Hegemony and settler colonial subjectivities: The censure of the Israeli Union of Social Workers (IUSW) by the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW)

Abstract

In March 2018, and again in January 2025, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) censured the Israeli Union of Social Workers (IUSW) for its failure to adhere to the profession's ethical principles. IUSW members have been combat active during the ongoing Gaza genocide and the Israeli union has been stridently unwilling to 'make any statement calling for peace’. This article seeks to comprehend the IUSW's stance in light of the twinned ideological imperatives of neoliberalism and settler colonialism. Furthermore, it explores how social workers’ subjectivities are shaped within the Zionist hegemonic project.

Keywords

hegemony neoliberalism settler colonialism subjectivities

Introduction

In March 2018, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) censured the Israeli Union of Social Workers (IUSW) for its failure to function as an ‘independent voice for the profession in Israel’ and its refusal to work ‘in accordance with the Federation's Statement of Ethical Principles’ (IFSW, 2018). This move followed the IUSW concluding that the ‘solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an end to the occupation’ was ‘not a social work issue’ (IFSW, 2018). Whilst rejecting calls to expel the IUSW, the IFSW was clear that the ‘intention of the censure’ was to register ‘concern about the ability of a member to fulfil the obligations of membership’ of the organisation. Furthermore, this censure, in force for five years, illustrates the fact that within the ‘field’ of social work in Israel there appears to be an embedded nationalistic and structural disposition to shy away from what are viewed as political issues encompassing Palestine (see also Bourdieu, 2003 [1977]). Consequently, questions circulating around ‘social justice’ and ‘liberation’, particularly those of Palestinians, are rendered null and void (IFSW, 2014).

This evident unwillingness to engage with core political and ethical issues was amplified in January 2025 when the IFSW issued another censure against the IUSW. It admonished the Israeli organisation for not upholding the ‘Federation's ethical principles of supporting peace and non-violence’ (IFSW, 2025). This was apparent because members of the IUSW were active in combat whilst genocide was occurring in Gaza (see, for example, Jewish Voice for Labour, 2024; Malik, 2024; Segal, 2023). Even more concerning, given the profession's ethical imperatives, was the IUSW's adamant refusal to even ‘make any statement calling for peace’ (IFSW, 2025; see also International Sociological Association, 2025). Whilst symbolically significant, the impact of a censure measure is somewhat limited in that it fails to include any sanctions:

The intention of censure is to mark a concern about the ability of a member to fulfil the obligations of membership of IFSW. In the event of a censure being issued, it would allow the member to continue to be active within the Federation and enable full voting and speaking rights in all IFSW forums. A censure would act as a public acknowledgement that the action of the member falls short of expectations of membership as guided by the Federation policies and principles (IFSW, 2018).

Perhaps it is too easy to merely castigate the IUSW for the position it has taken. An alternative response could be to express bemusement as to how a social work organisation, on the face of it committed to nurturing and promoting the values of the profession, can act in this way. The stance of the IUSW may also be interpreted as providing evidence to support Chris Maylea's call for ‘ending’ social work altogether on account of its ‘hypocritical’ nature (Garrett, 2021; Maylea, 2021: 9). The perspective taken it this article, however, is somewhat different.

The IFSW (2014) asserts that one of the ‘core mandates’ of the profession is that social workers should try and develop ‘critical consciousness through reflecting on structural sources of oppression and/or privilege’. This, in short, is what this article will aim to do: whilst not excusing or seeking to placate the IUSW, the aspiration is to critically examine what may have led it to decouple itself from social work's ethical principles. One of the main claims, in what follows, is that the ideological configuration of social work within a particular nation state can only be grasped if we have regard to the wider hegemonic structures. These do not wholly determine, but condition how social work functions, how it thinks, and contour what it views as significant and what it seeks to marginalise or erase. Nevertheless, the orientation of the IUSW is not a unique aberration and its strident stand can be compared to that of mainstream white South African social work which accepted segregationist ideologies and the practices of racial separation under the apartheid regime (Ioakimidis and Trimikliniotis, 2020: 6). Similarly, in Greece, Argentina and Chile ‘official’ social work readily accommodated itself to fascistic, military regimes.

Below, therefore, it is suggested that the attitude of the IUSW, might best be interpreted if observed through a theoretical lens in which the concept of hegemony and related ideas are to the fore. The article is divided into four parts: section one briefly outlines how the legal apparatus in Israel is purposefully constructed to maintain Zionist hegemony. Attuned to Gramscian perspectives on hegemony, it will be argued that the balance between consent generating interventions and the deployment of brute force is of the utmost importance particularly when hegemony encompasses those, namely the Palestinians, subject to ongoing colonisation. Part two focuses on how neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism are the twinned dynamos driving the Zionist state. The third element extends this discussion by exploring how the neoliberal and the colonial are wholly enmeshed and inseparable. The final section then proceeds to critically reflect on how, despite this not being conceded by the IUSW, settler colonial subjectivities may be formed and how they may produce and sustain positions and mindsets within Israeli social work that are so clearly at odds with the ethical imperatives of the IFSW.

