Mr Matan Flum

Research summary

My research project wishes to study how Israeli discourse, as presented in cultural representations, shaped the national landscape and to what extent, if any, the Israeli housing block ('shikun') discourse contributed to the further evolution of the conflict in the Middle East. I seek to address these issues by examining the political, and cultural discourse in Israel regarding the housing blocks during three periods: 1948-1961, 1961-1977, and 2000-2020. The study pushes further the observation that Israel's conception of its place in the Middle East has long been mirrored as a certain perspective in Israeli political culture, which has aimed to differentiate between Israel as a "Western" society and the Arab states around it. This perspective in turn greatly influenced the discourse around the housing blocks and shaped Israel's spatial design and policy.

Before my PhD project, Prof. Dalia Gavriely-Nuri and I wrote a co-authored book, "Ma'abarot": It Is Not Just a Name of a Kibbutz: Ma'abarot Representations in the Israeli Culture, 1950-2015, published in 2021. The book examines the discursive vanishing of the “Ma'abarot” – the Jewish refugee/immigrant absorption camps in Israel that were established during 1948-1953. The absorption camps were settled mostly by immigrants/refugees from Muslim states in the Middle East and North Africa (referred to as Mizrahi Jews).

Publications

Show more publications