Ebook: Implicate Relations: Society and Space in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

In his beautiful booklnvisible eities Italo Calvino writes about the two cities ofValdrada, the one which lies on the shores of a lake, and the other which is reflected in the lake and contains not only the exterior of Valdrada on the shores, but also its interior, and probably its inhabitants. "Valdrada's inhabitants know", writes Calvino, "that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror image . . . and this awareness prevents them from succumbing for a single moment to chance and forgetfulness". Such mirror­ image relations are characteristic of the Israeli-Palestinian relations, and the awareness of this property is, to my mind, one of the most dominant experiences in being 'an Israeli. As an Israeli I can testify that Palestinianism is a permanent resident in the personal and collective consciousness of Israelis, and I have good grounds to suppose that Zionism plays a similar role in the personal and collective consciousness of Palestinians. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is thus not only political, but also very personal, and the account I present below is no exception. It is my personal, and in this respect Israeli, perspective of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, with no pretension to a value-free and objective science.

---

The title of the book -- Implicate Relations -- is suggested as a notion which characterizes the nature of social relations in general and the relations between Israelis and Palestinians in particular. According to it, Israelis and Palestinians, as societies and as individuals, are not definable independently of each other. In a kind of implicate relation one is enfolded within the other to the extent that Palestinian national identity can be seen as a Zionist creation. Implicate relations further implies that societies are socio-spatial entities which come into being and acquire their collective self-consciousness and self-identity through a process of spatial dialectics. As illustrated throughout the discussions in the book, spatial dialectics was the process through which European Jews were driven into an identity crisis once their (spatial) Ghetto walls disintegrated and they thus became conscious of their nationalist-political identity. And it is this process through which, several decades later, the Arabs in Israel were forced into an identity crisis and became conscious of their Palestinian national identity once the Zionists had defined the boundaries of their future Jewish state. It is also the process through which Israelis and Palestinians became engaged in implicate relations. This is illustrated in the book by reference to historical events which have led to the emergence of Israelis and Palestinians as socio-spatial entities, and by means of empirical analyses of Palestinian labour in Israel, Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, and cognititive maps of Israelis and Palestinians. These empirical analyses are based on data collected in three large-scale field surveys among Palestinian workers and job hunters in Israel, and among Israeli settlers in the occupied territories.