1967

From Juan Cole's excellent blog, Informed Comment:

Netanyahu’s argument for not going back to 1967 borders is that it is inconvenient. He says that the 1967 borders are indefensible. This assertion is a logical fallacy, known as special pleading. You can’t launch a war and annex your neighbor’s territory because you fear that your own presents security challenges. Lots of countries are unhappy with their borders. Saddam Hussein annexed Kuwait in 1990 in part because he felt that the British had erred in not giving modern Iraq a deep water port, which made Iraq ‘indefensible’ and put it at an economic disadvantage. Pakistan believes that its failure to secure the headwaters of the Indus Valley rivers in Kashmir in 1947 puts it at a permanent disadvantage vis-a-vis India and makes the country overly vulnerable (‘indefensible’). Netanyahu’s immoral argument that a country just has to take by main force whatever it feels will make it more secure is astonishing and is a standing danger to world peace if it were taken seriously by other countries.

Israel enjoys a tactical and strategic superiority over its neighbors; its military is both better-equipped and better-trained than any other force in the region, and it enjoys access to all the benefits of being a staunch US ally. The 1967 borders weren't "indefensible" in 1967 (Israel won the 1967 war. QED.), and are even less "indefensible" now.

Camera shyness

I'm trying to get people willing to appear on-camera briefly to talk about how they imagine/understand/picture Jerusalem and the people who live there.

But most of the people I have asked don't want to appear on-camera--mainly because, they say, they don't know anything about Jerusalem.

So I'm putting out an all-points bulletin; I need help. If you know anyone who would be willing to talk on-camera about Jerusalem for 60 seconds or so (and, importantly, have never been to Jerusalem themselves), please refer them to me or give me their contact info. We can do it on or near campus just about any weekday.

I'm even contemplating bribing... er, compensating people with food.

Other blogs

Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan, a past president of MESA (the Middle East Studies Association), has a blog of his own that is worth reading.

He's got his slant on things, and is very stridently political on the blog. But the guy is extremely well-read, has a ton of experience in the region, speaks Arabic, and his blog makes for an all-around interesting read.

Plus, he links to a lot of Daily Show stuff, so if you don't have time to keep current on the Daily Show, you get the best of the bits that involve the Middle East and/or foreign policy.

And while I'm linking to other blogs of interest, Professor William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin also started a blog. Alas, the very first post he made prompted a poop-storm (keeping the language PG) of epic proportions. Cronon is an environmental scientist and geographer (we claim him as one of our own), is brilliant, and his initial post--and the reaction to it--is so deeply disturbing that I consider it a must-read for anyone who is interested in American politics, or the higher education system in America.

Seriously, go read Cronon's blog post about ALEC. Regardless of your political affiliation or inclinations, it's Stuff You Should Know™.

Tamkeen

quick links about Tamkeen--which is a USAID-funded initiative spanning several Middle Eastern countries, with the goal of fostering democratic institutions, civil society, and youth leadership and empowerment.

More information from the principal contractor, Chemonics
A view of some of Tamkeen on the ground, from The Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art
One of the products of Tamkeen

Pyalara questions

1. I noticed Pyalara's donors don't include USAID. What are the reasons for this; is there a relationship between Pyalara and USAID (including a dysfunctional one)?
2. Pyalara looks and sounds a lot like the Tamkeen project; is there any relationship between these initiatives?
3. How does the (internal) Palestinian political climate--that is, the contest between Hamas and Fatah, the corruption and graft endemic in the PA, etc.--influence and shape Pyalara? Is the idealism of creating "future leaders" tempered by reality within Palestinian politics?
   

Reading Response: May 18

Today's theme... well, there isn't one coherent theme. This is probably appropriate to the times, as the events in and around Israel/Palestine recently don't necessarily have one coherent theme, either. What I mean by that is that the Palestinians who demonstrated at the Syria-Israel border and the Lebanon-Israel border did different things, for different reasons, from protesters in East Jerusalem. Yes, the end goal of everyone might be the same, but the methods and the paths to that goal were different.

So what am I talking about?

