Culture and Conflict in Palestine/Israel

Tamir Sorek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000533040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While the scholarly study of culture as a politically contested sphere in Palestine/Israel has become an established field over the past two decades, this volume highlights some particular understudied aspects of it: the relations between Arab identity, Mizrahi identity, and Israeli nationalism; the nightclub scene as a field of encounter, appropriation, and exclusion; an analysis of the institutional and political conditions of Palestinian cinema; the implications of the intersectional relationship between gender, ethnicity and national identity in the field of popular culture, and the concrete relations between particular aesthetic forms and symbolic power.

The authors come from diverse disciplines, including anthropology, architecture, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, and political science.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Introduction: Culture and politics in Palestine/Israel

Tamir Sorek

For many years, the study of power struggles in Palestine/Israel tended to identify “power” with the state, military, and the economy (Stein and Swedenburg 2005). The “cultural turn” in the social sciences and the humanities since the 1970s was slow to gain ground in the Palestinian–Israeli context. For example, a Google Scholar search of materials that include the words “military” and “Palestine” in their title reveals that 54 per cent of these materials were published after 2000. However, the share of materials published after 2000 among items that include the words “Palestine” and “music” in their title is 70 per cent, of “Palestine” and “cinema”/“movies”/“films” is 73 per cent, while for “Palestine” and “sport(s)” or “theater” the share of the past two decades is 100 per cent. While the semiotic study of culture, especially in poetry and literature, is an established academic field, it has been only in the last two decades when scholars begun to analyse the ways material processes and forces shape and being shaped by cultural representations and aesthetics (Stein and Swedenburg 2005).

Scholars have become more interested in the political implications of cultural consumption, in the ways cultural products are interpreted and, in their potential to shape consciousness and political mobilization. This process has been fuelled by the emergence of new modes of representation and communication, as well as by the rise of new discourses of rights and rootedness. Therefore, these studies have paid growing attention to the political processes that shape the culture industry, such as institutional censorship or the politics of funding. Furthermore, there has been an extension of the scholarly interest from “high culture” such as literature to the spheres of popular culture, such as popular music, sports, and cuisine. These studies have been inspired by the global spread of cultural studies, and have used various conflictual analytical lenses, including post-colonialism, feminism, and critical sociology of culture. They examined cultural spheres as contested terrains shaped by politics and illustrated how actions and discourses in these spheres promote various political goals, such as maintaining hegemony, political oppression, protest, or resistance.

The chapters in this book are part of these emerging trends. The authors come from diverse disciplines, including anthropology, architecture, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, and political science. They share, however, the understanding of culture as a dynamic sphere with political relevance, where new fields, configurations, and constellations are constantly emerging and other are fading away. They all respond to the political and theoretical developments that has taken place during the past decade, or take a fresh look at older history, informed by these recent developments. While the scholarly study of culture as a political sphere in Palestine/Israel is not rare anymore, the chapters in this book highlight some particular understudied aspects of it: the relations between Arab identity, Mizrahi identity, and Israeli nationalism; the nightclub scene as a field of encounter, appropriation, and exclusion; an analysis of the institutional and political conditions of Palestinian cinema; the implications of the intersectional relationship between gender, ethnicity, and national identity in the field of popular culture, and the concrete relations between particular aesthetic forms and symbolic power.

Antonio Gramsci believed in the power of intellectuals to disseminate ideas and shape political consciousness. He commented, though, that non-intellectuals do not exist. While everyone has the potential to disseminate ideas, some individuals have the social position and resources that enable them to function as intellectuals (Gramsci 1971, 9). These remarks lead us to examine who could function as an intellectual. Scholars agree that in the Palestinian context, poets have historically played a major role as public intellectuals who shaped anti-colonial consciousness (Ghanem 2009; Furani 2012; Nassar 2017). With the diversification of artistic media, artists from other fields took upon themselves a similar role. Amal Jamal and Noa Lavie studied the dilemmas of a particular group of artists – Palestinian women filmmakers in Israel. Unlike poetry, cinema is an expensive art and for filmmakers to function as intellectuals, they need access to resources, a necessity that confronts them with constant dilemmas. Palestinian independent resources are scarce, Israeli public funding is growingly conditioned on monitoring the film’s content, and obtaining Western funding depends on adaptation to a Western gaze. Therefore, the way towards becoming functioning intellectuals already shapes the content of the cultural product.

