Gershon Shafir

Biographic Data

ID170232
NAMEGershon Shafir
GIVEN NAMESGershon
FAMILY NAMEShafir
SIGNATURESHAFIR G
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of California San Diego
ORCID0000-0002-6645-9936
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS45
TOTAL CITATIONS178
AUTHOR COUNT40
EDITOR COUNT5
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1984
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX7

  • Privilege Versus Right: Vigilantism Against Israel's Palestinian Citizens

    Open AccessGershon Shafir, Beatrice Charlotte Waterhouse et al.ARTICLESociology Lens2026References: 11

    This article addresses three core questions: What is the social origin of vigilantism? How do vigilantes justify extra‐legal violence and intimidation? What are vigilantism's long‐term effects? The analysis focuses on a period in which Israel's Palestinian‐Arab citizens increased their access to legal rights, social mobility, spatial integration, and political visibility. It then maps Lehava's violent backlash to this progress onto Stanley Cohen'…

  • Where were the listeners? Witnessing among Holocaust survivors

    Gershon ShafirARTICLEJournal of Human Rights2022References: 5

    This article questions two explanations given to Holocaust survivors’ prolonged silence about their experiences. The first highlights psychological impediments from the extreme trauma that set the survivor apart from his or her social environment. The second focuses on linguistic barriers—the limits of language itself—to adequately express the experience of the trauma and the emotions it generated. The author demonstrates that silence was not fol…

  • Politics of hope and populist backlash: Kurds in Turkey and Palestinians in Israel

    Gershon Shafir, Şevin SağnıçARTICLEBritish Journal of Middle Eastern…2022Cited by: 1References: 14

    Turkey and Israel are known, respectively, for profound conflicts with their Kurdish and Palestinian minorities. Economic and legal liberalization waves raised hopes for expanded civic and socioeconomic inclusion but instead both countries swayed to populism. "Why were the Kurdish and Palestinian politics of hope destroyed and what did it take to do so?" We argue that the HDP and Joint List's electoral in the 2010s threatened Erdoğan's and Netany…

  • Economic Liberalization and the Breakup of the Histadrut’s Domain

    Lev Luis Grinberg, Gershon ShafirCHAPTERNew Israel2018

    The most striking display of the Histadrut's authority occurred on May 1, 1980, when masses followed its call against the Likud government's economic liberalization and participated in one of the largest demonstration in Israel's history. This chapter analyzes the economic, political, organizational, and trade union-related transformations which led to the crisis of the Histadrut. The Histadrut was constructed from its inception as a proto-state …

  • The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization

    Gershon Shafir, Yoav PeledBOOKNew Israel2018

  • Introduction: The Socioeconomic Liberalization of Israel

    Gershon Shafir, Yoav PeledCHAPTERNew Israel2018

    This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book presents the transformation of the Israeli economy and society since 1974. It focuses on the liberalization of two key sectors of the Israeli economy, namely: telecommunications and energy, and illustrates that liberalization, in Israel as elsewhere, is a much more complex and complicated process than simply the retreat of the state and the expansion of th…

  • From Overt to Veiled Segregation: Israel's Palestinian Arab Citizens in the Galilee

    Open AccessGershon ShafirARTICLEInternational Journal Middle East…2018Cited by: 20References: 7

    This article's geographical focus is the Galilee, Israel's only region with a Palestinian Arab majority. Its sociological focus is the drive to Judaize this region, the mirror image of its de-Arabization, which I anchor in Israelis’ morbid fear of settler colonial reversal. Although direct legal discrimination—restriction of movement under a military government and exclusion from publicly administered land—was banned by the government and the Hig…

  • A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict

    Gershon ShafirBOOKHalf Century of Occupation2017

    The Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the world’s most polarizing confrontations. Its current phase, Israel’s “temporary” occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, turned a half century old in June 2017. In these timely and provocative essays, Gershon Shafir asks three questions—What is the occupation, why has it lasted so long, and how has it transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? His cogent answers illuminate how we got he…

  • Lessons and Legacies of the War On Terror: From moral panic to permanent war

    Gershon Shafir, Everard Meade et al.BOOKLessons and legacies of the war…2013

  • Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel

    Mark Andrew LeVine, Mark Levine et al.BOOKStruggle and Survival in…2012

    Too often, the study of Israel/Palestine has focused on elite actors and major events. Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel takes advantage of new sources about everyday life and the texture of changes on the ground to put more than two dozen human faces on the past and present of the region. With contributions from a leading cast of scholars across disciplines, the stories here are drawn from a variety of sources, from stories passed down t…

  • Capitalist Binationalism in Mandatory Palestine

    Open AccessGershon ShafirARTICLEInternational Journal Middle East…2011Cited by: 4References: 15

    In response to the outbreak of the Arab Revolt of 1936, a coterie of five prominent entrepreneurs and intellectuals in the Mandatory Jewish community formulated a capitalist binationalist resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This paper examines the genesis of and debate over the little-known Concord they proposed and compares it with better-known liberal and socialist binationalist plans. “The Five,” as they came to be known, were the …

