.
35:54
If you are with me. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: It’s just 1 s, and I think it will share. Can you see the screen?
36:06
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I’m sorry it’s a slow, but Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: a second, and I will be with you. Then you see the screen.
36:15
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Yes. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: yes, okay.
36:22
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Take a look at how the kibbut’s Archive documented
36:28
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: The documents. Each are a village that it’s helped to displace on a large map hanging prominently on the wall in the entrance of the keyboard archive representational discourse of the Palestinian Arab villages
36:45
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: shaped how settlers perceive the history of the indigenous, and their exit, as has she met, had saved settlers articulated indigenous life. Their information, gathering practices became a legitimation mechanisms as they attempt
37:01
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: to reconfigure Palestinian history as prehistory, and as they became intensely interested in the question of the Palestinian ethnic origin. The colonial archive captured captures the displaced Palestinian villages, just as it re
37:19
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: structures the historical narrative Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: representation of the Palestinian villages and their inhabitants persisted in the archive, despite systematic endeavors, to silence what preceded the distraction of property, renaming of places and etc. Many of the kibut’s archives contain media collections with images of the later displaced Palestinian village
37:46
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: villages and Kib boots. Member encounters with the Palestinian, indigenous in the vicinity
37:53
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: at Kibbutza, and Hashofet Archive, For instance, I located photographs of one of the one time Palestinian village Dramara.
38:03
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: a hilltop village which the Kibbutz colony subsumed in 37 after its residents were displaced.
38:13
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I will share. Can you see the screen.
38:19
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Ramos? Yes.
38:25
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: great. This is the Palestinian village, Johara I actually discovered in the Archive.
38:38
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Neither Johara nor its occupation appear in Israeli and Palestinian historical sources on the displaced Palestinian villages, and yet detailed R. Of these villages and other others that elsewhere are lost remains in the keyboards archive.
39:00
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Another another instance is in the project of the village files a completion of documents containing detailed information about the Palestinian villages and cities in mandatory Palestine, collected by the Hagana, the Zionist Free State militia between 43 and 48. The projects astounding delivers of cartographic visual and discursive detail can still be found in the Hagana Historical archives.
39:30
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: facilitated by hundreds of Hagana scouts, reconnaissance commanders, and intelligence officers. The settler militia apparatus inclusive of lyftusky wood settlers and Arab experts sought to apprehend the basic structure of the Arab village in their terms. Even as as the settler’s goals for the file wharfed over time scouts surveyed the village, topographic
39:57
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: geographic architecture, socio-cultural and political features, including infrastructure elements like roads, land, quality, water sources, and demographic data, including religious affiliation and age Details of the male Population
40:15
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: mit Ctl. And informants, Kitchen villages, maths, and viewpoints in my field work. Investigating the shermer, had saved colonies at Hagana historical archives, I encountered thousands of files detailing a range of information about the Palestinian villages, one
40:33
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: among them those that neighbor that would seem. I examine Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: files, detailed anything from your aura. So from a Bosre village newly planted through trees, or the number of students enrolled in it’s girls schools to the location of 29 0r up coffee houses in hyphen where political activity was presumed to take place to the names and ages of the Arab activity. Activists in Tantura obtained from an in for
41:07
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: this slide that I’m. Showing now depicts the first page of a
41:26
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: practices, and these 2 images, this, one and the other one.
41:32
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Our drawings created by Hagan’s count on
41:39
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: efforts to apprehend Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: just a second. I I see there is object. Efforts to apprehend. The Palestinians are important to resource are important resources, not least because they outline how Zenus lift us on the frontier understood themselves. There are numerous
42:02
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: erez
42:21
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: a value Hashemer had surre often profaced alongside their value of class liberation. For these lift, test. The archive reflected, and produced their self perception by preserving the Palestinian villages in Archival Iv. Even as the villages were being displaced, they simultaneously recognized, and this about the settlement rule in the village distraction, the constant colonial anxiety over impairments reinforced
42:49
by persistent violent violent scrimmage. Required a iterative reaffirmation of the colonial legitimacy and the Zionist militia attempt to so to secure it.
43:01
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Second, the inclusion forms part of an appropriation come substantial process settlers did not express feeling jeopardized by their explicit inclusion of the Palestinian path they legitimized their practices of territorialization and their right to claim space
43:20
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: by de-linking Palestinians as non-sover, non-historical, and rooted and unproductive from the land the kibut settlers substantiated their claims by linking themselves to
43:33
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: to conting just a jewish history extending to ancient time to position their claim to land as indisputable. They also aligned the right to belonging with Hashomer had say, Socialism claims that Lang belonged to those who productively worked it.
43:51
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Therefore the Palestinian on these settlers believed to be unproductive, despite their long history of cultivation, were not deemed legitimate processors of desired space, and their inclusion and archival form was no threat of
44:07
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: a redistribution. Third and loss. Some left as them as settlers expressed on few occasions, and in various locations across the archive effects of uneasiness and hunting over their own actions, and all over the sordid fate of their previous Palestinian neighbors, including the Palestinian in the archives, then may be one way. The settlers attempted to preserve this past
44:31
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: and all its features to depict what they turned an inevitable and intentional outcome and lost hyper inclusion in the archives pissed pits entirely. The Zionist policy of details. Palestine was not
44:47
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: only the promised land, it was a specific territory with a specific characteristic that was surveyed down to the laws.
44:55
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Millimeters settled on, planned for in detail, as it were. To it, argues Zenus Sittler historiography has dual function to inhabit the claims of settler and legitimacy on one hand, and to preserve the history of settler violence. On the other hand, thereby settler colonial archives are a significant but totally in adequate resource that we can that can be called up on to revive a past elsewhere denied
45:23
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Such archives, offer tools to challenge the inevitability of colonization and the valence of this position through the attempt to collect and eternalize settler national sovereignty. Such a process, paradoxically and dialectically preserve indigenous collective presence. Thank you.
45:44
Amos Goldberg: Thank you very much. We have already a number of questions, and I asked you also to prepare questions to each other. But let’s first. They go to the audience that they have, they. So I I I will. I will
Audience Questions
46:01
Amos Goldberg: collect together a couple of questions. I think you mostly
46:07
Amos Goldberg: a both of you. But you decide what you so many, many ask about those things that
46:16
Amos Goldberg: not open. Amos Goldberg: and for a it can. The speakers give an idea of what is the unavailable part of the archive? In other words, what are the authorities trying to hide? And what are the mechanisms?
46:30
Amos Goldberg: Another question in this direction is Amos Goldberg: a a for for for for a a Dr. Lassovi. One example of the unavailable parts would be their Ghana photographer, Shaga pellets, photos taking a April 1,948 during the Delia scene. Massacre
46:47
Amos Goldberg: and documentary movie make a Neta Sushani and many others have tried to have looked at the these photos during the years, but the request have always been denied. So with the kind of material from 1947 1949 will ever be released.
47:02
Amos Goldberg: So and there are several more questions on Amos Goldberg: what is what is unavailable. So perhaps you start the Yakub, and then I leave you at your jump in and add your
47:14
Amos Goldberg: what Amos Goldberg: unmute? Yaacov Lozowick: Yes, Sorry about that.
State Archive
47:21
Yaacov Lozowick: First of all in in the State Archive. There’s almost nothing from 1,948, which is still sealed. Yaacov Lozowick: And no should there be there’s no law that would allow it still to be sealed up to almost 75 years.
47:33
Yaacov Lozowick: It’ll say like, have. So I, as I said, there’s that that’s I mean. I suppose there may be a file here out there that somebody missed, or for whatever reason. But there’s no policy of hiding material from 1,948 the family matter is in the State archive. There’s no policy abiding information at all.
47:51
Yaacov Lozowick: There is in the State archive and in the Military Archive. Yaacov Lozowick: What is hidden is much more a question of what they have not yet gotten to, and they’re not in any hurry to get to. I’ll give you an example. The protocols of the cabinet meetings. according to law, should be open up until 1,992 is nice. Remain seal for 30 years, and 92 t0 23 is.
48:13
Yaacov Lozowick: is it? Where that’s that’s a 30 year period. So it it should be that all the cabinet meetings from 1,948, until 1,992 should all be open. In reality they’re open until 1,977 and from 1977 0n They’re not open.
48:28
