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Politics and Political History
In this book, Erez Tzfadia, a geographer specializing in public policy, and Haim Yacobi, an architect working on political science, come together to discuss Israel's production of space since its founding in 1948. In the last few years, many social scientists have sought a model that explains the internal ethnoclass divisions and stratification within Israeli society, including the Arab-Israeli community. Rethinking Israeli Space is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to offer a new analytical model of public space based on an examination of the production of Israeli peripheries and relying on postcolonial theory. The authors' argument is fairly straightforward: Israel is a country divided and stratified by ethnicity and class, and this characteristic has been reinforced by spatial policies. Through a variety of case studies, they aim to show how peripheries have been produced and identities formed in these spaces. They also aim to provide a brief historical overview of the transformations that occurred in the last few decades following the succession of sociopolitical models from modernism to multiculturalism via neoliberalism, adopted in relation to the production of peripheries and identities.
Tzfadia and Yacobi do not hide their opinions in regard to the spatial policies of the State of Israel. In their view, Israeli policymakers clearly implemented a colonial project based on ethnonationalism that evolved to embed newer practices such as neoliberalism and multiculturalism. The authors certainly deserve credit for openly discussing such a complex and contested topic. However, they prove less bold when making reference to the Palestinian refugees. The latter do not constitute a major issue in this book, which signals that some events and definitions are still taboo in Israeli academia.
In the first chapter, the authors discuss the establishment of twenty-eight small towns between 1949 and 1963 in remote regions of the...