The issues addressed in this article are central to the concerns of CSP given that the editorial collective aims to provide a space for critical approaches to the production, development and receipt of social policy and welfare. I am, though, only able to provide the skeletal outline of relevant themes because a lengthier analysis would stretch well beyond the word-limit for journal articles (see also Garrett, 2025a). For example, the largely omitted issue of gender is significant both in terms of the shaping of Zionist hegemony and specifically in relation to social work given that in Israel – not unlike elsewhere – approximately three-quarters of practitioners are female (Sinai-Glazer and Cohen-Achdut, 2025: 169). The Jewish-American scholar Rachel H. Brown (2024) has produced one of the most impressive books to appear in recent years examining gender and intersectional questions in neoliberal Israel. Broadly related to social work themes, it is a vital contribution which lucidly illuminates how capitalist social reproduction strategies are rooted not only in gender, but in class, racism and expansionist settler colonialism.

Writing from within Europe, I try to remain alert to how my positionality may affect my perception of the complex and controversial themes that I raise. I hope, however, that this contribution will prompt further debate on issues integral to social work and social policy which have been insufficiently aired, and perhaps sometimes politically suppressed, within the relevant academic literature (see also Ballantyne et al., 2023; McKendrick and Duarte, 2022). Such censorship or silencing often pivots on the claim that critics of Zionism are in thrall to a pernicious leftist ideology or – worse – to anti-Semitism (Heritage Foundation, 2024; see, for a particularly egregious example of this type of critique within social work, Farber and Fram, 2024) Often, this is a charge tactically levelled at those of us who view anti-Semitism as a blight, along with other forms of racism, that needs to be relentless opposed.

Hegemony

The legal apparatus and hegemony

Derived from hegemon, literally meaning leader, hegemony signifies a combination of authority and leadership. In the context of hegemony in Israel, the legal plays a vital role in shoring up and bolstering efforts to dominate the Palestinian population (Masri, 2017). Rhetoric proclaiming that Israel is a democratic state is unconvincing because, as the IUSW fails to acknowledge, it is founded and maintained by a political project relentlessly intent of maintaining Jewish supremacy. As Ofer Cassif (2024), a dissenting member of the Hadash party within Knesset (Israel's parliament), argues:

Democracy in Israel never really existed, owing to the state of Israel's definition as an ethnic concept, antithetical to political egalitarianism. A state that under its basic laws declares one group politically superior to the other cannot be regarded as a democracy, but as an ethnocracy (see also Masri, 2017: 400–403).

The Israeli legal structure is deliberately crafted to guarantee Jewish dominance and the Supreme Court has ‘repeatedly emphasised this principle ruling that “the raison d’etre of the state is being a Jewish state” (in Masri, 2017: 388). Consequently, as Ronit Lentin (2018: 45) argues, maintaining that the state of Israel is democratic, whilst simultaneously ensuring Jewish supremacy, is manifestly oxymoronic. Moreover, the state of Israel is predicated on the ‘denial of fundamental rights to the indigenous population of Palestine purely on account of their ethnic identity as non-Jews’ (Lloyd, 2012: 69). From its inception, Israel ‘became a republic based on blood and faith – confessional and biological criteria combining to define actual or potential citizens’ regardless of their actual ‘geographical location’ (Anderson, 2001: 13). Enacted in 1950, Israel's Law of Return

opens the country's borders to all Jewish individuals, regardless of their nationality or genealogy. Any Jew can relocate to Israel and naturalize; in fact, the state strongly encourages it. However, for Palestinians expelled by Zionist militias in 1948 and their descendants living in exile, the state consistently refuses their right of return, even though it is an internationally recognised right (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019: 21).

Those Palestinians remaining in Israel following the initial 1948 Nakba were ‘reduced to permanently inferior status, denied the right to purchase Jewish land or property, enter the armed services, or organize without political constraint’ (Anderson, 2001: 14). Relatedly, the 1952 Citizenship Law was drafted to govern the citizenship of Palestinians and other non-Jews (Tatour, 2019). That is to say, the citizenship conferred by this legislation is a ‘partial, hollow, and empty category – a citizenship devoid of substance…it as a fragile and vulnerable citizenship, a second-class citizenship, an inferior citizenship’ (Tatour, 2019: 10).

