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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, café 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 Pappé, Rebecca L. Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Salim Tamari
424 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 2005
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November 26, 2008
This was an amazing collection of articles edited by anthropologists Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg. The 13 essays are broken up into four section, focusing on historical articulations, cinemas and cyberspace, the politics of music and regional and global circuits. With this collection, the authors sought to introduce a prime focus on popular culture when discussing politics and power in the Palestine-Israel situation. The authors seek to break away from traditional Palestinian-Israeli binaries and to crack open the mixing and heterogeneity of relations between and among these two groups. The editors also seek to reinscribe Israel within the Middle East, both geographically and politically (Stein & Swedenburg 2005: 11).
In editor Rebecca Stein’s piece, “First Contact” and Other Israeli Fictions: Tourism, Globalization, and the Middle East Peace Process, I found some amazing things. Focusing on tourism and how tourism is used to define self/other, citizen/foreigner, here/there, etc., Stein brings a critical eye to tourism in the Middle East. Starting from the Israeli side, she notes how Israeli tourists, in the national narrative, are seen as good, adventurous, etc., while Arab tourists coming to Israeli are seen as suspect and potential criminals, or worse, terrorists. Even more worrisome is the colonial mindset of the popular Israeli press and some tourists who see themselves as discovering Arab lands, as though no one had seen them before or that there were no real ties between Israel and its neighbors prior to this moment of discovery.
To quote at length, she writes of first contact and creative remembering/forgetting of histories by saying “the forgetting of these histories enabled the discovery of Beirut as Israeli tourist destination, despite the 1982 invasion of the capital city, when many Israeli soldiers passed through its historic districts. A similar process of forgetting enabled the emergence of Tunis as a first-time leisure destination, despite a history of Israeli efforts to monitor (and assassinate) PLO leadership in the city” (Stein 2005: 274).
Looking at the effects of the Oslo accords on tourism and inserting Israel into the greater Middle East, geographically, politically, and economically, Stein notes that while Oslo was attempting to address the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, it ended up creating more suffering for Palestinians and/or rendering them less visible in the region and throughout the world. Israel opened its borders to other Arab markets and tourists, but clamped down on travel and trade with the Occupied Territories.
In Salim Tamari’s piece on music and early modernity in Jerusalem, he writes of the cognitive maps people have of Jerusalem illustrate that the division of the city into ethnic/religious quarters was a modern development. These so-called forever and unchanging boundaries were either non-existent or much more fluid that conventional wisdom promulgates. He writes of the implications of the 1919 Balfour Declaration, which saw a rise in the religious tone of Palestinian nationalism. The colonial authority, interpreting this Declaration, sought to fortify divisions between groups, “Christians were banned by military edict from entering Islamic holy places, and Muslims from Christian churches and monasteries” (Tamari 2005: 41).
Ilan Pappé’s piece on Post-Zionism and Its Popular Culture is a fascinating read, helping to deconstruct Israeli nationalism and how it renders citizens, subjects, outsiders, and insiders. From 1948-67, Palestinians were either portrayed by media and state apparatus as refugees or invisible. From 1967 through the 1980s, all Palestinians were framed as terrorists. By the late 1990s, duringa post-Zionist academic period, films on the Nakba (Palestinian expulsion from their homes in 1948) was shown on Israeli TV. By 2000, this openness to reviewing how the past and the state were constructed was on the wane.
In Laleh Khalili’s piece, entitled Virtual Nation: Palestinian Cyberculture in Lebanese Camps, her thesis and argument seemed pretty obvious and simple. One thing that I did like that she put in writing is that while some see the Internet as helping to break down borders and nations, it actually can have quite the opposite effect as people search out “themselves” and create e-versions of their nation-state, to the exclusion of others. Citizenship itself can become a cyber-commodity, debated and exchanged across virtual paths.
Livia Alexander writes profoundly in her essay, “Is there a Palestinian Cinema? The National and Transnational in Palestinian Film Production”, that “in fact, people in New York are still more likely to watch a Palestinian film than are residents of Nablus” (Alexander 2005: 156).
