Conflict, Nationalist Gentrification and Resistance in Israel

• In Event: Poster Session: Civic Engagement

Abstract

In the spring of 2021, unprecedented intercommunal violence between Jews and Arabs broke out in Jerusalem and across Israel’s ethnically “mixed” cities. At the height of Ramadan, violence escalated after the police prevented Palestinians from gathering at the Damascus Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem. Spreading like wildfire to other contested cities in Israel, bloody clashes resulted in arson attacks on houses and vehicles, with multiple lynches of Jewish and Palestinian residents.
One of the most significant catalysts to this cycle of violence occurred in the city of Jaffa, where two young Palestinian residents attacked that Rabbi of Shirat Moshe Yeshiva, who was scouting to buy property for the yeshiva’s expansion. The yeshiva (a traditional Jewish educational institute for men) was established in Jaffa as part of a Zionist-religious settlement movement called Garin Torani, which aims to Judaize the mixed cities. Garin Torani is a government-supported, Zionist organization of religious families who settle in Israeli mixed cities and development towns. Their goal is to Judaize space and disseminate Zionist and religious ideology among the general population. Following the attack, Arab residents protested that the housing crisis and their displacement from Jaffa resulted from the Garin Torani’s actions, in a process, we propose calling “nationalist gentrification,” namely, the convergence of the globalized neoliberal economic gentrification and “old-fashioned” nationalist territorialization. The displacement of Palestinians living in Israel has intensified in recent decades not only as a result of nationalist gentrification, but also due to urban redevelopment and neoliberal gentrification (Monterescu, 2015).
While the literature describes liberal gentrifiers as seeking to promote coexistence with other ethnic minorities in the city, it ignores non-liberal political gentrification agents acting on nationalist motivations (Kent-Stoll, 2020). Studies on gentrification are often detached from theories of nationalism, settler-colonialism, and political-ideological projects in contested territories. Urban settlers are excluded from social processes and there is a complete disconnect between the ideological settlers and the phenomenon of neoliberal gentrification. In doing so, studies ignore a more complex reality in which gentrifiers may be driven by nationalist ideology. We argue that neoliberal urban development processes, including gentrification, are not politically and nationally neutral, but are a platform for minority displacement, which may proceed through different types of gentrification agents. Under the benign guise of “urban renewal” designed to benefit all, gentrification promotes ethnonational domination and control over the “mixed city”. This mission is aided by settlement associations that serve as the state's agents, thus describable as “state-led ethno-gentrification” (Shmaryahu-Yeshurun & Ben-Porat, 2021).
In this study, we identify a new gentrifier type and social movement moving from the Jewish settlements in the West Bank into the periphery of the center – disadvantaged mixed cities. The research questions are: How has settlement been established and developed over the years in terms of size, location, and activities? How do Garin Torani members describe the goals of their settlement in Jaffa? Finally, how do the settlers perceive their relationships with the Arab-Palestinian residents?
This article is based on a series of interviews and observations conducted in the winter of 2020, about five months before the outbreak of the violence incident of May 2021. We detail the political and sociological context in which the nationalist gentrifiers operate in the mixed city and their motivations for settlement. We shows that these active actors represent a new social type, distinguished from both the liberal gentrificator and the settler from settlements beyond the Green Line. The Garin Torani members adopt from the repertoire of urban renewal the neo-liberal position that sees the city' outskirts a space of opportunity of social involvement and self-fulfillment but fill it with the illiberal content of excluded Jewish sovereignty. This sociological hybrid pattern reflects both processes of privatization and commercialization of space and trends of nationalist radicalization prevalent in Jewish society in Israel. The study calls on political sciences to critically examine the ethnonational drivers of urban policies and their consequences on violence and resistance among minorities.

Author

• Yael Shmaryahu-Yeshurun, University of California, San Diego