In 1954, the Israeli state passed the Prevention of Infiltration Law to criminalize Palestinians attempting to cross the borders of the recently established state to return home; by 1956, 2700–5000 refugees were killed for merely ‘trying to return’ (Masri, 2017: 399). The 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law prohibits Palestinians without Israeli citizenship from joining their spouses within Israel's borders (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019: 21). More recently, the 2018 Basic Law [Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People] unambiguously defines Israel as the ‘nation-state of the Jewish People’ (Brown, 2024: 11). Not only does it establish Hebrew as ‘Israel's official language (downgrading Arabic), it also ‘declares “Jewish settlement as a national value” and mandates that the state “shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening” (Svirsky, 2023: 515). Following the passing of the legislation, prime minister Netanyahu categorically stated that Israel is ‘not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people – and only it’ (in Tatour, 2019: 9; see also Drury, 2019).

The role of consent and force in maintaining hegemony

If a hegemonic project is to attain success, it must be constituted by much more than a legal apparatus and must result in a ‘saturation of the whole process of living’ (Williams, 1977: 110). Hence, continues the cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1973: 9), hegemony is ‘not to be understood at the level of mere opinion or mere manipulation. It is a whole body of practices and expectations’. Part of the political skill integral to such an endeavour is the ability to co-opt and nullify ‘alternative meanings and values’ (Williams, 1973: 10). Such an approach is essential because excluded social forces, whose consent has not been won, potentially form the basis for counter and insurgent movements. In this context, the hegemon's aspiration is to marginalise, to even render unthinkable, an alternative social order.

Netanyahu, who following an investigation for war crimes and crimes against humanity is subject to an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in November 2024, currently presides over the political bloc endeavouring to maintain and expand Zionist hegemony (see also Amnesty International, 2024). This is no easy task because of the internal fissures within the Israeli social formation. Central here, and intersectionally connected to question of class positioning, are the tensions and potential cleavages separating the Ashkenazi (European and historically dominant since the foundation of the state) and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern). The presence of Haredim or the ultra-Orthodox and Black (Ethiopian) Jews further contributes to the complexity of Israel which, without the unifying figure of the Palestinian foe, risks dissolving.

At present, excluding those living in the illegally occupied territories, Palestinians comprise approximately a fifth of Israel's population, but Israel consistently seeks to nullify their accounts of history and aspirations for political transformation. As Peteet (2016: 25) notes, authority over a ‘narrative constitutes an index’ of colonial power. This is reflected in the Zionist repetition of a certain terminology and the habit of filtering and structuring narratives to embed a narrowly pro-Zionist form of reasoning: for example, in the bland use of the word ‘conflict’ rather than of ‘occupation’. Israel ‘hires consultants to produce and distribute conceptual frameworks and linguistic repertoires to brand itself and challenge critiques of its actions’ (Peteet, 2016: 27). One striking illustration of this occurring was when the Israeli government hired the Frank Lutz (2009), the U.S. pollster and right-wing media figure, to author The Israel Project's Global Language Dictionary. More fundamentally, the power to name and define is inseparable from any hegemonic endeavour and this was recognised by the leaders of the Zionist movement prior to the creation of the state of Israel. For example, the Committee on Names, founded in 1930 (later the Place Names Committee) was responsible for systematically ‘changing Palestine's place names to either biblical or nationalist/Zionist names and, more recently, imposing Hebrew signage in the West Bank and removing Arabic signs continue the inscription of colonialism on the ground’ (Peteet, 2016: 28).

Central to Gramsci's conceptualisation of hegemony is the understanding that coercive power is perpetually held in reserve for those times when the means of generating sufficient consent fails (Hoare and Nowell Smith, 2005). Then, a competent hegemonic apparatus can unleash force in the shape of police and army deployments. Ordinarily, the mass of people within a state would not be targets of such coercive power, but in a colonial situation coercive interventions are routinely faced by occupied populations: this can take the form of intensive surveillance and periodic eruptions of extraordinary brutality and violence (Fanon, 2004 [1961]; see also Pe’ery, 2025).

Following the attack of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas) along with other Palestinian resistance factions on the morning of 7 October 2023, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commenced its ‘Swords of Iron War’ military campaign in Gaza. By mid-May 2025, this ground offensive, along with an engineered famine, had killed at least 52,928 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip while 119,846 have been reported injured (United Nations Relief Agency and Works Agency for the Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, 2025); just over half of identified victims are women, children or older people (Farge and Al-Mughrabi, 2025). Historically, the Israeli state has also routinely embarked on more targeted operations to eliminate the organic intellectuals of the Palestinian, and wider Arabic, resistance to Zionist hegemony in the region as illustrated by the assassination of the Marxist theorist and novelist Ghassan Kanafani (and his niece) by Mossad in 1972 (Kanafani, 2024). In terms of prominent social workers, this strategy can be associated with the murder of Hashem Abu Maria, the coordinator of Defense for Children Palestine, in the West Bank, in 2014 (Harrop and Ioakimidis, 2018).

