Speaking the conflict,or how the Druze became bilingual: a study of Druze translators in the Israeli military courts in the West Bank and Gaza

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.     

Colonialism and ethnicity: A theory and comparative case study

This article explores Arab American "invisibility" as a central theme in the historical narrative of Arab immigrants and their descendants in North America. "Invisibility" is primarily addressed in terms of Arab Americans' paradoxical positioning within the US racial/ethnic classification system. The article argues that four central paradoxes shape Arab American identity. The first paradox is that Arab Americans are a complex, diverse community, but are represented as a monolith in popular North American media images. The second paradox is that Arab Americans are simultaneously racialized as whites and as non-whites. The third paradox is that Arab Americans are racialized according to religion (Islam) rather than biology (phenotype). The fourth paradox involves the intersection between religious forms of identity that Arab immigrants bring to the US and racial forms of identity that structure US society. Overall, the article claims that each paradox of Arab American identity reinforces the difficulties associated in classifying this population.     

"Now, like Real Israelis, Let's Stand Up and Sing": Teaching the National Language to Russian Newcomers in Israel

This article addresses the links between nationalism, national identity, and the socialization of migrants through an ethnographic account of an encounter between an Israeli teacher of Hebrew and adult newcomers from the former Soviet Union at a state-sponsored Hebrew language class (ulpan) in Israel. A close look at the axes around which learning was organized, as well as the modes of instruction, reveals a particular conceptualization of learning to belong to Israeli society, one which the newcomers themselves appeared to contest.     

Authoritarianism among Afrikaners

In this paper we contrast two opposing theoretical views in the sociology of sport. The first sees sport as a field that brings together different groups and bridges social divides. In this view, minority sport stars serve both as role models and as a mouthpiece voicing the feelings and needs of their ethnic groups. The opposing view holds that the sport field reflects the tendencies of the larger society, helping to maintain the social dominance of hegemonic groups. In this view sport stars serve mostly as tokens and have no real influence on the social order. Our systematic analysis of Israeli media between the years 2002 and 2007 lends support to the latter view. We show that the expressions and behaviours of Israeli Palestinian soccer players are consistently policed and silenced by the Jewish-dominated media discourse, effectively blocking one of the few channels of expression for the Arab public in Israel.     

Arab sounds in a contested space: life quality,cultural hierarchies and national silencing

Sounds and sonic norms and regimes characterize both spaces/territories and individual bodies. This article explores the meanings of and reactions to Arab sounds in Israel – political struggles over muezzins, stereotypical representations of Israeli Palestinians as loud, and so on – in order to offer general insights into the role of the sonic (both actual sounds and their discursive representations) in the new ‘cultural’ racism, in the everyday ethnicized experience of one's body, and in shaping relations between ethnic and national groups.     

Numerical Relations and Skill Level Constrain Co-Adaptive Behaviors of Agents in Sports Teams

Similar to other complex systems in nature (e.g., a hunting pack, flocks of birds), sports teams have been modeled as social neurobiological systems in which interpersonal coordination tendencies of agents underpin team swarming behaviors. Swarming is seen as the result of agent co-adaptation to ecological constraints of performance environments by collectively perceiving specific possibilities for action (affordances for self and shared affordances). A major principle of invasion team sports assumed to promote effective performance is to outnumber the opposition (creation of numerical overloads) during different performance phases (attack and defense) in spatial regions adjacent to the ball. Such performance principles are assimilated by system agents through manipulation of numerical relations between teams during training in order to create artificially asymmetrical performance contexts to simulate overloaded and underloaded situations. Here we evaluated effects of different numerical relations differentiated by agent skill level, examining emergent inter-individual, intra- and inter-team coordination. Groups of association football players (national – NLP and regional-level – RLP) participated in small-sided and conditioned games in which numerical relations between system agents were manipulated (5v5, 5v4 and 5v3). Typical grouping tendencies in sports teams (major ranges, stretch indices, distances of team centers to goals and distances between the teams'' opposing line-forces in specific team sectors) were recorded by plotting positional coordinates of individual agents through continuous GPS tracking. Results showed that creation of numerical asymmetries during training constrained agents'' individual dominant regions, the underloaded teams'' compactness and each team''s relative position on-field, as well as distances between specific team sectors. We also observed how skill level impacted individual and team coordination tendencies. Data revealed emergence of co-adaptive behaviors between interacting neurobiological social system agents in the context of sport performance. Such observations have broader implications for training design involving manipulations of numerical relations between interacting members of social collectives.     

