Chapter Two: Luxurious Necessities
In this chapter, the author highlights the changing attitude of Palestinians in Israel when it comes to material aspiration as a result of Israeli’s discourse on modernity and how this discourse impacts the decision of how many children a woman should have. By deploying this discourse, Israeli government is achieving its goal of controlling the number of Palestinian population within its premises.
By linking modernity to the material possessions, then to family economics and eventually family sizes, Israeli’s discourses has insinuated into Palestinian ideology and Palestinians in Israel regard themselves as the most advanced Arabs in the region given their embrace to the new modernity of thinking, of which, a smaller family size is a desirable outcome where more could be provided for each child. This is a big step away from the traditional belief that each child’s livelihood is provided at birth – by God.
In the broader context, however, Palestinians are shifting towards a new way of providing for their families as they are stripped of their agricultural lands and have become wage laborers at the lowest rungs of Israel’s economic structure. It is becoming increasing difficult for the working father to provide for a large family. The hope of becoming middle class, nevertheless, is well and alive, among the Palestinians, by adopting a smaller size of family and by doing so they hope to have the material possessions and consumption that they think represent a modern life.
The incorporation of any marginal groups into the global capitalist economy is usually accompanied by the shift of the idea of what consumption is and what consumption represents in the groups concerned. The images from mass media carry with it an aspiration and hope to become part of the middle class, a rung that seem to represent the ideal lifestyle worldwide. This message is especially powerful when it comes to providing the best for the next generation.
This capitalist appeal doesn’t seem to hit any particular cultural barrier and it seems that human’s inspiration to have more is universal. From this observation, it could be easily argued that the best way to destroy your enemy who is impoverished is to provide them with more material possession or the hope that they could be able to achieve that dream; which seem to the tactic of the Israeli’s.
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