The next section of the article will turn to address the core components of hegemony in Israel – the twinned imperatives of neoliberal capitalism and expansionary settler colonialism. Understanding this enmeshment is important because it enables us to better detect the current position of the IUSW and its associated ideological contortions.

Two peas in a pod: neoliberalism and settler colonialism

Israeli neoliberalism

Turning first to neoliberalism, the aim is to foster an institutional and cultural environment which maximises the potential for capital accumulation for Israeli and global elites (see also Brockmann and Garrett, 2022; Garrett, 2019). Despite it being obscured in ‘official’ Zionist accounts which lay emphasis on Israel's cool and cosmopolitan character, the harms generated by neoliberal capitalism have resulted in a society riven by class inequalities (Communist Party of Israel, 2024). To take Tel Aviv as an example: fashionable consumers sauntering around luxury boutiques and art galleries in Neve Tzedek inhabit a very different planet compared to those dwelling in Levinsky Park and the nearby Central Bus Station who are, perhaps, likely to become users of social work services (Berger, 2018; Weinblum, 2019). Indeed, since the 1990s, the Israeli ‘political scene has increasingly come to resemble the American, if still with a few European touches’ given that neoliberalism has prompted wholesale deregulation and privatisation (Anderson, 2001: 22).

Theoretically, such developments illustrate the aptness of Harvey's twenty-year old articulation of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Although playing out differently depending on the national setting, this entails capital going on the offence and reneging on key agreements negotiated with trade unions in relation to wages and the terms and conditions of employment, including pensions. The ‘fundamental mission’ is to ‘create a “good business climate” and therefore to optimize conditions for capital accumulation no matter what the consequences for employment or social well-being’ (Harvey, 2005: 25). Thus, the ‘neo-liberal state is particularly assiduous in seeking the privatisation of assets as a means to open up fresh fields for capital accumulation. Sectors formerly run or regulated by the state (transportation, telecommunications, oil and other natural resources, utilities, social housing, education) are turned over to the private sphere or deregulated’ (Harvey, 2005: 25). The impact of such policies has been stark in Israel with the always informative Israeli Adva Center revealing that, in 2016, ‘around one-fifth of all Israeli households were under the poverty line’ (in Getzoff, 2020: 824; see also Swirski and Attias, 2024; Swirski and Endeweld-Sabag, 2024). Unsurprisingly, given the deeply racialised character of the state, the poverty figures can be broken down by ethnicity/cultural identity: 13.2 percent of Jewish Israeli versus 49.2 percent of Palestinian Israeli households were located below the poverty line. Because of the class and racial hierarchies within the Jewish population, the poverty rate for Ethiopian Jews was the highest at 22.8 percent (Getzoff, 2020: 824). Significantly also, 30 percent of Holocaust survivors living in Israel are below the poverty line (Brown, 2024: 213).

Settler colonialism

Settler colonialism is important because the concept helps us better comprehend the stance of the IUSW; this body of theorisation also aids social work practitioners and educators’ endeavours to decolonise the profession (see also Garrett, 2024a, 2024b, 2025b). Settler colonialism has been defined as a ‘specific mode of domination that requires that Indigenous life-worlds be destroyed so that new worlds can be established or extended’ (Veracini, 2024: 540). Hence, settlers, such as Zionists, ‘covet the land and the life worlds of others and violently dispossess Indigenous collectives’ (Veracini, 2024: 547).

Although Israel is the product of an ongoing settler colonial enterprise, it is apparent that the definition is not unique to Israel and to the Zionist project. Additionally, while all settler colonial nations are different, they all share certain defining characteristics. According to the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) (2024: 3), settler colonialism is structured by ‘territorial conquest via mass settlement: whereby a settler population seeks to replace native peoples, ecologies and modes of relations through a combination of killing, ethnic cleansing, land dispossession, partition, transfer and cultural assimilation’ (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES), 2024: 3). This is ordinarily accompanied by the evolution and hardening of a ‘siege mentality’ with the colonisers feeling permanently under-threat despite their being omnipotent and objectively dominating those subjected to colonisation (Lloyd, 2012: 66).

