Like a black fly in your chardonnay

It's ironic that when I checked this morning, one of the ads running on my blog was this:


I won't go into detail deconstructing this image, but this is a great example of a lot of geographic concepts (banal nationalism, Gottmann's iconography, the use of maps as propaganda, the signals and affective response of color in cartography, etc.). Note that Israel is "surrounded by enemies," despite the fact that the two non-Israel nation-states indicated on the map both have formal peace agreements with Israel. Gaza is reduced to being "Hamas" while the West Bank is given some status as a quasi-nation-state--interestingly, the Security Barrier's route through the western edge of the West Bank seems to be demarcated as a different class of territory, as well. Finally, the whole bit is summed up by equivocating "peace" with "support for Israel," which naturally is the ideal of Christians and Jews--never mind those Christian Palestinians, and let's not even get into those warmongering Muslims.

I enabled ads on this blog as an experiment to see what would come up, and to try to raise the profile of this blog so that I could connect to other people and organizations with interests in the region. I'm sickened by this ad, though, and am contemplating disabling ads. The only "plus" I see where this ad is concerned is that it gives me an opportunity to attack some of the persistent propaganda perpetrated by the virulent pro-Israel (and anti-Palestinian) crowd... and the ad costs them money.

So maybe I'll click on it myself, just so I can take a few tenths of a cent out of their coffers.

Living Jerusalem: initial readings

My first reflections upon reading about the Jerusalem Project and the 1993 Folk Festival were that my impressions of Jerusalem and its contested nature were pretty much spot-on. I don't mean to pat myself on the back, because to me, the complexities of representation and perception regarding Jerusalem are palpable, omnipresent, and abrasive.

In other words, you can't spend 10 minutes in Jerusalem--especially in the Old City--without tripping over the tangled mess of how different people perceive Jerusalem, and how everyone's subjective position determines what they perceive as 'objectively' Jerusalem. My first day in Jerusalem, I saw a Palestinian shopkeeper being accosted by Israeli Police because he didn't have his trash can in the right place. Perhaps to the shopkeeper, Jerusalem is his livelihood. Perhaps to the police, Jerusalem is a dangerous place--a powderkeg of contrary political and economic realities. To the tourists giving a wide berth to the argument, Jerusalem is a holy city with a conflict that would just go away if everyone would just find Christ (italics indicate my sarcasm here). To me, the geographer looking for moments of contention between groups, Jerusalem is a battleground of quotidian conflicts.

So we each bring our respective baggage to Jerusalem, and see the city through tinted lenses--and many assume that everyone sees (or should see) the city the same way. This subjectivity isn't restricted to how we perceive the city and its denizens (and its visitors), but extends to the history and the folkways of the city, as well as how the city is represented thousands of miles away, in and around the halls of power in Washington, DC.

Enough of my musing; I should respond specifically to the readings for this week.

The Hasan-Rokem paper hit squarely on the target painted by Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture. As in my musings above, Hasan-Rokem spends a great deal of thought on representation and the performative aspects of culture. Israel (and especially Jerusalem) is a terrain populated by history and revanchist cultural practices--practices that, to one degree or another, seek to connect to and perpetuate history. Sukkot, Purim, and other holidays are important to Jewish culture and religious practice, but also gain importance through their commemoration on Israeli soil. I feel that Hasan-Rokem has captured quite a bit of the ambiguity and difficulty of representing Jerusalem and its polyglot culture, but I can't help but wonder if he simplified things a bit--because Jerusalem isn't just a contest between Israeli and Palestinian, Jew and Muslim: Jerusalem is also a product of Armenians and Orthodox, of wealthy tourists and dispossessed families, of first-world technology and economics clashing with Iron Age archaeology and 19th-century infrastructure.

The Representing Jerusalem piece from Middle East Report is remarkable to me most because the text shows its age. 1993 was a moment of hope and possibility, and there was a palpable feeling that things would only get better--and they did, to a degree, for a while. Thus, the "most difficult problem" of the project is contextualization, in order to keep the threads untangled and prevent the Jerusalem Project from becoming "a caricature of itself." Never mind the grinding reality of ongoing conflict in and around the city, especially in the 21st century: in 1993 we just had to figure out how to be equanimous, how to be "fair and balanced" without going overboard.

Which is why Researching East Jerusalem feels more in-tune with (my) reality: Amiry talks about peasant women, teenagers, drugs, and crime. Sometimes we focus so much on the elephant in the room, we forget that Jerusalem is a city with problems like other cities. And that context is important to keep and remember, as well.

Finally, one bit of Living Jerusalem: Cultures and Communities in Contention really stood out for me: defining and delimiting the research process, particularly in terms geographical boundaries (hey, I am a geographer) and what is "contemporary." Jerusalem is a place where "contemporary" is particularly problematic--not just because of the age of the city, but because (as I mentioned above) how groups and individuals bring historical practices (and myth) to the present in efforts to reinforce their claims on space in the present.

Overall, I find two themes tie together the readings for me. First, as I've blathered on quite a bit already, Jerusalem is a quagmire of meaning and contested context. Second, 18 years ago, we could spend time and energy worrying about the politics of representation in an academic setting; nowadays, the politics of representation is geopolitics. When Bibi pronounces that "East Jerusalem is not a settlement," it's clear that what is at stake is a lot more than getting an ethnographic project done right.

Everyone loves the Old City at night

I'm just warming up and trying to get back in the blogging mindset. I noticed on the Living Jerusalem 2011 blog there was a header photo of the Old City at night, taken from the Mount of Olives.

It just so happens that I took a nearly-identical shot back in 2009. It was an interesting evening, as while I was setting up my tripod and composing the shot, a local kid was trying to beg money from me. Either my Arabic was off (which is entirely possible, as at the time my colloquial was virtually nonexistent), or the kid wasn't Palestinian (also possible, given that there was a nearby apartment building that looked to be all Jewish settlers), but we were having communication difficulties. Eventually the kid got through to me that he was willing to stick olives up his nose for money. I politely declined, but he stuck the olives up his nose anyway. And then, of course, he wanted money for the show.

I should've taken a picture of him and given him a NIS or two, just for fun.

In any case, in the spirit of friendly competition with the Living Jerusalem blog, here's another look at one of the images from that night. It's a HDR composite of several exposures, with some
additional tweaking in Photoshop:



Looking at the image I've produced, the colors are a bit unrealistic (though that's one of the styles you can achieve with HDR photography). In the end, though, I think that it's a fitting metaphor for Jerusalem. No one can be objective when it comes to Jerusalem (being something of a post-structuralist, I'd argue against the notion of 'objectivity' in regards to anything, but that's another story), and so our personal histories, biases, and preconceptions color how we look at Jerusalem, and many people end up idealizing it.

I am not immune to this tendency--I just spent a good long while compositing the HDR image, and then playing around with it in Photoshop, all to produce a 'perfect' snapshot of the Temple Mount. A snapshot that doesn't reflect the reality one would see when standing on the Mount of Olives and looking at this very same scene with her/his eyes.

It lives!

This blog has been silent for the past year and a half, since my return from Israel/Palestine.

But I am now resuscitating the blog for use in a class at OSU. The class is called "Living Jerusalem," and one of the central elements of the class is how Israelis, Palestinians, and others live in and perceive Jerusalem, as mediated by blogging.

So, kind of right up this blog's alley.

More to come later.