Uriel Abulof, Fulbright and David Nathan Meyerson Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University
Israel's Intra-State Arab-Jewish Conflict in a Comparative Perspective
The past year has seen Israel’s internal divide between
Jews and Arabs reach a new peak, with the publication of four milestone
documents written by the political and intellectual elite of Israeli Arab
citizens. Arguing for the transformation of Israel from a “Jewish state” into a
“consociational democracy”, the documents were dubbed almost unanimously by
Israeli Jews as dangerously subversive. However, these documents may also
present a valuable opportunity for launching a true normative dialogue between
the two rival communities. I argue that such a dialogue is sorely absent, as
both Jews and Arabs have so far been more concerned with either submission or
compromise, sidestepping the possibility of reaching ethical-political common
ground. Reviving and relocating Martin Buber’s concept of dialogue from the
intra-community level to the inter-community level I contend that Arab-Jewish
normative dialogue is both viable and vital for achieving peaceful co-existence
between the two groups. The discussion will be placed a comparative historical context,
with an examination of the Canadian and Macedonian cases.
Barenboim in Ramalla, Olivero in Jerusalem: Politics in Israeli Classical Music
Music and politics are inseparable in Israeli
concert music. While Daniel Barenboim, for well-known reasons, gave up his
attempts to perform Wagner in Israel,
he continued his collaboration with Palestinian musicians through the
Barenboim-Said initiative, the annual “West-Eastern Diwan” workshop. Local
composers often define Israelism in art music through their borrowings of
melodies, rhythms, and textures from Arab (or Jewish-Arab) music. One of the
recent examples is Out of Aida (2004), by the Nazareth composer Wisam Gibran, written for
an ensemble of Israel Philharmonic Orchestra soloists with distinguished
Israeli-Arab performers. Based on Verdi’s themes, the composition follows a
long-established Israeli tradition.
That Israeli music should reflect regional music was
decided by the Five Founding Fathers (Ben-Haim, Partos, Boskovich, Seter and
Tal) in their works from the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1990s, “third-generation”
composers’ introduce both Steigers (Jewish modes) and maqamat (Arab ones) alike
in their works. Betty Olivero’s monumental Bakashot (Intercession, 1996,
clarinet, chorus, orchestra) follows this ideology, employing Berio techniques
on Jewish and Jewish-Arab melodic sources. Across the Atlantic,
Israeli-American composer Shulamit Ran’s nostalgia for Ben-Haim yielded her
“Israeli Cycle” – multinational in its Middle-Eastern arabesques and American
orchestration. Gibran, Olivero, and Ran’s music, like that of many leading
Israeli composers, reveals a reality of the region: their music, paradoxically,
becomes “cosmopolitan” – part of “world music” – precisely when it expresses
distinctive cultural, social, and political attributes of the region.
Alternative Relationships: The Palestinian-Arab and Zionist-Jewish Citrus Industries of Pre-Israel Palestine
The citrus industry of Palestine has been associated with the myths
and ideals of the Zionist Labor Movement and its Zionist-Socialist ideology.
The Jaffa
orange, like the young pioneer and the collective kibbutz, served as a
major symbolic component of renewal, vitality and attachment to the land in
constructing the Zionist and Israeli Meta-Narrative.
However,
my research reveals that beyond this constructed narrative a very different –
almost antithetical – reality existed. First – contrary to popular assumptions,
the citrus industry was not dominated by the Zionist Labor Movement but rather
by individual citrus growers who comprised an often despised Zionist private
sector, which challenged the hegemonic Labor Movement with an opposing set of
economic and ideological tenets. The private sector did not view Socialism as
its model but rather aimed at emulating the Capitalist California model. Second
– a close look at the facts discloses that the true founders of Palestine's citrus
industry, which was the country's major export industry, were the
Palestinian-Arabs, not the Zionist-Jews. Up until 1948 the industry was divided
almost equally between the two national sectors. My talk will concentrate on
the unique relationships that evolved between these two national and ethnic
communities up to the Nakba. An important part of my talk will be
devoted to the issue of the complex relationship between ideology, "scopic
regimes", academic research and current paradigms in understanding
pre-Israel Palestine.