Certainly, although off the ideological radar of the UISW, Israel appears to share such characteristics with other colonising forces. If one looks at the history of the Zionist movement, for example, it is apparent that, while reflecting the ‘general Western enthusiasm for overseas territorial acquisition’, it never regarded itself as a ‘Jewish liberation movement’, but rather as a ‘Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the Orient’ (Said, 1979: 29). Prior to Israel's establishment in 1948, the Zionist movement unequivocally identified as a settler colonial endeavour with Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), its Austro-Hungarian founder, promising European leaders that ‘the “State of the Jews” would “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” (in BRISMES, 2024: 3). This frank colonial dimension was reflected in the names that the Zionist movement gave to its various institutions; for example, its first bank was titled the ‘Colonial Trust Company’, its department of settlement the ‘Department of Colonization’ (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2021). Despite the claim to have located ‘a land without people for a people without land’, the early Zionists were far more ‘willing to admit the colonial dimension of Zionism and correspondingly the legitimate existence of the Palestinians as a people’ than Israel's contemporary advocates (Lloyd, 2012: 62; see also Dowty, 2000, 2001). Underpinned by an eliminationist logic, Israel's intention to expel the indigenous Palestinians was apparent from the outset despite the warnings of prominent Jewish intellectuals, such as Arendt and Einstein, that such logic ‘contained the seeds of elements of the present catastrophe’ (Balibar and Lévy-Leblond, 2006: 3).

Israel differs from other settler colonial states in that many of its post-Second World War settlers had themselves been subject to genocide during the Holocaust (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2021). Israel also stands apart from many other settler colonial states in that its borders are never stable but are, seemingly, perpetually open for further territorial expansion. This has been evidenced during the past sixty years in the illegal occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights. In addition to the periodic and murderous forays into Lebanon, in late 2024 and days after President Assad was ousted, Israel seized a swath of southern Syria. In short, via serial and violent encroachments into the territory of others, the present state is ever reaching toward a Greater Israel and this relentless expansionism is wholly consistent with, and still driven by, the early Zionist maxim of ‘kiboush haAdamah’ (occupation of land) (in Masri, 2017: 397).

Exploring how the neoliberal and the colonial are intermeshed

Despite the IUSW's entrenched unwillingness to engage with this dimension, countless examples exist indicating that neoliberalism and settler colonialism are deeply intertwined in Israel. For instance, one of the chief factors accounting for the levels of poverty experienced by a substantial proportion of the population is the sheer scale of expenditure on the military budget. Israel's average annual military spending, as a share of GDP, was 12 percent over the period 1960 to 2022 (Foster, 2025). After beginning to decline, it is rising once again. Nevertheless, military spending is entirely ignored by the Zionist state authorised discourse circulating around so-called ‘poverty aware’ social work practice in Israel (Krumer-Nevo, 2020). For example, the ‘relatively low level’ social welfare budget is partly attributable to it needing to compete with the grossly inflated military budget helping to sustain ongoing colonial war (Swirski and Attias, 2024; see also Swirski, 2024). The Israeli state is considerably aided by the US which ‘made possible the Zionist fortress’ (Anderson, 2001: 14). Indeed, the ‘consolidation and expansion of the country depended completely on an immense funnel of arms and funds from Washington’ (Anderson, 2001: 15). Since October 2023, this channelling of weaponry and armaments has massively increased and this has, of course, benefited the arms industry in the US (El-Shewy et al., 2025). Across decades, Israel has also been keen to sell weapons and surveillance technologies to some of the world's most brutal fascistic regimes, including the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile (1973–1990) (International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), 2012).

Seeking to obscure this grim reality is hasbara or propaganda that aims to promote a benign image of Israel by masking the harsh economic realities of life for many Israelis and burying the brutalities associated with Israel's ‘permanent war against the Palestinians’ (Lentin, 2018: 6). In recent years, one of the best examples of this upbeat propagandistic national imaginary is probably Senor and Singer's (2011) Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle which depicts ‘Arab countries as the antithesis’ to a cosmopolitan and hip neoliberal Zionism (Getzoff, 2020: 813). Central to this evocation is the IDF, presented as a ‘mandatory business internship’ providing soldiers with the opportunity to develop leadership skills, to cultivate networks and to test out innovatory approaches that can then be put to work in civilian life where individuals can flourish as neoliberal, colonial subjects (Getzoff, 2020: 820). This construction is especially to the fore in terms of how the time spent in elite IDF units is presented as comparable to an ‘ivy-league education’ (Getzoff, 2020: 820).

Many older people in neoliberal Israel, including Holocaust survivors, are looked after by migrant care workers – from, for example, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India and Colombia – who constitute a supply of cheap labour (Norton, 2016). A lucrative market in private care results in migrant caregivers earning the ‘same amount of money for six days of live-in, round-the-clock labour as live-out, citizen caregivers earn for forty-three hours of work’ (Brown, 2024: 20). These workers from the global south enjoy few right and this neoliberal and racialised labour recruitment process ensures that there is no requirement to resort to Palestinian labour to undertake such tasks. More conceptually, the ‘question of labour (and therefore exploitation)’ is a ‘crucial aspect in the organisation of settler colonialism’ and the modalities of care work organisation in Israel provide an illustration (Englert, 2020: 1654).

