Governing Heterogeneous Populations: ‘Separate and Unequal’ in Israel

Introduction

On 17 June 2010, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the parents of 35 girls in the ultra-orthodox town of Immanuel to be detained for refusing to comply with its ruling that they send their daughters to a non-segregated elementary school, that is, one attended by both Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox Jews (of European origin) and Mizrahi (Oriental) ultra-orthodox Jews (of Middle Eastern and North African Arabic origin). Thirty-five Ashkenazi fathers subsequently presented themselves at the town’s police station; the mothers did not. On 27 June, after widespread protests by both the ultra-orthodox and secular communities, the High Court of Appeals rescinded the sanctions against the parents and ordered the school to hold three symposiums for all of its students, in which the most prominent rabbis and lecturers from all community factions would participate, ‘to bring people’s hearts closer together’. The students’ parents and the school’s teachers declared their intention to carry out the court order.

On 25 August, the High Court authorized the Ashkenazi group to establish a private school, which would receive no State funding and therefore be subject to less State supervision. The court stated that Israeli law acknowledges the right of individual groups to maintain their uniqueness and their religious and cultural styles within Israel’s multicultural society. Since the beginning of the September 2010 school year, two separate elementary schools have operated in Immanuel, one for Ashkenazi students and the other for Mizrahi students. They share a building but have separate entrances.

These descriptions should be read in light of the understanding that the main ethnic distinction in Israel is between Jews from European and North American countries (Ashkenazim) and Jews from Arab countries (Mizrahim). As in other cultures around the world, European identity is hierarchically culturally superior, while Oriental or Arab identity lies further down the scale. In other words, Oriental (or ‘black’ or ‘yellow’) identity is a marked identity, while white identity is seen as ‘neutral’, transparent and unmarked (Shoshana, 2011). Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox Jews are the dominant religious group. Mizrahi ultra-orthodox Jews are described as ‘marginal’, their practices regarded as a ‘mimicry [of] ultra-orthodox Judaism’ (Leon, 2009).

In this article, we examine the special fabric of relations between the State of Israel and the residents of Immanuel, as manifested in this event and in a series of encounters between them that preceded it. We attempt to elucidate the nature of the governance mechanisms operating in this case and thereby gain insight into the broader issue of the governmentality of heterogeneous populations. The literature on governmentality (Foucault, 2007[2004]) is based on specific premises concerning the conceptualization of ‘population’, mainly related to its homogeneity. With this in mind, we proffer the concept of ‘governmentality’ in the context of the heterogenic population and discuss the concrete governmental technologies that appear in this context. Moreover, we examine how these technologies produce the population and manage it, that is, the dynamics of the interaction between the population’s composition (homogeneity vs. heterogeneity) and actual governmental technologies.

We suggest asking what the actual technologies used in the Immanuel case study were. How do governmentality practices invent (Hacking, 1986) the population and manage it? Finally, we ask more broadly about the connection between homogeneity/heterogeneity, governmentality, and its means and end – the population.

Our findings shed light on attempts to govern the heterogenic ultra-orthodox sector in Israel not only through the management of space but also through the definition of the population. Some ultra-orthodox towns have population committees (Kahaner, 2009), selective committees that determine who may live in the towns and that give preference to Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox Jews. These committees govern through spatial segregation of ‘normal’ (Ashkenazi) and ‘abnormal’ (Mizrahi) parties. However, in Immanuel a different form of governing has emerged, one which regulates by way of the State’s invention (Hacking, 1986) of a homogeneous population of ultra-orthodox Jews. Furthermore, we find that the attempt to govern through a concept of ‘homogeneity’ actually establishes a heterogenic population, challenging the very governance mechanism that has been applied in this case. Our study also suggests that alongside population homogenization the State engages in deliberate neglect of the space and its inhabitants and minimizes its own presence, and thus pursues a policy of governance from a distance (Rose and Miller, 1992).

