...from the southern periphery of Israel to Gaza--had a tremendous impact on the empowerment of their self-images and identities. We contend that, unlike the "mythical sense of place" developed by the core of the settlers in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), in Gaza an "everyday-life sense of place" was more significant to settlers than was the mythical one. We also highlight the main dimensions of the settlers' sense of place and their significance in re-forming their identities.

FINDING ATTACHMENT AND EMPOWERMENT

We adopt a constructivist approach in unraveling settlers' attachments to place and the ways in which place empowered their identities. Our sources were statements of settlers published in brochures, on the Internet, and in local newspapers, as well as local rabbis' brochures distributed in synagogues between July 2004 and February 2005. In addition, we conducted thirty open, in-depth interviews with settlers during 2005, maintaining representational balance among religious, conservative, and secular settlers. (1) We contacted eighteen women, who were more readily available as respondents than were men, and twelve men. Nine settlers (30 percent) were of Ashkenazi origin (European, American, or Oceanic) and the rest were of Mizrachi origin (Asian or African, mainly from Arab and Moslem countries), giving slight overrepresentation to Mizrachi Jews, estimated to be about 60 percent of the Gaza population. The interviews began a year before evacuation and continued for nine months; we ended them three months prior to the evacuation, when interviewees stopped speaking about their personal feelings and experiences and preferred to talk politics.

Interviews were very open, allowing the settlers to develop their feelings about the threat of evacuation. Gradually we added questions about their process of rooting themselves in the place, stimulating them to recall memories. At a certain point, we asked the settlers to imagine themselves five years after the evacuation nostalgically dreaming about life in their settlement. What would they miss most? How would they remember the settlement?

We interpreted the information in three stages of extraction of categories from the texts produced. First, a search for any statements in the literature related to the settlers' sense of place and the power of place to affect identities led to the encoding of a list of references. Second, dimensions of sense of place and identity formation were extracted based on the interviews. At this stage we tried, as much as possible, to set aside our preconceptions of place formed by our experiences and academic knowledge. Third, the field models of sense of place and of place as a source of empowerment were articulated in written form using the minimal number and most effective quotations in order to demonstrate our case. In addition, we embedded our results in theoretical knowledge. In the text that follows we present a minimal number of translated quotations in order to buttress our argument. Despite our leftist political orientation regarding Gaza settlement, many settlers appreciated our empathy with their crisis.

THE CONCEPT OF PLACE

John Agnew defined "place" in terms of location, locale and sense of meaning, care, and identity (1987). Until the 1990s, the literature was based on the existentialist theory that emphasized the role of places as closed entities in constituting authentic identities (Relph 1976; Buttimer 1980; Pred 1986). According to this concept, each place is dominated by one community of residents, which tends to believe in one set of meanings about the place, evoking in its members one cohesive identity. This identity crystallizes from the close and habitual associations among insider community members, their memories of their common past, and their aspirations for their future.

These conceptualizations have been subjected to increasing criticism since the 1990s due to the impact of globalization on places as locally bounded units of space. Scholars differ in their understanding of the significance of place under globalization, but they agree that their role in forming social identities is significantly undermined (Bauman 1995; Harvey 1996; Escobar 2001; Castree 2004; Smith 2004; Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005). Studies tend to assign major power to global forces and only marginal power to local places. Some scholars even further undermine the significance of place in a globalized world: Doreen Massey emphasizes the role of open networks that may spread globally in determining human social networks, worldviews, and identities; accordingly, she suggests redefining place as "an intersection of networks in a boundless space" (1995, 2002). Tim Cresswell concludes that, in the current reality, places have lost much of their power to shape social identities (2004).

In this article we put forward two arguments. First, even today, under certain conditions, places may play a key role in shaping social identities, as was demonstrated in the Gaza settlements, which were established during the second half of the twentieth century. Second, distinguishing "mythical" or "big" places from "everyday-life" places may enrich our understanding of the significance of sense of place. Jane Jacobs, who briefly introduces the concept of big places in the context of skyscrapers, restricts the concept to places produced by utopian visions, national monumental projects, and the like that have gained significant sociopolitical recognition (2006). In contrast, Philip Crang's description of his parochial sense of place that is made up of the paving stones down the street, the peeling paint on the Vietnamese take-out restaurant across the road, and so forth can be defined as "little places" (2002). In line with this emerging argument, we suggest thinking of mythical big places and parochial little places as the extremes of a continuum with everyday-life places in between.

Sociopolitical authorities mystify places. Whereas capitalist corporations institutionalize skyscrapers (Domosh 1988), state elites exalt national monuments (Zukin 1995; Mitchell 2000; Harvey 2000; Redfield 2006), and religious places have become sacred by bestowing the name "place" (makom in Hebrew, makam in Arabic), which relates semantically to the "place of God." By mystifying places we mean that places are invested with socially unifying interpretative schemes in order to define an ultimate intersubjective claim of truth, rooted in a glorious past and articulated in transcendent language (Cassirer 1953; Levi-Strauss 1966; May 1991; Gadamer 1996). Mystification of places is likely to be initiated by sociopolitical groups in search of hegemony; marginal groups tend to adopt not a systematic consciousness comprising incompatible values and ideas rooted in hegemony-seeking social groups but ideas that spring from more their direct, everyday-life experiences (Gramsci 1971).

Robert Redfield and James Scott deepened our understanding of the "bigness" of places and the relationships between them and everyday-life places by portraying the role of "big" and "little" traditions in managing national discourses (Redfield 1960; Scott 1977). In their view, big traditions represent discourses of those who strive for hegemony. Relationships between elites and the rest of society are characterized by the difficulties the elite encounter in imposing their hegemony. As a consequence, interrelations between elites and other groups may be characterized on one hand by shared interests and on the other by tensions and even revolt against the elite. These relationships also characterize discourses about the ways in which sense of place is constituted.

In consolidating place meanings as cores of identity formation, elites tend to anchor places in solid time-space frameworks. Elites show a tendency to invest in building material, monumental constructions that objectify the invested meanings and magnify the mythical status of these places. By the same token, mythical places are presented as being "bigger" than human everyday life, and their identity is embedded in successions of generations. This commitment helps elites to delegitimize any change in hegemony-seeking meanings in the name of generations of people in the past and in the future, thus securing their interests. Mythical places therefore become sources for recruiting human everyday lives for the elites' ends. Last, mythical places gain the power to radiate meanings and centers of power to wider expanses and larger communities of believers. In addition, we need to remember that places may be hierarchically defined with, for example, local settlements representing hologramic pictures of larger regional or national territories.

Little places remain intimate and...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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