Post-doctoral fellows research 2022-2024
Appraising Conflict: Property Valuations and Urban Governance in East Jerusalem
Uri Ansenberg
In the context of East Jerusalem’s contested urban landscape, this research explores the complex role of property appraisals amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By examining the Israeli Property Arbitrament Mechanism (PAM) and employing an ethnographic approach, the study seeks to uncover how techno-economic knowledge mediates geopolitical tensions through the valuation of property. This investigation aims to bridge political urban studies and valuation practice studies, offering insights into the interplay of legal, economic, and political factors in urban governance. The research contributes to understanding the nuanced ways in which property appraisals serve as instruments of control and negotiation, potentially informing more equitable approaches to urban governance in contested cities.
Hospitals as Frontlines: Palestinian Physicians and the Politics of Recognition on the Pandemic Frontlines in Israel
Guy Shalev
This research is concerned with medicine’s ethical framework of benevolence, universality, and political neutrality and how it affects social dynamics in the extreme political conditions of Israel/Palestine. It consider the Israeli space of medical practice as exceptional, not because it is politically neutral, but rather because its perception as such enables different modes of imagining, enforcing, resisting, and re-inscribing colonial politics.
Guy’s interest in medicine’s eminent ethical framework and professional capital and its role in political structures also drives his current two major projects. The first project, entitled Doctors and the State, addresses the moments when medical doctors and doctors’ organizations respond to state-led political agendas as agents of ethical standards, torture, humanitarianism, and personhood. Funded by the Dan David Young Researcher Fellowship in Bioethics, he studies the case of the struggle against the force-feeding of hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners in Israel. He looks into various solidarity networks of physicians in the power struggle between medical professionals and the Israeli state and examined doctors’ call for conscientious objection and the moral and political justifications they employed. He analyzes the acts of three networks of doctors: (1) the Israeli Medical Association, which invoked ideas of universal medical ethics and global networks of professional solidarity in resistance to force-feeding; (2) Civil society organizations, led by Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, which advocated for prisoners’ political rights; and (3) Palestinian physicians with Israeli citizenship who resisted in national solidarity with their non-citizen compatriots. A rare case of physicians’ participation in the highly politicized Israeli ‘security discourse,’ these three solidarity networks gained different degrees of legitimacy in the public sphere. Guy shows how medical ethics, the ethos of medical neutrality, and ideas of humanistic medicine played a role in forming and mobilizing professional solidarities.
The second project, entitled Hospitals as Frontlines, is a collaborative study based in the UK and Israel and is in preliminary stages. Together with Dr. Gry Wester from King’s College London, they examine the increased visibility of minority health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to discourses of exclusion in British and Israeli societies, and the possibilities and limitations of the medical sphere as a political arena for advocating and enacting social change. The Israel-based research was also funded by the Truman Institute.
In Israel, when the pandemic threat became imminent, leaders and commentators used militaristic jargon to address the “war on corona” and the “heroes” on the medical frontlines. But since a fifth of Israel’s healthcare workers are Palestinian citizens, Israeli heroism took on a new face. This research-in-progress includes interviews with Palestinian physicians and political activists, and media analysis. The study considers the experiences and perspectives of Palestinian physicians in moments of health crisis and in light of unprecedented visibility as Palestinians in the Jewish-Israeli public. Particularly, in the context of public campaigns that seized upon this increased visibility to challenge the marginalization of Palestinians by featuring Palestinian doctors saving Israeli lives. This visibility highlighted the limitations of the recognition of the Palestinian minority in Israel and the potential and constraints of the medical field as an arena for a politics of recognition.
Theorizing Transition in Intractable Conflict: From Violence and Subjugation to Parity and Cooperation in Israel/Palestine.
Limor Yehuda
Limor was chosen by the Center PIs for 2022-23 academic year. In her research she aims to add to existing understandings regarding transitional processes from conflict and domination to peaceful arrangements of power-sharing. Based on an overview of socio-legal processes in Israel/Palestine during the last two decades, she seeks to identify those processes that increase, or may increase, the likelihood of parity and cooperation in the local context and those that may decrease them.
In recent years a new paradigm for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been consolidated in the academic literature and within civil society discourse. The new paradigm is based on power-sharing arrangements — in the form of a confederation between two independent and sovereign states or through a bi-national (consociational and/or federal) state. While power-sharing arrangements are usually viewed as a pragmatic solution for group conflicts, they also play a substantial role in remedying injustices in such places: first, as they can address group-based inequalities and political marginalization; second, as they provide an institutional framework within which ex-rival groups can participate and negotiate in a context of non-domination. Thus, power-sharing arrangements should be viewed not only as a pragmatic tool for ending violent group-based conflicts but also as an integral element of justice in political transitions.
According to the proponents of the new paradigm, power-sharing arrangements are a promising framework for addressing root causes and root injustices of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that cannot be addressed within the traditional two-state solution. However, existing accounts consider the conditions in Israel/Palestine as unlikely to facilitate the adoption of power-sharing arrangements, either within a bi-national state or within a confederation of two-states.
Main factors for this appraisal include the extreme imbalance of power between the national groups and the cleavages of nationality, language and religion which reinforce rather than crosscut. Although the appraisal seems sound, it does not fully account for the mixed internal/external nature of the conflict, and especially does not explore the ways in which social, economic and legal processes, among the national and international political elites, social mobilisers or grassroots, may change the background conditions and support parity and cooperation in Israel/Palestine.
Managing the COVID-19 Epidemic Locally: A bird’s eye view of the challenges faced by local governments, local responses, and the differential local needs of municipalities in Israel
Danielle Zaychik
This research aims to describe the experience of local governments managing the COVID-19 epidemic, with a focus on five key areas: crisis management, public obedience, law enforcement, vaccinations, and cooperation with other agencies and organizations. The research surveys local governments in Israel about the challenges and approaches taken with regards to these topics, with the goal of identifying differences between localities and understanding how to better tailor policies and central government support to effectively serve local interests.
Making the Victim of Terrorism: Contested meanings and cultural shifts in the emergences of a new social category
Ben Bornstein
Ben’s research contributes to the understanding of current global victimhood, looking into wide-scale political crises in the world, such as wars in Syria, Ukraine, and Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as major natural disasters such as the Turkey-Syria earthquake. Dealing with public support for victims poses a unique challenge for societies in the face of these atrocities. While the global legal norms regarding compensation are more advanced than ever, we also face a wave of worldwide political instability and a democratic retreat that reshapes the relationship between states and their citizens. Examining the field of victim compensation would help understand the relationship between these cultural-political changes and the ways in which states perceive ongoing crises and deal with their consequences.