Alona Nitzan-Shiftan's chapter "Seizing locality in Jerusalem," from the title alone, would appear to a geographer as a very straightforward tract on how different groups claim space in the city. But, obviously, she wasn't writing it for geographers, because the chapter instead revolves around the co-opting of "traditional" (or "native") Palestinian architecture by a movement of Israeli architects. However, what Nitzan-Shiftan sees as an inversion of structure and form imposed upon the landscape--wherein conqueror takes up the symbols and methods of the conquered--is actually, to me, a straightforward co-opting of culture by a colonial power. We see numerous examples of this aping of indigenous culture by colonial powers, producing something hybridized and not truly "indigenous" or similar to culture in the imperial heartland. Look at the architecture of the British Raj in cities like Lahore, Delhi, and Calcutta; the "mission" style in the American southwest; the baths and seraglios created by Turks (Seljuk, Ottoman, Mamluke, etc.) in Arab cities like Cairo. The creation of a colonizer/colonized fusion of culture, often expressed in architecture, to me seems to be a common occurrence.

Nitzan-Shiftan reads the sabra movement, in its abandonment of Modernism and its taking up of an "Arab" ideal, as something of an unconscious colonial apologia--as Modernist architecture looked/felt alien to the landscape of the state of Israel, the sabra designers sought a more authentic, a more fitting style for the land. Of course, this "fit" and "authenticity" was expressed in the native dwellings of indigenous Palestinians, and so by taking up this more "authentic" style of design, the sabra architects were actually affirming the place of Arabs, the "belonging-ness" of Palestinians to the landscape.

Though maybe I'm reading too much into the chapter--Nitzan-Shiftan repeatedly alludes to sabra architects and their efforts as a "yearning to be 'of the place,'" that is, the form and design ideas aped native building (or evoked Biblical or Mediterranean themes) because of the dislocation of Diasporic Jewry, and the need for Israelis to feel at home in what was, to them, the ancient homeland they had lost. A more cynical reading might argue that this "yearning to be 'of the place'" is coterminous with a need to establish "facts on the ground," that is, the more "authentic" the look and feel of a community, the more valid one's claim to the land, stretching back to antiquity.

I've noticed that I'm using a lot of quotation marks, commas, and shifty, vague terms like "look" and "feel." And then, there in that sentence, I've done it again: more commas and more quotation marks. That's a central problem when we're dealing with something ans inchoate and slippery as "culture." And isn't architecture, in a very fundamental sense, an expression of culture? Taking up notions of how a nation should build and what suits the landscape as well as human function, and then creating tangible icons of the nation and how its people function--that is architecture. Based on, and reflecting... or perhaps refracting culture. Then again, what is "culture"? More slipperiness and ambiguity.

I will say this: architecture is both an expression of, and expressive to, a nation's culture. Israel today sees itself as a fusion of Occident and Orient, and this is at least partly due to the uptake of native and Western design. Sort of like Disney's Epcot Center, or the Strip in Las Vegas--where you can walk through little compartmentalized versions of a dozen different countries, each designated by a style of design and some recognizably "authentic" landmarks--you can make a place feel a certain way, simply by building that way. To be clearer: build a shopping mall with stone, throw a few arches and shady promenades, maybe a dome somewhere, and it is "Middle Eastern." The shopping mall doesn't have to be in the Middle East, or evoke the Middle East for any purpose other than to divert shoppers' imaginations, so they feel like they're buying an "authentic" Middle East experience instead of just a new pair of shoes. One shopping mall designed in such a fashion is a gimmick; a hundred shopping malls, apartment complexes, suburban communities, and governmental buildings designed this way create a cultural notion that the place is the Middle East.

And so it went with the sabra architects. They were as much creating a connection with the landscape as they were forging an Israeli identity, an identity of having one foot in the West and one in the East. I would argue we hear that identity expressed every time someone invokes Israel as "the only democracy in the Middle East." But that's a can of worms for another occasion.

Oh, one last bit on Nitzan-Shiftan: for anyone interested in doing a doctoral dissertation, take careful note of the last block of text from the lead paragraph on page 232:

Why should architects Israelize a contested city with architectural forms of another nation? Moreoever, once such espousal of the Palestinian vernacular took place, what were the mechanisms that enabled Israelis to separate it from the culture that produced it in order to make it constitutive of 'an Israeli architecture'?