Yaacov Lozowick: Is this a policy decision to say that we’re not going t0 0pen? What was done for the big and gave government? I don’t think so. I honestly don’t think that’s what’s going on. Opening cabinet to protocols is a is a is a lengthy process. 2 different people have to read it. A third person has to has to look over at what they did. It’s a lot of work. They’re not in any particular way to do so. This is very aggravating.
48:52
Yaacov Lozowick: but I don’t think it’s a policy of saying we don’t want people to know what the vacant government is.
48:58
Yaacov Lozowick: As a general statement, I would say, even in the military archive, which is far more sealed than the state of
49:04
Yaacov Lozowick: you’ve been in the military archive. There is rarely a policy of saying, we don’t want this sort of material to be to a certain extent in the military archive. There is, indeed military material from 1,948, which is not yet open.
49:19
Yaacov Lozowick: There is a lot of material in the State in the military, from from more recent years which is an open.
49:26
Yaacov Lozowick: I again I I I mean I will be the first to admit that this is very frustrating and aggravating.
49:33
Yaacov Lozowick: but I have to say that I think it is more Yaacov Lozowick: a question of
49:40
Yaacov Lozowick: focusing their Yaacov Lozowick: limited resources on things that interest them rather than things interest the public More than a policy of this is what we want to hide. I I don’t think that they are certainly not in state archive
49:54
Yaacov Lozowick: in the military archive I don’t know, but in the standard I have. There is no policy that says we’re going to hide the events of 1948 0r 1967 0r or anything else. And so it’s a question of they don’t care enough, and the public is not putting pressure on them, and so they’re not getting around to doing.
50:17
Amos Goldberg: Please, do you want to add something? Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I think I want to add another layer of say of what Yakov, they say. Thank you, Yako, I think. First of all, the question is not about hiding or not. It’s not to just that.
Discussion
50:36
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: First of all, how the percentage of materials that are exposed in this or cars. They, as as far as I know, they don’t exceed 5%. This is first.
50:47
so we, the the general information from the archives are just 5, so we have 95 around 95%
50:57
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: that are not a a a open to the public. The second thing is, i’m not sure about the your opinion, Yakov. About their. They They rarely hide information or etc. I myself find in different files
51:18
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: places where a paper was added. A file was removed from here, especially after the a. After the the archives were opened, and there were information about the 48 the like, the and etc. So this is one. The second thing the harm was, I think, we should like the the that we should raise is also which kind of archive we are looking for, and for which, what is the AIM of this?
51:46
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: As I said on my port in in my talk, and I want to in a certain that that the the this state archived as as the State archive, or the Hagan, or etc., they give us to just a general a general pictures, and if we go to the local archives, the one that I examine, they really expose
52:11
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: mit Ctl, and a different kind of history of past of information and the possibility to read against the archivally grain. That means not to just what they AIM. By the collections of this archive archival material is more open to us. One.
52:27
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: So I would move if from the question of hiding or not, because I I think, and and the other people actually Benny Morris himself talks about, for example, how the how the Zionist leaders would themselves
52:44
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: through their right, through their writing, their preserving the protocols of committees, Bingarian himself and his diaries would eliminate part of what the
52:58
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: in the beginning role in this journals or in these menu. So the question is for for me is to they construct and to read the critically the archives. It’s not the just what they include, but how we read them. What are the information that we can extract from them.
53:19
Yaacov Lozowick: I I would agree with her. She’s right.
53:29
Yaacov Lozowick: and what she’s describing is a way of a very intelligently analyzing what’s in there in order to see
53:37
Yaacov Lozowick: the outlines of what’s not in there. That’s great, that that’s that’s that’s good historical research doesn’t it doesn’t change the fact that the archives are open or not open.
53:53
Amos Goldberg: I don’t know if you mentioned it, that they Amos Goldberg: they unlock unlawfully. It sends out the archives and a a and it’s it’s, it’s, it’s it’s the archives and in and of it and UN unlawfully.
54:10
Yaacov Lozowick: No, no, I don’t. I don’t. There is no such committee not that i’m aware of. There’s a process again in this. In the in the in the military archives they have a committee which has no legal standing, but it’s very. It’s very much there which a a decides in the case of each researcher, if they’re going to be, if they’re going to be helpful or not, which is totally illegal.
54:30
Yaacov Lozowick: and I’ve told them any number of times. This is illegal, but they continue to it, and that’s the way it is. But there there’s no committee which is deciding that this is, or that can’t be open. What there is is a process of
54:43
Yaacov Lozowick: checking files before they open to the public. Yaacov Lozowick: and some of that was done many years ago. When, when I really says correctly, she’s right. When I read, says that she gets files that have entire pages removed. She’s right. But the fact is, those files are probably the pages. We probably will removed in the 19 nineties, or maybe even in the 19 eighties.
55:04
Yaacov Lozowick: or certainly 20 years ago, and if you, if you, if you say to them, wait a minute that you could have done that then, but you can’t do it now. They will back up. They’ll feel back off. I I have this experience with the military archive. Last week they sent me a pile of files took me a long time to get them, but they sent me a pile of files.
55:23
Yaacov Lozowick: about 20,000 pages of files, and there were about 760 pages that were there, were they were it it said that they were removed.
55:31
Yaacov Lozowick: I said, what’s going on? You You can’t do that that’s illegal, and they said you’re right, Yako. But the files were checked in in 2,006, and in 2,006. It was still legal, because it was less than 50 years, and we since you call our attention to fact, we will now go and re-examine those files, but I assume that they’re probably open most of the pages.
55:48
Yaacov Lozowick: This will take months to waste of their time in line. It’s aggravating. Yaacov Lozowick: But and this is what I said before, if there were more users who were insisting on
55:59
Yaacov Lozowick: who knew the law and insisted that they live according to the law, they would be more careful.
56:07
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Yeah. Cove a, and that’s Yaku. Sorry almost. Can I have the small thing about the digitization, Yakov? I would think I I I I think we need to complicate our our perspective of the digitization and make the archive accessible to general to public. Because if we, if we
56:34
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: try to deeply understand this process. This is, I see it as part of surveillance that the original materials before they’re digitizing are scrutinized to the public. I am afraid that this process might take out out
56:53
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: further information. Further, a files that could that we, as researchers, can approach them differently. This is first, second, almost, if they, if you may let me. I see one questions from Dr. Sal about the the significance of using left in this case
57:16
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: to this is the question I I address deeply in my book. But here I want to say that
57:25
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: the
57:48
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: there’s an in interaction with these movements. So they, the the question of left here is in the Archive, specifically dealing with the archives, I think, and according to my work, in different archives, the list test archives quote, and was left us. Zen is left us include more information about the Palestinians, because they address also the question.
58:17
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: the Arabic question intensely, and they are occupied with. So, in terms of how these archives can help us
58:26
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: reconstruct the Palestinian House. It’s beneficial, but E. As to the other question about left, I I will leave it to my book, because it will take more time from me to explain
58:46
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: almost. You are still in a muted Amos Goldberg: Thank you. So let’s take one very brief. We fair question, and I I encourage also the public, the audience
58:58
Amos Goldberg: to search a to a search, the website of a keyboard?
59:04
Amos Goldberg: A. What do we do? Do we do a an extensively and an impressive work in the archives, and search there and see the reports on
59:15
Amos Goldberg: on, on various aspects, on various topics that we have discussed here. So
59:20
Amos Goldberg: we Google a you vote and see how Ak or v it, and and you can see it there. A very brief question to to to you a
59:33
Amos Goldberg: a it. Amos Goldberg: a Los Angelesen, and it’s, please be. We have 1 min to answer it as a a taking the add, a history is told by the oppressive victims. It face value and seeking an alternative narrative. What forms of archival or historical knowledge are available from Palestinian projectives.
59:55
Amos Goldberg: a perspectives either through all this or less institutional, any means of information collection. Please be brief, because we have only 1 min.
1:00:05
I just want to say that the the answer to this is, I can share in in an article that I published, which is settler colonialism, and the Archives of Apprehension, where I based my talk on it’s that I can’t relate to this question. But the oral history projects by the Palestinian Institute and different Palestinian Institute are very important and crucial a oral history projects and the family
1:00:35
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: files, of course, and there are other, a Palestinian documents and resources. I think that should be, including, while we a right the history of Palestine and the Palestinian I myself did around 50 0ral history interviews, and this will be this in on my second book. Project.
1:00:57
Amos Goldberg: Okay. Amos Goldberg: Thank you very much.
1:01:04
Deborah Dwork: and I add my thanks. Thank you, Ari Shakov, and almost for the work each of you does for these fabulous presentations for your participation in this event.
1:01:18
Deborah Dwork: Indeed, many thanks to everyone, speakers and listeners for Jo for joining today. The conversation prompts all of us to think and to think a new, and to send in requests to the Archive for the opening of documents.
1:01:38
Deborah Dwork: So I thank you. Deborah Dwork: and have a good evening. All
1:01:44
Deborah Dwork: those who are in Jerusalem, and a good afternoon for those of us in New York. Thank you so very, very much.
1:01:52
Yaacov Lozowick: Thank you. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Thank you. The Board and everyone. Thank you.

