Full Description
In Wrapped in the Flag of Israel, Smadar Lavie analyzes the racial and gender justice protest movements in the State of Israel from the 2003 Single Mothers' March to the 2014 New Black Panthers and explores the relationships between these movements, violence in Gaza, and the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran.
Lavie equates bureaucratic entanglements with pain-and, arguably, torture-in examining a state that engenders love and loyalty among its non-European Jewish women citizens while simultaneously inflicting pain on them. Weaving together memoir, auto-ethnography, political analysis, and cultural critique, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that is both lyrical and provocative. Lavie's focus on the often-minimized Mizraḥi population juxtaposed with the state's monolithic culture suggests that Israeli bureaucracy is based on a theological notion that inserts the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship.
In this revised and updated edition Lavie connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War, providing an extensive afterword that focuses on the developments in Mizraḥi feminist politics and culture between 2014 and 2016 and its relation to Palestinians.
Contents
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Marching on Jerusalem with Israel's Single Mothers "Reaganomics," Ḥok HaHesderim, and the Oslo Boomtime
The Hudna
Knafonomics: Vicky and I
On Ethnographic Data
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel's Bureaucracy: A Road Map
Chapter 1. Left Is Right, Right Is Left: Zionism and Israel's Single Mothers Ḥad Horit: Notes on the Hebrew Etymology of Single Motherhood
The Typology of Israel's Single Mothers
On Zionism
Why Mizraḥim Support the Right Wing
Why Mizraḥi Feminists' Hands Are Tied
Chapter 2. Protesting and Belonging: When the Agency of Identity Politics Becomes Impossible Figurations of Agency
Protesting and Belonging: An Argument in Six Parts
Capturing and Conveying Elusive Bureaucratic Torture
Chapter 3. Take 1: The GendeRace Essence of Bureaucratic Torture Classificatory Schemes of Bureaucratic Logic
Negative Communitas: Bureaucracy's "Tough Love"
The Plus-Minus Model of Torture
The Zone of Repulsion: Plus-Plus Relationships of Pain
Documents as Implements of Torture
Bureaucracy's Essence: GendeRace
Response to Bureaucracy: Bracketing
Impossible Articulation, Impossible Agency
Chapter 4. Take 2: Ideology, Welfare, and Single Mothers
Chapter 5. Take 3: Diary of a Welfare Mother
Chapter 6. The Price of National Security Knafoland-The End
This Is Exactly What We Did
Epilogue: Israel, Summer 2011
Afterword(s): Gaza 2014 and the Mizraḥi Predicament Bureaucratic Torture: When Agency Becomes Impossible
Agency
Torture
One People One Heart: The War on Gaza 2014
The New Black Panthers, or HaLo Neḥmadim
Ḥok HaHesderim 2014
Labor Hill B-Jamusin
The Ḥamas Salary Fiasco
Operation Brother's Keeper
The War on Gaza-Protective Edge
Under the Smokescreen of War
Elections 2015: The Center Moves Further to the Right
The Mizraḥi Cultural Renaissance
The Steady Drumbeat of Eternal Return
Acknowledgments
Notes
Glossary of Hebrew, Arabic, and Yiddish Terms
References
Index
