New Article: Violi, A Peace-Building Experience in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Violi, Patrizia. “Just Words under the Wall: A Peace-Building Experience in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” In Gender and Conflict: Embodiments, Discourses and Symbolic Practices (ed. Georg Frerks, Annelou Ypeij, and Reinhilde Sotiria König; London and New York: Routledge, 2016): 217ff.

 

 

Extract

This experience, in which I was personally involved, was a three-year EU-financed project initiated in late 2005 entitled ‘Building Constituencies for Women’s Alternative Ways for Peace’. Its primary objective was to promote encounters between Palestinian and Israeli women and support peacemaking efforts by The Jerusalem Link, an organisation involving two Women’s Centres: Bat Shalom and Jerusalem Center for Women.’ The Jerusalem Link involving these two women’s organisations was established in 1994 to bring about a just, comprehensive and lasting peace between the two peoples of Palestine and Israel, and its feminist grounding is explicitly emphasised in the declaration of intent.

 

 

New Book: Feldman, A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land

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

• 1. How Guiding Christians Made Me Israeli
• 2. Guided Holy Land Pilgrimage—Sharing the Road
• 3. Opening Their Eyes: Performance of a Shared Protestant-Israeli Bible Land
• 4. Christianizing the Conflict: Bethlehem and the Separation Wall
• 5. The Goods of Pilgrimage: Tips, Souvenirs, and the Moralities of Exchange
• 6. The Seductions of Guiding Christians
• 7. Conclusions: Pilgrimage, Performance, and the Suspension of Disbelief

 

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.

 

 

 

New Article: Dibiasi, Changing Trends in Palestinian Political Activism

Dibiasi, Caroline Mall. “Changing Trends in Palestinian Political Activism: The Second Intifada, the Wall Protests, and the Human Rights Turn.” Geopolitics (early view, online first)

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2015.1028028

 

Abstract

This paper asks where and why Palestinian protests take place and how particular manifestations of territorial dislocation affect the dynamics of Palestinian political activism. Political, social and territorial transformations over the Oslo period had resulted in the fragmentation of Palestinian resistance, a development that had become most evident during the second intifada through the absence of mass-based non-violent protest. Israel’s complex control over Palestinian territory and mobility has been a key factor in driving this fragmentation. In contrast to checkpoints, forbidden roads, and closures, the construction of the Separation Wall had a very different impact, and amid the continuation of a violent and fragmented uprising, it presented a focal point for cohesive organised non-violent local protest. This paper examines to what extent the construction of the Wall has engendered a different type of protest, conception of activism and new forms of cooperation, that break the trend of the second intifada.

New Article: Gould, Israel’s Apartheid Wall in an Age of Globalization

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.

Cite: Hatuka, Transformative Terrains: Counter Hegemonic Tactics of Dissent in Israel

Hatuka, Tali. “Transformative Terrains: Counter Hegemonic Tactics of Dissent in Israel.” Geopolitics – ahead of print.

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URL:  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14650045.2012.659298

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Abstract

What makes citizens choose a particular mode of protest? This paper discusses the role of space in recent protests by three Israeli groups, Machsom Watch, Anarchists Against the Wall, and Women in Black, in Israel/Palestine. It looks at the way groups protest state violence (i.e., the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the construction of the separation wall) by initiating counter hegemonic strategies and tactics, and by creating new terrains of opposition. More specifically, I elaborate on their model of action and its function within a range of spheres (physical, geographical and virtual), supported by four key principles (difference, decentralisation, multiplicity and informal order). I argue that unlike more conventional protest rituals, often led by the dominant political parties, contemporary dissent takes place in parallel spheres constructing what I call transformative terrain – a social platform that challenges bounded politics by using imagination and space in creating new possibilities.

Reviews: Ochs, Security and Suspicion

Ochs, Juliana. Security and Suspicion. An Ethnography of Everyday Life in Israel. Ethnography of Political Violence Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

 

 

Reviews

 

• Idris, Murad. “Review.” Middle East Journal 65.4 (2011): 680-681.
• Pearlman, Wendy. “Review.” American Ethnologist 39.2 (2012).
• Beckerman-Boys, Carly. “Review.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 11.2 (2012): 279-281.

Cite: Rokem, The Violin Player, the Soccer Game and the Wall-Graffiti

Rokem, Freddie. "The Violin Player, the Soccer Game and the Wall-Graffiti. Rhetorical Strategies in the Border-Regions between Israel and Palestine." Arcadia. International Journal for Literary Studies 45.2 (2011): 326-38.

 

URL: http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/ARCA.2010.019

 

Abstract

This contribution examines an incident at a roadblock which took place in November 2004, documented in a short video and was also reproduced as a still in Israeli media. This image immediately became broadly discussed and contested. It shows a young Palestinian man playing a violin at a check point while a group of Israeli soldiers are standing and guarding the place. This image was drawn into larger clusters of signification where the rhetorical strategies employed become both quite complex and ambiguous. The image became contextualized within discourses of conflict, creating what Walter Benjamin in his Passagenwerk termed “constellations.” – Besides presenting this notion and its hermeneutic potentials my article examines the historical associations of the image, arguing that the associations with the Holocaust are actually a way to minimize the pain and suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation rather than highlighting them in a broader universal context. – Another aspect of this image is connected to the technologies of creating and disseminating images of conflict/occupation and how they affect the ethical discussions surrounding this incident. I will argue that historical constellations tend to obscure rather than sharpen the ethical dimensions of images like the Palestinian violin player at the check point. – A number of graffiti paintings on the separation wall, in particular by the British graffiti artist Bansky, as well as a cellphone advertisement featuring the separation wall will be examined in order to contextualize the discourses of conflict and occupation.