Two states for three peoples: the ‘Palestinian-Israeli’ in the Future Vision Documents of the Palestinians in Israel

This article focuses on the Vision Documents of the Arab civil society organizations in Israel as an act of citizenship and an expression of the politics of contention used by the Palestinians in Israel. We argue that these documents challenge both the political inclusiveness of the identity of Israel as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state, and the political continuity of collective identity of the Palestinian people. With these documents, the Arab civil society organizations reclaim responsibility over their political future by clinging to the Israeli citizenship framework, but at the same time attempt to change its nature from within, by re-associating the Palestinians in Israel with the core issues of the stumbling peace process, especially in regard to the ‘Right of Return’. The paper contends that for the Palestinians in Israel, the national and the civic frameworks do not circulate in separate orbits, but constitute and reframe each other.     

Upper extremity sensorimotor control among collegiate football players

Injuries stemming from shoulder instability are very common among athletes participating in contact sports, such as football. Previous research has shown that increased laxity negatively affects the function of the sensorimotor system potentially leading to a pathological cycle of shoulder dysfunction. Currently, there are no data detailing such effects among football players. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the differences in upper extremity sensorimotor control among football players compared with that of a control group. Forty-five collegiate football players and 70 male control subjects with no previous experience in contact sports participated. All the subjects had no recent history of upper extremity injury. Each subject performed three 30-second upper extremity balance trials on each arm. The balance trials were conducted in a single-arm push-up position with the test arm in the center of a force platform and the subjects' feet on a labile device. The trials were averaged, and the differences in radial area deviation between groups were analyzed using separate 1-way analyses of variance (p < 0.05). The football players showed significantly more radial area deviation of the dominant (0.41 ± 1.23 cm2, p = 0.02) and nondominant arms (0.47 ± 1.63 cm2, p = 0.03) when compared with the control group. These results suggest that football players may have decreased sensorimotor control of the upper extremity compared with individuals with no contact sport experience. The decreased upper extremity sensorimotor control among the football players may be because of the frequent impacts accumulated during football participation. Football players may benefit from exercises that target the sensorimotor system. These findings may also be beneficial in the evaluation and treatment of various upper extremity injuries among football players.     

Towards understanding: antisemitism and the contested uses and meanings of ‘Yid’ in English football

This article addresses an omission in the currently brief body of work on antisemitism in football and contributes to and advances wider sociological debates in the sub-disciplines of race and ethnicity, religion, linguistics and sport. The article examines antisemitic discourse in English football and in doing so, explains the different uses and meanings of ‘Yid’ in the vernacular culture of fans. While many conceive of ‘Yid’ as an ethnic epithet, fans of Tottenham Hotspur – Gentiles and Jews – have appropriated and embraced the term, using it to deflect the antisemitic abuse they are targeted with due to their ‘Jewish identity’. The study maps the contested uses of ‘Yid’ on a continuum to explain and demarcate between the nuanced forms of antisemitism in football. It makes central the cultural context in which ‘Yid’ is used, together with the intent underpinning its use, since epithets and slurs are not simply determined by their lexical form.     

The good Arab: conditional inclusion and settler colonial citizenship among Palestinian citizens of Israel in Jewish Tel Aviv

Dominant majorities often use idealized categories to validate the ‘goodness’ and deservingness of minority citizens. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, this category is the ‘good Arab’. Since its origins in early Jewish settlement of Palestine, it has become a powerful and controversial metaphor in Israeli public discourse. As an experienced condition of limited inclusion, the ‘good Arab’ exemplifies the Palestinian dilemma of accessing socioeconomic opportunities in Jewish Israeli spaces that stigmatize and fend off their ethnonational identity. Combining a historical genealogy of the ‘good Arab’ with ethnographic research among Palestinians in Tel Aviv, this article shows how a historically evolved logic of settler colonial control and indigenous erasure continues to define liberal frameworks of conditional citizenship and inclusion. Theorized through the emerging concept of conditional inclusion, these insights open up new avenues for analysis and comparison in anthropological debates surrounding indigenous struggles, settler colonialism, urban inclusion, and citizenship.     

Race,ethnicity and German identity: a media analysis of the 2010 world cup men's national soccer team

Enjoying a surge of national pride, the German media celebrated the 2010 German World Cup team's success in South Africa. A dominant theme in this coverage was the ‘immigration background’ of 11 of the 23 players on the team and their claim to German identity despite their ethnic diversity. Amid debate over the changing nature of German citizenship, the national team's ‘multicultural kickers’ became the focal point for those who wished to re-frame German identity. This article examines German newspaper and magazine coverage of the national soccer team emphasizing the role that media played in constructing competing definitions of the German citizen and nation.     

