Rebecca L. Stein

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

SOUVENIRS OF CONQUEST: ISRAELI OCCUPATIONS AS TOURIST EVENTS

Itisperhapsself-evidenttosuggestthatmilitaryconquestsharessomethingwithtourism because both involve encounters with “strange” landscapes and people. Thus it may not surprise that the former sometimes borrows rhetorical strategies from the latter— strategies for rendering the strange familiar or for translating threatening images into benign ones. There have been numerous studies of this history of borrowing. Scholars have considered how scenes of battle draw tourist crowds, how soldiers’ ways of seeing can resemble those of leisure travelers, how televised wars have been visually structured as tourist events (e.g., the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq), and how the spoils of war can function as a body of souvenirs. 1 These lines of inquiry expand our understanding of tourism as a field of cultural practices and help us to rethink the parameters of militarism and warfare by suggesting ways they are entangled with everyday leisure practices. This paper considers the ways this entanglement functions in the Israeli case. To be more specific, I am interested in the workings of Israeli tourist practices and discourses during two key moments of Israeli military engagement: the 1967 war and subsequent onset of the Israeli military occupation and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. My analysis in both instances focuses on a reading of popular Israeli Hebrew and Englishlanguage print media, 2 with attention to the ways that Israeli newspapers represented the incursion, occupation, and/or conquest to Israeli publics in the immediate aftermath of thewartimevictory(1967)andinvasion(1982).Bothcaseshavebeenlargelyoverlooked within the scholarly writing on Israel, and both expand our account of Israeli militarism by considering the popular cultural avenues by which state military projects have been enabled and sustained. 3 Consider, by means of introduction, the 1967 case. The gradual dissolution of borders between Israel and its newly occupied territories in war’s aftermath generated numerous new possibilities for Israeli travel to places that had been inaccessible since 1948. What resulted was a tourist event of massive proportions, passionately documented by the Israeli popular media of the period through images of surging Israeli crowds in Jerusalem’s Old City, of the rush to buy souvenirs in Bethlehem and inexpensive appliances in Gaza City, and of collective wonder at sites that had been off limits to Rebecca L. Stein is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Cultural Anthropology and Women’s Studies,

First contact and other Israeli fictions: tourism, globalization, and the Middle East peace process.

In the summer of 1994, several days before the signing of the Washington Declaration that would end the official state of war between Israel and Jordan, one of Israel’s most popular daily newspapers documented the “first” Israeli visit to Petra, the Nabatean city in southern Jordan. A two-page spread, featured in the front section of Yedi 3ot Ah. aronot and illustrated with photographs, recounted the clandestine voyage of two Israeli travelers who had crossed the border into Jordan illegally with their European passports. “I Got to the Red Rock!” the headline proclaimed. Dramatic, first-person prose recounted the travelers’ mounting anticipation as they neared Petra in a Jordanian taxi, their constant fear of discovery, and, at last, the thrill of arrival. “And then it happened. Suddenly, between the crevices of the giant stones, 100 meters from us, [we caught our] first glimpse of the red structures hewn in rock. Tears came to our eyes. . . . ‘Photograph me,’ we said to each other in the same breath” (Lior 1994). Israeli voyages into the Arab world received extensive coverage in the mainstream Israeli media of the mid-1990s. The figure of the Israeli tourist, and the grammar of a tourist imagination, constituted crucial discursive tools by which popular newspapers represented the so-called Middle East peace process, and its

Explosive: Scenes from Israel's Gay Occupation

This essay examines two works by the Israeli director Eytan Fox—Florentin, a television serial, and The Bubble, a feature film—and the highly divergent ways they negotiate the interplay between queerness, the Israeli state, and the Israeli military occupation. Reading Foxs works symptomatically, the essay proposes that Florentin and The Bubble can be understood as indexes of the changing Israeli political landscape of the last decade—both the vacillating landscape of gay rights and visibility within the nation-state and the changing landscape of Israeli occupation and Palestinian struggle that the Oslo process of the 1990s made possible. In keeping with the tradition of symptomatic reading, the analysis pays close attention to storylines and populations that Fox has excluded from these works, arguing that Foxs representations of gay Israeli life are intimately enmeshed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even at moments when, through cinematic silence, the conflict is implicitly disavowed.