As mentioned, though, not ‘all settlers are equal’ given that some ‘benefit more than others in terms of the neoliberal distribution of the wealth created by settler-colonial capture’ (Svirsky, 2023: 512). Related to the tensions that this internal maldistribution produces, colonial expansion is used by Israeli elites as a safety valve to ‘soften the blow of internal inequality’ and to try and prevent social turbulence that may fracture the hegemony of the Zionist ruling bloc (Englert, 2020: 1662). For example, when neoliberalism was intensified, ‘more and more lower-class Mizrahi families’ began to acquire housing in the occupied West Bank where ‘low-interest mortgages, cheap land, and good education and social services were offered’ (Svirsky, 2023: 514). In this way, occupying new (i.e., more Palestinian) land became a ‘means to social mobility for those who had been marginalized for decades’ (Svirsky, 2023: 515). A similar process has taken place in relation to Jewish ultra-orthodox families who discovered a ‘chance to improve their socio-economic prospects in the settlements near the separation barrier along the West-Bank’ (Svirsky, 2023: 515).

Economic and social policy in Israel is complex and Janus-faced. Inside the borders of the Green Line, the internationally recognised borders of the state of Israel established in 1949, governments follow the orthodox neoliberal script by cutting public spending and reducing social programmes. Beyond the Green Line, the Zionist state tends to be much more interventionist and appears ever keen to propel further colonial expansion by funding the construction of a material infrastructure to support settlers’ incremental encroachment onto Palestinian land. Hence, the building of new roads and the creation of special industrial development zones are meant to entice additional Jewish settlements in the illegally occupied territories (De Martino and Santini, 2023).

Given the very clear enmeshment of neoliberalism and settler colonialism, how can organisations such as the IUSW, the leadership of which has been taken over by an allegedly more politically progressive faction in recent years, often condemn neoliberalism, yet champion settler colonialism? Bourdieu's (2003 [1977]) concept of ‘habitus’ may have some relevance here, encouraging us to question how customs, mores and expectations become internalised and shape how individuals perceive, describe and write about the world. Alert to, but not dwelling on, his theorisation and drawing on a range of literature from critical and dissenting Jewish scholars, the next section of the article tentatively explores how settler colonial subjectivities are made and maintained in Israel.

Making settler colonial subjectivities within and beyond Israeli social work

As we saw earlier, for colonial hegemony to be achieved, it must be maintained and sustained across the ‘full gallery of institutional spaces’ (Svirsky, 2022: 723). This interpretation has a certain affinity with Althusser's (2014 [1995]) conceptualisation of ‘ideological state apparatuses’ and how they play a decisive role in ensuring the social reproduction of a particular dominant social order. According to the Jewish scholar, Marcelo Svirsky (2022) this ‘gallery’ includes various sites, such as Education, but also the ostensibly private sphere of the family; it can also be perceived as encompassing social work which is not only an educational endeavour, but is also associated with specific organisational forms, such as the IUSW, and the practices of individual social workers.

Although not focusing on social workers, a compelling exploration of the Jewish Israeli ‘habitus’ is furnished by Marcelo Svirsky whose focal interest is the ‘everyday participation of regular Israelis in the systematised acts of oppression that have been taking place in Palestine for generations’ (Svirsky, 2023: 504). His approach to this issue is very much in tune with perspectives stressing the centrality of hegemony in that he urges us to investigate not only how formal state institutions are responsible for colonisation and its perpetuation, but also why Israelis – and here we can include those within the field of social work – are ‘readily making themselves the protagonists in the variety of everyday acts prolonging that colonization’ (Svirsky, 2023: 504). In short, how within a particular social formation is the Israeli settler subject constituted, nurtured and maintained? How does a specific subjective mode of being become aligned with neoliberal and settler colonial structures, and thus fail to resist the associated practices of apartheid and genocide? This form of questioning runs in parallel with the theoretical observations of figures such as Gramsci, Althusser and – intent on locating such themes in a colonial context – Fanon (see also Garrett, 2020a, 2020b).

In exploring these ‘intricate’ questions, Svirsky (2023: 511) dwells on how Israelis are ‘socialized to see and practice oppression as both ordinary and necessary’, delving into the often ‘hidden abodes’ of settler colonial society (Svirsky, 2023: 512). Investigating such ‘abodes’ provides insights into how ‘subjective modes of being are formed and reproduced as a result of the myriad of social interactions producing, developing, and restyling attachments to values, ideas, worldviews, feelings, relations, and specific practices, from childhood to adulthood’ (Svirsky, 2023: 513). The analysis Svirsky produces is complex, but vital. I will simply summarise his main theoretical claims as they relate to the statements that led to the censuring of the IUSW by the IFSW.