The Problem of ‘the Population’ in Governmentality

In his series of lectures ‘Security, Territory, Population’, Foucault (2007[2004]) describes three governmental technologies. Each emerges in response to a different governmental problem and is enacted with a certain aim through certain practices. The first form is the legal mechanism. It is based on law and punishment, on the division between the forbidden and the permitted, and on the specific punishment of lawbreakers. The second is the disciplinary mechanism, which mainly deals with the surveillance and supervision of individuals and with bringing those who have transgressed back into line with accepted norms. To create order, a special body is constructed that mediates between the law and individuals. This body creates a supervisory sphere that oversees various disciplinary arms, such as psychology, medicine, and so on. The main thrust of these supervisory activities is to distinguish between the normal and the abnormal and to create ‘normation’. ¹

The problem of population management emerged at the end of the 18th century, with the development of scientific disciplines such as political science and economics and scientific methods of statistics. The technology of the security apparatus, the third form of governmental technology, appeared as its principal solution. In the security form, the intervention of power is dependent on calculations of cost and potential damage. In place of the dichotomy between the permitted and the forbidden, an optimal average is established toward which the general normal population is directed. The central mechanism involves regulating the population in the milieu, a space of possible events that may impinge upon the population, and bring it to normalization, to a suitable end. This end is not predetermined (as it is in the disciplinary mechanism) but is set over the course of normalizing the population as a whole.

Foucault calls this type of governance ‘governmentality’ and highlights that security is the principal means of this apparatus. It is also important to point out that when Foucault speaks about governmentality he is not speaking about one means of governance that is stable over time, but rather he is describing different forms of governance in various periods of history as a response to assorted events and problems. In other words Foucault suggests dealing in concrete means of governance that are encountered in each period (Samimian-Darash, 2011a).

Foucault’s study of governance, especially his concept of ‘governmentality’, ² has been extensively discussed in the literature. This concept has been particularly relevant to current discussions of destatization, neoliberalism, and multiculturalism, among other issues (e.g. Das and Poole, 2004; Ferguson, 2002; Rose, 2002[1996]), in which it has most commonly been used as a ‘theory’ of power, denoting a totalizing force invading all aspects of life (and often referred to as ‘bio-power’). However, as Rabinow and Rose (2006) point out, Foucault emphasized the heterogeneity of governmental forms (sovereignty, discipline, and security, in particular) and the potential for multiple actual technologies to express various forms of governing that do not submit to any singular unified form of power (Samimian-Darash, 2011b). Moreover, recent studies examining statistics, risk assessment, epidemiology, and preparedness have shown the complexity of forms of governing within the security apparatus and concrete techniques of governing (e.g. Castel, 1991; Dean, 1999; Ewald, 2002; Hacking, 1991; Lakoff, 2008; O’Malley, 2004; Power, 2007; Samimian-Darash, 2011a, 2013).

However, the heterogeneity of governmentality, and of the security apparatus in particular, is but one part of the puzzle of governing. When presenting the security apparatus, Foucault also discussed its special object and subject of action, that is, the ‘population’:

And finally, I will come to what will be the precise problem of this year, which is the correlation between the technique of security and population as both the object and subject of these mechanisms of security, that is to say, the emergence not only of the notion, but also of the reality of population. Population is undoubtedly an idea and a reality that is absolutely modern in relation to the functioning of political power, but also in relation to knowledge and political theory, prior to the eighteenth century. (Foucault, 2007[2004]: 11)

That is, Foucault was interested in the problem of governing population, which raises different challenges than does the problem of governing territory. The population, Foucault argued, is a governmental invention:

… the transition from an art of government to political science, … the transition in the eighteenth century from a regime dominated by structures of sovereignty to a regime dominated by techniques of government revolves around population, and consequently around the birth of political economy. (2007[2004]: 106)

Moreover, the population was not an abstraction (on the order of ‘the social’ and ‘the public’ commonly used by sociologists and political scientists) but a concrete figure accessible through particular forms of knowledge and governing (2007[2004]: 75). Foucault nevertheless treated the emergence of the population as a problem one needs to recognize and inquire into, rather than assume as given or as a pre-existing ‘thing’. ³

Studies that draw on the idea of ‘securing the population’, we argue, usually either assume the population represents a homogeneous group on whose members technologies of governing work equally, or do not investigate the implementation of security actions when the invention of a homogeneous population is impossible, that is, when a heterogeneous population is the object and the subject of governing.

Research Design

Ethnographies in Immanuel were conducted between October 2010 and February 2012. Two visits were also made to the town of Elad in order to see a Haredi town that is different from Immanuel. Both Immanuel and Elad are in the same socio-economic cluster, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. The first ethnographic visits to Immanuel included unstructured tours and observations of the town (residential neighborhoods, the shopping center, schools) in order to get a general impression of the place. The observations included spending long periods of time (from the morning until late at night) at the town’s shopping center; observations at the town’s supermarket for six days; observations at schools during different times of day (when the children arrive at school in the morning, recess periods, and the end of the school day); observing the interactions between parents at the different schools; joining the public receptionist at the local council for five days (a position that involves meeting with residents of Immanuel in order to deal with bureaucratic issues); and finally, tours and observations at the industrial zone at the entrance to the town.

