As a contribution to conceptual debates over 'the secular', particularly its emotional dimensions, I look at practices of self-fashioning, particularly the cultivation and performance of the self as ‘reasonable’. Using the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I argue that ‘secular’ self-fashioning may sometimes have little to do with individuals engaging the secular-religious boundary in a particular society through processes of self-differentiation. I also argue that hiloni cultivation of reasonableness is an emotio-political outcome of a long-standing and unresolved ideological problem within Zionist thought. Reasonableness is not simply an emotional practice of self-cultivation but has also facilitated and rendered opaque practices of Israeli state sovereignty over many aspects of Palestinian life. Secularity has facilitated sovereign governance of Palestinian social life but not through political secularism per se, which further illuminates the intersection between individual ‘secular affect’ and state sovereignty.

This paper explores the growth and significance of the Islamist Movement inside Israel in attracting and mobilizing Arab Israeli religious sentiment and popular support. Despite scant scholarship (Rekhess 1996; Aburaiya, 2004; Rosmer 2012; Larkin and Dumper, 2012; Ghanem & Mustafa (2014 2014), this socio-political movement is helping to forge a new form of Palestinian Islamic resistance — one that crosses political and territorial divides and seeks to challenge Israel both within and outside of its political system. Dynamic and multifaceted, the movement has been subject to internal splits – a Northern and Southern branch was formed in 1996 - and ongoing Israeli state suppression, with the banning of the Northern branch as a ’terrorist organisation’ in 2015. Based on ethnographic research (2014-2016) with officials, community leaders and representatives of the movements relevant education programmes, religious heritage organization (al-Aqsa Association) and civil society charities, this paper offers an empirically rich critique of the Islamist movement, examining its tensions and leadership struggles, and how they have extended their influence from their traditional support base in the North (‘the Arab Triangle’) to the Southern Negev and Jerusalem. This paper argues that the Islamist movement is increasingly shaping and influencing contemporary ‘Arab Israeli’ identity and is providing resistance strategies that blur secular and religious binaries. Relying on research based on three specific sites – Umm al-Fahm, Jerusalem and the Naqab (Beer Sheva) the paper examines how the Islamist movement utilises urban context, community grievances and everyday experiences. Umm al-Fahm, close to Nazareth, remains the stronghold of the Movement's Northern branch led by Sheikh Ra'id Salah, who rejects involvement in Israeli parliamentary elections and has sought to create an ‘Islamic community’ through parallel local power structures. In Jerusalem, the Islamic Movement are increasingly visible through heritage campaigns ('al-Aqsa is in Danger') and charitable committees supporting education, legal aid against house evictions and protection of the Haram al-Sharif (Mourabitat and Mourabitoun). In the Naqab, the Islamic movement have grown in municipal strength, providing Islamic education and legal support for the Arab Bedouin community, from which its Southern branch leader, Sheikh Hamad Abu Daabis now hails. These three contexts provide unique lenses to assess the evolution of the Islamist movement inside Israel and its diverging resistance strategies.

In October 2012, a government-initiated forum took place in the Arab city of Nazareth to promote, in collaboration with local church representatives, the enlistment of Palestinian Christians. Although Christians have, together with Muslims, been historically exempt from the draft since it was first introduced in 1950, some young men have joined up on a voluntary basis. “Why”, as Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh (2003: 6) put it, “have these men elected to engage in behavior widely condemned in their communities? Why have they chosen to serve in the army of a state that colonized them and that is occupying and fighting other Palestinians only a few miles away?” Couched in nationalist language and tropes of “model citizens” or “traitors”, “opportunists” or “dupes”, the absence of statistical data on the number and ethno-religious breakdown of volunteers, has fed rumours and stereotypes about the alleged proclivities of certain communities towards military service. This paper examines the role, and significance, of rumours in these debates and in wider processes of securitization on the margins of a deeply divided society. Focusing on the rumour that Christians “go to get a gun”, this paper seeks to reveal the issues and challenges in framing, and analysing, the complex material realities and political subjectivities of ethno-national minorities living in a highly militarised context.

The Naqab Bedouin are an indigenous community of ca. 200.000 Arab Muslim Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship. Today, after various waves of displacement and expulsion, they predominantly reside in the Northern Naqab region of Southern Israel; ca. half live in state-planned townships, and the other half in villages that remain unrecognised by the Israeli state. In the official state narrative forced urbanisation is commonly framed as ‘modernisation’. The state’s modernisation discourse clings to a classic secular/religious binary: while displaying strong secular undertones, religiosity is permitted as long as it remains within an orthodox institutional framework. Each Bedouin township is characterised by the quartet of (at least partially) state-funded institutions: secular schools, municipalities and hospitals, and Islamic mosques. These institutions, although staffed by Bedouin professionals some of whom struggle to negotiate spaces for alternative narratives and forms of agency in complex ways, overall implement the state’s agenda aimed at disciplining Bedouin residents into docile ‘modern’ citizens of the state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in three Bedouin townships (Rahat, Laqiya and Shqeeb as-Slaam) from 2014-2016 and ca. 80 interviews with Naqab Bedouin women from the Nakba generation, my paper focuses on how these older Bedouin women challenge, circumvent and/or resist (often silently) Israeli state control over their lives. Women from this generation tend to avoid and have little contact with state institutions, and instead maintain and performatively enact their own religious, social and political spaces. In particular women’s everyday religious practices in the field of local medicine and healing (tibb ‘arabi) run parallel and sometimes even counter to both the Israeli secular biomedical healthcare system, and the orthodox Islam as preached in Israel’s mosques. Women’s healing practices such as wet cupping (hijama), treatments against the evil eye (al-hassad) or against children’s fear (khoof) are widespread. Largely practiced by older women, they are sought after and consulted by Bedouin from all generations. As such, they constitute important performances of religious subjectivities that cannot be captured by the binary of ‘secular’ vs. ‘religious', or ‘modern’ vs. ‘traditional’. By continuing, adapting and reshaping their local religious medical practices, women from this generation have maintained their own alternative spaces of social and political power. Going beyond the modernist divide of (orthodox) Islam vs. secularism, they have not been turned into, and become legible as, ‘good modern citizens’ of the Israeli state.