  • The Miscarriage of Peace: Israel, Egypt, the United States, and the "Jarring Plan" in the Early 1970s

    Gershon ShafirARTICLEIsraeli Studies Review2006References: 4

    This article asks whether the Yom Kippur War was avoidable. The intense diplomatic efforts of the 1971-1973 years that are examined include plans and counterplans offered by special United Nations representative Gunnar Jarring, US Secretary of State William Rogers, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The article concludes that since settlement was the method of Is…

  • The Globalization of Rights: From Citizenship to Human Rights

    Gershon Shafir, Alison BryskARTICLECitizenship Studies2006Cited by: 13References: 18

    Globalization is shifting the balance away from membership-based citizenship towards universal human rights, thus we ask: how are new human rights generated? We argue that the movement for human rights follows on the heels of the much older and richer tradition of citizenship, as can be seen from the fact that many of the new claims put forward by human rights activists seek to define traditional citizenship rights as universal human rights. Most…

  • People Out of Place

    Alison Brysk, Gershon ShafirBOOKPeople Out Of Place2004

    Part 1: Framework 1. Globalization and the Citizenship Gap Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir 2. Citizenship and Human Rights In An Era of Globalization Gershon Shafir Part 2: Producing Citizenship 3. Constituting Political Community Ronnie Lipschutz 4. Latitudes of Citizenship Aihwa Ong Part 3: Constructing Rights 5. Agency on a Global Scale: Rules, rights and the European Union David Jacobson and Galya Benarieh Ruffer 6. International Law and Citi…

  • Reading Palestine-Israel on Coloniality and Other Paradigms

    Kaylin Goldstein, Gershon Shafir et al.ARTICLEMiddle East Report2002

  • Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship

    Open AccessGershon Shafir, Yoav PeledBOOKBeing Israeli2002Cited by: 1

    A timely study by two well-known scholars offers a theoretically informed account of the political sociology of Israel. The analysis is set within its historical context as the authors trace Israel's development from Zionist settlement in the 1880s, through the establishment of the state in 1948, to the present day. Against this background the authors speculate on the relationship between identity and citizenship in Israeli society, and consider …

  • Business in politics: Globalization and the search for peace in South Africa and Israel/Palestine

    Gershon ShafirARTICLEIsrael Affairs1998Cited by: 1References: 3

    (1998). Business in politics: Globalization and the search for peace in South Africa and Israel/Palestine. Israel Affairs: Vol. 5, Israel: The Dyanamics of Change and Continuity, pp. 103-120

  • Citizenship and stratification in an ethnic democracy

    Gershon Shafir, Yoav PeledARTICLEEthnic and Racial Studies1998Cited by: 68References: 8

    A theoretical framework of multiple citizenship discourses is proposed for analysing the transformation of the structure of ethnic relations in the yishuv and Israel. An historical overview indicates how Israel's 'incorporation regime' for its main ethnic and religious groups - ashkenazim, mizrachim, Orthodox-Jews, citizen and non-citizen Palestinians - was constituted through a hierarchical combination of three citizenship discourses: a collecti…

  • Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914

    Gershon ShafirBOOKLand, Labor and the Origins of…1996

    Gershon Shafir challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise. He argues that it was not the imported Zionist ideas that were responsible for the character of the Israeli state, but the particular conditions of the local conflict between the European "settlers" and the Palestinian Arab population

  • Israeli Society: A Counterview

    Gershon ShafirARTICLEIsrael Studies1996Cited by: 2References: 2

    One of my formative experiences as a sociologist took place in my last year as an undergraduate student while attending, for the first time, the annual congress of the Israeli Sociological Association. S.N. Eisenstadt, the keynote speaker of the congress, which was held at Haifa University in 1971, held forth at length on "social differentiation" within Israeli society. It was a member of the audience who respectfully reminded him that just a few…

  • Israeli Decolonization and Critical Sociology

    Gershon ShafirARTICLEJournal of Palestine Studies1996Cited by: 2

  • Israeli Decolonization and Critical Sociology

    Gershon ShafirARTICLEJournal of Palestine Studies1996Cited by: 5References: 1

    For many years, narratives about Israeli state building, especially in Israeli academic works, followed one of two plots. The first, written mainly by social scientists, presented the story of the Zionist immigrants who built their institutions according to their ideals and ideologies-mostly socialist ideas imported from the Pale of Settlement-and who were occasionally in disagreement with other immigrants having different blueprints for the stat…

  • New Historiography

    Gershon ShafirARTICLEJournal of Palestine Studies1996

  • New Historiography: Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900. . Beshara Doumani

    Gershon ShafirARTICLEJournal of Palestine Studies1996

  • Immigrants and Nationalists: Ethnic Conflict and Accommodation in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Latvia, and Estonia

    José Casanova, Gershon ShafirARTICLEContemporary Sociology A Journal…1996