Between Conflict and Collegiality

Palestinian Arabs and Jews in the Israeli Workplace

Asaf Darr

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781501770753, 9781501770685
• eBook ISBN: 9781501770708
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture

Between Conflict and Collegiality explores how ethnonational-religious struggle between Jews and Palestinians affects relations in ethnically mixed work teams in Israel. Asaf Darr documents the tensions that permeate the workplace and reveals when such tensions threaten the cohesion of the work environment. Darr chronicles the grassroots coping strategies employed by both Jewish and Palestinian through field studies conducted with workers in various sectors in Israel, adopting a comparative method that identifies the differences in how ethnonational-religious tensions play out.

Between Conflict and Collegiality asks how workers deal with external ethnonational and religious pressures and whether the broader ethnonational conflict is reflected in the career expectations and trajectories of minority group members. Darr examines whether minority group members' use of their own language at work become a point of contestation; how religion is manifested in the workplace; whether co-workers from different ethnonational groups form amicable relations that extend beyond the workplace; and whether positive experiences working in ethnically mixed workplaces have the potential to mitigate conflict in the wider society.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Introducing Tension into the Workplace
• 2. The Grassroots Coping Strategy of Split Ascription
• 3. Ethnonational Background and Career Trajectories
• 4. Language Use as a Symbolic Arena for Ethnonational Display
• 5. Religion at Work
• 6. Building Bridges across the Ethnonational Divide
• Discussion and Conclusions
• References
• Index