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The Bedouin Village of Rah’ma: Toward Recognition and Beyond.

CSHGCAH

Mar 17, 2023 The Bedouin of the Negev desert have long sought legal recognition from the State of Israel. Without legal status, they are denied their basic rights as Israeli citizens: access to public health services, water, electricity, public transportation, is inadequate or unavailable. Rah’ma is one of the few unrecognized villages that has been promised recognition, yet that promise remains unfulfilled. Still: a school has been approved and built, public utilities have improved, and village residents see some hope. What makes Rah’ma different from other Bedouin villages in the Negev? What paved the way to the promise of recognition? What changes will recognition bring? And can Rah’ma be a model for Israeli-Bedouin relations going forward? Please join for a discussion between Sliman Elfregat, Rah’ma school principal; Debbie Golan, co-founder and president of Atid Bamidbar; and Dvir Warshavsky, Ministry of Education project director. Chair and moderator: Eli Karetny, deputy director of the Ralph Bunche Institute.

Transcript

0:59
Deborah Dwork: Hello. Deborah Dwork: My name is to Deborah Dwork, and I am the director of the Center for the study of the holocaust
1:07
Deborah Dwork: genocide and crimes against humanity at the graduate Center City University of New York.
1:15
Deborah Dwork: It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the fifth of a year long series on the marginalized
1:24
Deborah Dwork: and the displaced. Deborah Dwork: The historical record is marked by voids. Delighted events disappeared. People erased to counts marginalized communities.
1:38
Deborah Dwork: This series tackles a number of those blank spots in history. and in our own time.
1:48
Deborah Dwork: I thank our series partners, and why You’s Professor Emerita, of Hebrew and Judic Studies, Marion Kaplan and Stockton, University, Professor Ros. Sagon.
2:02
Deborah Dwork: I think, to center associate one as a vehicle on whose help I rely
2:09
Deborah Dwork: Michael X. From for his outreach activities and the Gc’s terrific it people Brad, Wholesh and Steve Thomas.
2:20
Deborah Dwork: Above all. Deborah Dwork: I am grateful to our speakers and to everyone who has tuned in. Thank you for your engagement.
2:30
Deborah Dwork: It is now my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Dr. Eli. Correct me. Deputy Director of the Ralph Bunch Institute for International Studies, and a lecturer in Political science at Baruch College at Cuny.
2:48
Deborah Dwork: Eli will have the honor of introducing our esteemed guests.
2:55
Deborah Dwork: the son of immigrants. Deborah Dwork: not by their own reckoning refugees, so as I say, the son of immigrants from the Ukraine. As it was then
3:08
Deborah Dwork: Eli returned to his parents homeland as a Peace Corps volunteer. His life path took him from there to scholarship
3:19
Deborah Dwork: on the intellectual foundations of American neo-conservatism the wartime origins of the United Nations.
3:29
Deborah Dwork: And now a research project on the negative Bedouin
3:36
Deborah Dwork: in the course of the discussion today you may catch a glimpse of a core interest.
3:44
Deborah Dwork: What factors influence the path Deborah Dwork: to recognition of Bedouin villages by the state of Israel. I will leave you with that cliffhanger.
3:58
Deborah Dwork: Eli. Deborah Dwork: It is with great appreciation that I seed the floor to you.
4:07
Eli Karetny: Thank you, Professor Dork. Eli Karetny: It is my honor and privilege on behalf of the Cuny Graduate Center, the Route Bunch Institute
4:14
Eli Karetny: and the center for the study of the holocaust genocide and crimes against humanity. To moderate this discussion of the Bedouin of the negative.
4:21
Eli Karetny: Our second discussion of the topic Eli Karetny: This is a follow up to our October, 2021 event which looked at the Bedouin issue through the lens of emptied lands and displaced people there we discussed the situation of the unrecognized villages and now Israeli Policies of displacement and urbanization
4:39
Eli Karetny: have led to hopeless conditions in these villages, leaving some to become symbols of Sumud. Eli Karetny: a Bedouin tradition of steadfastness that animates an attitude of nonviolent resistance which the Palestinian writer, Raja Shahade, has described as a third way between mute submission and blind rage.
4:57
Eli Karetny: But an ethic of resistance that links identity and political struggle to reclaiming ancestral land is not the only way the better, and have chosen to pursue their goals
5:06
Eli Karetny: better when Sumud expresses itself differently from village to village. Some villages even choose to focus on the tools of engagement
5:13
Eli Karetny: by deepening relations with neighboring Jewish towns. Eli Karetny: The village of Ahma is a case study, and how good neighborly relations between Bedouins and Jews on the periphery can overcome challenges at the national level.
5:26
Eli Karetny: The plan for today’s discussion is to focus on. Eli Karetny: to compare it to other unrecognized Bedouin villages, discuss what makes it unique, but also what makes it representative of those Bedouin villages that resist urbanization while seeking recognition by working closely with neighboring Jewish communities
5:43
Eli Karetny: and local government agencies rather than emphasizing the tools of resistance. Eli Karetny: But in light of what’s happening now in Israel? We’re reminded that resistance is often required
5:52
Eli Karetny: when state policies threaten the basic rights of citizens. Eli Karetny: Some commentators like Youval Harari, have called the government’s proposed changes to the judiciary.
6:02
Eli Karetny: a cool. Eli Karetny: an anti-democratic plan, that endangers the fundamental rights of all Israeli citizens, particularly minorities. the nature, and maybe even the existence of Israeli. Democracy appears to be at stake. Certainly the liberal character of Israeli. Democracy is at stake.
6:18
Eli Karetny: but Israel’s Arab citizens never experienced Israel State power as liberal Eli Karetny: Israeli Arabs understand the State can deny its citizens their basic rights.
6:27
Eli Karetny: and if the State privileges the Jewish character of his democracy. so Eli Karetny: how much of what we fear could happen in Israel and not just in Israel is already happening, maybe has always been happening. The logic of the modern state can be ruthless, and the logic of ideologies that privilege, certain chosen groups, is always so.
6:45
Eli Karetny: The better one of the negative have their own story to tell about their experience as indigenous Arabs confronting a modern State, which granted them citizenship soon after its founding.
6:55
Eli Karetny: but never protected the basic rights that accompany this legal status. Eli Karetny: But there seems to be a positive shift in recent years and State policy towards some guideline villages.
7:04
Eli Karetny: even as the Supreme Court ruled definitively against all Bedouin claims to ancestral land ownership. It also insisted that the State cannot deny it’s bed on the citizens their basic rights.
7:15
Eli Karetny: the act of recognizing Bedou and villages, but forced the State to build schools, provide electricity, water, health services.
7:23
Eli Karetny: But the State continues to deny that recognition. So all but a few villages and treat the bedroom as trespassers on their own historic lands.
7:32
Eli Karetny: The State has favored Jewish settlement of the land since it’s founding, which is meant that some Bedou and villages are relocated to make room for new Jewish towns.
7:40
Eli Karetny: How this would change, if at all, under a transformed Israeli regime is unclear
7:46
Eli Karetny: for some bedroom villages nothing will change at all. Eli Karetny: Pressure to urbanize will continue demolitions, relocations with the dial of recognition. This will continue
7:56
Eli Karetny: some villages of long known. They would never be recognized by the State. Eli Karetny: and even as they differ amongst themselves as to how best to proceed with honor, Young Bedouin may be turning toward new legal and political tools. Some of them may turn to international law and the protections offered by undrip the UN Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples.
8:14
Eli Karetny: Some may turn to their king in the Palestinian national movement. Some will remain steadfast in their samood.
8:20
Eli Karetny: but Rafael has pursued a different path, and it now finds itself at the doorstep of legal recognition which should facilitate further development. I’m delighted to introduce our panelists who have each played in their own way a role in the changes that Akma is now undergoing, centered around an elementary school that was built in 2,020.
8:38
