M Kaminer
Biographic Data
| ID | 38691 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Kaminer |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Kaminer |
| SIGNATURE | KAMINER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1212-3345 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
“Matter in the Hands of the Maker”
As Zionist cultural production reveals, class formation in Palestine/Israel is bound to a racialized perception of Arabs as “natural workers”—hardworking yet unskilled, humble yet unruly. Besides Palestinians, this framework extends to Mizrahi Jews, rendering the two groups uncomfortably akin and structurally antagonistic. Analyzing texts produced at key moments in Zionist history, this article relates changes in representations of Mizrahi worker…
Capitalist Colonial
For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel's arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labor-Zionist commitment to abstaining from hiring outside labor. But beginning in the late 1980s, the region's agrarian economy was rapidly transformed by the removal of state protections, a shift to export-oriented monoculture, and an influx of disenfranchised, ill-paid migrants from northeast Thailand (Isaan). Capitalist Colonial , Matan Kamine…
“No Foreign Workers, No Agriculture, No Region”
There is perhaps no more paradigmatically settler-colonial activity than agriculture, especially in the Palestinian/Israeli context. Zionist strategists perceived the takeover of farmland from indigenous cultivators as a primary goal of their colonising project, pursuing it eagerly through purchase until the war of 1948, and primarily through violence since then. More than an economic sector, agriculture has served a strategic role in consolidati…
The Abrahamic Ideology
This article examines the geopolitical landscape organised by the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain under US sponsorship, by exploring their namesake’s status as the common ancestor of Jews/Israelis and Muslims/Arabs through his sons Isaac and Ishmael. I begin by presenting the background and significance of the Accords, and show how despite its US-Christian origins, their nomenclature was enthusiastically receiv…
Projectland
Saving the face of the Arabah
Since the 1990s, Israeli agricultural settlements in the remote Central Arabah region have relied heavily on the cheap labor power of Thai migrant workers. Yet the agrarian settler-colonial movement to which these settlers belong has historically rejected such "foreign labor" as a moral threat to the collective. Thai employees are thus enjoined not only to plant and pick vegetables in sweltering greenhouses, but also to enlist their own cultural …
The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism
Agricultural settlement geared to capitalist commodity production and accompanied by massive ecological interventions has historically been central to the Zionist colonial project of creating a permanent Jewish presence in the “Land of Israel.” The hyperarid southern region known as the Central Arabah is an instructive edge-case: in the 1960s, after the expulsion of the bedouin population, cooperative settlements were established here and vegetab…
At the zero degree / Below the minimum
Giving them the slip
In a 2013 Facebook post, Israel’s then Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett (2013; my translation) wrote: 'If an Israeli employer knows that he has to pay every worker the minimum wage, give him one day off a week, pay overtime and produce pay slips – he just won’t employ infiltrators and foreign workers. He will choose an Israeli worker. This is how we dry the main fuel which sets fire to the problem of infiltrators in south Tel Aviv and across t…
The Oksana Affair
In volatile situations, resistance can often take an ambiguous form which demonstrates the power of the dominated but avoids provoking repression. Such ambiguity cannot be simply dispelled by ethnographers; rather, it must be acknowledged and accounted for through a methodology that is willing to accommodate uncertainty while demonstrating the researcher's good faith and sufficient knowledge. I show how this can be done by narrating an episode of…
Saving the face of the Arabah
Since the 1990s, Israeli agricultural settlements in the remote Central Arabah region have relied heavily on the cheap labor power of Thai migrant workers. Yet the agrarian settler-colonial movement to which these settlers belong has historically rejected such "foreign labor" as a moral threat to the collective. Thai employees are thus enjoined not only to plant and pick vegetables in sweltering greenhouses, but also to enlist their own cultural …
The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism
Agricultural settlement geared to capitalist commodity production and accompanied by massive ecological interventions has historically been central to the Zionist colonial project of creating a permanent Jewish presence in the “Land of Israel.” The hyperarid southern region known as the Central Arabah is an instructive edge-case: in the 1960s, after the expulsion of the bedouin population, cooperative settlements were established here and vegetab…
