TY - JOUR
T1 - Balancing atrocities and forced forgetting
T2 - Memory laws as a means of social control in Israel
AU - Gutman, Yifat
AU - Tirosh, Noam
N1 - Funding Information:
Yifat Gutman is Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Email: [email protected] Noam Tirosh is Lecturer, Department of Communication Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York in August 2019. We thank Ron Dudai and the reviewers for their helpful comments, Naaman Tal for research assistance, and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (Grant no. 2016354), as well as the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University, for funding this research.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/8/1
Y1 - 2021/8/1
N2 - This article examines memory laws as a new form of social control, demonstrating the significance of cultural memory to law and society scholarship. It focuses on two Israeli laws that seek to control public debate by giving voice to one marginalized group in order to silence another. The article presents two forms of such utilization of the law: forced forgetting and the balancing of atrocities. Forced forgetting validates the memory of one group of people over another group. Balancing atrocities equates victims, pitting the suffering of one group against that of another for the purpose of dismissing the former's claims for recognition and redress. The 2011 Nakba Law, an example of forced forgetting, dismisses the Palestinian minority's experience to amplify the memory of the Jewish majority, while the 2014 Jewish Nakba Law creates an analogy between Palestinian redress claims and those of the Mizrahi Jews in order to balance the atrocities that these groups suffered. We show that both forms of control have limitations that create gaps between legislation and implementation, yet their political-symbolic impact is much greater.
AB - This article examines memory laws as a new form of social control, demonstrating the significance of cultural memory to law and society scholarship. It focuses on two Israeli laws that seek to control public debate by giving voice to one marginalized group in order to silence another. The article presents two forms of such utilization of the law: forced forgetting and the balancing of atrocities. Forced forgetting validates the memory of one group of people over another group. Balancing atrocities equates victims, pitting the suffering of one group against that of another for the purpose of dismissing the former's claims for recognition and redress. The 2011 Nakba Law, an example of forced forgetting, dismisses the Palestinian minority's experience to amplify the memory of the Jewish majority, while the 2014 Jewish Nakba Law creates an analogy between Palestinian redress claims and those of the Mizrahi Jews in order to balance the atrocities that these groups suffered. We show that both forms of control have limitations that create gaps between legislation and implementation, yet their political-symbolic impact is much greater.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85111618444&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/lsi.2020.35
DO - 10.1017/lsi.2020.35
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85111618444
SN - 0897-6546
VL - 46
SP - 705
EP - 730
JO - Law and Social Inquiry
JF - Law and Social Inquiry
IS - 3
ER -