In order to study the spatial features of Immanuel and accounts regarding the town in the Immanuel Affair, interviews and observations were carried out, and written texts concerning Immanuel were analyzed (local newspapers since the establishment of Immanuel in 1983). A total of 47 interviews were carried out: 24 with men from Immanuel (12 Ashkenazi and 12 Mizrahi) and 11 with women (five Ashkenazi and six Mizrahi); six with senior functionaries in the local council (the town engineer, education officials, and security officials); and six with officials from the Ministry of Housing and Construction. The interviews were conducted in the interviewees’ homes, in Immanuel’s shopping center, or in cafes in and around the center of Israel. The interviews comprised five main sections: an open description of the interviewee’s personal life story; a description of Immanuel; life in Immanuel; the Immanuel Affair; and the cultural hierarchies in Haredi society. All of the interviews were recorded and analyzed in accordance with the procedures for content analysis as put forward in grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1998).

Immanuel: Extreme Heterogeneity, One Space

Immanuel is located in the West Bank, ⁴ not far from the center of Israel (50 km from Jerusalem, 56 km from Tel Aviv, and 35 km from Bnei Brak). It was established in 1983 and was declared a local council in 1985. The town was established to provide a solution to the housing shortage affecting ultra-orthodox Jews in heavily populated areas of Israel. Unlike other ultra-orthodox towns, Immanuel was planned as a populous town (in Israeli terms), one that would house approximately 200,000 residents. However, as of December 2010, it only had 3000 residents (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2011). In other words, during its 20 years of existence, the town failed to expand and develop as envisioned, and throughout the years many residents have left. Socio-economically, Immanuel is one of the five weakest towns in Israel.

We were struck during our first visits to Immanuel by the dramatic heterogeneity of its residents. This heterogeneity is manifested not only in separate residential areas and in the residents’ appearance and style of dress but also in the various modes of conduct in the public sphere. Immanuel houses a number of ultra-orthodox Jewish groups: Ashkenazi (from various Hasidic backgrounds, such as Slonim, Lithuanian, Breslov, Gur), Mizrahi (including the Yemenite Hasidic group), American, and Chabad.

What especially drew our attention were two other groups of residents who did not display the obviously ‘normal’ ultra-orthodox appearance to which our secular eyes had been accustomed. In conversations with local residents, we learned that these groups are unique to Immanuel among ultra-orthodox towns and cities: ‘ex-convicts who are newly orthodox’ and ‘wanderers’. ⁵ Tomer, a 32-year-old Ashkenazi Jew, describes the first group: ‘they are what you call rehabilitated, they were convicts who have now become religious, but they still haven’t broken off from their past … they steal water, they steal electricity, they don’t pay rent, they don’t pay municipal taxes’.

Aharon, a 42-year-old Ashkenazi Jew who has been living in Immanuel for 14 years, says that he thinks the ‘most problematic’ population is the ‘wanderers’ and not the ‘criminals who are newly orthodox’:

The wanderers are these strange people who one bright morning land in Immanuel and walk around looking like they have lost something, they still haven’t found it, they look mad, wandering from this place to another, isolated, don’t speak to anyone, dirty … kind of like the homeless you seculars have … one day they just disappear, and others arrive, and look exactly the same … long hair like Jesus [laughs] … they finally leave.

Aharon emphasized that Immanuel, unlike other ultra-orthodox towns, allows the wanderers to reside in it and that it is a town in which many marginal and contradictory groups exist side by side. Our interviews with residents of Immanuel show that this heterogeneity is experienced as a critical characteristic of the space and of daily life. For example, Rachel, a 48-year-old Ashkenazi woman, who owns a stationery shop, says:

Did you notice that this is not an ordinary ultra-orthodox town? … There are different groups here, and even a Yemenite Hasidic group [laughs], not that I know where it came from, because that’s an invention that does not exist in Judaism, there’s no such thing as a Yemenite Hasidic group, Sephardim ⁶ cannot be Hasidim, but here you have a variety of groups.

