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This paper examines how the state apparatus classifies who are the citizens to be symbolically included in the collective, and who are to be excluded by analysing interfaith marriages in the Israeli context, where ethno-national identity is society's main category organizer. I argue that the women's social-economic standing (working-class versus middle-class) and ethnic origin (Mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern and North African ancestry versus Ashkenazi Jews of European ancestry) play an important role not only in their strategies but in the nationalist rhetoric against them. The paper also shows how interfaith marriages, although rather rare in Israel, determine that ethno-national boundaries are more permeable than they are first appear, although crossing and shifting them is never simple. Yet the importance of this phenomenon is not in its prevalence, but in its social and political impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have long emphasized the significant impact of national days on the masses, the actual impact of national days on people's national sentiments have been ignored. This study set out to examine the ways in which exposure to Remembrance Day impacts national sentiments and hostility towards outgroups. Unlike previous cross-sectional-design studies, it adopted longitudinal design in order to explore the actual impact of exposure to Remembrance Day amongst Israeli Jews. While exposure to Remembrance Day increased the respondents' sense of nationalism, neither their level of national identification and hostility towards out-groups nor the magnitude of the positive link between nationalism and hostility towards out-groups changed significantly. While national identification was unrelated to hostility prior to Remembrance Day, it became negatively related to it on Remembrance Day itself. The findings shed new light on the prevalent assumption regarding the impact national days have on public sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research explores how Ethiopian Jews in Israel apply local and global cultural resources when forming their reactive strategies to stigmatization. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with adult men and women, we examine class variations in the destigmatization strategies of working-class and middle-class Ethiopian Jews. Working-class Ethiopian Jews rely on their local bounded identity, that of Jews, rather than identity politics, which stresses phenotype in formulating destigmatization strategies. The former provide is Ethiopians of all classes with the network of meaning necessary for active participation in the broader society, whereas the latter is primarily the province of a small number of highly educated middle-class individuals, those who had access to social networks of highly educated liberals and could mobilize valued global black cultural resources (e.g. music, art) to their advantage in the local context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, football (soccer) has become a major institution within the popular culture of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel. The centrality of football has given different identity agents opportunities to impose different meanings on the sport, depending on the agents' definitions of collective identity. This article utilizes ethnographic observation in the football stadium and coverage by Arab and Hebrew sports media to illustrate and analyse this battle over meaning. The Hebrew sports media, the Arab sports press, and the Arab audience are three different agents that attach divergent meanings to the notable presence of Arab players in the Israeli football leagues. The article argues that the overlapping interests of the Hebrew sports media on the one hand and the Arab football fans, players, and bureaucrats on the other lead to the construction of the football sphere as an integrative enclave in the general Israeli public sphere. The article considers the relevance of Gramsci's theory of hegemony to explain the production of the integrative meaning of football, and it suggests integrating this explanation with other recent theories regarding the tensions between different discourses of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Transnationalism', 'globalization', etc. have been adopted by the postmodern anthropologists as providing conceptual evidence for a world that defies understanding in historical, political economy, or structural, terms. Thus, for Dan Rabinowitz (2001) ERS 24(1) 'subjectivity' reigns, transnationalism displaces the state in analysis, and the Palestinian citizens of Israel are discussed as 'a trapped minority'. I critique Rabinowitz's essentialist subjectivity which denies the Palestinian citizens rational, objective, comprehension of their situation, while emphasizing the key role of Israeli statism, alongside the state's welfare and citizens' rights components, and show that our common future lies in our joint, Jewish-Arab, active opposition to Israeli external and internal militaristic-nationalistic policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elastic, adaptable and vibrant, minorities often stretch across state borders in ways traditional concepts of states and nations fail to acknowledge, let alone theorize. The discourse of transnationalism helps to dislodge the study of minorities from the analytical straight-jacket of the state. The concept of 'trapped minority', developed herein from an analysis of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, adds to this debate. A trapped minority is a segment of a larger group spread across at least two states. Citizens of a state hegemonized by others, its members are alienated from political power. Unable to influence the definition of public goods or enjoy them, its members are at the same time marginal within their mother nation abroad. My use of the concept of 'trapped minority' offers a critique of Smooha's rationalized concept 'ethnic democracy' (1990) and of Yiftachel's ethno-regionalism (1999a, after Hechter and Levi 1979), a critique that helps to re-frame and critique the Oslo-Wye process of Israel-Palestinian reconciliation and is relevant to similar situations elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Druze community occupies a distinctive niche in the broader context of Israel/Palestine, one which is located in the interstices of various socio-political cross-currents, notably Jewish/Arab and Israeli/Palestinian. Druze Israeli identity is built around a politics of difference and separation from all other population groups residing in this area, yet it is an ambivalent and contradictory designation. This article focuses on those Druze who, through their service in the army, have been used as translators in the military courts in the occupied territories. The preference of Druze for this role relates to the fact that they have both bilingual skills (Hebrew and Arabic) and a socio-political status as `non-Arab Arabs'. Following a general discussion of the politicization of Druze identity, I analyse the state's uses of Druze bilingualism for the purposes of maintaining and legitimizing the occupation, and the effects that fulfilling such a role have had on those who have functioned in this capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A theoretical framework of multiple citizenship discourses is proposed for analysing the transformation of the structure of ethnic relations in the yishuv and Israel. An historical overview indicates how Israel's `incorporation regime' for its main ethnic and religious groups - ashkenazim, mizrachim, Orthodox-Jews, citizen and non-citizen Palestinians - was constituted through a hierarchical combination of three citizenship discourses: a collectivist republican discourse, based on the civic virtue of `pioneering' colonization; an ethno-nationaiist discourse, based on Jewish descent, and an individualist liberal discourse, based on civic criteria of membership. It is suggested that Israel's historical trajectory has consisted in its gradual transformation from a colonial to a civil society, and concomitantly in the gradual replacement of its republican citizenship discourse by a liberal discourse. Finally, the dilemmas of its ethnic and religious groups in choosing between the liberal and the ethno-nationalist citizenship discourses in the current period are charted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electoral success of Shas, a mizrahim, religious political party in Israelis analysed with the help of the cultural division of labour model. Mizrahirn (Jews originating in Muslim countries) are a semi-peripheral ethnic group in Israel, located between the dominant ashkenazim (Jews of European origin) and the Palestinians. While most mizrahim have been voting Likud for the past twenty-five years, increasingly the poorer among them have been shifting their vote to Shas. The key to Shas's success, where other efforts to organize mizrahi political parties have failed, is its integrative, rather than separatist, ideology. Shas seeks to replace secular Zionism with religious Judaism as the hegemonic ideology in Israeli society, and presents this as the remedy for both the socio-economic and the cultural grievances of its constituency. This integrative message, emphasizing the commonalities between mizrahim and ashkenazim, rather than their differences, is attractive to mizrahim because of their semi-peripheral position in the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]