Materialism and Sensuality: Visualizing the Devil in the Festival of Our Lady of Urkupiña

During the Festival of Our Lady of Urkupin ¨ a, held every August in Quillacollo, Bolivia, an estimated half million pilgrims petition Our Lady for wealth and material goods. The festival has become a national event and now includes the participation of government officials, including the President, as well as widespread coverage by the media. The festival has also become a point of controversy and contestation over the meanings of Bolivian nationalism, commercialism, and economic development. These issues, as I will show, have been articulated through criticisms of the festival as being too sensuous and overly commercialized. Through an examination of media coverage of the festival of Urkupiña, this article focuses on the ways that "evils" of materialism and sensuality are represented visually. The Bolivian state and the Catholic Church have sought to define the meaning of the festival in terms of devotion and national identity while criticizing some festival practices associated with gaining wealth. Here I show how the folkloric and devotional elements of the festival are embodied in the dancers while the visual referent for the materialism of the festival is street vendors. I also discuss how the festival transforms the meanings of the ch'alla and other Andeanpractices that anthropologists have traditionally associated with resistance to capitalism (as found for example in the work of June Nash and Michael Taussig). The article concludes by noting that, rather than mapping these meanings ontogeneralized resistance, anthropologists must be prepared fully to engage contestations over devotion, material gain, sensuousness, and economic development. In short, we should also be prepared to dance with the devil.     

Shifting Egalitarianisms and Contemporary Racism in Rural Victorian Football: The Rumbalara Experience

This article builds on our understanding of racism towards Aboriginal people in Australia through an examination of discriminatory belief structures pervasive in the mainstream community as evidenced through the important social field of country football in regional Victoria. It analyses the power and pervasiveness of the racial stereotyping that exists in some segments of the community by using Langton's (1997) notion of ‘iconic images' as well as discussing the importance of particular ideological motivations around values such as ‘egalitarianism’. This is achieved through analysing the views of players, supporters and officials of mainstream clubs towards the Aboriginal Rumbalara Football Netball Club. This analysis is structurally situated within a broader understanding of Australian national identity, in particular looking at the intersection of the powerful cultural domains of sport and evolving expressions of whiteness and egalitarianism.     

Minority status in an ethnic democracy: The status of the Arab minority in Israel

It is commonly assumed that democracy in deeply divided societies takes either a majoritarian or consociational form. While the state in both types is ethnically neutral, there are some countries that combine viable democratic institutions with institutionalized ethnic dominance. The article introduces this third, so far not recognized, general type of ‘ethnic democracy’ and demonstrates its utility for Israel in treating its Arab minority. The tensions and contradictions in Israel's dual character as a Jewish democratic state give rise to five Arab demands that the Jewish majority reject: making Israel non‐Jewish and non‐Zionist, accepting Palestinian nationalism, lifting all restrictions on Arab individual rights, granting Arabs certain national collective rights and incorporating Arabs into the national power structure. Each Arab demand is discussed in detail and the rationale for Jewish objections is spelled out. The problem can be reduced, but not resolved, by establishing a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the Palestinian people and by according Israeli Arabs the status of a Palestinian national minority within the Jewish state. These issues are not unique to Israel but rather common to ethnic democracies. It is concluded that the Israeli experience is becoming increasingly relevant to states which are democratizing but keeping appreciable ethnic dominance.     

The language of everyday racism and microaggression in the workplace: Palestinian professionals in Israel

Based on interviews with Palestinian professionals in Jewish organizations in Israel, this article discloses a distinctive practice of ‘everyday racism’ and microaggression – a language of everyday racism. This ‘language of everyday racism’ refers to Hebrew words and expressions that are routinely used by Jews in their mundane conversations and that include the word ‘Arab’ when describing a deficiency or defect, some sort of unsightliness, filth, or general negativity (as in the expression ‘You're dressed like an Arab woman’). This article not only describes the language of everyday racism as a specific form of everyday racism and microaggression (national microaggression), it also illustrates how this language activates the Palestinian professionals in a reflexive manner. The discussion section describes how the internal dialectic between structure and agency is critical to understanding the language of everyday racism, which in turn acts as a mechanism of the inequality that underlies face-to-face interactions.     