Despite the town’s ability to absorb various groups (according to the vision of its establishment), our observations reveal radical residential segregation, mainly between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox Jews. The town stretches across 1200 acres and was originally built for the Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox community. It was not initially planned with neighborhood segregation in mind. However, after the company responsible for construction in Immanuel went out of business, two years after the town was established (1985), and particularly after the town became a target of terror attacks, poorer groups of people began to arrive, mostly ultra-orthodox Jews, and boundaries began to form between groups. Today each group has its own synagogue. Moreover, even in the common public spaces (e.g. the walkway between the residences and the shopping center), members of different groups do not communicate with each other or even share the same space. As Israel, a 37-year-old Mizrahi observed: ‘They [Ashkenazi] walk on one side, and we walk on the other side. Each of us has his own side; it’s better like this, it creates order.’

The segregation, especially between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, is so fundamentally rooted that members of different groups experience their lives as almost completely separate. Chaim, a 53-year-old Ashkenazi man, described the segregated atmosphere of life in town:

It is a routine known to everyone. You pass each other without looking in each other’s eyes, like air, you pass by, there’s no issue of avoiding one another … we don’t even feel embarrassed, the situation is clear for both parties.

Ashkenazis expressed their longing for a homogeneous space, for Mizrahis to leave Immanuel, so that they can make it into the kind of ultra-orthodox space they have seen elsewhere. Aharon, a 53-year-old Ashkenazi, expressed his desire for homogeneity in the following terms:

Immanuel should be like an East European shtetl or like Mea Shearim in Jerusalem. Only Hasidim whose origin is Eastern Europe should be living here. There should be complete separation. Each group needs a place of its own. This is not the place for them [Mizrahim]. What do we have in common? They make our lives hard, we have no common ground.

For Aharon, then, the European shtetl is the model for community: an enclosed space, segregated, with a homogeneous population. Moreover, he asserts, a homogeneous population would make daily life in Immanuel easier.

Meanwhile, Mizrahis expressed their longing to leave Immanuel for a different community, one where discrimination and separation are not so dramatic. As Moshe, a 52-year-old Mizrahi, describes the situation:

They [the Ashkenazi Jews] openly say, there is only one Judaism, and it is the Ashkenazi Judaism; the Sephardim [Mizrahim] are not real Jews as far as they are concerned, they are tyrants, it’s painful to live in a such a place where there is discrimination. ⁷

One of the public spaces in which segregation is most visible is the elementary school, Beit Yaakov, which Mizrahi and Ashkenazi girls attend and which was at the center of the public storm that erupted at the end of 2007. On 5 July 2011 we visited the school with Amos, who has a senior position in the educational system in Immanuel. The school is divided today into two wings, one for the students from the Ashkenazi community and one for the students from the Mizrahi community. For maximal segregation, there are separate entrances to these wings.

Since we could not easily identify the origin of the students attending the school, we asked Amos whether he can do so and, if so, how. Amos replied:

Strangers cannot understand this, but I can tell; not always, in most cases, the Sephardic girls are light-skinned and you may get confused, but you can notice in the speech, both in the style of speech and in the tone, in their body movements, in the way they dress, and even in the look in their eyes.

We asked Amos whether there is any interaction between students from the different communities, and he responded, ‘No. That is avoided. They take recesses at different hours. They cannot be in contact.’

The segregation extends beyond students to their parents. While in the school, we observed Ashkenazi and Mizrahi parents pass by one another other without any acknowledgment. Their bodies did not touch and their eyes remained focused straight ahead.

The dramatic separation and segregation we observed in Immanuel, and that is typical of daily life there, is not reflected in the informational summaries compiled by the officials in charge of governing the town, as we discuss in the next section.

Practices of Governing and the Promotion of Homogeneity

Notwithstanding the stark heterogeneity of the space as we experienced it and as our interviewees extensively described, Ministry of Housing and Construction officials and senior functionaries in the local council with whom we spoke told a different story. Central to their discourse was the use of homogenizing language to refer to the town’s population: ‘They are all ultra-orthodox; they are all Jews; there is no difference.’ These expressions were completely at odds with the radical separation manifested in the daily practices of the town’s residents. Amiram, a Mizrahi and a leading functionary at the Ministry, clearly expresses the official position:

