The Arab Lecturer on a Zionist Campus: Student Practices Replicating National Hegemony

Abstract

Minority groups tend to experience the academic campus as unpleasant and excluding. Relevant literature attempts to analyze the position of these groups, using terms such as ‘race’ and investigating how higher education institution mechanisms replicate the inequality between the minority group and the hegemonic majority population. In Israel, unresolved problems cause continuing tension between two national groups: citizens who are members of the Palestinian Arab minority (PAMI) and citizens from the Jewish majority. This article focuses on relations between PAMI and Jews on Israeli campuses by drawing upon insights from American research, but it replaces the term ‘race’ with ‘nationality.’ Academe is the only place in Israel where the Arab lecturer is in a position of power vis-à-vis the Jewish student. The study presents this encounter from the viewpoint of the lecturer, drawing on data from interviews with 56 PAMI lecturers in public and private Israeli universities and colleges. The findings indicate that Jewish students use various strategies to divest Arab lecturers of their elevated status in academe.

Key Words:

• Arab minority in Israel
• dispossession of status
• indigenous people
• Israeli academe
• racialization of the academic institution

Acknowledgments

We thank all the Arab lecturers who agreed to participate in the study.

Disclosure Statement

The authors reported no conflict of interests in the research and writing of this article.

Notes

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2 Excluding the Palestinian Arab population in East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

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12 Ariella Friedman (2019) Dialogue on Campus: Jews and Arabs Sharing Common Space (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad).

13 Mustafa, Formations in Higher Education.

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25 Knesset, Israel (2018) Basic Law: The Nation State of the Jewish People. Available at: HYPERLINK "https://m.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf"https://m.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf

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35 Ibid., pp. 222–243.

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41 Ibid.

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47 Tatour, Citizenship as Domination.

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50 Tatour, Citizenship as Domination.

51 Yiftachel, Democracy in Israel.

52 Ghanem & Mustafa, Palestinians in Israel.

53 Abu-Rabia-Queder, Epistemology of Surveillance.

54 Oren Yiftachel & Haim Yacobi (2003) Urban Ethnocracy: Ethnicization and the Production of Space in an Israeli ‘Mixed City’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21(6), pp. 673–693; I. Shdema, N. Haj-Yahya & I. Schnell (2018) The Social Space of Arab Residents of Mixed Israeli Cities, Geografiska Annaler Series B, Human Geography, 100(4), pp. 359–376.

55 Maayan, From a Racialized Space.

56 Bäuml, Zeevi & Totry, Jewish and Arab Students.

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58 Ali, Representation of Arab Citizens; Mustafa, Israeli Universities and Academia.

59 Friedman, Dialogue on Campus.

60 Sylvia Hurtado, Jeffrey F. Milem, Alma R. Clayton-Pederson & Walter R. Allen (1998) Enhancing Campus Climates for Racial/Ethnic Diversity: Educational Policy and Practice, The Review of Higher Education, 21(3), pp. 279–302.

61 Abu-Rabia-Queder, Epistemology of Surveillance.

62 Elizabeth Levi Paluck, Roni Porat, Chelsey S. Clark & Donald P. Green (2021) Prejudice Reduction: Progress and Challenges, Annual Review of Psychology, 72(1), pp. 533–560.

63 Abu-Rabia-Queder, Epistemology of Surveillance.