Those are research questions, folks--the big, sprawling, "what is going on?" and "under what conditions can this happen?" questions that you can build an entire dissertation around.

some wall/settlement pictures

I have a stash of photos I use for class lectures and presentations, and, unfortunately, I don't have any metadata to accompany them.

So, I'm posting a link to a PDF that includes these pictures and some of my own that I had handy, showing the wall, settlements, and some of the immediate effects thereof.

I've put as much source data as I have. If there isn't a caption on a slide, it's because I have no idea who shot it, where it was shot, or when--except that it was definitely earlier than 2006, and possibly before 2004 (but after 2000).

As I don't own the rights to many of these pictures, I converted everything to a PDF, and am restricting access to the file. If the slideshow doesn't load, or you're getting a "no access" type message when you click on that link above, let me know and I'll see about fixing whatever is going wrong.

Setting the discourse

Today's Jerusalem Post is instructive: the Palestinian protests and border "incursions" are relegated to a story well down the page. The stories with higher precedence and higher position on the page?

• Abbas: Enough time before September to renew peace talks
• Father of kidnapped soldier criticizes Israeli gov't for giving PA tax revenues it is entitled to
• Fatah & Hamas start talks in Cairo
• German prosecutors appeal release of Demjanjuk
• ICC prosecutor wants Qaddafi arrested
• Shuttle Endeavour launched
• Likud Knesset leader tells Netanyahu West Bank settlements should be annexed
• Israel to file UN complaint against Syria & Lebanon for border incursions*
• 350+ hurt in protest of Israeli embassy in Cairo
• Thai princess comes to Israel to promote cooperation
• LA chef makes world's largest felafel
• Israel (music) festival celebrates 50 years
• Countdown to a Palestinian state
• J-Post correspodent argues that Hamas-Fatah deal is not a "game-changer"
• Some comparing bin Laden raid to Entebbe

And then, finally, there is a story directly discussing the Palestinian protests. Of course, this is the J-Post--not exactly the most Palestinian-sympathetic paper you'll find.

*I'm not including this as a story about the protests, because this is more about Israel's reaction. Israel gets triple-ironic points for going to the UN to complain, when it still is in violations of UN resolutions as well as ICJ decisions.

Well, how about Haaretz, then? Well to the left of the J-Post, maybe Ha'aretz isn't buying into the discourse of "the border incursions are Syrian challenges to Israel's integrity!" instead of looking at the Palestinian protests in totality...

Yup, top headline:

Netanyahu: Palestinians want to destroy Israel, they are no partner for peace
boom!
Haaretz isn't minimizing yesterday's events, but they're caught up in Netanyahu's reframing of them. Right below the lead story is another one:
U.S. accuses Syria of inciting Israel border clashes
....and there we go.

Haaretz has a lot of coverage on its homepage about the Palestinian protests, but sadly, not only are they repeating Netanyahu's spin (as a headline), it shows that the US has bought the smoke-and-mirrors. Never you mind what my left hand is doing, says the magician to his audience, just watch my right hand as I pull a rabbit out of my hat! Meanwhile, the magician's left hand is busy stacking a deck of cards for his next trick.

"We urge maximum restraint on all sides," said White House spokesman Jay Carney. As if unarmed people climbing a fence are as culpable as soldiers firing live ammunition across an international border.

Reading Response: May 16

Sadly, the first thing that struck me when reading "Old and new walls in Jerusalem" was that the editing process at Political Geography must have gone haywire. PG is the flagship journal of political geography, and one of the most important and influential journals in human geography. But Klein's article was full of grammatical & spelling errors, and it was organized poorly (not to mention the literature review section was hard to follow and didn't really say much about how Klein was presenting his argument). Ansi Paasi is a very prolific and well-known geographer who specializes in borders and identity, and repeated misspellings of his name (Klein called him "Passi" in the text and in his references) really grated on me.

That said, Klein's stumbling through the rich trove of geographic thought on borders and boundaries did communicate some important ideas--even if others have articulated these ideas more clearly and trenchantly elsewhere (e.g., Paasi 1998, Newman 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006... in fact, come to think of it, it's odd that David Newman isn't cited more in Klein's paper, as Newman not only is a preeminent geographer, editor-in-chief of Geopolitics, and a scholar who writes exhaustively on borders and boundaries, but Newman is a faculty member at Ben-Gurion University, and frequently writes on Israel/Palestine issues--including via Op-Ed pieces in the Jerusalem Post).