They are all ultra-orthodox; they are all Jews; there is no difference. They should be educated and understand that they are all Jews. This place [Immanuel] should be an example of the way ultra-orthodox Jews can get along with each other. It’s not like other ultra-orthodox cities like Modi’in Illit or Beitar Illit, where we are having problems. There you see selections, the Lithuanians do whatever they want there, and decide who can or cannot enter. For example, newly orthodox and Mizrahi Jews have no chance of entering the city, unless they speak Yiddish and look like the Lithuanians … In other places you have selection, you have selection committees called population committees, they are prohibited according to the Israeli law, but the State can’t do anything, these committees act informally, you can’t mess with the rabbis there, they are very powerful. [our emphasis]

The last quote reverberates to Ian Hacking’s (1986: 166) discussion on ‘making up people’: ‘who we are is not only what we did, do, and will do but also what we might have done and may do. Making up people changes the space of possibilities for personhood.’ For an ultra-orthodox Mizrahi, the range of possibilities of what kind of a person one can be, or alternatively the kind of population one can belong to or be observed through, is discursively led by ‘you are all Jews’ and ‘you are all orthodox’. The possibility of being ‘an ultra-orthodox AND a Mizrahi’ is discursively absent. It is absent from the State’s mode of veridiction, and from the legal discourse in particular. Thus our findings claim not only the invention of a particular population, but also the inevitability of an invention of alternative populations instead. Furthermore, the unifying discourse enacted upon the population in Immanuel is also manifested in practices of homogenization. The government is most centrally concerned with preventing the existence of population committees in the town. As Amiram laments, in other ultra-orthodox cities and towns in Israel, population committees determine the composition of communities according to various criteria. For example, strict population committees operate in two other ‘new’ ultra-orthodox cities: Beitar Illit and Modi’in Illit (Kahaner, 2009). Both cities have established a limit on the number of Mizrahis who can live there; in neither case can the city’s Mizrahi population exceed 25 percent. These cities are controlled by Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox elites and have received the formal blessing of Hasidic community leaders.

The population committees check would-be residents’ parents’ background, where their father and mother went to school (e.g. whether to Yeshiva and seminary, respectively), their ethnic origin, knowledge of Yiddish, daily religious practice, adherence to Ashkenazi pronunciation when praying, and so on. In other words, in ultra-orthodox towns, these committees de facto prevent the acceptance of Mizrahis, guaranteeing the homogeneity that Ashkenazis seek. ⁸ However, in Immanuel, the governmental officials claim, there is no rationale for such committees, since ‘they are all Jews’. That is, the population is undifferentiated – residents are all Jews, they are all ultra-orthodox – and this generalization is sufficient to control what happens in the town.

The absence of population committees, on the one hand, enables ultra-orthodox Jews of different origins to take up residence in the town unopposed; but, on the other hand, that unfettered access contributes to the emergence of local, self-imposed practices of cultural and ethnic segregation, selection, and discrimination among community factions. Thus, while the population committees in other ultra-orthodox towns implement spatial selection guaranteeing homogeneity by approving the access of only one ultra-orthodox group into the community, in Immanuel, government officials attempt to achieve a similar homogeneity by inventing a population to which all residents belong: ultra-orthodox Jews. In other words, the two cases illustrate the connection between homogeneity and governmentality – that homogeneity can be a means of governance and that there are various ways of achieving it.

Interviews with governmental officials and local council functionaries unearth another aspect of governance unique to Immanuel: daily neglect by the State. Senior functionaries on the local council, for example, reported that the State is not interested in tax collection, that it forces the local municipality to undertake this task. In addition, they asserted that officials in various governmental departments did not return their phone calls and charged that the municipality was forced to operate independently of the State. Amir, a senior functionary, said:

This in no ordinary place, it’s more like the Americans’ Wild West, Immanuel is a different state [a state within Israel], people don’t pay taxes, municipal taxes, they steal water, yes, you heard me, have you ever heard of a place where they steal water? … We can’t do anything, the State isn’t interested in this place; there are senior governmental officials that tell me, you should be grateful that anyone would even want to come live in that remote place, we should be paying them, they tell me, so we at the council try to chase them down ourselves, we do everything by ourselves; Immanuel is not an ordinary place …

Ministry of Housing officials, for their part, explicitly say they try not to interfere with what is going on in Immanuel because of the town’s complex situation. Erez, who is responsible for issuing construction approvals, told us too:

… don’t let the media blind you, Immanuel is hell … it a poor, filthy place, we have nothing we can do there, you can’t help them, they are all desperate there, and whoever tells you differently is lying, only the minimum should be done and it should be done from a distance, we should not interfere with what goes on there.

