The dialectic between modernization and orientalization: ethnicity and work relations in the 1950s Lakhish region project

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on agricultural planning and work relations in the Lakhish regional settlement project in 1950s Israel. During this period, Jewish immigrants from Arab countries – considered the other of allegedly Modern and Western Israeli society – were sent to settle the new frontier, in order to establish Jewish sovereignty over former Palestinian land. I discuss the ways in which agricultural planning and the organization of the work process created a relationship of dependency between the settlers and the settling institutions. I show, that the plans were shaped by Orientalist assumptions concerning the nature of the settlers, their social and family relationships and their cognitive abilities. I argue that it was these plans and the work relations they engendered, that doomed the settlers from the start, undermining their ability to form functioning cooperative communities. The settlers, however, were not passive objects of state policies but rather displayed patterns of resistance to state regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Israel
• ethnicity
• orientalism
• development
• modernization
• resistance

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on my dissertation research on the planning and settlement of the Lakhish region, at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. I wish to thank my supervisors, Prof. Yehouda Shenhav and Prof. Hanna Herzog, for their devoted guidance and support. Special thanks go to Dafna Hirsch, Gadi Algazi, Gil Eyal, Shira Robinson, the participants of the Jerusalem Van Leer group ‘Encounters Between History and Anthropology’, and the three anonymous reviewers of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a detailed discussion of Israeli sociologists’ approach to ethnic inequality between the 1950s and the 1990s, see Ram (1995).

2. On the international pressure on Israel to relinquish some of the occupied Arab territories and allow the return of Palestinian refugees, see Asya (1994).

3. Tnuva was a cooperative company for the marketing of the agricultural product of the cooperative farms. Hamashbir Hamerkazi was a co-op for the supply and sale of goods.

4. Chaim Pretkin (1961). ‘“Planned Cooperation” in the Lakhish Region Agricultural Settlements.’Arieh Eliav private Archive.

5. A comprehensive study which compared net income from agriculture in collective settlements (mostly populated by Israeli-born settlers) versus ‘regular’ moshavim (most of which were originally moshavim populated by Mizrahi immigrants) in the years 1967/68, discovered that ‘per capita income in the moshavim is estimated at approximately half that in the collective settlement’ (Applebaum et al. 1970, 96).

6. Ra’anan Weitz, from the Lakhish Farm Planning Department, Jerusalem, August 5, 1958, Central Zionist Archive, S15/40300.

7. The publicized dispute occurred between 4 August 1956 and 17 August 1956, and was reported in six different newspapers.

8. The most detailed description appeared in Ha’aretz, on 12 August 1956, but other papers printed similar accounts of the story.

9. Ra'anan Weitz to Levi Eshkol, 21 August 1956, Jewish Agency Archive, column 108, container 974, 43/911258.