As-Sahyuniyya: An Arab Theory of Jewish History in Late Ottoman Palestine
My dissertation-in-progress considers the ways in which
Zionist and Arab intellectuals in Late Ottoman Palestine sought to learn about
one another. In particular, I am concerned with the relationship between
self-understanding and an understanding of others, a relationship that in this
case (unexceptionally) is multi-directional. As a case study, I will
present elements of my ongoing research on an unpublished Arabic manuscript
called "Zionism, or the Zionist Question," a pre-WWI text written by
a prominent Jerusalem Arab intellectual. The author focuses on
the historical link between the Jews and Palestine
since the biblical era. In turn, I will analyze how this link is
presented and interpreted in light of the intellectual and political
contexts--contemporary and historical, Arab and European.
February 15, 2008
Nimrod Luz, Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Indiana University
Palestinian Identity, Collective Memory, and Resistance in the Hassan Bek Mosque Conflict
This
lecture is primarily concerned with the use and production of Palestinian sacred
sites within the context of ethno-national Israeli context. It focuses mainly
on the ways minority groups develop intricate politics of identity that enable
them to resist and subvert state and majority control over their symbolic space
(sacred) and as part of a process of self empowerment. Particularly, Luz will
present a reading of the construction and contestation involved in the
restoration project of the Hassan Bek mosque in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel.
The paper explores the use of a Muslim scared site as a place for identity
formation and as a nexus of resistance for a minority group in the context of a
hegemonic and secularizing state and as part of an ethno-national conflict.
Focusing on the long and convoluted history of the Hassan Bek mosque in Tel
Aviv-Jaffa and the struggle of the Arab-Palestinian community therein, the
objectives are twofold: (1) to explore the formulation of resistance among the
Palestinian community and the struggle for self-empowerment through the sacred;
and, (2) to outline and reconstruct the reterritorialization of the Hassan Bek
mosque by its community in the face of the state’s continuous efforts to
deterritorializate it. Following these questions Luz seeks to highlight the
role of the sacred as a site of resistance, a space where minority identity
(not 'sons of the soil citizens', following Appadurai) may be formulated and
negotiated.
Roni Stauber, Tel Aviv University, Aresty Visiting Professor, Rutgers University
Memory and Diplomacy: Israel's Foreign Office, West Germany and the Confrontation with Nazi Past in the 1950s
The aim of this paper is to examine the conflict
between the desire for normalization and meeting the exigencies of the time,
and the power of memory in Israel's
foreign relations with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) at the beginning
of 1950s.Based on first hand documents,
mainly correspondence between Israel's diplomats as well as protocols of meetings
of the foreign office officials, Stauber will analyze the difficulties of
Israeli diplomats to resolve the contradiction between Realpolitik, the
striving for normalcy in the relations between the two countries, and commemoration
of the Holocaust.The paper will focus
mainly on the different views in the Israeli Foreign Office regarding the avoidance
of the German society to confront its behavior during the Nazi era.
April 11, 2008
Yinon Cohen, Yosef Haim Yerushalmi Professor of Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University
The Demographic Success of Zionism
In this paper, Cohen argues that if a central goal of
Zionism was “to populate Eretz Yisreal with multitudes of Jews,” as Ben-Gurion
remarked, then it has been successful. The number of Jews in Israel has
increased impressively, and a solid Jewish majority in the country has been
maintained. This demographic success is also manifested in other dimensions.
These dimensions are examined by focusing on changes in immigration patterns to
Israel
since 1948, with an emphasis not only on the number of immigrants, but also on
the number of emigrants, as well as on the educational levels of immigrants and
emigrants. This inquiry enables us to evaluate Zionism’s success in keeping
emigration rates relatively low; its success in attracting highly educated Jews
to immigrate, reside, and stay in Israel; and its success in
attracting back those who emigrated, especially the highly educated.
New Old Land: Herzl and the Zionist Utopia in Histrorical Perspective
Russell Jacoby, in a recent study of utopias and
their relevance in today’s world, has argued that we live now in an
anti-utopian epoch that rejects all grand ideological vision and embraces a
more pragmatic approach to political programs and solutions. Herzl’s
/Altneuland/, a utopian novel, is one of the key texts in Zionist history and
its interpretation (as well as that of Herzl’s overall ideological vision) in
the prevailing—post-Zionist, postmodern--intellectual and cultural climate
seems to affirm Jacoby’s assessment. However, recent changes in the cultural
and intellectual landscape, which some critics have described as a return to
history or the end of the Pax Americana—9/11, and emergence of the
anti-globalization movement and in Israel the second Intifada—may indicate a
new horizon for utopia in the 21st century. It is in this context that a new
reading of /Altneuland/ is suggested as
a text that offers a complex and nuanced version of the utopian.