Eli Karetny: I’ll introduce our speakers and invite each to share a few thoughts about what’s happening in Israel at the national level. But then we’ll shift our focus to Rahma, which may offer some insight into changing social dynamics in Israel.
8:51
Eli Karetny: Debbie Goldman and Golan was born in the Us. And made Aliyat to Israel in 1,972 ultimately settling in the town of Utaham in the negative desert She’s, the co-founder of ate Buttoni, Butter, which means future in the desert.
9:05
Eli Karetny: which does important work in several areas, including as an incubator for Bedou and Jewish initiatives that support women’s, empowerment programs, capacity development projects for Bedouin farmers and other educational health initiatives.
9:17
Eli Karetny: A Tee Bami Bar is a co-founder and leading member of the good neighbors network, and the negative, which includes 9 Grassroots, Bedouin and Jewish organizations, and 40 activists in 14 Bedouin and Jewish localities.
9:31
Eli Karetny: The Network’s mission is to build a foundation of trust and collaboration between residents of Jewish and Bedouin communities share best practices, create grassroots, social change
9:41
Eli Karetny: and influenced public policy. Eli Karetny: Slim on Alpha-gat has been the Rahma school principal since it opened in 2,020.
9:49
Eli Karetny: He was born in Rahma got a master’s degree in history and geography from Jadata University in Jordan.
9:55
Eli Karetny: has a teacher certificate from Ben Gurion University, and is a graduate of the principals training program at Ahma College
10:02
Eli Karetny: for 17 years. Lemon was a nature education teacher and one of the biggest bedroom schools in the Mega. Eli Karetny: He believes better when education requires blending modern pedagogy with traditional cultural knowledge
10:13
Eli Karetny: via. Or Shevsky. Eli Karetny: He’s a social activist, engage in education, policy, reform. He has managed projects for the Ministry of Education consulted for various foundations and currently works. The Rashi Foundation.
10:25
Eli Karetny: via is a lifelong resident of, and has worked closely with, the Bedouin of Rahma for many years, including developing educational programs at the Rahma School
10:34
Eli Karetny: landscaping projects after-school robotics programs, student mentoring even helping Rachman residents defend against demolition orders
10:43
Eli Karetny: the format of Today’s talk is a. Q. A. About the Bedouin of Rahma. I’ll ask each speaker, as I said, to say a few words about the national situation. But then we’ll shift our focus to Rahma.
10:53
Eli Karetny: A note to the audience. The final round of questions will come directly from you, so please use the Q. A. Box and zoom to ask questions of our panelists.
11:03
Eli Karetny: So the first question is to each of you, we I I want to apologize. We were hoping Sliman would, would would be here by now. But
11:12
Eli Karetny: I’m sorry. Okay, that’s great. I see perfect. So
11:18
Eli Karetny: that is excellent Welcome, Shalom. The first question is for you. How concerned are you about the this this situation happening nationally the political situation? How is it affecting life for for you? And in
11:37
Eli Karetny: Hi, let me just say, Slamine, who was aware that this question would be coming, prepared a few remarks. He will speak in Hebrew, and I will share a screen of his translated remarks, which they’d be translated earlier today. So i’m going to share that screen and
11:53
Eli Karetny: slim on police. The floor is yours.
12:08
Debbie Golan: Hey, man Dvir Warshavsky: again.
12:41
Dvir Warshavsky: and a to. Aye, aye, Sierra Leone.
13:01
Dvir Warshavsky: Oh, now she hmm!
13:17
Dvir Warshavsky: And of the Kazakh.
13:25
Eli Karetny: So the Sliman
13:30
Dvir Warshavsky: David Eli Karetny: to be here. Maybe I i’ll shift to you to beer, just to say a few words, please, about the you know your thoughts about the national political situation. How far do you think some of these proposed changes could actually go. Do you? Do you see this as a threat to? Is Israeli democracy?
13:49
Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah. So I would say, in short, that all I think all of us Really, we don’t really know what’s gonna happen, but it’s it. It’s it’s quite scary, and we we don’t really know. But the direction is.
14:05
Dvir Warshavsky: I don’t know it. It looks very problematic.
14:11
Dvir Warshavsky: but I have to say that I think that it’s important to to to point about the distinction between the things that going on in the political level
14:21
Dvir Warshavsky: and the things that happened in the civic level of the the level of the communities, especially in the periphery context.
14:29
Dvir Warshavsky: I mean, there is a it’s. Of course, there is connection between these levels. but definitely not
14:36
Dvir Warshavsky: total correlation, like there is other trends that happen in the same time, maybe sometimes in a very paradoxical way.
14:46
Dvir Warshavsky: And there’s many new connections in the level of communities
14:51
Dvir Warshavsky: that they that Dvir Warshavsky: exist, although we don’t really know how.
15:00
Dvir Warshavsky: in the long run the the political level will influence them. So it’s an important thing to note and let’s see.
15:08
Eli Karetny: Thank you to be here and and Debbie. Maybe you could just share a few thoughts about how you understand what what’s happening.
15:14
Debbie Golan: I I really identify with the words of the President of Israel Hertzog. It’s a character of last night, he said. We’re either on the edge of a cliff, but also maybe on a potential for moving off to a new rising to a new future. And I think
15:31
Debbie Golan: that we have a tremendous opportunity here as well as tremendous. What looks like danger to basic democratic rights and
15:39
Debbie Golan: balances, and
15:45
Debbie Golan: I think my my personal take is to Debbie Golan: a Debbie Golan: work harder to to do what we can to connect communities and people
15:57
Debbie Golan: of differing opinions, and also differing nationalities here in Israel, and also between Rahma and Yvonne, in the hope that the interpersonal and intercommunal relationships that we’re building will be strong enough to weather any top down.
16:15
Debbie Golan: Kind of decisions. I’m. I’m. Very concerned. But I want to spend my energy
16:21
Debbie Golan: on the the building of the better foundations which I think are necessary, and I think that I see them also emerging.
16:29
Debbie Golan: New groups are coming into the protest movement. Who are, I mean right wing, and
16:34
Debbie Golan: not only left wing, and that Debbie Golan: for me is the kind of awakening of the silent majority what’s called a silent majority that gives me great hope that there is a lot of people who don’t want to rush down
16:47
Debbie Golan: this too fast road to Debbie Golan: to what looks dangerous
16:54
Eli Karetny: today. Thank you for that, Debbie, just knowing a little bit about just how hard you you work. I can’t imagine what what it looks like for you to work even harder. So with that I wouldn’t want to shift to to talking about Rahma and what’s happening with the Bedouin in the negative.
17:10
Eli Karetny: and Debbie might maybe we can begin with you sharing some some of the experiences with the the work of your organization that
17:20
Eli Karetny: I know You’ve done a lot of important work over the years with the Bedouin. Maybe you can tell us about how the relationship between the residents of Utah and the bedroom of Rahma serves as a kind of model for the work of the good good neighbors network.
17:36
Debbie Golan: I’ll be happy to the Our nonprofit is over it’s almost 33 years old, from 1,990, and from the in the inception one of our goals was creating connections, mutual acquaintance and joint
17:53
Debbie Golan: work, joint action, collaboration between diverse population groups, both within your and and between Yuru Khan and Rahma, and between different population groups in the negative region as a whole, and I think the key to our work is working with, and not for, and being very
18:12
Debbie Golan: listening really carefully to what what hurts other people, but also what we have in common, and what? What will work
18:22
Debbie Golan: together, maybe to to make things better. The the work with the Rasma sits on of between you are common. It’s on a very solid foundation of relationships that we’re built because a lot of the Presidents of are Arabic, speaking North African Jews and some of the Persian Jews who Don’t speak Arabic.
18:41
Debbie Golan: but they come from agricultural backgrounds and found a a common language also. Many of the men in Raqhma. The older men especially served in the Idf as trackers for many years, and some lived in Yurucham. So that was like a kind of foundation of mutual acquaintance. 150
18:57
Debbie Golan: and good neighborly relations that a group called a Citizens group called Milk is only need. Your original texture and neighbors that we started about 17 years ago. One
19:08
