How did you come to choose your research topic?

I was most keenly interested in why the development industry seems to fail in its professed goal of reducing inequality. All of us understand intuitively that international development has multiple points of entry, that it casts different groups of people into different pre-determined roles. Growing up as a middle-class kid, I’ve imbibed the notion – though it was never put to me explicitly – that volunteering to help others was a good way to embellish your CV and get ahead in life. And after a short period of volunteer work, the people I was supposed to help would say “thank you” and remain with the same structural problems, whereas I would be free to move on to greener pastures.

Since a lot of the details and themes of our research are, at core, autobiographical, I began exploring this question through the history of the place where I grew up, in the southern Negev desert in Israel. My MA dissertation was about a development town, Yeruham, situated near my home in Midreshet Ben Gurion. As I researched the people who managed and led this fledgling worker’s town during the 1950s and 1960s, I kept on encountering a curious phenomenon: they worked and travelled internationally as well as nationally. My PhD, therefore, took up the task of telling the global history of Israeli development.

Can you describe your thesis questions and methodology?

My dissertation explores the nexus between family history, international development, and state formation in the context of Israel. I investigate how family ties and strategies influenced the social mobility and class formation of Israeli development experts and their families, and how these dynamics intertwined with the broader historical processes of nation-building and colonisation.

To approach these questions, I adopt a microhistorical approach, focusing on the everyday lives and experiences of specific families involved in Israeli development projects. I use a variety of sources, including family archives, oral history interviews, memoirs, and company and government records, to reconstruct the family and professional trajectories of these individuals. By tracing the genealogies, marriages, and social networks of these families, I shed light on the ways in which kinship ties and family strategies unlock opportunities, accumulate resources, and shape experiences in the context of international development.

What are your major findings?

My research reveals that family and kinship ties played a crucial role in the social mobility and class formation of Israeli development experts and their families. I found that families served as dynamic networks, helping individuals build connections, navigate society, and gain power within the Israeli development apparatus. Moreover, families and kin-groups constituted critical spheres of action and actively shaped broader societal changes. In reading agency on the level of the family, my analysis offers an alternative to the traditional focus on individual actors or broad economic forces in our analyses of agency.

Another significant finding is the crucial role women played in these processes. They weren’t passive figures but actively shaped careers and contributed to their families’ success, despite often being overlooked by male centric narratives. I show how women maintained kinship ties, managed households, and navigated complex social environments.

My dissertation suggests that Israel can be understood as a “familial-developmental” state, where families compete for resources and opportunities within the state’s development apparatus. This challenges the traditional view of the state as the public sphere par excellence and highlights the role of family ties and kinship networks in the making of the two modern formations that supposedly replaced family: the state and class.

The “familial-developmental” model emphasises the agency of families in navigating the political and economic landscape of state-led development. It prompts us to examine how families leverage their resources and connections to achieve upward mobility within formations of development, and how this process interacts with broader historical forces. In essence, it encourages us to look at development critically and politically by mapping out the possible pathways families take to use the opportunities offered by development projects for some of them to enter the middle class.

What are you doing now?

I’m now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Neuchâtel, working on an SNSF-funded project called “Sea-Border and Air-Space Formation in the Interwar Middle East: A Trans-Imperial Perspective” in collaboration with Professor Jordi Tejel and PhD Candidate Carl-José Abi Hanna. We will be examining how shipping and civil aviation affected the air spaces and sea spaces of the interwar Middle-East, as the two imperial and mandatory powers sought to navigate their policy amid local actors and imperial competitors.

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David Motzafi-Haller defended his PhD thesis in International History on 27 August 2024. Associate Professor Nicole Bourbonnais presided over the committee, which included Professor Cyrus Schayegh and Professor Jean-François Bayart, Thesis Co-Supervisors, and, as External Reader, Professor Antoinette Burton, Department of History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Citation of the PhD thesis: 

Motzafi-Haller, David. “Zionism in Development: A Family Microhistory.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2024.
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis via this page of the repository. Others can contact Dr Motzafi-Haller.

Banner image: Kyriat Tivon, Yad Itzhak Ben Tzvi, Gershoni Family Collection. Photography by: Hanna Gershoni.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.