abstract
Social researchers have extensively addressed the immigration of one million Russian speakers to Israel/Palestine over the past twenty-five years. However, the immigrants’ incorporation into the Israeli occupation regime and the ongoing colonisation of Palestine have rarely been questioned as such. In the interviews informing this article, Russian-speaking immigrant women living in Arab-Palestinian communities discuss their complex relations with Palestinian, Jewish-Israeli and Russian-Israeli communities. Sharing a background with Russian-speaking Jewish Israelis on the one hand, and marital kinship ties to Palestinians on the other, these women encounter multiple boundaries of territory and identity in their everyday lives. Drawing on feminist border thinking, I explore these encounters as a navigation through geopolitical and epistemic borderlands in a dense colonial reality. I am particularly interested in the potential of such an exploration to question essentialism and destabilise binary ethno-national categories of identity, such as Arab/Jew and Israeli/Palestinian, that dominate not only hegemonic but also emancipatory discourses. These binary divisions are not a straightforward outcome of political regimes but rather the result of ongoing border-making processes, which are vulnerable to disorder and disruption. This perspective aims to enrich understandings of the roles that gendered ethno-national identities play in sustaining the colonial relations of power in Israel/Palestine.
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Notes
Names and places have been changed to protect privacy.
Jewish communities in these regions of the FSU differed from Ashkenazi Jews in language and tradition. Bukharan Jews resided in Central Asia, their name deriving from the Emirate of Bukhara, which existed until 1920 in today’s Uzbekistan. Caucasus Jews, also known as Mountain Jews, are descendants of Iranian Jews who settled in Azerbaijan and in today’s Russian republics in the Caucasus region, such as Chechnya and Dagestan. It should be noted that Georgian Jews living in the region also differ from Caucasus Jews in origins and culture.
Literally ‘territories’, Hebrew shorthand for Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
It is not uncommon for Russian-speaking immigrants from post-Soviet countries to be identified as ‘Russians’ in Palestine, Israel and other host societies, with no differentiation among Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and even countries of Central Asia, like Kazakhstan. Self-identification among post-Soviet immigrants is a complex and highly dynamic process, differentiated among the countries and national contexts, and influenced by their reassessment of the Soviet past and by the present developments in relations with Russia, among other factors.
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acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Centre for Gender Studies conference ‘Gender and the colonial’ held on 13–14 May 2015 at SOAS, University of London. The author wishes to express her gratitude to the conference organisers and the Feminist Review Collective for their encouragement and commitment to supporting young researchers, to Dr Carola Hilfrich and Professor Adriana Kemp for their invaluable intellectual guidance in the research process, and to the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and insightful suggestions.
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Michaeli, I. immigrating into the occupation: Russian-speaking women in Palestinian societies. Fem Rev 120, 20–36 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0136-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0136-5