Essentially, he views four specific dimensions as significant when considering the ‘formation of the subjectivity-matrix of the settler’ in Israel (Svirsky, 2023: 513). First, there is a solid material base at the core of this ‘matrix’ relating to settlers’ privileged position and ongoing ‘expectations’ of future privileges on account of their dominant role within the colonial social formation. Thus, material advantages such as land acquisition, goods and services, or the ability to move around freely, accrues to the ‘settler-colonial’ regardless of ‘whether or not settlers are aware of it or willing to acknowledge its source’ (Svirsky, 2023: 514). Svirsky also recognises the point made earlier in the article relating to the differential access that occurs amongst the settler population with the Ashkenazi middle-class better able to enjoy the fruits of neoliberal inflected settler colonialism that other Jewish communities. This part of his analysis is also significant because it enables us to critically reflect, as the IFSW (2014) prompts us to, on ‘structural sources of oppression and/or privilege’ in Israel. In this sense, the position of the IUSW, resulting in the censures in 2018 and 2025, can be interpreted as implicitly seeking to maintain the privileges of settler colonialists at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians. In this context, some research suggests that a relatively high proportion of Palestinians, who comprise approximately a fifth of the population of Israel, are drawn toward social work education even though they view themselves as institutionally marginalised and discriminated against within the profession in Israel (Mahajne and Bar-On, 2022; see also Ashly, 2019; Mahajne, 2023; Matar, 2021). Moreover, the Israeli state maintains oversight of social work education and refuses to recognise programmes that are deemed to undermine the legitimacy of Zionist hegemony (International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) News, 2018).

Second, it is argued that the patterning of colonial relations before the inception of the state remains significant and contributes to the shaping of current modes of settler subjectivity. Especially noteworthy are the ‘imprints’ that the ‘Zionist efforts to fracture pre-Zionist Arab-Jewish shared forms of life had on the emerging Jewish subject in Palestine’ (Svirsky, 2023: 516). This is likely to have had particularly adverse impacts in locations, such as the northern port city of Haifa, where prior to the Nakba the Palestinian and settler population co-existed peacefully (Karkabi, 2018). One of the prime tasks of fundamentalist Zionism – as a military and political project – was to destroy those relations and to install a form of Jewish hegemony and domination. In this context, national organisations such as the Histadrut (the General Organisation of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel), of which the IUSW is a part, fulfilled important roles.

Third, is the fact that Israel is a militarised society and this core feature is generated and maintained through intensive socialization practices commencing early in life. Here, Svirsky's perceptions can perhaps be connected to Bourdieu's theorisation of ‘habitus’ which is shaped ‘in each agent’ during their ‘earliest upbringing’ and from then it continues to reverberate throughout an entire lifetime (Bourdieu, 2003 [1977]: 81). According to Svirsky, a good deal of childhood circulates around the making of the Zionist child-soldier. Moreover, there exists an ‘unholy alliance between parents and teachers’ that ‘navigates the lives of young Israelis, literally from pregnancy to their conscription’ (Svirsky, 2023: 517). Crucial here is the notion of ‘Abrahamic parenthood’ rooted in the ‘social obligation’ of parents to transform their ‘progeny into soldiers-to-be’; the embeddedness of this process across the social formation in Israel reflects also the extent to which the ‘military and war are normal phenomena in Israeli society’ (Svirsky, 2023: 517). Moving beyond the family, the institutional enmeshment of the school system and the military further deepens this dominant patterning of socialization and aids the shaping of martially inclined subjectivities. Hence, there exists an ‘open-door policy for military officers to lecture in schools’ and pupils participate in various school-based military programmes. Outside the gates of the school, militarism wedded to ‘national sentiment’ is ‘pervasively visible and audible’ with ‘the presence of weapons everywhere’ (Svirsky, 2023: 518, emphasis added).