The constraints and cross-pressures in this sphere are further complicated by the gender dimension. As long as debates about gender role and patriarchy are part of an internal Arab debate in the press or other Arabic public spheres, the moral and social fields shape most of the controversy. Once it is embodied in the form of cinematic production, it is potentially viewed by Jewish-Israelis and then the political field and the national conflict gain dominance. The existential anxiety and the reality of constant dispossession and marginalization experienced by Palestinians in Israel propelled the political dynamics to the front row and erodes the autonomy of the cultural field.Samira Alayan and Lana Shehada’s chapter about donning the Hijab in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank illustrates Gramsci’s assertion that everyone is an intellectual (even though Gramsci originally wrote “every man”), because the justifications these women give to donning the hijab are frequently political, which means that they embed this practice in the context of a struggle over consciousness. Like the study of Palestinian filmmakers, this chapter engages with the intersection of anti-colonial struggle, gender, and cultural choices as political acts. Relying on in-depth interviews, the authors compare the justifications women give for wearing the hijab under two different types of political subjugation. They found that Palestinian Muslim women in the West Bank, where interactions with the occupier are limited to tense encounters with soldiers, use the hijab as a defiant symbol against the Israeli occupation. In East Jerusalem, Palestinian women use the hijab as a visible representation of their identity and resilience, but at the same time, they are more cautious and consider the way the hijab might be viewed by Jewish-Israeli civilians, whom they encounter daily.

Two chapters in the book are based on ethnographies in nightclubs. They map the extreme potentials of nightclubs as a political space, and especially the complicated relations between Arab and Mizrahi identities, as well as Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms. Merav Kaddar and Daniel Monterescu studied a nightclub in Jaffa as a stage for the contours of an emerging new social type – the political hipster. This type, like the scene within it is acting, proposes a particular blend of centre and periphery. It offers the wild nightlife of the centre, complemented by the rugged authenticity of the binational periphery, on the seam line between “Palestinian” Jaffa and “Jewish” Tel Aviv. Anna Loulou, the bar under discussion, is a carnivalistic scene, which allows a non-binding integration of nationalism, identity politics(Palestinian and Mizrahi), postnational utopia, cosmopolitism, and artivism.This fluidity stands in a sharp contrast to the narrative provided by Yotam

Hotam and Avihu Shoshana in their chapter about a Jewish night club in Tel Aviv, where Arabness is excluded by Jewish gatekeepers, whose own Arabness would have prevented them from crossing the entrance of the club as guests. In this case, Mizrahi Jews are assigned with the role of identifying Arabness, represented by the stereotypical image of the ars (a pejorative term for a stereotypical Mizrahi men), and separating them from Ashkenazi guests and Mizrahi guests who abandoned enough signifiers of Arab identity. This is a symbolic dissection of Arab and Jewish identity, and since the dividing line between these identities exists within individuals rather than between them, the separation requires particular forms of symbolic violence. Hotam and Shoshana focus on the experience of the Mizrahi doormen, who report that customers’ faces make it difficult for them to do their jobs and force them to engage in evading faces and suspending ethical judgments. Together the two chapters about nightclubs present the two extreme potentials of this contested nocturnal space.

Nadeem Karkabi, in his chapter about the attempt of a female pop-singer of an Arab-Palestinian origin to claim Jewish Mizrahi identity, portrays another type of relationship between Arab and Mizrahi identities. The singer Nasreen Qadri challenges Ashkenazi definition of Jews and Arabs as antagonistic ethnonational binaries but she falls short to cross into religious-national privilege in Israel/Palestine. Her failure to overcome colonial segregation is a testimony to the racialized politics of conversion in Israel. While Mizrahi Jews’ entrance to the nightclub in Tel Aviv is conditioned on their will and ability to shed signs of Arabness (and especially Arab masculinity), Qadri’s Arab identity is understood in racial terms, which makes her claim to be Jewish almost impossible. Her status as a pop icon amplifies her personal experience and provides exceptional echo to a widespread racializing practice.

Qadri’s attempt to enter the gate of Israeliness has been done through transforming herself into a Jewish-Zionist Mizrahi popular singer. Mizrahi music as a genre emerged in Israel as a style that both retains the connection of Mizrahi Jews with the cultural origin of their families, while at the same time distances itself from Arabness, leaning towards “Mediterranianism”, a label which is more socially acceptable under Zionist hegemony. The path chosen by Qadri, therefore, is not coincidental – it is based on the raison d’être of Mizrahi music and the longing for Mediteraniansim in Israeli public culture. In their chapter, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat and Alona Nitzan-Shiftan point to a similar phenomenon in the fields of architecture and urban planning. Focusing on the Israeli development plan in the Gaza Strip and Northern Sinai from 1972 to 1982, they show how Mediterranean architecture embodied long-percolating Zionist ideals of belonging to a de-Arabized Middle East. Mediterranean architecture was posited by Israeli architects and engineers in Gaza as a way to transform the conditions of refugees and make them ordinary urban citizens. At the same time, in Yamit, the short-lived city Israel built in Northern Sinai, the use of Mediterraneanism intended to instil a sense of community and safety to a Jewish settler population in recently occupied territory surrounded by Arab neighbours.