Thus, the absence of the State does not just signal a lack of interference in what goes on in the town; rather, it reflects a policy of governance at a distance: ‘acting from a center of calculation such as a government office or the headquarters of a non-governmental organization, on the desires and activities of others who [are] spatially and organizationally distinct’ (Rose et al., 2006: 89). This governing at a distance helps perpetuate the radical heterogeneity of the population.

Residents too describe a state that is conspicuous by its absence. They describe the place as ‘godforsaken’, and say that ‘someone forgot us’. Tomer, a 33-year-old Mizrahi, offers the following description:

If I were still secular I would say this place was ‘godforsaken’ [laughs]. Non-religious people call remote places godforsaken, but we can’t say godforsaken, because god is with us, Immanuel, ⁹ and that’s what’s holding people here. But this place is tough; the things that go on here are not natural … There are divisions here, it’s a place of rigid divisions.

Tomer clearly sees a connection between the absence of daily State management and the radical heterogenic nature of the town’s population, its ‘tough cases … of rigid divisions’. Other residents too see a direct link between their town’s radical heterogeneity and governance practices: the absence of population committees and the unrestricted access to the town have created, paradoxically, a heterogeneity of ‘rigid divisions’.

Foucault insinuated a connection between spatial unification and the disciplinary mechanism. Spaces such as the clinic or the jail, Foucault (1998[1977]) emphasized, are designed to facilitate surveillance of individuals belonging to a defined homogeneous category (they are all insane, sick, criminals), and thus to control and monitor their behavior. The Immanuel case study reveals the connection between the security apparatus and the degree of a population’s homogeneity and, therefore, governability. Through the reinvention of the general normal population in the absence of population committees, a radical heterogenic governance object/subject is formed, and, through it, the lives of residents are dramatically affected. This radical heterogeneity challenges the governance mechanism in town. The missing premise here is that the homogeneity of the governed population acts in itself as an efficient measure of governance.

In the following section, we show what happens when the State, and the High Court of Justice in particular, is summoned to actively correct the discriminatory policies and practices that the population itself has instituted. This event can be seen as an encounter between the dramatically heterogenic population and governmental practices in the non-territorial space of Foucault’s milieu. In the milieu, one can observe the heterogeneity not only of the population but also of governance mechanisms and the encounter between them.

The Event: ‘The Town Calls the Universe to Order’

During the 2007 school year, in response to an initiative of some of the students’ parents, the Beit Yaakov school management decided to make changes in the school structure and educational arrangements. All students’ parents received a letter specifying the following requirements:

Notably, students who did not comply with these requirements were prohibited from studying in the Hasidic academic track, which could have a detrimental effect on their futures. Ashkenazi education in men’s yeshivas and women’s seminaries is prestigious, equips individuals with cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984), and may enable them future access to various institutions.

Along with these changes, curtained partitions and a railing were raised, separating Ashkenazi from Mizrahi students. According to the accounts presented in court, even the lesson hours were changed so that the recesses for the two student groups did not overlap. Ashkenazi and Mizrahi students were given distinct uniforms to wear. In fact, two programs of study were established in the school (the general program and the Hasidic program), essentially creating two separate schools. Each program had its own principal. According to proponents, the segregation reflected differences in Ashkenazi and Mizrahi lifestyles and ultra-orthodox observance. The Hasidic educational program, according to the segregationists, was more stringent and strict than the general one, and more appropriate for students of Ashkenazi origin. The general track was seen as more appropriate for girls of Mizrahi origin, some of whom came from families of newly orthodox Jews and of low socio-economic status.

Following this segregation, in August 2007, a number of parents of Mizrahi students petitioned the Ministry of Education to intervene and halt what they saw as discrimination against their daughters. The Ministry of Education sent letters to the school, which were ignored. The Ministry subsequently appointed the legal counselor in the Israeli State comptroller’s office, Adv. Mordechai Bass, to investigate the situation. In his findings, Adv. Bass noted that he understood the segregation to be the result of different degrees of observance in the religious life of Hasidic community members (Ashkenazi) and Mizrahi members. According to Bass, this division had no ethnic basis, and he asserted that every parent should be free to enroll his or her daughter in the Hasidic track. The Mizrahi parents also filed a petition asking the High Court of Justice to look into the matter. The High Court ordered the Ministry of Education and Immanuel local council to explain why the Ministry was not actively supervising the school and why it did not ensure that the financial support given to the school was contingent upon compliance with the law against discrimination.