Traveling Zion: Hiking and Settler-Nationalism in pre-1948 Palestine

This essay considers the political import of the hike or walk (ha-tiyul; plural, tiyulim) among Jewish settlers in Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century. Situating this travelling practice within the broader Zionist discourse of which it was a part, I will suggest that the tiyulim conducted by Jewish settlers were important technologies of settler nation-making which helped to rewrite Arab Palestine as a Jewish geography. Drawing on postcolonial arguments about imperial travel, this essay presents both a condensed history of such travelling practices and a close reading of some of the travelogues they spawned. I focus on two divergent itineraries: (a) accounts of travel within the borders of the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) replete with classic colonial tropes of conquest, the empty landscape, and Palestinian-Arab culture qua ethnographic object; and (b) accounts of Jewish travel to neighbouring Arab countries (Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon) from which colonial tropes are frequently absent. I suggest that these postcolonial readings of Zionist travel and travelogues advance the scholarship on Zionist coloniality by suggesting the role of everyday culture within the settler-national project.This essay considers the political import of the hike or walk (ha-tiyul; plural, tiyulim) among Jewish settlers in Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century. Situating this travelling practice within the broader Zionist discourse of which it was a part, I will suggest that the tiyulim conducted by Jewish settlers were important technologies of settler nation-making which helped to rewrite Arab Palestine as a Jewish geography. Drawing on postcolonial arguments about imperial travel, this essay presents both a condensed history of such travelling practices and a close reading of some of the travelogues they spawned. I focus on two divergent itineraries: (a) accounts of travel within the borders of the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) replete with classic colonial tropes of conquest, the empty landscape, and Palestinian-Arab culture qua ethnographic object; and (b) accounts of Jewish travel to neighbouring Arab countries (Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon) from which colonial tropes are frequentl...

Impossible Witness: Israeli Visuality, Palestinian Testimony and the Gaza War

This article studies Israeli news coverage (chiefly via newspapers and television) of the Gaza war of 2008–2009, with a focus on what the national media withheld from its consuming publics – namely, depiction of the extent of Israeli-inflicted violence upon Gazan people and infrastructure. At the core of this article is a study of an anomalous instance of Palestinian testimonial which was broadcast live on Israeli national television – this in an Israeli media context in which Palestinian eyewitness accounts were largely occluded from public view. How, the article asks, are we to make sense of this scene of televised Palestinian trauma and the enormous attention it garnered among Israeli publics? The author’s reading detours through the work of Israeli cultural theorist Ariella Azoulay with her insistence that the study of images and visuality in the Israeli context be attentive to the inextricable interplay between ways of seeing and national ideologies. In conclusion, the author proffers a reading which folds this scene of televised testimonial back into the hegemonic Israeli field of perception.

GoPro Occupation: Networked Cameras, Israeli Military Rule, and the Digital Promise

This paper is an ethnographical exploration of the growing importance of photographic technologies within the contemporary political theater of Israel’s military occupation studied from the vantage of Israeli actors and institutions. My ethnography focuses on the Israeli military’s growing investment in cameras as public relations technologies and how Israeli human rights groups are employing camera technologies against the military in unprecedented ways and degrees. Both institutions are now laboring to translate their work into visual registers, recognizing that political claims making depends on networked cameras and viral images as never before. My analysis focuses on what I term the “analytics of lapse”—instances in which photographic technologies, images, and associated infrastructures break down, lag, or otherwise fail to deliver on their ostensible communicative promise. Lapse provides a mean of thinking against cyber-utopian theories of new media even as it provides a way of unsettling enduring Israeli colonial logics of technological modernity.

Tours that bind: diaspora, pilgrimage, and Israeli birthright tourism

the changing structure of Bennett’s business as technological advances allowed tourists to create their own photographic images, thereby reducing the need for professional photographers such as Bennett. The epilogue moves the project forward by a century to look at a contemporary Ho-Chunk photographer, Tom Jones, and the differing way that a member of the Ho-Chunk community uses photographs to represent his people in the twenty-first century. In sum this is a beautiful book on two levels. First, the artwork is delightfully reproduced giving easy access to numerous important images. Second, and more importantly, Hoelscher has expertly delved into and behind the images to give a fascinating and nuanced understanding of Bennett’s photography.