New Article: Bleibleh, Walking Through Walls. The Invisible War

Bleibleh, Sahera. “Walking Through Walls. The Invisible War.” Space and Culture 18.2 (2015): 156-70.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1206331213512919

 

Abstract

This article presents the implications of modern urban warfare through ethnographic research of the Palestinian lived experience of the 2002 Israeli invasion Edjteyah. It is a scholarly attempt to document, investigate, and analyze the community’s response to Israel’s new military strategy of “walking through walls” as invisible urban warfare. This article connects the community experience in the old town of Nablus with the broader experience of warfare and political uncertainty. It is structured in three parts. The first discusses “walking through walls” as a modern warfare strategy, the second presents the methodology to capture the consequences of war with a case study of suspended everyday life, and the third narrates the participants’ “making-do” emergent tactics to counter the oppressor’s strategies. Following an analysis that encompasses qualitative ethnography and storytelling, it provides an interdisciplinary perspective of people’s temporal, spatial, and behavioral aftermath based on the participants’ narrations and experiences. In conclusion, the colonial power’s extended contemporary war delays any long-term planning, development, and sovereignty statehood by suspending the Palestinians’ everyday life.

New Book: Bishara, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics

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.

Reviews: Hammack, Narrative and the Politics of Identity

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

• Chappell, Larry W. “Review.” Journal of Political Science Education 8.2 (2012): 226-7.
• Friedman, Adina. “Review.” Peace Review 25.2 (2013): 318-21.

Cite: Dabashi, Paradise Delayed

Dabashi, Hamid. "Paradise Delayed: With Hany Abu-Assad in Palestine." Third Text 24,1 (2010): 11-23.

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Abstract: This article takes us on a journey through occupied Palestine to the ancient city of Nablus, where Palestinian film-maker Hany Abu-Assad was location scouting for the shooting of his globally celebrated Paradise Now (2005). The travelogue is a meditation on the interplay between film and fact, fiction and reality, the joy of creative defiance and the mendacity of colonial domination. The ethnographic practices of visual anthropology and academic film studies are taken critically to task for undermining the art and creative energies of a people in their transcendence of a siege condition.

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URL: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a918982020

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Keywords: Hany Abu-Assad; Paradise Now; Palestine; Hammouda; Jerusalem; Nablus; claustrophobia; military checkpoint; national cinema; national trauma; Nakba; Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestine: Culture, Film / Cinema, Israel: in media, Occupation, Millitary