Internalization of Israeli-Zionist Othering Processes? Doctoral Researcher Self-Critique -- CANCELLED

In this paper, based on examples taken from recent field work, I intend to self-critique my position as an Ashkenazi-Israeli doctoral student interviewing Palestinian and Mizrahi-Jews on one hand. I am concerned by understanding whether I ended up reproducing othering processes within these interviews. Therefore this paper will first present othering processes within Israeli-Zionist context. I will then present questions such as: Whether holding the interviews, with the Palestinians participants, in Hebrew, thus my mother tongue and the hegemonic dominant one, is at the end of the day my internalization of hegemonic othering processes. How then did this influence the interviews? What dynamics did it generate?

    Social and political positioning are key factors in transformation processes to radical consciousness. Asking Israeli and Palestinian political actors to expose themselves and their consciousness transformation processes, I am thus concerned by my own ethnic/national and gendered position as a researcher. Born to South-African parents,  I have experienced to this day socio-political positioning of an Ashkenazi-Jewish woman in context of armed conflict such as the Israeli case.

    Mechanism of war and militarization create socialization processes which are often expressed in military concepts of superiority and power. Within the Israeli-Zionist context othering processes were first applied to the Palestinians, by Israeli hegemony. However, later with the construction of Israeli state, it was also employed when referring to Mizrahi Jews. This view of the East as aberrant, underdeveloped, and inferior, exists in order to constitute the Occidental self, thus Hegemonic I, as rational, modern, and superior. Israeli Ashkenazi-Jewish identity aims at constructing a western image of self, in order to distance oneself of the representation of the passive, oriental body that might have been their identity in Diasporic Europe and was now projected onto the native Palestinian population and Arab-Jewish migrants.