For those interested in political music, be it historical or politicized rap, you should take a look at Joseph Massad’s “Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music”. In it, he discusses DAM and MWR, two rap bands that I’ve been listening to for over a year now and really enjoy. Also see Amy Horowitz’s article on “Dueling Nativities: Zehava Ben Sings Umm Kulthum”. Horowitz pays special attention to how states create and craft their own national identities and how popular and underground music can either complement or subvert such narratives.
In editor Rebecca Stein’s piece, “First Contact” and Other Israeli Fictions: Tourism, Globalization, and the Middle East Peace Process, I found some amazing things. Focusing on tourism and how tourism is used to define self/other, citizen/foreigner, here/there, etc., Stein brings a critical eye to tourism in the Middle East. Starting from the Israeli side, she notes how Israeli tourists, in the national narrative, are seen as good, adventurous, etc., while Arab tourists coming to Israeli are seen as suspect and potential criminals, or worse, terrorists. Even more worrisome is the colonial mindset of the popular Israeli press and some tourists who see themselves as discovering Arab lands, as though no one had seen them before or that there were no real ties between Israel and its neighbors prior to this moment of discovery.
To quote at length, she writes of first contact and creative remembering/forgetting of histories by saying “the forgetting of these histories enabled the discovery of Beirut as Israeli tourist destination, despite the 1982 invasion of the capital city, when many Israeli soldiers passed through its historic districts. A similar process of forgetting enabled the emergence of Tunis as a first-time leisure destination, despite a history of Israeli efforts to monitor (and assassinate) PLO leadership in the city” (Stein 2005: 274).
Looking at the effects of the Oslo accords on tourism and inserting Israel into the greater Middle East, geographically, politically, and economically, Stein notes that while Oslo was attempting to address the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, it ended up creating more suffering for Palestinians and/or rendering them less visible in the region and throughout the world. Israel opened its borders to other Arab markets and tourists, but clamped down on travel and trade with the Occupied Territories.
In Salim Tamari’s piece on music and early modernity in Jerusalem, he writes of the cognitive maps people have of Jerusalem illustrate that the division of the city into ethnic/religious quarters was a modern development. These so-called forever and unchanging boundaries were either non-existent or much more fluid that conventional wisdom promulgates. He writes of the implications of the 1919 Balfour Declaration, which saw a rise in the religious tone of Palestinian nationalism. The colonial authority, interpreting this Declaration, sought to fortify divisions between groups, “Christians were banned by military edict from entering Islamic holy places, and Muslims from Christian churches and monasteries” (Tamari 2005: 41).
Ilan Pappé’s piece on Post-Zionism and Its Popular Culture is a fascinating read, helping to deconstruct Israeli nationalism and how it renders citizens, subjects, outsiders, and insiders. From 1948-67, Palestinians were either portrayed by media and state apparatus as refugees or invisible. From 1967 through the 1980s, all Palestinians were framed as terrorists. By the late 1990s, duringa post-Zionist academic period, films on the Nakba (Palestinian expulsion from their homes in 1948) was shown on Israeli TV. By 2000, this openness to reviewing how the past and the state were constructed was on the wane.
In Laleh Khalili’s piece, entitled Virtual Nation: Palestinian Cyberculture in Lebanese Camps, her thesis and argument seemed pretty obvious and simple. One thing that I did like that she put in writing is that while some see the Internet as helping to break down borders and nations, it actually can have quite the opposite effect as people search out “themselves” and create e-versions of their nation-state, to the exclusion of others. Citizenship itself can become a cyber-commodity, debated and exchanged across virtual paths.
Livia Alexander writes profoundly in her essay, “Is there a Palestinian Cinema? The National and Transnational in Palestinian Film Production”, that “in fact, people in New York are still more likely to watch a Palestinian film than are residents of Nablus” (Alexander 2005: 156).
For those interested in political music, be it historical or politicized rap, you should take a look at Joseph Massad’s “Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music”. In it, he discusses DAM and MWR, two rap bands that I’ve been listening to for over a year now and really enjoy. Also see Amy Horowitz’s article on “Dueling Nativities: Zehava Ben Sings Umm Kulthum”. Horowitz pays special attention to how states create and craft their own national identities and how popular and underground music can either complement or subvert such narratives.
May 6, 2025
most interesting read of my french degree by far
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews