Mark LeVine

Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture

This important volume rethinks the conventional parameters of Middle East studies through attention to popular cultural forms, producers, and communities of consumers. The volume has a broad historical scope, ranging from the late Ottoman period to the second Palestinian uprising, with a focus on cultural forms and processes in Israel, Palestine, and the refugee camps of the Arab Middle East. The contributors consider how Palestinian and Israeli popular culture influences and is influenced by political, economic, social, and historical processes in the region. At the same time, they follow the circulation of Palestinian and Israeli cultural commodities and imaginations across borders and checkpoints and within the global marketplace. The volume is interdisciplinary, including the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, ethnomusicologists, and Americanist and literary studies scholars. Contributors examine popular music of the Palestinian resistance, ethno-racial “passing” in Israeli cinema, Arab-Jewish rock, Euro-Israeli tourism to the Arab Middle East, Internet communities in the Palestinian diaspora, cafe culture in early-twentieth-century Jerusalem, and more. Together, they suggest new ways of conceptualizing Palestinian and Israeli political culture. Contributors . Livia Alexander, Carol Bardenstein, Elliott Colla, Amy Horowitz, Laleh Khalili, Mary Layoun, Mark LeVine, Joseph Massad, Melani McAlister, Ilan Pappe, Rebecca L. Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Salim Tamari

Theorizing Revolutionary Practice: Agendas for Research on the Arab Uprisings

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue of the journal Middle East Critique on the Arab uprisings of 2011. It presents a summary of the main ideas that were analyzed and debated at a unique conference that brought together in April 2012 several academic experts and several activists who had participated in the revolutionary events that the international media dubbed the ‘Arab Spring.’ The aims of the conference were to encourage dialogue between scholars of the Middle East and the activists in order to reach some degree of common understanding about the factors that precipitated the mass protests, especially in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain; to assess the dynamics of the uprisings; and to explore ways to conduct research on and to apply theories to the revolutionary practices that emerged during the uprisings.

Doing the Devil’s Work: Heavy Metal and the Threat to Public Order in the Muslim World

The author explores how the millennia-old concept of Satan in the three Abrahamic faiths has shaped the cultural landscape in which heavy metal as a musical genre has been experienced and responded to in the Muslim world. He first surveys the evolution of Satan from the Hebrew Scriptures through the Quran, and its subsequent development in Islamic thought through the contemporary period. He then discusses the socio-economic and political environment that influenced the development of heavy metal as an art form, and why it has had such resonance in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world. Finally, he explores the largely negative reaction to the music by Muslim governments and societies, and how, in a certain sense, today’s Muslim metalheads are fulfilling a historic function of Satan in Islamic theology. L’auteur analyse comment le concept millénaire de Satan, au sein des trois religions abrahamiques, a façonné le paysage culturel du monde musulman et comment celui-ci a expérimenté et réagi au metal comme genre musical. L’auteur investigue d’abord les évolutions de Satan des écritures hébraïques jusqu’au Coran, ainsi que ses développements ultérieurs dans la pensée islamique au long de la période contemporaine. Il analyse ensuite les environnements socio-économique et politique qui ont contribué au développement du metal comme forme artistique et les raisons pour lesquelles il a eu un tel écho dans le Moyen-Orient et, plus largement, dans le monde islamique. Enfin, l’auteur revient sur la réaction négative vis-à-vis de la musique manifestée par les sociétés et les gouvernements musulmans et les manières dont, selon une certaine interprétation, les metalleux musulmans d’aujourd’hui remplissent une fonction historique de Satan dans la théologie islamique.

Conquest Through Town Planning: The Case of Tel Aviv, 1921-48

The role of the discourses of town planning and development played an important role in the Zionist leadership9s attempts to expand its urban territorial base, nowhere more obviously than in Tel Aviv. This article examines the land and town planning legislation introduced by the Mandate, how the rapidly growing Municipality of Tel Aviv used this legislation to annex lands from the surrounding Arab villages, and the local Palestinian population9s understanding of and resistance to the Zionist-inspired urbanization of the region.

Socio-Religious Movements and the Transformation of “Common Sense” into a Politics of “Common Good”

This chapter explores the philosophical and epistemological foundations of the variety of notions of the “public” utilized—explicitly and implicitly—by socio-religious movements to define and justify their ideologies and actions to achieve social power. Our hypothesis is that contemporary Muslim socio-religious movements attempt to formulate and implement discourses of common good that aspire to legitimate specific forms of political community, based on distinctive methods of public reasoning. These discourses are often in tension with modern liberal conceptions of the public sphere; specifically, they remain unbounded by the strictures of liberal norms of publicness premised on atomistic views of the social agent and contractually based notions of trust, by a strict interpretation of the dichotomy between private and public spheres, and by the ultimate basing of public reason on private interest. What socio-religious discourses and movements primarily base their public reason on is a practical reason sanctified by religious tradition, however variably interpreted. Such a perspective provides these discourses with a level of fluidity and adaptability that accounts in large measure for their success in mobilizing large numbers of people to their cause.