Cite: Feldman, Conflict and Christianity on the Road to Bethlehem

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.

New Publication: Ochs, Security and Suspicion

Ochs, Juliana. Security and Suspicion. An Ethnography of Everyday Life in Israel. Ethnography of Political Violence Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

 

In Israel, gates, fences, and walls encircle public spaces while guards scrutinize, inspect, and interrogate. With a population constantly aware of the possibility of suicide bombings, Israel is defined by its culture of security. Security and Suspicion is a closely drawn ethnographic study of the way Israeli Jews experience security in their everyday lives.

Observing security concerns through an anthropological lens, Juliana Ochs investigates the relationship between perceptions of danger and the political strategies of the state. Ochs argues that everyday security practices create exceptional states of civilian alertness that perpetuate—rather than mitigate—national fear and ongoing violence. In Israeli cities, customers entering gated urban cafes open their handbags for armed security guards and parents circumnavigate feared neighborhoods to deliver their children safely to school. Suspicious objects appear to be everywhere, as Israelis internalize the state’s vigilance for signs of potential suicide bombers. Fear and suspicion not only permeate political rhetoric, writes Ochs, but also condition how people see, the way they move, and the way they relate to Palestinians. Ochs reveals that in Israel everyday practices of security—in the home, on commutes to work, or in cafés and restaurants—are as much a part of conflict as soldiers and military checkpoints.

Based on intensive fieldwork in Israel during the second intifada, Security and Suspicion charts a new approach to issues of security while contributing to our understanding of the subtle dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This book offers a way to understand why security propagates the very fears and suspicions it is supposed to reduce.

URL: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14804.html

Conference: Radars and Fences 2010

Radars and Fences III

Friday, March 12, 2010
10:00 AM – 05:00 PM

Radars and Fences 2010 will explore the production of the Israel/Palestine and Mexico/US borders, examining how they engage affects, bodies, and spatial scales. Despite their seemingly confounding specificities, it is our intention to open up a dialogue between these borders in order to enable new terms of practical and political engagement. By bringing this plurality of perspectives into dialogue around the themes of affect and space, we hope to reinvigorate critical analysis of the border in all of its (im)materialities and locations. 

Schedule:
10-10.30 Coffee & Opening Remarks
10.30-11.15 Electronic Disturbance Theatre: Amy Sara Carroll & Ricardo Dominguez
11.15-12 Laila El Haddad & Mushon Zer’Aviv
Break for Lunch
1.15-2 Teddy Cruz
2-2.45 Helga Tawil-Souri
2.45 Long Table Discussion

Sponsored by:
Council for Media and Culture, The Humanities Initiative, The Hemispheric Institute, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Taub Center for Israel Studies

For further information and RSVP, see here:

 http://www.nyu.edu/media.culture/events/event.html?e_id=2324

New Publication: Sheffer and Barak, Militarism and Israeli Society

Sheffer, Gabriel and Oren Barak, eds. Militarism and Israeli Society. An Israel Studies Book. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010.

URL: ttp://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?isbn=978-0-253-22174-2

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Table of Contents:

1. The Study of Civil—Military Relations in Israel: A New Perspective / Oren Barak and Gabriel Sheffer
2. Military Knowledge and Weak Civilian Control in the Reality of Low Intensity Conflict—The Israeli Case / Kobi Michael
3. Civil Society, the Military, and National Security: The Case of Israel’s Security Zone in South Lebanon / Avraham Sela
4. Intractable Conflict and the Media / Yoram Peri
5. Tensions between Military Service and Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel: Implications Imagined and Real / Stuart A. Cohen
6. From "Obligatory Militarism" to "Contractual Militarism"—Competing Models of Citizenship / Yagil Levy, Edna Lomsky-Feder, and Noa Harel
7. Shadow Lands: The Use of Land Resources for Security Needs in Israel / Amiram Oren
8. "The Battle over Our Homes": Reconstructing/Deconstructing Sovereign Practices around Israel’s Separation Barrier on the West Bank / Yuval Feinstein and Uri Ben-Eliezer
9. The Debate over the Defense Budget in Israel / Zalman F. Shiffer
10. Civilian Control over the Army in Israel and France / Samy Cohen
11. The Making of Israel’s Political—Security Culture / Amir Bar-Or
12. The Discourses of "Psychology" and the "Normalization" of War in Contemporary Israel / Edna Lomsky-Feder and Eyal Ben-Ari
13. Visual Representations of IDF Women Soldiers and "Civil-Militarism" in Israel / Chava Brownfield-Stein
14. Contradictory Representation of the IDF in Cultural Texts of the 1980s / Yuval Benziman
15. Military and Society since 9/11: Retrospect and Prospect / Christopher Dandeker

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Keywords: Israel: Politics, Military, Lebanon, Israel: Society, Gender, Israel: Culture, Israel: Economy, West Bank, Partition / Separation, Wall / Separation Barrier, Israel: Religion, Religious-Secular Dividem גבי שפר, אורן ברק