Debbie Golan: built on that. And then we decided to. We began talking with our Bedwin neighbors and seeing, okay, what’s one of the big issues? What are the big issues that you’re dealing with.
19:19
Debbie Golan: and one area was education. There were no kindergartens. They, the Government ministry of education assumed that 3 to 5 year olds, would be bused 35 kilometers to another tribe or another town, and and that just didn’t happen. So the people in Rahma said the first thing we water kindergartens
19:35
Debbie Golan: so our kids can get prepared for school. And then after that there was a 5 year struggle. That also was about 5 years, 4 and a half years, and then a 5 year struggle to get the elementary school open again, so the children wouldn’t have to be bust, and there wouldn’t be the dropout situation. That’s often new case in Bedwin schools, and
19:53
Debbie Golan: the work that we do together today is based on Debbie Golan: both. As you mentioned Women’s empowerment a a joint Yurukam Rahma Women’s group that became a model for a rod. Telerad, the robotics program that beer headed that he’ll he’ll speak about. I think Yuri Khan is a robotics empire for children, and and that’s also
20:15
Debbie Golan: benefiting the residents of Raja. But also there’s something called a youth home that a lawyer, you know, a police set up for disadvantaged neighborhoods around Israel. And this is his first time to set up such a program in Rothman and unrecognized Bedwin village.
20:30
Debbie Golan: It’s basically giving afternoon enrichment activities and help with homework.
20:36
Debbie Golan: But we also see that bed with women that we’ve worked with, that we work now with. There are 3 groups of women studying Hebrew in their homes, and some some of them started help with the homework for the kids in their area of Rahma. I think I should say that Rahman is not like a concentrated in one spot village. It’s 16
20:55
Debbie Golan: clubs of settlement surrounding your and 300 degrees, and very spread out. It’s a kind of way of preserving something of the nomadic distance between people that existed also in a sedentary format, and
21:11
Debbie Golan: therefore you need buses for everything to get people to the school and to the kindergarten, and also to activities enrichment activities in your
21:22
Debbie Golan: which provides services. De facto is a mixed city Debbie Golan: for for Eli Karetny: Debbie. Can you say a little more about about this unique relationship? What seems to me like a unique relationship, or maybe, or maybe tell us just how unique is this, and also what what is what? Some of the kind of historical experiences that have contributed to this to the relationship. Some, you know you do harm is not like other Israeli cities, right? So maybe give us a feel for what makes you, Tom unique, and how that contributes to to this special relationship.
21:53
Debbie Golan: Okay, I I think I mentioned that that maybe i’ll make it clear. Your hum is a small town of not even yet 13,000 people
22:01
Debbie Golan: by extremely diverse with representatives from most of the major immigrant groups that came to Israel, I would say about 40% North African, 12% Indian Jews, maybe 5% Persian Jews, and about 25% Russian speaking Jews from all over the former Soviet Union, and
22:21
Debbie Golan: and Debbie Golan: also a religious Zionist community and and secular and ultra orthodox.
22:29
Debbie Golan: So it’s a very, very mixed community and a poor community. The socioeconomic ranking of Israeli localities has us, in the third from the bottom
22:40
Debbie Golan: level, and it’s about 30% of your home’s budget goes to welfare.
22:47
Debbie Golan: elderly immigrants, etc., and Debbie Golan: therefore there is maybe a commonality of
22:56
Debbie Golan: the the the need to deal with issues of being in a periphery, and the negative periphery far from the center of country, far from centers of power. And
23:06
Debbie Golan: one of the things that’s also unique about your home, I think, is that it always, from the beginning actually had this entrepreneurial spirit in areas of education and culture, and even businesses, to some extent that that has
23:22
Debbie Golan: maybe interacted with and and helped Debbie Golan: promote some of those initiatives, also with our neighbors and friends in Rahma the
23:32
Debbie Golan: I. When we founded the good neighbors network with chateau, and and then later, the Council for unrecognized villages in Israel, we said, the model of promoting
23:45
Debbie Golan: good health. Okay, which is a critical issue for poor communities where it’s cheaper to buy junk food and
23:51
Debbie Golan: get Debbie Golan: obese and diabetes and heart problems, especially if you’re leading a sedentary life now instead of a nomadic one. It’s also in in your and it’s I mean it’s. It’s a common problem in poor populations in the negative.
24:06
Debbie Golan: And Debbie Golan: so we we said, okay, we Debbie Golan: We can
24:13
Debbie Golan: teach other activists in Bedwin and Jewish villages and towns in the Negative how to
24:20
Debbie Golan: News Debbie Golan: Women’s Empowerment. Hebrew Instruction. Arabic Language Studies Sports for Children and Tourism Development as so community-based tourism. The kind of tourism that a Tibet Bar believes in as a social change tool, because it adds.
24:38
Debbie Golan: it gives a stage for personal stories. It gives income. Debbie Golan: and it gives
24:44
Debbie Golan: a new way to encounter the other. Okay, whether you’re from the center of the country or from abroad, and you you, you are no longer trapped by the images that the media sells, and this is important for Yurukan no less than for Raja.
25:02
Eli Karetny: Thank you, Debbie. Thank you. In in our discussions you’ve helped me understand the complexity of the Bedouin issue, both as a subset of the broader Israeli Palestinian struggle and a separate challenge related to indigenous rights, Ancestral land claims and the protection of basic citizenship rights.
25:23
Eli Karetny: So the Bedouin are Israeli citizens. They are Palestinian Arabs. They’re Muslim, but above all, they’re better win. Even if the Bedouin way of life is no longer an option, the traditional better one way of life.
25:36
Eli Karetny: But you often remind me that these identity questions can actually create obstacles to progress, and it’s better to think in terms of village strategies. And here we’ve discussed 2 different approaches to kind of sets of tools, some mood and engagement.
25:54
Eli Karetny: Can you talk about what each of these mean to you? Why, some villages would emphasize one approach over the other, and why Rahma has tended to opt for engagement.
26:06
Dvir Warshavsky: sure. So I can say that in general, when we are thinking about the different strategies.
26:12
Dvir Warshavsky: I should say that even though every every village, every community, bedroom community have its own story, which is quite unique. The challenges the big challenges is a is most of the time quite similar. Like all of the villages
26:31
Dvir Warshavsky: doesn’t matter, if they are recognized or unrecognized, suffer by demolition orders by lack of
26:39
Dvir Warshavsky: infrastructures, and many, many challenges which is very similar.
26:45
Dvir Warshavsky: So so it’s not so trivial, and it’s, maybe may surprise us that different villages choose different strategies of how of how to deal with
26:56
Dvir Warshavsky: the very challenging and difficult situation that they are deal with.
27:02
Dvir Warshavsky: So Dvir Warshavsky: if if I I will start with talking about this full mode.
27:08
Dvir Warshavsky: so we know about, and maybe it’s more famous about a few villages that they are like the role model of how a bedroom, local community, a struggle, and and
27:21
Dvir Warshavsky: and in in in more or less effective way try to to get the
27:29
Dvir Warshavsky: rights on on lens, sometimes to to.
27:36
Dvir Warshavsky: So it’s create processes of recognition. So one case study which is very famous is the Omar Khran is a village next to me, and Fora to to my town, maybe more.
27:57
Dvir Warshavsky: which is. Dvir Warshavsky: which is a unrecognized village, who there was a plan to build the
28:06
Dvir Warshavsky: Jewish down above it. Dvir Warshavsky: And then there was a big, like many, many ways. They tried many strategies in many ways, and then some of them was to collaborate with the Jewish actors, and I was part of some of that. This
28:28
Dvir Warshavsky: projects and and Dvir Warshavsky: the same time, and after after a while it was more a central, also more a
28:39
Dvir Warshavsky: protests and and active strategies also, with many times with the Jewish bedroom collaboration.
28:50
Dvir Warshavsky: And then. Dvir Warshavsky: but but in a way. That is more, I can say more like
28:58
Dvir Warshavsky: a classical way in in an active term, because it’s more complicated, but
29:05
Dvir Warshavsky: not for now. Now I will be a quite simplistic, and then i’ll try to to make it more complicated.