First, borders aren't simply locations in space: they are social processes, and even further, they are social institutions. Saying that, we can posit the reverse, as well: social processes can be conceptualized as borders. Klein touches on this, particularly when he discusses the ethnic divisions within health services (both for employees and for patients) in the Jerusalem metropolitan area. It's worth noting that most, if not all, of the border processes Klein discusses are one-way: for example, Klein notes that it is not an uncommon occurrence for a Palestinian doctor to work in a hospital in West Jerusalem, but it would be very unusual for an Israeli/Jewish doctor to work in East Jerusalem.

Next, Klein touches on the notion that borders are far from static--they are fluid and change with the political climate. So, when a Likud administration is in power, there are stronger barriers (and more of them) to movement and circulation (circulation being an old geography term, borrowed from French, that encompasses economic and social activity), and then when a Labor or Kadima administration comes in, those barriers change.

It is interesting to note that Klein sees the "taboo" on a united Jerusalem being broken through permanent status negotiations. I was never aware that serious talks were undertaken regarding Jerusalem and its final borders--I had thought that Jerusalem was such a complex, contentious issue that it had been pushed to the end of negotiations, that is, after all the other stuff got resolved. I suppose that the mere mention of a possible end-state for Jerusalem would indeed seem to break the "taboo," but the latest Netanyahu administration would seem to have re-instated the taboo. And, given progress on settlements surrounding Jerusalem, and evictions/demolitions in East Jerusalem, it would appear that Netanyahu wants that taboo to be stronger than ever--to the point of never being broached again.

I found it interesting when Mount Scopus was brought up--I had taken a bus tour of Jerusalem, and the narration on the tour was (expectedly) jingoistic: the Israelis on Mount Scopus were portrayed as noble survivors, standing watch and operating the hospital under the most trying conditions, holding out against Jordanian/Palestinian violence and recriminations (I find that this mind-set informs a lot of the settlement movement, as well). But if/when Palestinians "hold out" against the Israeli siege, their portrayed as stubborn refuseniks, obstacles, and/or cowards.

The final point in Klein I feel worth noting is the total lack of responsibility Israel takes in regards to East Jerusalem. Treating Palestinian areas like slums, withholding trash removal and policing Palestinian areas only to keep crime and violence from reaching Jewish areas (and not to enforce laws and pursue criminals who engage in Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence)... it smacks of the experience of Diasporic Jews in European ghettos.

Klein, along with Bernard Avishai, comes across as scathingly opposed to the occupation and the continued Israeli appropriation of East Jerusalem. It's something that amazes me in politics outside America--in the US, such strident opposition to the regime, particularly concerning national security, would provoke such a backlash (by the true 'patriots') as to all but stifle any real debate on the issue. In Israel, however, there are loud & prominent voices opposing the occupation and the subjugation of the Palestinians, and these voices are not silenced or even seemingly discriminated against. Of course, at times it seems that advocates of Palestinian rights are shouting their voices raw and accomplishing little. But at least there is a vocal opposition to power.

Peteet's study of graffiti is notable for a host of reasons, not the least of which is her conceptualization of graffiti as not only a vehicle of communication, but a shaper of those who participate in it (the viewer and the writer). But beyond that, I find it troubling that graffiti was so dangerous. I did not know how deep the oppression was before Oslo; I didn't know that Israeli censorship applied to all "publications... brought in, sold, printed, or kept in someone's possession in the West Bank unless a permit has been obtained for them."

That is stunning. Any publication or writing was subject to this censorship and confiscation.

I'll just let that sit there. The fact that if the IDF found a book that they didn't like--for any reason--they could confiscate it (and charge the owner), as every publication, under this order, required a permit. Even a copy of the J-Post, or Ha'aretz (more likely the latter than the former), would thus require a permit. This order by itself provided carte blanche to the IDF to stop and arrest just about any Palestinian. All you have to do is find one bit of printed paper--a pamphlet, a map, a photocopy of some document--and they've violated the order.

