Or, Dyhan, and Heidi Kuhn. “Clearing Minefields in Israel and the West Bank.” Journal of ERW and Mine Action 15.3 (2015): 24-28.
URL: http://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cisr-journal/vol15/iss3/7/
Abstract
Recent legislation in Israel has opened the door to demining in Israel and the West Bank. Roots of Peace campaigned for this legislation and will begin demining a village near Bethlehem before the end of 2011.
Feldman, Jackie. A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land. How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.
For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practicing their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than three decades, Jackie Feldman—born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, now an Israeli citizen, scholar, and licensed guide—has been leading tours, interpreting Biblical landscapes, and fielding questions about religion and current politics. In this book, he draws on pilgrimage and tourism studies, his own experiences, and interviews with other guides, Palestinian drivers and travel agents, and Christian pastors to examine the complex interactions through which guides and tourists “co-produce” the Bible Land. He uncovers the implicit politics of travel brochures and religious souvenirs. Feldman asks what it means when Jewish-Israeli guides get caught up in their own performances or participate in Christian rituals, and reflects on how his interactions with Christian tourists have changed his understanding of himself and his views of religion.
Table of Contents
JACKIE FELDMAN a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is author of Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity. He has been a licensed tour guide in Jerusalem for over three decades.
Stadler, Nurit, and Nimrod Luz. “Two Venerated Mothers Separated by a Wall: Iconic Spaces, Territoriality, and Borders in Israel-Palestine.” Religion and Society 6.1 (2015): 127-41.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/arrs.2015.060109
Abstract
This article explores the role of sacred places and pilgrimage centers in the context of contemporary geopolitical strife and border disputes. Following and expanding on the growing body of literature engaged with the contested nature of the sacred, this article argues that sacred sites are becoming more influential in processes of determining physical borders. We scrutinize this phenomenon through the prism of a small parcel of land on the two sides of the Separation Wall that is being constructed between Israel and Palestine. Our analysis focuses on two holy shrines that are dedicated to devotional mothers: the traditional Tomb of Rachel the Matriarch on the way to Bethlehem and Our Lady of the Wall, an emergent Christian site constructed as a reaction to the Wall. We examine the architectural (and material) phenomenology, the experience, and the implications that characterize these two adjacent spatialities, showing how these sites are being used as political tools by various actors to challenge the political, social, and geographical order.
Biggs, Victoria. “Women, Faith, and the Politics of Space in Israel/Palestine.” Peace Review (early view; online first).
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2015.1063375
Excerpt
Bishara, Amahl A. Back Stories. U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
URL: http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=20559
Few topics in the news are more hotly contested than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and news coverage itself is always a subject of debate. But rarely do these debates incorporate an on-the-ground perspective of what and who newsmaking entails. Studying how journalists work in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Nablus, and on the tense roads that connect these cities, Amahl Bishara demonstrates how the production of U.S. news about Palestinians depends on multifaceted collaborations, typically invisible to Western readers. She focuses on the work that Palestinian journalists do behind the scenes and below the bylines—as fixers, photojournalists, camerapeople, reporters, and producers—to provide the news that Americans read, see, and hear every day.
Ultimately, this book demonstrates how Palestinians play integral roles in producing U.S. news and how U.S. journalism in turn shapes Palestinian politics. U.S. objectivity is in Palestinian journalists’ hands, and Palestinian self-determination cannot be fully understood without attention to the journalist standing off to the side, quietly taking notes. Back Stories examines news stories big and small—Yassir Arafat’s funeral, female suicide bombers, protests against the separation barrier, an all-but-unnoticed killing of a mentally disabled man—to investigate urgent questions about objectivity, violence, the state, and the production of knowledge in today’s news. This book reaches beyond the headlines into the lives of Palestinians during the second intifada to give readers a new vantage point on both Palestinians and journalism.
Gould, Rebecca. “The Materiality of Resistance. Israel’s Apartheid Wall in an Age of Globalization.” Social Text 32.1 (2014): 1-21.
URL: http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/32/1_118/1.short
Abstract
This essay examines the graffiti that covers the portion of the West Bank’s segregation wall that traverses Bethlehem. That the majority of the representations covering the wall are intended for international rather than local consumption complicates the prevalent tendency in the literature on this wall to align these representations homogenously with resistance. More than resisting a specific regime, many of these images enter into global conversations about the circulation of power. Images of resistance scripted and consumed by those who observe suffering from afar are juxtaposed to Palestinian engagements with the wall, which is frequently represented allegorically or not represented at all.
Hammack, Phillip L. Narrative and the Politics of Identity. The Cultural Psychology of Israeli and Palestinian Youth. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Reviews
Feldman, Jackie. “Abraham the Settler, Jesus the Refugee: Contemporary Conflict and Christianity on the Road to Bethlehem.” History & Memory 23.1 (2011): 62-95.
URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/history_and_memory/summary/v023/23.1.feldman.html
Abstract
By examining tour brochures, practices of landscape display, posters and tour guiding narrations, I seek to understand how Bethlehem and the "separation wall" between Jerusalem and Bethlehem are integrated into the experience of Western Christian pilgrims of a variety of theological orientations. I argue that current practices of display and narration promote particular political views of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and lend them authority by saturating them with particular Christian meanings and associations. The study contributes to our understanding of pilgrimage as a site of contested discourses in which local actors sacralize the landscape while making their understandings of the conflict seem self-evident and divinely justified.
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