29:13
Dvir Warshavsky: So there is a story of which is also a village that destroyed hundreds of times, and every time, like the police destroyed and
29:26
Dvir Warshavsky: the activists and the inhabitants. Dvir Warshavsky: it’s the original I mean the the owners of the land come again and build it again. And it’s like very repetitive.
29:37
Dvir Warshavsky: and that’s maybe the classical a form in the the most famous form of a so what there is many other ways that I will not mention all of them, but also
29:50
Dvir Warshavsky: is also a very interesting case studio. If one of you want to see, I think it’s a very interesting, and and you can you can check after
29:59
Dvir Warshavsky: after the Webinar Dvir Warshavsky: and and I want to mention to mention a different way different strategy. which which is a more typical to
30:13
Dvir Warshavsky: community Dvir Warshavsky: in. I think that the during all the history of the village and it’s the village, as I said that suffered by the the same challenges, like every other unrecognized village.
30:29
Dvir Warshavsky: still the strategy focus on Dvir Warshavsky: for operations and then working with
30:38
Dvir Warshavsky: Jewish communities, and also most of the time with the authorities.
30:43
Dvir Warshavsky: and to try to find find out together solutions. I have to say that today that we feel that the political level is, is less an address than
30:56
Dvir Warshavsky: a year ago. So when we have a demolition order, it’s more like a collaboration between communities.
31:04
Dvir Warshavsky: And that’s that’s I think the the most important thing here.
31:10
Dvir Warshavsky: and it’s it’s independent in what’s going on in the politic 11 like. I think that there is a stable infrastructure of connections between the communities, which is also a strategy of how to deal with demolition, all those how to deal with the lack of infrastructures. And I think that
31:29
Dvir Warshavsky: thinking about what’s happened in the last 10 years, this last 10 years in we we can see a few very successful processes that we can.
31:43
Dvir Warshavsky: We we can see as a Dvir Warshavsky: outcome of of this strategy. Starting with creating a building.
31:54
Dvir Warshavsky: the kindergarten, the first indoor garden in the village about 15 years ago, I think if i’m right, maybe 17, yeah. And no 15. Yeah. Okay. And then and also 3 years ago, after a very long and intensive process.
32:12
Dvir Warshavsky: And that was, it Dvir Warshavsky: was a a project that there was also a collaboration between a actors from Italian and from the leadership of last me, and they established a elementary school, which is Lima now is the the manager of the size of this school.
32:34
Dvir Warshavsky: which which is an official school of the Ministry of education and everything. And so it’s not. Of course there is many, many things that we still have to do. It’s only one step, and then the go, of course.
32:49
Dvir Warshavsky: is to have a service center is to recognize this village, but I think that that the steps that we already did, and I say we because I think that it’s a a share shirt project. Of that many will come people.
33:05
Dvir Warshavsky: I think that we did something that is very unique, and it makes me to think that
33:12
Dvir Warshavsky: the strategy of collaborations between communities Dvir Warshavsky: is a is a very effective way.
33:19
Dvir Warshavsky: Maybe I will add Dvir Warshavsky: that I think that this choice, the choice of rasm to
33:25
Dvir Warshavsky: to take this Dvir Warshavsky: strategy. Dvir Warshavsky: Connect I. There is many factors here, but one of them, maybe 2 of them, is what they’d be mentioned that Las Vegas, in fact, part of it will come, and it will come surrounded by rasm. And actually the center of it will come. The commercial center is also.
33:45
Dvir Warshavsky: and and the services center of real time is also the services and the commercial center of. So the connection between the the communities is very like it’s very basic. It’s daily.
33:58
Dvir Warshavsky: and it it makes more levels of of connections, of of collaborations, and which is very, extremely important.
34:05
Dvir Warshavsky: and also the cultural background, which is also something that the that we mentioned mentioned. And I think that it’s also a very important point.
34:17
Dvir Warshavsky: and maybe I will adjust to say Dvir Warshavsky: to to Con as a conclusion that when we talk about solid.
34:27
Dvir Warshavsky: I think that some more have Dvir Warshavsky: many applications like there is more active applications that we can see in many villages.
34:36
Dvir Warshavsky: and also sometimes in. But I think that an important application that we we can see in Rasman, and it’s
34:43
Dvir Warshavsky: also a form of Simon is Dvir Warshavsky: is also about patience. He is also about the understanding.
34:53
Dvir Warshavsky: and that’s something that Simon told me 2 months ago, when the Government just elected, and I was really worried, and I went to Slim on, and I asked him what what we’re going to do right now. It’s really scary, and and we don’t really know what’s going to happen to all the projects that we we do. And Simon told me, okay, see
35:11
Dvir Warshavsky: if it will be and not democratic government, you know. It’s not the first one in this area.
35:19
Dvir Warshavsky: The Ottoman Empire was here. Dvir Warshavsky: It wasn’t the most democratic, you know, political system. The British Mand that was here, and they left, and we are still here.
35:33
Dvir Warshavsky: and you and me. We’re still gonna be here, and and and we just have to wait.
35:39
Dvir Warshavsky: And I think that this form of so mode is is is an important point, because
35:46
Dvir Warshavsky: I really believe that all of us like in in this the communities. The society is gonna be here, anyway, in any case. So all all the infrastructures, all the all the connections that we create in this level, I think that it’s is is really
36:06
Dvir Warshavsky: so standing by the way to to to look on on on this very complicated situation.
36:12
Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah, thank you very much and lots of important things.
36:18
Eli Karetny: and I I wanna shift the to talking about the school and hearing about from both Debbie and and Suliman about the process of, you know, getting the approvals getting the school bill. What are kind of all the different moving parts. But I I do want to first follow up with with something you said one of the things you said, you know, in thinking about this special relationship between Raqqa and and you know, Ham, and the way that the the tools of of engagement have been effective for Rahma.
36:48
Eli Karetny: Remember you telling me in the past that other bedroom villages also tried, you know, tried engagement, tried other approaches, and and they they weren’t effective. So the kind of turning to kind of some mood as a kind of long term resistance. Strategy was seemed to be for some villages the the only alternative left
37:08
Eli Karetny: but for for Rahmah engagement has been effective, so I maybe help us see again, or or further. W. Why, Why, it’s worked there, and it doesn’t work elsewhere. And you mentioned the location, the kind of the closeness.
37:21
Eli Karetny: proximity, the geographical closeness to to you know you also mentioned the kind of for the cultural history of of, and the kind of the make up of of of you to hom. But I wonder if if leadership plays any role. There’s civic leadership.
37:37
Eli Karetny: but also political leadership leaders in Rahma leaders in Utahom. What makes them different than maybe a a leaders elsewhere throughout Israel.
37:48
Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah, that’s a good point. So I think that basically the the connections in the more like daily level in so small place like it will come in last me.
38:01
Dvir Warshavsky: so that immediately affects also the decision making in the political level in the municipality of it will come. And of course, in the Council of Rasm, which exists, I have to say, and 101.
38:18
Dvir Warshavsky: So that’s that’s one thing that it’s. I think that it’s important to to note.
38:24
Dvir Warshavsky: And yeah, and and also Dvir Warshavsky: it may be.
38:30
Dvir Warshavsky: I I may say that the I think that the in different Dvir Warshavsky: in different communities in different villages it’s Sometimes there is
38:41
Dvir Warshavsky: similarities to what’s to the situation here in in your, for example, and also in Diamonda, which is about 15 min north from Iraq, and there is also a a village next to the Mona, who called the Casino.
38:58
Dvir Warshavsky: And then Dvir Warshavsky: and there is many connections like there is many people from the man who works in the educational system inside Casara sale, and also people from
39:09
Dvir Warshavsky: it work in the man I like. There is Dvir Warshavsky: connections, and also there is also in the political level. There is a dialogue at least.
