Pnina Motzafi-Haller, בקופסאות הבטון : נשים מזרחיות בפריפריה הישראלית/ Bekofsaot Habeton: Nashim Mizrachiyot Baperipheria HaYisraelit, Jerusalem, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2012, 276 pages, $33.00 paperback. ISBN 9789654936507.

As an architect picking up a book about the Israeli periphery, I immediately associated the book’s title–In the Cement Boxes–with the endless rows of modernist public housing that so typically shape the urban landscape of any Israeli “development town”. Twenty-eight development towns were established ex nihilo in the first decade of Israeli statehood, especially in the south and north peripheries (Tzfadia, 2006). Scattering the new towns throughout the Israeli frontier played a pivotal role in an immense national program to settle over one million immigrants, tripling Israel’s population at the time. This plan was carefully crafted to serve the dual goal of outwardly defending state borders while internally Judaizing national space (Yiftachel, 2006). The towns served as primary housing sites for Mizrahi Jewish newcomers, a term which literally translates as Oriental Jews and refers to Jews who migrated to Israel from Middle Eastern and North African countries, who willingly or unwillingly served as the agents carrying out this national task. The long blocks of brut cement housing formed the standard building blocks of this statist project, which worked not only to erase the Palestinian landscape, but also created inter-ethnic hierarchies among Jews of different origins. Soon, the cement blocks came to symbolize the forced marginalization of the Mizrahi Jews relegating them to ongoing poverty and deprivation on the Israeli periphery.

In the intra-Israeli public discourse, Yeruham, which is the focus of Pnina Motzafi-Haller’s book, probably represents this social-spatial reality more than anywhere else. In providing a detailed and sensitive description of the everyday realities of Mizrachi women living in Yeruham, the book offers a fresh perspective on the outcomes of this national project. By paying close attention to how these women describe their own lives, Motzafi-Haller succeeds in deviating from the stereotypical and many times paternalistic discussion about life on the social and geographical periphery.

Throughout the book, Motzafi-Haller describes the physical places that make up Yeruham and analyzes the ways these spaces shape social relationships; the main road, the shopping center with its weekly market, the variety of synagogues, and of course the public housing apartments of the women she visits.  Yet, the cement boxes do not represent any of these everyday spaces. Hers is a metaphor for the multiple limitations and confining boundaries marginalized women on the periphery face, which at times seem impenetrable. In this sense, the cement box is an extreme extension of the famous feminist notion of the glass ceiling, which refers to the hidden limitations that hinder the ability of women to advance their professional careers. Simultaneously, the author’s choice of the cement box aims to criticize this white, middle class centered feminism for its overlooking of poor, ethnically subordinated women. By focusing our attention on Mizrahi women that experience social, geographical, economic and cultural marginalization, Motafi-Haller strives to steer current feminist scholarship away from notions self-reliance and well-being which are entrenched in neoliberal values, and focus it back on questions of promoting equality and social justice (Rottenberg, 2014).

In a clear, straight-forward language, Motzafi-Haller beautifully describes the struggles, thoughts, self-images and internal tensions of five Mizrahi women from the town of Yeruham, located in the Negev desert. All the women were either born in Yeruham or arrived there as immigrants at a young age, and were all reared in the remote southern town. Only one has permanently left Yeruham to live elsewhere. Three of the five women head single households. Each in her own way struggles against the limitations of material poverty, inadequate education and training, limited employment options, and scarcity of resources. Importantly, the selection of the women is not narrowly restricted to those who have the most compelling stories to tell. Rather, it is an analytical choice in which each of the women presents a structural alternative for coping with the confinements the cement box poses on their lives (page 6). Through the participants, we learn about five analytical options. Nurit struggles to survive poverty without giving up social recognition. Efrat uses her process of reinforcing her religious belief and lifestyle to reconstruct gender relations in her family and achieve socio-economic mobility. Rachel constantly juggles between values and discursive systems but cannot break the cycle of dependency on state-welfare. Esty refuses to be a victim of the traps of chronic unemployment, rebels against social conventions but builds her own extensive social net. And Gila, has an ostensible success-storythat  is nonetheless suffused with internal conflicts.

The author, however, refrains from turning these characters into simplistic illustrations of her analytical argument. Quite the opposite, she sensitively depicts the women’s own voices and interpretation of their lives, bringing their personal life-stories to the forefront. She does so by presenting to the reader long, unedited sections of conversations she had with them, and in some cases texts they themselves wrote. Moving smoothly between description and analysis, Mutzafi-Haller also consciously makes an effort to expose and reflect on power-relations not only between the women and the wider systems that subject them to marginalization, but also on the power-laden relationships between researcher and her research-subjects. Indeed, one of the significant contributions of the book to the Mizrahi feminist literature in Israel and in general, is the careful examination of the ways power differences between herself, a Mizrahi, educated, university professor with a similar background, and the women she follows play out in her ability to conduct the research and eventually write the book.

The choice to focus on subordinated women living in the periphery, who have hardly been explored in academic as well as popular literature, opens up a wider discussion on the reproduction of those social and geographical margins. Narrating the women’s stories provides a much wider view on the ongoing processes of social stratification within the Jewish society in Israel, and especially on the question of why the second and third generations of immigrants remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and dependency on the State. It reveals that many of the women experiencing these limitations are aware of the structural barriers they face, and that their inability to break out is not a matter of flawed personal choice. It also exposes the meaningful networks of informal support among the local community.

As an Israeli scholar working on questions of social justice in urban environments, I too am subject to the global regimes of knowledge which dictate that I do most of my reading and writing in English. This is part of what makes reading an anthropology book in one’s own mother tongue such a refreshing experience. Indeed, reading In the Cement Boxes is much of the time more like reading a novel than professional literature, which will hopefully assist this important book to reach a wide readership within and beyond academic circles. 

References

Rottenberg C (2014) The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Cultural Studies 28: 418-37.

Tzfadia E (2006) Public Housing as Control: Spatial Policy of Settling Immigrants in Israeli Development Towns. Housing Studies 21: 523-37.

Yiftachel O (2006) Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.