Helga Tawil-Souri

It’s Still About the Power of Place

Against the claim that the uprisings in Egypt were driven by social media, this article argues that territorial place continues to be a fundamentally important aspect of political change—even within the realm of media. Two key arguments are made: first, that territoriality and place are integral to media networks and infrastructures themselves; and second, that media studies needs to give greater importance to such a geography. The author argues that while the uprisings displayed a shifting spatiality, it is nonetheless one that is rooted in real places and embodied practices.

Uneven Borders, Coloured (Im)mobilities: ID Cards in Palestine/Israel

The Israeli state apparatus mandates differentiated IDs to Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinian non-citizens in East Jerusalem, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The bureaucracy of Palestinian ID cards since 1948 has rendered Palestinians more legible for the security interests of Israel while simultaneously discriminating Palestinians from Jews as unequal citizens and non-citizens. The ID card regime, and less so the permit regime, limits Palestinian geographic movement and economic mobility while simultaneously permitting freer Jewish-Israeli flows and mobilities. ID cards demonstrate the power of the Israeli regime to produce distinct people and bind them to specific territories (such as the Palestinians), while allowing others (Jewish-Israelis) to ‘trespass’ over those same boundaries. Through ID cards borders are erected between Jewish and Arab people, not Israeli and Palestinian territory. The ID card regime puts into question the nature and territorial boundaries of ‘Israel’, and the geopolitical existence of the ‘Palestinian Territories.’

Cinema as the Space to Transgress Palestine’s Territorial Trap

In this article, Palestinian national cinema is interpreted through the lens of a ‘structure of feeling’ in order to address the theme of Palestinians reconstituting themselves in relation to changing geographies. Palestinians must constantly negotiate the tensions between mobility and immobility, whether in exile or diaspora, inside Israel, or within the Territories. Connecting these lived geographies to film, the article argues that analytic frameworks mistaking the national for a territorially-defined and stable order are ill-suited for a treatment of Palestinian national cinema. Touching on film production, narrative tropes and filmic locations in various films, the paper argues that cinema serves as a space to transgress Palestine’s territorial trap. Cinema as a structure of feeling allows for a more elastic, transgressive and encompassing understanding of Palestine and Palestinians.

Towards a Palestinian cultural studies

This article sheds light on poetry written by two of the most prominent leaders of Hamas, assassinated by Israel in 2003 and 2004, respectively: Ibrahim al-Maqadmah and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. Both leaders took part in the creation of Hamas and propagated its ideology in political, cultural and other fields. Poetry, being the premier form of artistic expression in the Arab world, is used by the leaders of Hamas to present their experiences in Israeli prisons, and their vision and involvement in the Palestinian struggle. The sentiments that their poetry expresses, reveal deep and nuanced cultural, political and philosophical dimensions. The poetry of Hamas can be characterized as one of commitment, suffering, pain, longing, defiance, and certainty.

Media, Globalization, and the (Un)Making of the Palestinian Cause

This article examines the Palestinian cause’s relationship to globalization: how it has been represented, mediated, and co-opted since the 1950s, and how it echoed rhetorically, politically, and ideologically by different groups; and how these resulted in both wider attention and obscurity. Particular moments of the Palestinian cause are highlighted, beginning with the movement’s circulation within third world liberation struggles and anti-imperial movements, which thrust the Palestinian struggle to prominence in contemporary history and across media platforms. By the 1980s, Palestine became deployed as an unresolved system of imperialism, and as media attention expanded the result was an abstraction of the struggle’s anti-colonial origins. This tension of attention and abstraction is discernible in contemporary solidarity movements on human rights and social justice. The article concludes that as the cause continues to gain universal traction, the core political issues are rendered distant and mediated spectacles.

Between Digital Flows and Territorial Borders: ICTs in the Palestine-Israel-EU Matrix

Few things in our contemporary world are assumed to hold as much revolutionary promise as information and communication technologies (ICTs). They help connect people across space and time, leading to claims of an increasingly ‘borderless’ world in which it no longer matters where we are in (real) space. As some radically suggest, our communication ‘will be everywhere, but because it is independent of place, it will be situated nowhere’ (Wellman, 2001: 230; original emphasis). Such a world is determined by streams and flows, by switching and connecting, by trans-local and transnational mobility of people, capital, ideology, sTheres of influence, goods, and of course information and data. Everything has become a matter of passwords, mouse clicks, links, data logs, download/ upload streams and speeds, and portals, thanks to digitisation, to satellites, cellular phones, and the Internet.

Where is the political in cultural studies? In Palestine

By drawing on scholarship that focuses on cinema and music, the author argues that the very act of ‘creating culture’ in the contemporary Palestinian period is a form of political resistance. Second, given political conditions of countering Zionist/Israeli erasures, the study of Palestinian culture is also a form of political resistance. The author argues that the resistance at the heart of the two ‘analytics’ of culture and cultural studies is imperative.

A Tale of Love and Darkness

It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was twelve and a half years old, his mother committed suicide, a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen and joins a kibbutz, changes his name, marries, has children, and finally becomes a writer as well as an active participant in the political life of Israel.