Abstract
Markowitz offers an ethnographic exploration of the lived and narrated practices of Beer-Shevans as they negotiate their everyday experiences. During the latter part of the twentieth century when Israelis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were frequently confronted with suicide bombings, Beer-Shevans often joked that ‘we are just too insignificant’ for Palestinian militants to waste manpower and materials. But that complacency-in-the-periphery was shattered first in 2004 with a suicide attack and then in 2008 by the development of new long-range missiles in Gaza that reached Beer-Sheva. Ever since, the city and its surroundings have become part of the brutality that has always characterized the Middle East conflict. Told from the perspective of a researcher-citizen, this chapter will illustrate how Beer-Shevans have been adjusting their perceptions and practices of time and space as they go about their daily lives in a steady, yet fluctuating, state of in-betweenness, between peripherality and centrality and peace and war.
Portions of this chapter are based on Fran Markowitz and Natan Uriely’s ‘Shopping in the Negev’ published in 2002 in City and Society 14 (2), 211–236 and on Dafna Shir-Vertesh and Fran Markowitz’s ‘Entre guerre et paix: Israël au jour le jour’ published in 2015 in Ethnologie Française 45 (2), 209–222.
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- 1.
See The State of Israel, Central Bureau of Statistics, ‘Israel in Figures 2012’ www.cbs.gov.il/www/publications/isr_n_n12e.pdf. A long and contentious literature traces, debates and critiques the Ashkenazi/Mizrahi Jewish divide in Israel . Some key texts are Ben-Rafael and Sharot (1991), Yiftachel (2006), Khazzoom (2008).
- 2.
The burial site of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah is the Machpelah Cave in Hebron, 25 miles to the north-east, or halfway to Jerusalem.
- 3.
Publication of the Balfour Declaration shortly followed the first battle of Beer-Sheva. To the joy of most Jews and the anger of most Arabs, the Balfour Declaration officially expressed British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. At the end of World War I, the League of Nations granted its Mandate to Great Britain to govern conflict-ridden Palestine. After 30 years of Arab and Jewish insurgencies, riots, tensions and violence, the United Nations voted to adopt a partition plan for Palestine, and on 14 May 1948, the Jewish State of Israel declared independence just as Britain’s uneasy Mandate was about to end. The new country fought on multiple fronts for its independence against a combined invasion by the neighbouring countries of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, including the second, October 1948, battle of Beer-Sheva.
- 4.
Yiftachel states that, as of 1998, Israel’s development towns (and it is not clear whether or not he is including Beer-Sheva under this rubric) were populated mainly by second-generation Mizrahim, 61 per cent, followed by recent Soviet and Ethiopian olim (19 per cent), veteran Ashkenazim (14 per cent), and Arabs (2 per cent), with the remainder third-generation Israeli-born citizens.
- 5.
I have been a resident of the Beer-Sheva metropolitan area since I relocated to Israel in September 1992 to join the faculty of Ben-Gurion University (BGU). My first apartment was within walking distance of BGU. The next was a ten-minute bus ride away. At the beginning of 2000 I moved to the northern suburb of Meitar. At the turn of the twenty-first century, I developed a research project on shopping in Beer-Sheva with sociologist Natan Uriely (Markowitz and Uriely 2002), and later (2009–2015) teamed up with fellow anthropologist Dafna Shir-Vertesh, when residents of the Beer-Sheva area, ourselves included, lived through three IDF operations while experiencing missile attacks from Gaza (Shir-Vertesh and Markowitz 2015). Most recently, I have returned to the area of shopping by making several visits to Beer-Sheva’s major shopping centres, sometimes alone, and sometimes in the company of research participants who accompanied me to their favourite stores.
- 6.
Beer-Sheva has had an indoor shopping centre, Kenion ha-Negev, since 1988 which quickly became a local landmark. It also usurped the Ottoman-built (not-so) Old City of Beer-Sheva as the region’s sole commercial and entertainment centre (see Markowitz and Uriely 2002, 219–20).
- 7.
Purim is the springtime Jewish holiday that celebrates salvation by Queen Esther and her uncle Mordechai of the Jews of Persia from a plot to kill them by the King’s vizier, Haman. The holiday is celebrated by a public reading of the Book of Esther, and a holiday meal accompanied by an abundance of wine, as well as the offering of charitable donations and gifts of sweets. Since at least the fifteenth century, Jews have taken to the streets and/or synagogues to stage plays, carnivals and masquerades during Purim. In Israel , the streets are full of masqueraders from little babies to very mature men and women, and both secular and religious Jews stage boisterous costume parties.
- 8.
That does not at all mean that local sons and daughters, or their friends or relatives, were not injured or killed as soldiers or civilians in other parts of the country.
- 9.
While this chapter focuses mainly on the experiences of Jewish Beer-Shevans in the rounds of violence that constituted the military operations, there were obviously two sides that were attacking and being attacked, bombing and being bombed. Israelis and Gazans both experienced physical and emotional suffering. Israeli casualties were far fewer than those in Gaza; during Pillar of Defence in 2012 over 160 Palestinians were killed compared with six Israelis, and in the 2014 operation Protective Edge, over 2100 Palestinians were killed in comparison to 73 Israeli casualties.
- 10.
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Markowitz, F. (2018). Betwixt and Between in Beer-Sheva: Consumption and Chronotopes in the Negev. In: Pardo, I., Prato, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64289-5_9
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