39:17
Dvir Warshavsky: and between the communities. Dvir Warshavsky: but I think that the the geographical distance which exist there and have a very big influence, because it’s not in your Also, I think that we we, in a way we can call it a mixed city.
39:31
Dvir Warshavsky: So Dvir Warshavsky: whatever we do in last may effect immediately, it will come if there is a problem, and the people of of last now afraid to be in a roof, and they will not
39:45
Dvir Warshavsky: the the of of of the local communities, so they they will not. The I don’t know, go to come to go to shops, and they will not be at work, and, like the friends of them in your home, will ask why we don’t You don’t come in the opposite like
40:04
Dvir Warshavsky: It’s the it’s a it’s one city in many ways in the Mona and Castle assail there is many connections.
40:10
Dvir Warshavsky: but it’s not the same. You got geographical Dvir Warshavsky: space.
40:16
Dvir Warshavsky: So so in a way, it creates also, I think, different connections and a less connections, I think also, and and it affects. It affects also the
40:32
Dvir Warshavsky: the nature of the of the dialogue between the leadership in both sides.
40:38
Debbie Golan: But but it’s not the dichotomy. Okay, there’d be one. I want to add something. So I I would like to add that in the neighbour good neighbors network between the mits paramount, and
40:52
Debbie Golan: even though there is geographical distance. There’s a lot of interactions, especially around joint tourism, entrepreneurship, and also and now the recognition of Abe, which is a large
41:03
Debbie Golan: hereto for unrecognized village that was one of the 3 Rahma Abde, and in Hashemzana that were recognized by the Government by the preceding government, and and
41:16
Debbie Golan: are in some kind of recognition process, and Jews and Bedwin are working together both on the leadership level and also on the grassroots level in that area, and to a lesser extent, but also in Arad Telescope there is a interaction between especially education and Women’s groups
41:35
Debbie Golan: at the schools in Bolt, Arad, the Democratic School, and the school in Elfura and Tallahad, and and the around enrichment activities. I wanted to maybe translate for Suleiman.
41:47
Debbie Golan: Your question maybe, has something to add about leadership, because I think it is an important question
42:11
Debbie Golan: the the
42:16
Debbie Golan: so you should be my bedroom ab day.
42:24
Debbie Golan: But but the kidu she’s Debbie Golan: sharing to him
42:30
Debbie Golan: tagat Al-miye tad license
42:39
Dvir Warshavsky: and
43:00
Dvir Warshavsky: she
43:09
Dvir Warshavsky: a
43:15
Dvir Warshavsky: hey?
43:28
Dvir Warshavsky: I mean
43:42
Dvir Warshavsky: a
44:23
Debbie Golan: all kinds of interactions. The the commercial center is to be able mentioned the the fact that I mentioned also the residents of roughly get their services from you will come. So there is that interaction. But also there’s a lot of opportunities through a Tibet bar and other communal organizations for mutual.
44:42
Debbie Golan: a consultation for mutual interaction, and that he it Part of that is also that the leadership
44:49
Debbie Golan: in both towns in both the knows knows each other, and also the last point was very important. In other words, Tai Kyle is invited to Rahma to speak. When we had demonstrations to open the school in in Raqqa. So she came to speak, and her, the leader of the opposition to the municipal council also came to speak.
45:08
Debbie Golan: and the the a lot of people in Rahma about 300 Bedwin are registered as voters in Yukon, because a lot of roughness it’s in the
45:17
Debbie Golan: jurisdiction. The the boundaries, the the municipal boundaries of your will have
45:23
Debbie Golan: which Yukon has decided to give up. Debbie Golan: and Ramat, negative Regional Council have decided to give up about 2,000. Do not for the betterment, for the for the planned recognized dropway in the future. So
45:38
Debbie Golan: there’s a sense here that it’s going to be better for both communities. If situation in Rahma will improve, and that we have a mutual responsibility to help each other. I think that’s right. That’s what
45:50
Debbie Golan: So I was trying to say.
46:33
Dvir Warshavsky: who are we?
46:41
Dvir Warshavsky: And Dvir Warshavsky: my time T. V.
46:55
Dvir Warshavsky: The I have the
47:09
Dvir Warshavsky: but it’s it’s. Maybe it’s.
47:21
Eli Karetny: Thank you, because i’m on. We don’t have too much time I want to take at least a few questions from the audience. I have, you know, tons more questions, but i’ll be able to follow up with you guys, you know, after the Webinar about lots of. But here’s a a question from from Carol sitcherman, and it’s a question that also kind of
47:40
Eli Karetny: frames there our whole discussion today, and Eli Karetny: it’s about to what extent Rahma can be a model or or the relationship between you, Don’t, have to be a model. Carol asks, Can the cooperation cooperative relationship between the Bedouin village of Rahma and the Jewish town of Gilcombe be emulated in other communities that Don’t have the demography of you know how.
48:02
Eli Karetny: To what extent does that demography demographics make the town receptive to cooperation? So to? Is there something here or that that can be a model to to others.
48:13
Debbie Golan: and maybe maybe I think that’s the whole idea of the good neighbors network was to use Euro-com Rahma relations and mutual projects, joint projects as models for other places. And when we have funding we could do a lot, and even without funding, we’re still doing.
48:28
Debbie Golan: Not a not Not so, not very. We. We’re we’re doing significant things together. And I think that
48:36
Debbie Golan: I spoke about the demography right. If there’s a Debbie Golan: a kind of mutual culture of hospitality and
48:46
Debbie Golan: live and let live. Okay, that is characteristic of your hub, then.
48:51
Debbie Golan: That’s it. I think. Le Man also mentioned right now in what he was saying, that people in Alaska want to live their lives
48:59
Debbie Golan: quietly. If there is a theft Debbie Golan: in in your home, and it’s bed when it’s never bed, when from Rahma it’s from other places. And there’s a there’s been offers of cooperation in in the the Civil Civil Civil Civil Guard, so to speak, of the
49:22
Debbie Golan: There’s Debbie Golan: this. The brief answer is, Yes, I I think that there this can be a model, and the kinds of projects that we’re doing. There’s a lot that we can learn and teach other places to
49:37
Eli Karetny: the farm that we have only a few minutes left, and we’re getting a couple of really good questions on from from Mary and Kaplan. She asks whether the schools are integrated. I I know they’re not, but maybe you can just say something more about. You know better when schools being for the better when children and separated from the Jewish schools.
50:24
Dvir Warshavsky: you a mute
50:40
Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah, it’s the growth. Dvir Warshavsky: Yes, that mode
51:17
Dvir Warshavsky: they had to be on a bedroom. I for not here. I need no idea.
51:22
Debbie Golan: I’m not i’m not as a mentality currently in Rahma and in your home won’t.
51:33
Debbie Golan: won’t, be amenable to having a a a a bilingual school, or a by national school. People are interested in having education systems or institutions that reflect their own cultures and help them
51:48
Debbie Golan: advance their children. But it it doesn’t contradict the deep desire for coexistence and mutual respect.
51:57
Debbie Golan: The question of land, he said if we had. There are also examples of people from Raqqa who’s children studied in Yoruhan schools.
52:05
Debbie Golan: but also went back to out of your office and move back to Rosma Debbie Golan: A,
52:12
Debbie Golan: and we can go into this. But there’s not really a lot of time. Debbie Golan: if not always. I think integration is the best.
52:21
Debbie Golan: The way to enable people to move ahead. That’s my permission. That’s my take on things. But another very important issue that he mentioned is that
52:30
Debbie Golan: the whole question of land and the Bedouin claims to only about 3% of the territory of the negative. But he said, okay, if the Government doesn’t think that
52:40
Debbie Golan: we. We even have that land. So where am I going to live right? So
52:46
Debbie Golan: he thinks that that maybe Debbie Golan: in a in a mixed school some of the politics might get in the way of mutual joint education that would be beneficial to both communities.
52:58
Eli Karetny: Thank you.
53:06
Dvir Warshavsky: is shared. Debbie Golan: He wants to. So they might have something urgent that came up.
53:11
Dvir Warshavsky: and he’s he’s apologizing that he has to
53:17