The High Court’s ruling, issued on 6 August 2009, asserted that the school had infringed on the Mizrahi students’ right to equality. Moreover, the court ruled that the Ministry of Education was negligent in not exercising its legitimate authority to prevent this discrimination. The High Court ordered that the segregation in the school be ended and asserted that ethnic, and not religious, discrimination was transpiring in Immanuel. The ruling was based on the breach of three central Israeli laws: the law guaranteeing the right to education and equality (1948); the law protecting human dignity and liberty (1992); and the law against discrimination (2000).

The parents of the Hasidic-track students refused to comply with the court order. Their daughters withdrew from the school and alternatively joined ‘private schools’ established in private apartments.

The petitioners then requested that the High Court hold the parents in contempt of court. The court subsequently ordered contempt proceedings and imposed a penalty on both the school and the recalcitrant parents. On 7 April 2010, after the parents refused to comply with its rulings, the High Court ruled that they pay a fine of NIS 5000 for each day of continued refusal. On 15 June 2010, after the parents had refused to comply with this order, the court resorted to the threat of arrest. In their ruling, the judges wrote:

Finally, we shall comment that we are still hoping that in Israel there will be no need for the severe measures used in the United States in order to enforce the famous ruling, Brown vs The Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 (1954), in which the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ was abolished in the field of education.

The court, in short, used every means at its disposal to try and dismantle the ethnic segregation created in the town’s educational system. Its rulings were ignored. On 17 June 2010, the Supreme Court ordered the arrest of the defiant parents, and 35 fathers duly surrendered themselves at the police station.

However, after protests in the ultra-orthodox and secular public sectors (demonstrations and appearances by community leaders in the media), the High Court of Justice ordered the sanctions against the parents lifted and drastically changed the anti-segregation policy that had characterized its previous ruling. This time, the High Court ruled that the school hold three joint symposiums for all of the school’s students, in which the most prominent rabbis and lecturers of all communities were to participate. The intent was to achieve a level of understanding and reconciliation before the beginning of summer break in July 2010. That is, instead of imposing a joint educational system, the High Court in a way embraced the State’s ‘alignment’ practice, according to which all groups should live side by side in a shared space as if identical. However, this ruling reinforced the segregation between the different groups, thus having the opposite effect of its unifying intent.

On 25 August 2010, only three months later, the High Court of Justice demonstrated a radical shift in its previous decision and approved the operation of the Hasidic track as a private school, unsubsidized by the State and thus subject to little State supervision. Hence the High Court employed the practice of neglect and governing ‘at a distance’ and actually authorized the segregation of the population. The High Court acknowledged the right of various populations to maintain their uniqueness and their religious and cultural style within Israel’s multicultural society. Currently, two separate schools operate in Immanuel. They occupy the same structure, which has separate entrances for Ashkenazi students and Mizrahi students.

Contrary to Brown vs The Board of Education, in which the law overpowered other governance mechanisms, in this case the assumption that the creation of a ‘population’ requires a certain amount of homogeneity and the practice of governance at a distance actually led to an antithetical result: an authorized preservation of segregation and heterogeneity.

The claim by Shlomo (a 41-year-old Mizrahi) that ‘the town called the universe to order’ characterizes a single transient moment in this event, during which a segment of the local population tries to undermine the segregation created in town by the State’s governing practices. However, at the end of the day, the judicial order that is sought is not maintained. On the contrary, the ‘disorder’, discrimination, and official neglect receive a governmental seal of approval through legal mechanisms.

Discussion

In the past three decades, the concept of ‘governmentality’ has figured prominently in discussions about the complex ways in which neoliberal and democratic states act. Foucault emphasized, first and foremost, the heterogeneity of forms of governance (sovereignty, discipline, and security apparatus) and the multi-dimensionality of the local technologies enacted under specific political-cultural circumstances. To this complex concept of governmentality, however, Foucault added the concept and the entity of population, and he discussed the manner in which the governance mechanism invents the population and governs it to achieve specific goals. It is surprising not only that the invention of population remains largely untouched in the literature, but also that one of the most central premises in studies of governmentality – both theoretical and empirical – is that populations are homogeneous. In this article, we suggest that governmentality always be examined with the understanding that population is not a pre-existing entity and that it may incorporate a variety of groups rather than constituting a homogeneous collective body.

