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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
The Palestinian residents of Natzerat Illit treat the town primarily as a satellite of Nazareth, a convenient suburb to commute from to the Palestinian town. Few of them are employed in Natzerat Illit, hardly any at all own businesses in it or participate in its social and cultural life. Their involvement in economic transactions is almost exclusively restricted to renting and purchasing homes. Their visibility is mainly connected with their residency.
The real-estate realm thus emerges as the main arena where relations between Israelis and Palestinians are acted out. It is an arena which most readily transliterates issues of space, territoriality, control and domination into personal decisions which actors must take, then live with the consequences. Palestinians occupying mixed residential compounds in Natzerat Illit pose especially powerful dilemmas for themselves and for their Israeli townsfolk. Their case, with its particular sociological meanings naturally became a focus of my attention.
Palestinians’ choice of residence in Natzerat Illit, while obviously related to the economic reality, is also, fundamentally, a decision to live with Israelis. Whatever the rationale behind it, it is a choice which Israeli residents find hard to stomach. For many Israelis, the Palestinian presence in the town is commandeered from the realm of individual choice into the menacing domain of collective Palestinian intent. This tendency is partly fuelled by media coverage of Palestinian discourses of land, the patria, right of return and the importance of extended presence on the ground. These images, replete with symbols and conceptualizations so similar to those invented and used by Zionism decades earlier, strike a sensitive cord among Israeli onlookers.
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