OK, aside from that...

Peteet is analyzing something critically important; though it isn't too much of an innovative thought to see graffiti (particularly in the Occupied Territories) as a form of political expression and even political resistance, it is an innovation to see that graffiti as a self-reflexive dialogue within the Palestinian community. It's all too easy, all too common, for us (as scholars, or just as people) to see political movements as monolithic: e.g., it's "the Israelis" versus "the Palestinians." Peteet shows that the Palestinian resistance wasn't singular; it was multifarious and fractious and contentious, even as it was united in opposition to the occupation.

There's a lot more to Peteet, but I don't want to beat a dead horse on this (plus, this is a long post already). I'd just suggest that anyone interested check out more graffiti.

It was Blogger

Apparently Blogger was the source of the problem, and was down for several days for many people, and not working right for others.

But that's over, and now my posts are starting to show up, kinda.

Blogger/Browser technical issues

Ever since Windows installed some "critical security updates" last week, I've been having some issues--issues that came to a head yesterday. I spent most of the day trying to figure out & fix some major problems on my computer, and then when I thought I had everything fixed, apparently either Blogger or my browser doesn't like me, because my recent posts have gotten garbled up, lost, and/or delayed in posting. I'll work from another computer and see what I can do to fix things. Sorry for the delays.

Imagining Jerusalem

Imagining Jerusalem: Multimedia Presentation

Abstract

Building on Edward Said’s notion of “imaginative geographies,” in his book The Colonial Present, geographer Derek Gregory analyzes the tropes and modalities of modern colonialism, bound up in assumptions and assertions based on “imaginative geographies” of the Middle East and South/Central Asia.

Geographers have dedicated a great deal of attention and scholarship to the elements of Said’s imaginative geographies: from notions of identity and nationality, to perceptions of out-groups and the militarization of borders between groups. Israel/Palestine is a bubbling cauldron of all these geographic curiosities—and no wonder, given Said’s Palestinian heritage.

This project, then, aims to illustrate and depict the geographic imaginary of Jerusalem, as held by non-Jerusalemites. Through short interviews, what Jerusalem is and what it means to Americans will be explored—and Jerusalem itself will be populated by these “imaginative geographies.”

Presentation (rough) outline

I. Introduction (~3 minutes)

A. Powerpoint—background on Said & Gregory

B. Application to Jerusalem as object of desire and contest

II. Vignettes (~4 minutes)

A. Description of research method

B. Interview clips

III. Conclusions (~3 minutes)

A. Creation of “imaginative geographies” through contrasting distance and attachment

B. Implications of these constructions on American foreign policy, as well as contemporary Jerusalem

Research method

Interviewees will be chosen from pool of bystanders and students involved in various Israel Independence and Palestinian Nakbah events on the OSU oval. This is a nonscientific, and deliberately nonrandom sampling, in order to solicit opinions and ideas about Jerusalem from people who have vested interests (and therefore who have constructed imaginative geographies in the first place) in Jerusalem as a city and an object of the Israel/Palestine dispute. Interviewees will be asked a series of closed- and open-ended questions, including:

• How many people live in Jerusalem?
• How large an area does Jerusalem encompass? (further prompted by “smaller than Franklin county, about the same size as Franklin county, or larger than Franklin county?”)
• How many Israeli Jews live in Jerusalem?
• How many Palestinians live in Jerusalem?
• Can you name some places in Jerusalem that are important to you?
• What is the status of Jerusalem at present?
• What does Jerusalem mean to you?
• What does Jerusalem mean to Israelis?
• How would you fit in Jerusalem
• What does Jerusalem mean to Palestinians?
• What do you think will be the eventual resolution to the dispute—that is, what will Jerusalem look like?

Interviews will be done on-camera and recorded for editing and display in IS 501 final project, and interviewees will be informed of this prior to interview. Interviewees will not be asked their names, occupations, residency status, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, etc., and interviews, once edited and inserted into multimedia presentation, will be used solely for the purposes of an IS 501 student project and no other research. Unedited interview footage will be deleted, and the edited and finished final presentation will be shown exclusively to the IS 501 (Living Jerusalem 2011) students and instructors, and for no other purpose.