In their chapter about Music Education and the Palestinian Arab Citizens of Israel, Oded Erez and Arnon Degani describe a similar attempt to use particular aesthetic to maintain power. Here the authorities did not attempt to de-Arabize music, but to de-nationalize Arab music. Music played a nationalist role in Palestine during British Mandate period (McDonald 2013), and during the Military Rule period (1948–1966). Palestinians who recently became Israeli citizens were exposed, through the radio, to Arab national songs, including specific references to the Palestinian Nakba and calls to liberate Palestine (Massad 2003). Israeli education authorities used music to confront these trends and disseminate a cultural identification with a general “Arabness”, deprived of explicit nationalist content. While Palestinian music educators after the Nakba attempted to navigate their way under these restrictive conditions and use their own voice, the way Arab music was used in the curriculum of Arab schools meant that Palestinians were integrated only as a group-apart, relating to the authority of the state using a separate musical idiom.

The Arab musical education in Israel, argue the authors, is an expression of what they call “subordinate integration” of Palestinians into the Israeli polity. The subordinate integration has taken place because of Israel’s character as a settler–colonial project which, unlike most other settler–colonial polities, still consider the indigenous population as a threat. Therefore, the state was very careful with the integration it offers, simultaneously encouraging “a-political” cultural expressions while limiting independent political power.

Emphasizing Zionism’s settler–colonial character is also the analytical prism Liora Halperin is taking in her chapter about the commemoration of early Zionist settlements in Palestine. Halperin’s organizes her discussion around the term “firsting” which she borrowed from Jean M. O’Brien (2010), and was originally developed to explain settler–colonial discourse and practice in the United States. Firsting consists of repeated and exhaustive litanies of “first” people and things, identifying instances of land settlement as moments of historical rupture. The chapter is looking at the firsting process in commemorative sites including medals, military parades, local commemorations, and protocols of commemorative sessions in the Knesset, where Jewish settlements established in the 1880s are constituted as signifying a rupture with the past and a new beginning.

Together these studies illustrate various dimensions of culture as power and as a field of productive contention, at a time when the struggle for justice, freedom, and peace in Palestine/Israel seems to reach an impasse. With the demise of the two-state solution and no realistic paths for implementing alternative forms of de-colonization, the future of Palestinians and Israelis depends on the ability of creative forces to imagine new paths and mobilize support for their ideas. The cultural sphere is where this imagination could happen, and cultural producers have the potential to serve as intellectuals disseminating new ideas and building innovative forms of consciousness. The chapters in this book provide some potential leads to the ways it could happen, as well as indicate to the obstacles, limitations, and challenges we could face as we expect a political change to emerge from the cultural arena.

Acknowledgements

This book is based on papers presented on the conference “Culture and Conflict in Palestine/Israel” that took place on 1–3 February 2020 at the University of Florida, funded by the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Florida, the University of Florida Office of Research, and the Center for Global Islamic Studies at the University of Florida.

Funding

This work was funded by the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Florida, the University of Florida Office of Research, and the Center for Global Islamic Studies at the University of Florida.

References

• Furani, Khaled. 2012. Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Ghanem, Honaida. 2009. Reinventing the Nation: Palestinians Intellectuals in Israel (in Hebrew). Jerusalem: Magnes Press.
• Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London: Lawrence & Wishar.
• Massad, Joseph. 2003. “Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music.” Journal of Palestine Studies 32 (3): 21–38.
• McDonald, David A. 2013. My Voice is My Weapon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Nassar, Maha. 2017. Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• O’Brien, Jean M. 2010. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Stein, Rebecca L., and Ted Swedenburg. 2005. Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dancing with tears in our eyes: political hipsters, alternative culture and binational urbanism in Israel/Palestine

Merav Kaddar

and Daniel Monterescu

ABSTRACT

Excessive redevelopment and gentrification in Jaffa produced limi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: culture and politics in Palestine/Israel
• 2 Dancing with tears in our eyes: political hipsters, alternative culture and binational urbanism in Israel/Palestine
• 3 Face control: everynight selection and “the other”
• 4 The impossible quest of Nasreen Qadri to claim colonial privilege in Israel
• 5 Mediterraneanism in conflict: development and settlement of Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants in Gaza and Yamit
• 6 Songs of subordinate integration: music education and the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel during the Mapai era
• 7 Self-categorization, intersectionality and creative freedom in the cultural industries: Palestinian women filmmakers in Israel
• 8 Religious symbolism and politics: hijab and resistance in Palestine
• 9 Anniversaries of ‘first’ settlement and the politics of Zionist commemoration
• Index