Introduction Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Muslim Majority Societies

The collection of essays in this volume examines how modern public spheres reflect and mask—often simultaneously— discourses of order, contests for hegemony, and techniques of power in the Muslim world. Although the contributors examine various time periods and locations, each views modern and contemporary public spheres as crucial to the functioning, and thus understanding, of political and societal power in Muslim majority countries. Part I of this volume analyzes the various discourses and technologies operating within Muslim public spheres; part II investigates how they impact and interact with the construction of moral and legal arguments within Muslim societies.

Fugitive Pedagogy: Guattari’s Ecosophy in the Mural Discourse of the Zapatistas

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation has been struggling for greater rights and autonomy for the indigenous Mayan peoples of Chiapas, Mexico for the last three decades. The iconography, semiotic system, and progressive myth-making the Zapatistas produce in the hundreds of murals adorning their communities disseminate a powerful anti-state and anti-capitalist ideology that mutually reinforces the Zapatista culture on which the functioning of their communities, economy, and overall sociopolitical campaign depend. We argue that their positive, forward-oriented and environmentally sensitive art, and the broader political, social and pedagogical discourses it represents, is strongly congruent with Guattari’s intellectual focus and political orientation toward developing a transversal “ecosophy,” an ethico-aesthetic perspective that can enable greater freedom from the heavy chains of both the Mexican government and the global neoliberal capitalist system in which Mexico is embedded.

Israel, Palestine, and the Language of Genocide

T he israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip has now reached the halfcentury mark. There is little, if any, chance in the foreseeable future that Palestinians will achieve even a small measure of independence, sovereignty, or statehood; never mind a measure of political rights in a Greater Israel. As Israel intensifies its control over the Occupied Territories, the violations of international law that have long been at the heart of the Occupation continue to grow in number, kind, and scope. At the same time, Israeli religious, political, and military leaders make increasingly racist statements that call into question the possibility of the Zionist state ever coming to terms with Palestinians. The list of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel includes torture, kidnapping, human shields, theft (of land, money, and resources), denial of education, collective punishment, detention without trial, home demolitions, extrajudicial executions, imprisonment of minors, a massive settlement complex, and even worse from the perspective of international law, persecution on political, racial, ethnic and religious grounds, and racism. Even Apartheid is increasingly accepted as a legitimate legal description of Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories. But there is one label that still elicits intense opposition even among progressive critics of Israel—genocide. We know the reason why. For Jews, genocide was, is, and will always be primarily associated with the Holocaust. Only crimes involving the highest level of death and destruction justify such a judgment. Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, perhaps the Yazidis. But Israel? The Occupation might be brutal, but who besides an antiSemite would suggest Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians? This understanding of genocide as encompassing only extreme levels of mass murder is why last year’s invocation of the term by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), in criticizing the Occupation in the explanatory text of its manifesto, caused a firestorm of criticism. And yet not all Jews oppose the use of the term. Jewish Voice for Peace, the Jews of Color Caucus, historian Ilan Pappé, and the Center for Constitutional Rights (headed until his death about a year ago by attorney Michael Ratner), among others, have all supported, to a greater or lesser degree, the use of the term in the Israel/Palestine case, as have some of the world’s leading scholars of international humanitarian law. With the 50th anniversary of the Occupation now upon us we believe it is crucial to assess the accusation of genocide in a dispassionate and objective manner. The problem with engaging in such an assessment is that for all its power— indeed, because of it—the term genocide does not have one agreed upon meaning. Rather, its legal, sociological, political, and polemical meanings overlap at points while also diverging significantly today and over time. As enshrined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, “genocide can be carried out through acts against individuals, when the ultimate intent is to annihilate the entire group composed of these individuals.” Enshrined in Articles II and III of the Convention, genocide comprised both a “mental” and a “physical” element and was defined as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” While the level of death and destruction does not have to encompass most or even a majority of members of a protected group, the violence does have to be of sufficient extent to threaten to change its “pattern of life.” This basic definition has held true in the ensuing seven decades, including most recently in the Rome Statute of 1998 to establish an International Criminal Court (ICC). It is worth noting here that since the coining of the term by the Polish Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin in the 1930s

In Lieu of Conclusion: From Bare Life to Dignity

As I write these lines, the one hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide is being commemorated around the world, although still not in Turkey. The systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians, during what was then history’s most brutal and deadly war, reminds us that the violence, exploitation, and oppression are in no way unique to the present neoliberal global order. In the past century alone, Stalinism, Maoism, Nazism, Cold War imperialism, and a host of local and globally intentioned ideological-cum-political systems and their attendant economies—in particular, exclusivist national and religious identities—have all had equally (and in many cases far more) deleterious consequences. The “politics of denial” (as Zafer Fehmi Yoruk describes it in his chapter in this volume on Turkish state repression of Kurdish identity) is a common place in most every large-scale system of social, political, and economic organization, precisely because most every macrolevel, or “state” system, ultimately functions in practice more or less as a mafia or protection racket—syphoning off as much wealth as possible to elites while offering a modicum of protection for the masses of society (cf. Tilly 1985).