Questions for Yonatan Gher

1. By my reading, the LGBT community in Israel can be conceived as more secular and less religious, and therefore less inclined to support Likud (and more pro-Labor). One of the hallmarks of Israeli democracy is the reliance on coalition government, which, especially to outsiders, seems to privilege tiny minority interests--as these very small parties command power in the Knesset far exceeding their actual representation (I'm thinking specifically of parties like Shas, who can get pretty powerful concessions from majority partners in coalitions, just to get the smaller parties on-board). So all that said, how monolithic a political bloc is the LGBT community? How opportunistic is the LGBT community in supporting one party or another?
2. Why is JOH in Jerusalem, rather than Tel Aviv? Geographically, the two cities are very near each other, and it seems that Tel Aviv is a better social climate and less provocative to religious hardliners.
3. On that note, what constitutes "too much" for Jerusalem--that is, how prominent a presence (or demonstration) can JOH have in Jerusalem before it is considered too radical for religious hardliners?

Bonus: In regards to West Bank settlements, are they "hostile" to the LGBT community? I imagine that, especially in settlements founded by/for the religious right, there wouldn't be a very visible LGBT presence, and that sexual orientation might be one of the few things that created out-migration from the West Bank settlements.

Journal (my visual passport)

This is an experiment, using images to convey some idea of who I am, without me writing or explaining any of it. Well, except to say that this starts in my home, in the present, and then works outward & backward. These are all shots taken by me, over the last eight years.

Reading Response: May 9

I think in my hyperverbosity (my spell-check is telling me that I made up that word, and if so, hooray!) in my questions for Galit Hasan-Rokem expresses a lot of my response to the readings for today, and I don't want to repeat myself too much here.

So I'll talk a bit about recent history and its absence from narratives about Jerusalem.

Like we noticed in Armstrong, it seems that the recent history of Israel/Palestine is often given short shrift: the ancient history, with its religious monuments and milestones, takes up much of our understanding of the region and the current situation. Alternatively, we think about the wars of the 20th century--1948, the Suez Crisis, the Six Days War, 1973, the invasion of south Lebanon, the (first) Intifadeh...and, more recently, the Al-Aqsa Intifadeh, 2006, and Operation: Cast Lead.

What's lost is much of the history during the reconciliations and negotiations of the 1990s. It's as if history didn't happen when there was hope and potential for a peaceful resolution. When the 1990s do get mentioned, it's often in the context of obstacles to the peace process--cafe & bus bombings, settlement construction--as if history is only made up of a series of "flashbulb memories" and spinning newspaper headlines.

Which is why Suad Amiry's vignettes are so critical to understanding not just the lives of Palestinians under occupation (and during closure), but this portion of "missing" history. As an aside, it really threw me off-balance, reading Amiry and recognizing landmarks and roads in Ram'allah.

What is most important is that Amiry is filling in the gaps in the dominant narratives of Israel/Palestine--not just the gaps in history, "filling up" the void of the 1990s, but also "filling in" the void of what people's lives were like--particularly Palestinian lives--on a day-to-day basis.

Questions for Galit Hasan-Rokem

As we address the details and lived experiences of people within contested Jerusalem/Israel/Palestine, and explore the setting of Jerusalem and all the multifarious complications and complexities of life there, here are three questions for Galit Hasan-Rokem:

1. Jerusalem inspires a great deal of literature, reflecting deep emotions that individuals and groups invest in the city. You yourself say that "Jerusalem is my home. I love it and ache for its dead and its living inhabitants." Are these emotions, is this attachment to place, purely a function of the place being Jerusalem? In other words, why don't we see a corpus of literature (both fiction and scholarly nonfiction) about the deep attachment to and longing for, say, Nazareth? (I understand the historical, religious, and nationalist disputes at the heart of Jerusalem's contestation, but what I'm going for here is why Jerusalem has been romanticized while other places have not.)
2. Following up on that, how does self-identity figure into this attachment to Jerusalem? What does it mean to have one's relationship to Jerusalem bound up into one's concept of self and belonging to place?
3. Again returning to the quote above ("Jerusalem is my home. I love it and ache for its dead and its living inhabitants"), this is certainly a feeling that a great many people would feel comfortable expressing and owning. What does it mean, as Jerusalem annexes more of the surrounding area, as settlements like Ma'ale Adumim are included in the metropolitan area of Jerusalem (and Bethlehem is excluded, despite being about the same distance from the Old City), to long for Jerusalem? Are we indeed talking about the Old City and peoples' desired attachment to it? Does being a "Jerusalemite" thus give one a claim to the Old City--rather than the Knesset, or suburban West Jerusalem, etc.?