Debbie Golan: You’ll have another question a last question he’d be. You’ll be happy to answer before he goes. Maybe something about the the the role that the school plays in the kind of unfolding process of recognition. What what comes next? Water, electricity, paved roads like. What w that? That that sequencing work?
53:53
Dvir Warshavsky: Say a classic. Dvir Warshavsky: And it’s no
54:02
Dvir Warshavsky: I I
54:08
Dvir Warshavsky: the
54:15
Dvir Warshavsky: Hello, Akara! Dvir Warshavsky: No. Can I make sure
54:23
Dvir Warshavsky: De Luca, my and Shehma comes here in my there. Dvir Warshavsky: you know no relevant. It’s no. I heard you from a car
54:34
Dvir Warshavsky: that’s it through.
54:52
Dvir Warshavsky: It’s the they that I had no
55:01
Dvir Warshavsky: myself but Debbie Golan: the fact, the fact, he says, that the fact that there is a school, one of the factors in the recognition of the town, and that he, he.
55:15
Debbie Golan: he what he sees and what he feels Bedwin in is recognition, and on their own terms, in other words, a a a model of a town that will be also agricultural, and enable them to pursue certain traditional ways of life that they have.
55:32
Debbie Golan: But what are the things that they’re aiming for is this kind of Mo shave, which is an Israeli Jewish, cooperative, agricultural village that can combine tourism with agriculture with people who live there and do engage in other professions, and there’s no reason that it can’t be a model for
55:51
Debbie Golan: Rahm and other Bedwin villages in the negative, so that it’s not a completely urban settlement, but something that’s more integrated with the way of life of Bedwin traditionally, and just to say that next week there’s a visit of the ministry of Agriculture people, and in the text that I’m sent the third text. He talks about
56:11
Debbie Golan: how when we work together getting Debbie Golan: higher-ray ranking officials down to discuss making a Bedwin moshave is something that Jews can do more easily with Bedwin, and then, when the Bedwin talk, it’s a different perspective when it’s backed up by Yurujan, by the mayor, and by leadership
56:34
Debbie Golan: and by civilian activists, that Debbie Golan: that can explain why it’s so important to do something that will have sustainability and relevance for bedwin way of life.
56:48
Eli Karetny: Thank you, Debbie Toda Sliman. Eli Karetny: Maybe we just to to close things off. We only have a few minutes left. It would be great to learn to to understand little more about what recognition means, like what? What was the process of getting here now that it it’s kind of happened. What what does it mean now? Does it? Does it really pave the way for further developments? Is it a kind of
57:12
Eli Karetny: you know? Is it a symbolic thing, because it it always I thought of it as something more than symbolic, that it really has legal weight right? But but but what’s changed since recognition, so maybe help us understand that
57:25
Debbie Golan: you can complete my my my answer. But I think that the answer is that it’s not so clear for everyone like
57:38
Dvir Warshavsky: we. We are looking on the recognized villages, and like on the like, Officially.
57:44
Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah, when you were recognized on a village legally. Dvir Warshavsky: so you can hope that there will be like a a plan for this like planning
57:56
Dvir Warshavsky: a process, and then Dvir Warshavsky: recognition will mean that there will be like a services center, and we see that sometimes there is sometimes not. And
58:09
Dvir Warshavsky: but but it’s it’s it’s an important step, because I I will. I would say that without recognition. There is no chance
58:17
Dvir Warshavsky: to these processes. Dvir Warshavsky: but with the recognition it’s an option. It’s not necessarily will happen, because it’s really not so clear. What’s
58:24
Dvir Warshavsky: the immediate effect of this act, but it’s a necessary necessary step
58:30
Dvir Warshavsky: before all of the of the all the other processes that we want to add something
58:36
Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah. Eli Karetny: muted. Debbie Golan: so they might apologize that he had to really leave. Now I think I completely agree that the Government still Hasn’t discovered the most
58:52
Debbie Golan: the best practices for recognizing a Bedouin village, and it’s definitely more than symbolic, because it means that along with a municipal plan, there’s also the possibility of building legally so. There theoretically, wouldn’t be any demolition orders needed.
59:11
Debbie Golan: and that it would mean there are infrastructures like sewage, like paved roads like electricity from the national grid like
59:20
Debbie Golan: after school and the leisure activities like a community center. These things Don’t exist in in as well.
59:30
Debbie Golan: and also water in a in a better way, and and then, as Saliman said in our preparatory meeting, he said that he would. He’s he’s dying to pay municipal taxes, because it’ll mean he’ll be getting the services that are due to him, and not only that, but negative towns
59:47
Debbie Golan: and other towns in Israel that are low in the lower ranking of Israeli socioeconomic ranking of Israeli settlements. They get discounts and taxes in your home residents. We pay 10% less taxes, and he’s saying, i’m, i’m dying to get a 10% discount on my taxes. So far my salary goes mostly to taxes.
1:00:05
Debbie Golan: so it’s definitely something promising. He also mentioned in the preparatory meeting. It’s in the text a translator for him that
1:00:13
Debbie Golan: he he wants a house, a permanent settlement, not pertinent building right, not a metal shack that he may have to change the roof if the weather is bad, and and might leak and stuff, and
1:00:25
Debbie Golan: and it’s true that some of the Bedwin have made nice homes out of those metal shacks, but it’s no
1:00:31
Debbie Golan: a comparison to a home that has a paved road, and that has a neighborhood, and it has the infrastructures that hopefully future Rahma will. And, as beer mentioned, the so far the examples of some of those recognized bedroom villages
1:00:47
Debbie Golan: not talking about the towns initiated by by Israel are not that attractive to to to Bedwin? So what we’re trying to do here, I think, in Rahma together.
1:00:59
Debbie Golan: the Bedwin of Rahma and the Jews in the and the leadership in both communities is to create a model of what
1:01:06
Debbie Golan: could work for the best Debbie Golan: right? And that’s what we’re working on. Eli Karetny: Thank you, Debbie. Thank you, Devere, and I’ll thanks, Sliman again. It’s time to wrap up. I wish we had more time, and our conversations will continue. But I invite the Bora back to to to wrap things up. Thank you again.
1:01:26
Eli Karetny: Thanks, David. Deborah Dwork: Tomorrow, please. What I add my thanks. For some reason I I press the
1:01:35
Deborah Dwork: it start Video. Deborah Dwork: Okay. So I add my thanks to Eli. And I thank you, Eli, for moderating this really riveting conversation. So many thanks to Debbie to Sulimon, to beer, and to everyone who has joined to listen. Today
1:01:57
Deborah Dwork: the discussion prompts us to think a new and in light of the current political situation, and what we have learned to plum new perspectives.
1:02:10
Deborah Dwork: so warmest wishes to all stay safe. Stay well.

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https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29027
Colonizing Palestine:

The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian NakbaAREEJ SABBAGH-KHOURYSERIES: STANFORD STUDIES IN MIDDLE EASTERN AND ISLAMIC SOCIETIES AND CULTURES

AUGUST 2023

History / Middle East

Middle East Studies

Sociology / Middle East

Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn ‘Amer.

Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.

About the author

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Reviews

“Colonizing Palestine guides us with great precision and acumen through the memory lanes of Israelis and Palestinians. Those who think they have read it all about the Nakba and its impact on our present realities will need to consult this impressive and crucial addition to the literature on settler colonialism and Palestine.”—Ilan Pappé, University of Exeter

“Areej Sabbagh-Khoury’s groundbreaking book sheds light on the structures and events that facilitated Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand exactly how the tensions between socialism and Zionism played out on the ground.”—Maha Nassar, University of Arizona

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https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=1a68621207ab977886041b5d3ee32db984dcad7e

borderlands

e-journal

www.borderlands.net.au

VOLUME 14 NUMBER 1, 2015

Mohammed Abu-Khdeir and the Politics of Racial Terror in

Occupied Jerusalem

Sarah Ihmoud

University of Texas, Austin

Falsification of History at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

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