State and minority in Israel: the case of ethnic state and the predicament of its minority

The connection between ethnicity and democracy has been the subject of much debate among scholars in various disciplines. This article deals with the ethnic divisions and the debate over democracy in Israel. How Israel should be defined, with regard to the democracy-ethnic affiliation nexus, has long been debated by scholars in the field. Some present Israel as a consociational democracy. Some Israeli scholars consider Israel to be a liberal democracy. Others define it as an 'ethnic democracy' that balances the ethnic and democratic components in its dealings with its Arab-Palestinian citizen. In this article I claim that Israel, like many other countries (Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Canada until the sixties, Malaysia) is not a democracy, if our criterion is the ethnic preference it shows for Jews. It is, instead, a textbook example of an ethnic state, applying sophisticated policies of exclusion and discrimination towards the Arab minority. In principle, it invites its Arab citizens to participate in its life; but under no circumstances does it offer them equality. It maintains Jewish superiority in all fields and grants them preference symbolically, structurally and practically.     

Recruitment and selection of workers in Israel: The question of disparate impact

Like employers elsewhere, Israeli firms rely on an extensive variety of mechanisms to recruit and select job applicants. Some of these recruitment sources such as word‐of‐mouth referrals, reliance on local employment exchanges, and newspaper advertisements limit information on job openings to Jewish workers, and/or discourage Arab workers who are citizens of Israel from applying. Where Israeli Arab workers do succeed in identifying and applying for job vacancies, their chances of employment are disproportionately impaired by intensive employer use of such selection factors as the personal interview, experience, residency, and army service requirements. Currently the Israeli legal system permits employers to use recruitment and selection criteria which, although neutral on their face, have a discriminatory effect on Arab workers. To provide equal employment opportunity for Israeli Arab workers, Israeli policy should challenge recruitment policies and techniques which reach only a limited segment of the labour force. Similarly, selection criteria shown to have a significantly detrimental effect on Arab hiring rates should be prohibited in the absence of evidence that they are job related. Requiring that standards be affirmatively related to considerations of efficiency and productivity would benefit the Israeli Arab worker, promote the best interest of the employer, and would be reflective of principles of social justice on which basis the State of Israel was founded.     

Contested Citizenship and Social Exclusion: Adolescent Arab American Immigrants' Views of the Social Contract

Drawing from social contract theory, we explore how some adolescent Arab immigrants' (n = 99) sensitivity to the image of their ethnic group as enemies of America colors their interpretation of the social contract. Analyses of data collected in 1997 reveal that those youth who reported that the American media portray Arab people and nations as enemies of the United States are more attuned to personal experiences of prejudice based on their ethnic identity and are more dubious that the tenets of the social contract apply equally across groups. Negative images of Arab Americans were well in place prior to September 11, 2001, a pivotal moment that altered the lives of Arab Americans as well as the discourse on immigration and citizenship.     

Second to fourth digit ratio and male ability in sport: implications for sexual selection in humans

Fetal and adult testosterone may be important in establishing and maintaining sex-dependent abilities associated with male physical competitiveness. There is evidence that the ratio of the length of the 2nd and 4th digits (2D:4D) is a negative correlate of prenatal and adult testosterone. We use ability in sports, and particularly ability in football, as a proxy for male physical competitiveness. Compared to males with high 2D:4D ratio, men with low ratio reported higher attainment in a range of sports and had higher mental rotation scores (a measure of visual–spatial ability). Professional football players had lower 2D:4D ratios than controls. Football players in 1st team squads had lower 2D:4D than reserves or youth team players. Men who had represented their country had lower ratios than those who had not, and there was a significant (one-tailed) negative association between 2D:4D and number of international appearances after the effect of country was removed. We suggest that prenatal and adult testosterone promotes the development and maintenance of traits which are useful in sports and athletics disciplines and in male:male fighting.     

Racism and the politics of signification: Israeli public discourse on racism towards Palestinian citizens

This paper explores the phenomenology of racism using the Israeli situation as a case study to examine if, when and how the concept of ‘racism’ is employed in local media discourse on policy towards Palestinian citizens.

Our central argument is that racism, as a signifier of policy, can be located in the dialectic between denial and affirmation of the category of race, while we link the scope and meanings of practices marked by the media as ‘racism’ to contingent cultural, social and historical conditions. The article proposes the periodization of the relevant discourse into three primary phases: from 1949 to the late 1970s, when the category of racism was ‘prohibited’ in Israeli discourse in the aftermath of the Holocaust; the mid-1980s, when this taboo was broken and the phenomena included in the category of racism expanded accordingly; and the 1990s to 2000, during which racism became an institutionalized, all-encompassing discursive term.