Bonus question!

• How is this longing for, and claiming of, Jerusalem delimited in time? Diaspora Jews would say at Passover seder "Next year, in Jerusalem!" Is that a claiming of Jerusalem? Before the first waves of European immigration, can we say that the local Palestinian Arabs really claimed Jerusalem , or longed for it? In other words, aren't we talking about the idea of Jerusalem, bound up in specific sacred geography, rather than the actual municipality?
  

Reading Response: May 2

The three chapters from Salim Tamari's Mountain against the Sea provide a brilliant counterpoint to top-down political narratives about the Israel/Palestine dispute. One of the primary weaknesses of the dominant political narrative is one of scale: the actors in the dispute are groups and their political leadership; Tamari's chapters re-introduce the individual as the site and the object of these larger geopolitical narratives. In other words, Tamari skillfully demonstrates the lived experiences of people who were the pawns of geopolitics, the very people who were most affected by the dispute, querying sources and individuals far removed from the circles of power, from the typical descriptions of Jerusalem before and after the 1948 war. What results is a very different picture of Israeli/Palestinian relations--indeed, a completely different topography of Jerusalem.

In chapter 5, "A Musician's Lot," Tamari lays out his fundamental departure from "conventional narratives" about Jerusalem. As history books tend to short-hand the city into the quarters (Jewish, Christian, Armenian, and Muslim), individual identities and lived experiences are subsumed into these "ethno-confessional divisions"--divisions that can be simply circumscribed and described in diagrams and neat paragraphs by historians, sociologists, etc.

Tamari complicates this through the writings of a Jerusalem musician from the early 20th century, and shows that the socio-cultural map of Jerusalem was far more complex, fluid, and hybrid than allowed for in conventional narratives. Identity itself is (and was) a fungible thing, and in Wasif Jawhariyyeh's narrative, individuals and groups with multiple identities shared the same spaces, creating not only a complex map of overlapping group identities, but a creolized culture that bridged differences.

Interestingly, in his brief biography of Jawhariyyeh, Tamari illustrates many of the problems of conventional narratives: Jawhariyyeh's life story was complex and irreducible to a single sentence--even the parts before his music career. If one individual's life is so deep and rich, imagine the injustice done when entire communities are so treated, reduced to a single sentence in a footnote of a 400-page history book.

But then, one of Tamari's points is that the division of the city into four "confessional" quarters was a retroactive reduction by the British during the Mandate, and this fits well with how we see imperial/colonial re-writings of history and geography. There is a deep need to simplify and create realities that correspond to (and support) colonial mappings of conquered/administered territory--and colonial imaginations of the homeland and the roles of its people. In other words, the British simplified the geography and history of Jerusalem in order to administer it, to "create" a new past that fit the present (at the time) geography and history, and to reify their roles as administrators of the Mandate.

I could say a lot more about chapter 5, but rather than spend too much time on this one chapter, I'll skip ahead to chapter 6, "Lepers, Lunatics and Saints." In this chapter, Tamari discusses the (interwar) ethnographic writings of Tawfiq Canaan, a Jerusalem physician.

One of the most brilliant points Tamari makes is how "the process of ethnic exclusion and demonization had sunk" to the point that Arab and Jewish lepers were segregated after the war of 1948--even members of a group typically shunned by society were subject to, and objects of, the divisions caused by the territorial dispute-cum-war. Leprosy's provenance is given little thought anymore, despite the religious connotations of the disease and thus its role in the religious histories of the region--because Canaan was so very successful at helping eradicate the disease from the region.