This necessitates us to uncover concrete State governance technologies (what Foucault calls ‘the history of actual technologies’), to examine how they produce the population and manage it, and to examine the dynamics between the population’s composition – homogeneity/heterogeneity – and actual governability.

In this regard, Curtis (2002) offers an interesting development of the concept of ‘population’ and points out an important distinction between populousness and population:

‘Population’ is dependent, in the first instance, on the establishment of practical equivalences among subjects, objects or events. In contrast to populousness, whose logic centers on the hierarchical differentiation of essences (knights fight, priests pray, peasants till), population depends upon the notion of a common abstract essence. At the outer limit of abstraction, population consists of so many undifferentiated atoms distributed through abstract space and time. (Curtis, 2002: 508)

Moreover, whereas populousness:

… sustains analyses of the collective or social body that connect the relative size of its categories to policy initiatives, population sustains analyses that may centre on the categorization and re-categorization, the de-composition and re-composition, the articulation or re-articulation of the molecular elements of the social body. (Curtis, 2002: 509)

Curtis argues that using the concept of the ‘population’ enables ‘the construction of the uniformity of the governed’. Curtis implicitly suggests a relation between governmentality and the uniformity of the governed: governmentality calls not only for a particular form of governing but also for a particular form of ‘the governed’ – the population – as a unified and homogeneous subject. However, when Foucault formulated the concept of ‘governmentality’ and discussed the security apparatus, he concurrently emphasized the latter’s distinction from the discipline mechanism.

In this regard, we argue that the concept of ‘population’, extracted from a complex and heterogeneous group of elements, marks a certain level of abstraction which enables the flattening of its complexity but not necessarily the unification of its components. Hence, the connection between governmentality and the problem of the population deserves further discussion, particularly in the context of the heterogeneous population. We argue that numerous studies of governmentality simply assume the homogeneity of the governed population. Questions about what happens in cases of heterogeneous populations and how heterogeneous populations should be governed are not asked. In this article, we examine concrete techniques of governance that invent a heterogenic population and ask what challenges this object/subject brings to the act of governing and how it is governed in practice (Samimian-Darash, 2011a).

In this article, we suggest that governmentality and the population are connected in a complex manner. While the space of the disciplinary mechanism is also one that creates homogeneity, or at least compels joint categories through enclosure and circumscription, in governmentality the concept of the ‘population’ creates flattening, but not necessarily homogeneity, through which the population is visible and may be acted upon (Shoshana, 2011). The advantage gained by State authorities in viewing the population as homogeneous is evident. Reducing variance within the population while increasing variance between populations (normal–insane; criminal–normative; religious–secular; Jews–non-Jews; Mizrahi–Ashkenazi, etc.) seemingly makes regulation easier (as in the disciplinary mechanism).

The daily governance of the population in Immanuel may be divided into three main practices that governmental officials try to carry out: non-selection with respect to admission, neglect, and reducing the State’s authorities presence in town. These practices, aimed at creating a certain unification and enabling governance at a distance, instead allow the creation of radical heterogeneity in the town, which in turn decreases the State’s involvement to the point in which the town becomes almost ‘invisible’ (‘godforsaken’) to the authorities. However, the town temporarily achieves maximal visibility during ‘the event’, when the relationships between its constituent groups as well as the State’s governmental mechanisms are revealed.

Taking these findings into consideration, we suggest reading and examining the encounter between the population and the governance and emerging forms of governing (governmentality) through Foucault’s 1998[1977] concept of the ‘milieu’. The milieu is the (non-material) space of possible events in which the State operates in regulating the population. In other words, we propose examining governmentality in events that highlight the unique encounter between complex governance mechanisms and heterogeneous populations.

This examination of governmentality may also contribute to the understanding of the underlying complex cultural and political dynamics within inequality. The sociological and anthropological study of inequality suggests three levels of analysis: structural, phenomenological, and ethnographic. The first level describes the structural and organizational factors responsible for durable inequality (Tilly, 1999). The two other levels involve analysis of inequality in naturalistic social settings (Rivera, 2010). The Immanuel case study, drawing on the study of Governmentality, shows the manner in which the actual technologies of governance, explicitly intended to promote homogeneity, end up increasing heterogeneity, segregation, and inequality. Hence, more studies on practices of governing that take place beyond formal State institutions’ actions might shed light on the complex relationship between governmentality, population, and inequality.