Between November 2006 and May 2007, four "vision documents" for the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel were published. They were put together on the initiative and under the auspices of Arab civil organizations (rather than political parties). These documents deal with the future of the Palestinian Arab population in Israel and propose changes in the character of the state and of its regime. The documents aroused contradictory responses in the media and in the Jewish population, and, to a lesser extent, the Palestinian Arab community. A recent campaign has been launched by the Supreme Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, and Dirasat Arab Center for Law and Policy (a prominent Palestinian NGOs in Israel) to create an alternative civil vision. This project is composed of several layers, which intend to substitute the formal government curriculum of civics for Arab high schools in the Israeli state system. As such, the paper will examine and scrutinize al-Madaniyyat, an alternative guide for Arab high school civics teachers, that was composed and distributed by "Dirasat" on behalf of the Follow-Up Committee. The paper will attempt to answer the question: Is there an alternative civil perception, or even vision for the Palestinian Citizens in Israel, following the decade-old Vision Documents? Has the vision changed since 2006-2007? This civil perception will be examined in light of its historical contents and contexts.

In early 1943, two Lebanese customs agents working in the Khirbet post along the Lebanon-Palestine border were caught colluding with a local onion smuggler from Marjayoun. A military tribunal was convened to assess the extent of the border agents’ roles in the smuggling, and how they came to be involved. For the French, the incident was in itself relatively insignificant, involving a single truckload of onions destined for the Palestinian town of Metulla. Of more significant concern was the breach in the mandatory state’s edifice as its agents abandoned their duties in favor of corrupt dealings with a smuggler. This is reflected in the disparate punishments between the smuggler and the customs agents: the former received a fine, while the agents received lengthy prison sentences. I examine this case of smuggling and the subsequent French investigation in order to highlight a conflict that runs throughout the Mandate period. On the one hand the French Mandate deployed institutional apparatuses to interpolate Lebanese citizens and provide a material presence for the burgeoning Lebanese state. On the other hand, local conceptions of space persisted while being excluded from or radically transformed by the formation of states in the region following World War I. With the establishment of the Mandates, regional trade networks spanning al-Sham became international trade routes. Mandatory authorities understood that the effective implementation of border controls was an integral component to reifying the state in the minds of colonial citizens. Thus, the onion smuggling investigation highlights the failure of a mandate institution to make the Lebanese state “real.” At the same time, this episode demonstrates enduring resistance to the state, its institutions, and practices on the part of Lebanese citizens. Through the example of the onion smuggling investigation in 1943, I argue that a contradiction was carried within the successful establishment of Lebanon. Though the Mandate succeeded in reifying the Lebanese state at the expense of alternative possibilities for Arab self-rule, that success did not supplant the very practices that made alternatives to the Lebanese state viable, attractive and relevant to the people. While South Lebanon was fashioned out of the region historically known as Jabal ‘Amil, the material practices that defined Jabal ‘Amil remained, undermining the Lebanese state from the outset. This contradiction enabled a form of cynicism in which the state was “real” insofar as it was to be avoided and skirted, but not necessarily abided by and obeyed.

Orientalism posits a global race/gender divide in which women from the cultural west are more liberated than women from the cultural east. While much has been said about how this discursive structure can trap putatively eastern women in traditional roles, Orientalist contrasts likely limit women on the western side of the divide as well. For example, the belief that one is from a community distinguished by its gender egalitarianism can blind women to the sexism they experience in their own communities. In this paper, I use life stories to explore feminine self presentations among Polish and Iraqi Jewish women who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s, and who are matched on class background and gender roles prior to immigration. In Israel of the 1950s, benefits accrued to those who appeared western, and both groups of women came to Israel with the cultural capital necessary to convincingly self-present as western. However East European immigrants like Poles were regarded as already part of the western sector, while Iraqi Jews were classified as eastern. The contrast between the two groups of immigrants thus enables us to ask: in this environment in which westernness matters, how is being perceived as already-western associated with gender presentations? I show that while the two groups’ educational and occupational experiences in Israel were largely similar, the Poles also self present as traditionally feminine in ways the Iraqis do not, by stressing their homecenteredness, delicacy, personal style, passivity, self sacrifice, and modesty. The respondents’ own words suggest that this difference is tied to the strategies they use to highlight their western identities. With gender traditionalism an omnipresent eastern stereotype, most Iraqi narratives construct western by stressing the immigration’s value in opening up new options for women. Poles, whose gender relations have never faced the same scrutiny, construct western by highlighting continuity between their current behavior and their lives in 1930s Europe, preserving older feminine ideals in the process.

Since the ouster of Tunisian president Zine El Abiding Ben Ali in 2011, the country’s borders have become more porous, allowing for increased unregulated trade and leading the government to present Kasserine, a province on the Algerian border, as a particular challenge to its efforts to establish the rule of law. Historically, Kasserine has borne the brunt of systematic socioeconomic marginalization traceable to the formation of the modern Tunisian state that ended up privileging the country’s coastal strip to the detriment of the interior regions. With high levels of poverty and unemployment and a dearth of state investments in socioeconomic infrastructures, some Kasserinians have turned to el contra, a label used by residents to refer to what the government calls “illegal smuggling,” along the Algerian border known as el-had as a source of employment and as a survival strategy. But with the 2013 rise of an armed insurgency in the nearby Chaambi mountains, media reports have portrayed the province as a hotbed of youth radicalization, conflating terrorism with smuggling, the lifeline of many impoverished families, and stigmatizing residents of the province (Meddeb 2015; 2016) by associating them with a state of illegality. By examining Kasserinians’ involvement in el contra, this paper aims to examine how the multiple and competing understandings of states of (il)legality and their attendant conditions of possibility are produced as well as disrupted at the geographical and conceptual margins of the state (Poole and Das 2004). Combining ethnographic research with media analysis, this paper asks: to what extent and in what ways do claims about and contestations over (il)legality and (its relationship to) “legitimate” citizenship constitute technologies of power and governance (Foucault 1975; Hibou 2006)? This work seeks to move away from analysis of smuggling through the optic of the resistance/compliance binary and to recognize the ways in which the very notions of legality and illegality constitute fields of contestation and are unstable and heterogeneous constructs undergirded by an ethics that need to be historicized (Roitman 2005).