But the contribution that Tamari makes with this chapter that I think is most important to our perceptions and study of disputed Jerusalem is his discussion of nativism and how Canaan and his contemporaries in the Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society anticipated and to some degree presaged Said's notion of Orientalism and the reductions and violences Orientalism entails. Tamari seems to indicate that Canaan and his circle valorized the peasantry to no small degree, but despite this problematic elevation of the peasant as the repository of culture and history, Tamari sees Canaan's work as ethnography unsullied by later folklore revivalism--a revivalism that was both insincere and inaccurate in its representation of Palestinian life.

Tamari points out that revivalism--and, by extension, the Orientalist-tainted histories and geographies of the region--was a reaction to Zionist history, and thus surrendered authenticity and representation to Zionist claims. Thus, Tamari sees Canaan's writings as being descriptive of quotidian Palestinian life, rather than a reactive movement that simply argued with counter-histories about "who was here first," or "whose culture is most authentic to the region."

To wrap up (prematurely) what has turned into a very labyrinthine meta-discussion of the readings within the readings, I'll just touch on the ethnographic details of Tamari--details left out of histories like Armstrong's. For example, despite Armstrong's love for digging into the details of religious belief and practice, revelations like Canaan's detailing of the relationship between madness and demonic possession, the attachment of religious meaning to the darwish and the practices of djinn--these are little tidbits, samples of life during the interwar period that Armstrong skips over. And for good reason: Armstrong isn't interested in the peculiarities of religious belief among Palestinian peasants in the interwar period. By this time, Armstrong doesn't feel that the reader needs more details about Baal or local demons, etc., Armstrong has decided that the political climate of the interwar period is more important to relate than the substance and details of the lives of people.

And thus it is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that people were living, and continue to live, in this region, and their daily lives are subject to--but oddly, not relevant to--the political tides of the day.

Questions for Salim Tamari

Before I get into my response to the excellent chapters from Salim Tamari's book, I'll pose here the questions I have for him. For those of you who aren't part of the Living Jerusalem Project and/or are unfamiliar with Tamari, his book Mountain against the sea is full of material and ideas that are highly relevant to my research. Tamari uses ethnography to complicate and problematize the geopolitics of Israel/Palestine--he doesn't realize it, but Tamari is engaging with the project of critical geopolitics, by challenging the assumptions bound up in traditional top-down approaches to examining the Israel/Palestine dispute, as well as methodologically challenging classical geopolitics, by locating the practice and object of geopolitical practice at the scale of the community and even the individual, rather than purely in the aeries of state power.

So, based on my reading, here are the questions I have:

1. One theme that resonates throughout chapters 5, 6, and 9 is that of the complexity and fungibility of identity in Ottoman/Mandate Palestine. If, as you argue, there weren't discrete, ossified, coterminous identities among the residents of the region (prior to 1948), does that imply, then, that a one-state solution was possible and even preferable back then? And, at the same time, does the movement away from the complex identities and communitarian notions of these "confessional communities" therefore imply a concomitant move away from a one-state solution and necessitate talk of a two-state solution?
2. There is a great deal of literature in social psychology and political psychology that parallels Edward Said's Orientalism, particularly in the construct of the Other--particularly to the end of constructing an idea of the self. Do you see that this notion of the Other feeds nationalism and separateness in Israel/Palestine, or do you think that the reverse is true--that the nationalist drive of the Israeli proto-state fosters a notion of Other-ness. In other words, which comes first--the chicken (nationalism) or the egg (Other-ness) in your reading of Israel/Palestine?
3. Ethnography is a research method applicable to many questions, but geopolitics has largely shied away from ethnography, often because of the difference in scales between research subjects and where power is assumed to reside (individuals vs. states). Your writings have explicit geopolitical connections drawn between ethnography and state power: do you feel that this is a "natural" way of analyzing geopolitics? In other terms, you are critical of revisionist renderings of quotidian life in Israel/Palestine by the powers that created the contemporary dispute--is a return to the story of the individual (i.e., hearing the subaltern speak) a solution to this inscribing of history by the powerful?
4. (bonus question) What work is done by historians like Armstrong, who tend to write the narratives against which your ethnographic studies argue? That is, Armstrong portrays religion in Israel/Palestine as contested and contesting, whereas you paint a picture of syncretic and communitarian practice (if not belief). Is there a place for Armstrong's reading, or is this type of history just a starting point, so that we can begin to uncover the complexities that are left out of traditional narratives?