The Oksana Affair
In volatile situations, resistance can often take an ambiguous form which demonstrates the power of the dominated but avoids provoking repression. Such ambiguity cannot be simply dispelled by ethnographers; rather, it must be acknowledged and accounted for through a methodology that is willing to accommodate uncertainty while demonstrating the researcher's good faith and sufficient knowledge. I show how this can be done by narrating an episode of…
Giving them the slip
In a 2013 Facebook post, Israel’s then Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett (2013; my translation) wrote: 'If an Israeli employer knows that he has to pay every worker the minimum wage, give him one day off a week, pay overtime and produce pay slips – he just won’t employ infiltrators and foreign workers. He will choose an Israeli worker. This is how we dry the main fuel which sets fire to the problem of infiltrators in south Tel Aviv and across t…
The Oksana Affair
In volatile situations, resistance can often take an ambiguous form which demonstrates the power of the dominated but avoids provoking repression. Such ambiguity cannot be simply dispelled by ethnographers; rather, it must be acknowledged and accounted for through a methodology that is willing to accommodate uncertainty while demonstrating the researcher's good faith and sufficient knowledge. I show how this can be done by narrating an episode of…
At the zero degree / Below the minimum
Giving them the slip
In a 2013 Facebook post, Israel’s then Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett (2013; my translation) wrote: 'If an Israeli employer knows that he has to pay every worker the minimum wage, give him one day off a week, pay overtime and produce pay slips – he just won’t employ infiltrators and foreign workers. He will choose an Israeli worker. This is how we dry the main fuel which sets fire to the problem of infiltrators in south Tel Aviv and across t…
The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism
Agricultural settlement geared to capitalist commodity production and accompanied by massive ecological interventions has historically been central to the Zionist colonial project of creating a permanent Jewish presence in the “Land of Israel.” The hyperarid southern region known as the Central Arabah is an instructive edge-case: in the 1960s, after the expulsion of the bedouin population, cooperative settlements were established here and vegetab…
Projectland
Saving the face of the Arabah
Since the 1990s, Israeli agricultural settlements in the remote Central Arabah region have relied heavily on the cheap labor power of Thai migrant workers. Yet the agrarian settler-colonial movement to which these settlers belong has historically rejected such "foreign labor" as a moral threat to the collective. Thai employees are thus enjoined not only to plant and pick vegetables in sweltering greenhouses, but also to enlist their own cultural …
The Abrahamic Ideology
This article examines the geopolitical landscape organised by the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain under US sponsorship, by exploring their namesake’s status as the common ancestor of Jews/Israelis and Muslims/Arabs through his sons Isaac and Ishmael. I begin by presenting the background and significance of the Accords, and show how despite its US-Christian origins, their nomenclature was enthusiastically receiv…
Capitalist Colonial
For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel's arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labor-Zionist commitment to abstaining from hiring outside labor. But beginning in the late 1980s, the region's agrarian economy was rapidly transformed by the removal of state protections, a shift to export-oriented monoculture, and an influx of disenfranchised, ill-paid migrants from northeast Thailand (Isaan). Capitalist Colonial , Matan Kamine…
“No Foreign Workers, No Agriculture, No Region”
There is perhaps no more paradigmatically settler-colonial activity than agriculture, especially in the Palestinian/Israeli context. Zionist strategists perceived the takeover of farmland from indigenous cultivators as a primary goal of their colonising project, pursuing it eagerly through purchase until the war of 1948, and primarily through violence since then. More than an economic sector, agriculture has served a strategic role in consolidati…
“Matter in the Hands of the Maker”
As Zionist cultural production reveals, class formation in Palestine/Israel is bound to a racialized perception of Arabs as “natural workers”—hardworking yet unskilled, humble yet unruly. Besides Palestinians, this framework extends to Mizrahi Jews, rendering the two groups uncomfortably akin and structurally antagonistic. Analyzing texts produced at key moments in Zionist history, this article relates changes in representations of Mizrahi worker…
Political science (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Economics (5 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Agriculture (3 works) · Colonialism (3 works)