University of Cambridge
A Tainted Opportunity: Palestinian Practitioners Navigating Development Work in Occupied Jerusalem
Abstract
dc:description.abstractAbstract This dissertation explores how Palestinian Jerusalemites who work for an Israeli-led socioeconomic project relate to their role within a racialised development apparatus. Specifically, it discusses the tensions that shape the social lives of young Palestinian workers from Jerusalem (aged 23-35), situated within broader structural and political contexts. My work is based on 15 months of extensive fieldwork with Palestinian practitioners who implement an Israeli development project that targets their own Jerusalemite communities. Based on ethnography, it proposes the analytical framework of ‘a tainted opportunity’ to address the contradictory nature of development work from the perspective of local workers. Essentially, it asks: how do Palestinian workers make sense of their role in a socioeconomic development project shaped by the very power that occupies them? Acting creatively as they navigate life and work, these workers take up an uncanny tainted opportunity to engage in the social and economic transformation of their own people. Working for Israel’s development apparatus, these Palestinian workers uncomfortably engage with the same entity that also fundamentally limits their freedoms and actions. Since its occupation in 1967, East Jerusalem has been a target of Israel’s brutal institutionalised systems of coercion. While continuing to demolish and evict Palestinians from their life-long homes in Jerusalem, in 2018 Israel enacted Resolution 3790 which allocated 2.1 billion NIS for a five-year project directed at the socioeconomic development of East Jerusalem. Recruiting dozens of Palestinian Jerusalemites for its facilitation, Israel offered new opportunities for Palestinian Jerusalemites to engage in development work. Seeking job opportunities that exceed blue-collar positions to which Palestinians were historically directed, young Jerusalemites have gradually taken up these Israeli offers of employment. However, such opportunities were fraught with contradictions and potential harm, therefore these newly recruited workers were criticised heavily by other Jerusalemite Palestinians for producing, maintaining, and normalising the Occupation. Navigating the space between opportunity and a morally compromised, physically dangerous and socially excluding task, my interlocutors consciously acknowledged the implications of working with the Israeli state. Studying political action under such a coercive context, I show how workers critically construct their roles and responsibilities vis-à-vis other Jerusalemite Palestinians with whom they engage in the development work. Considering my interlocutors’ multi-layered precarity, I suggest shifting the gaze towards the kind of social life that forms under extremely coercive realities. From this perspective, attention to the tainted opportunities taken up by Palestinian workers challenges the common binary of resister/collaborator that dominates scholarship on Palestine. This dissertation, then, aims to bring a distinct angle to the anthropologies of development, politics and work through an ethnography of the social lives of workers, while offering a nuanced account of life and work under ongoing Occupation.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2025
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Kramarski, Gal
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Navaro, Yael
Subjects
dc:subject × 9Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.124487
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/394498