Fourth, Svirsky draws attention to how these forms of socialization and schooling, aiding in the maintenance of settler colonial domination, may also give rise to an unreflective belief in the efficacy of violence. More generally, this Jewish scholar's critically incisive contribution is in implicit dialogue with other ideas around the emergence of ‘settler common sense’ (Rifkin, 2013). This refers to the ways the ‘legal and political structures that enable non-Native access to Indigenous territories come to be lived as given’ (Rifkin, 2013: 322–3). The concept highlights the ‘mundane dynamics of settler colonialism, the quotidian feelings and tendencies through which it is continually reconstituted and experienced’ in such a way as to produce the normal and common-sensical (Rifkin, 2013: 323). Consequently, colonialism's brutalities and infringements of human rights are, as we can observe in the stance of the IUSW, unlikely to be viewed as ethical concerns by most of its members. In this way, ‘settler common sense’ functions to shape what ought to be of legitimate concern for the settler subject. As Rifkin (2013: 324) characterises it, this lack of interest in the seemingly pertinent (for example, occupation, apartheid, genocide) results in an ‘entrenched inattention’ to ‘the ways non-Native conceptions and articulations of personhood, place, property, and political belonging coalesce around and through the dispossession of Native peoples’. Indeed, this can be viewed as a hegemonic form of sense-making flowing undisturbed through organisations such as the UISW, and it is a sense-making structured and affectively organised to ignore ethical aberrations which are wholly integral to the maintenance of the Zionist state.

Conclusion

This short article has contended that hegemony in Israel is comprised of two intermeshed elements: the neoliberal and the settler colonial. Some writers within the discipline of social work have noted the harm generated by Israel's neoliberal character (Feldman, 2021), but this is an incomplete diagnosis if Palestine and illegal occupation is omitted: in short, the neoliberal and settler colonial aspects are co-constituted and enmeshed (Brown, 2024). This connection is constantly elided by the profession's literature emerging from Israel. More critical perspectives, aired in, for example, + 972 Magazine (Pe’ery, 2024, 2025) and by human rights organisations like as B’Tselem (2021) are expunged in an ideologically constrained social work scholarship harnessed to serving narrow, nationalistic imperatives (Tarshish, 2025; see also Garrett, 2025a). Such acts of elision have been magnified by the IUSW in its support for the continuance of the IDF's ‘Swords of Iron War’ massacre.

To conclude, perhaps one of the most glaring illustrations of this orientation is how the ‘Chairman’ of the IUSW engaged with the genocide in Gaza by not calling for its halt, but by opportunistically using it to criticise neoliberal cost-cutting to Israeli social work services. In November 2023, issuing a brisk statement from the IUSW Arlozorov Street office in Tel Aviv, Inbal Hermoni (2023) argued that the ‘Swords of Iron War’ operation in Gaza highlighted the need to cease neoliberal cuts because it was impossible to sustain the war effort while simultaneously continuing to ‘build an Israeli society and create resilience with a “lean” and stingy public service’. Entirely airbrushed from her account was that, by November 2023, at least 10,300 Palestinians had been killed by the IDF, including more than 4000 children. Over 25,000 had been injured and more than 2200 people were reported missing in Gaza, including 1270 children trapped under the rubble (reliefweb, 2023).

This is the material conjuncture in which the IUSW appears to have intentionally severed itself from the core ethical principles of the IFSW aligning instead with the imperatives of the settler colonial state and its brutal military wing, the IDF. Acting in this manner, the IUSW mirrors ‘official’ social work during the apartheid years in South Africa (Harms-Smith and Turton, 2023). However, to understand the IUSW's apparent callous indifference to Palestinian lives, evidenced by Hermoni and her colleagues, it is important to examine how settler colonial subjectivities are formed and how they help to constitute Zionist hegemony.

In his discussion on the interplay between the Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser (2014 [1995]: 88) avows that they ‘“conscientiously” do their daily duty' and ‘constantly lend one another a hand, in an overtly and tacitly “concerted” operation’. This, he continues, is not a smoothly functioning process; tensions can arise within the ISAs and ‘ideological sub-formations’, giving rise to oppositional values that ‘make the gears grate and grind’ (Althusser, 2014 [1995]: 88). What appears startling in terms of the IUSW is just how little ‘grate and grind’ is occurring. Expressed somewhat differently, although the ethics and values articulated by the IFSW are wholly in conflict with the actions of the IDF in Gaza, this seems to be prompting little ‘friction’ or resistance within Israeli social work (Althusser, 2014 [1995]: 36). Rather, as indicated by the UISW’ position, and despite the growing ambivalence on the part of the Israeli public on the Gaza ‘war’, the profession seems to be entirely harnessed to the contemporary brutality of settler colonialism and critical scholars such as Svirsky, Rifkin and others may help us to comprehend why this is the case.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to the reviewers from Critical Social Policy collective and to Anna Valeria Ballarotti whose helpful suggestions contributed to my reshaping aspects of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Paul Michael Garrett is a social work educator and trade union activist based in Ireland. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and, in 2024, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Ghent University in Belgium. His most recent books include Welfare Words (2018), Dissenting Social Work (2021), Social Work with the Black African Diaspora (2022) (with Washington Marovatsanga) and Social Work and Common Sense (2024).

Address: University of Galway, University Road, Galway, Republic of Ireland

Email: PM.Garrett@universityofgalway.ie

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