Browsing by Subject "Israel"

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Ahmad Kaki Interview
(2022-12-21) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious Studies
This interview is with Ahmad Kaki, a legal assistant and law student in Arlington, VA. Ahmad describes growing up Palestinian and Muslim in Texas and how his life changed after 9/11. He talks about his college experiences of involvement in the Muslim Students Association and pro-Palestine organizing. Ahmad shares the trajectory of his career, which brought him to law school and his current work as a legal assistant with the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The Arab street : a photographic exploration
(2009-12) Cheney, Clifford Sidney; Darling, Dennis Carlyle; Reed, Ellis
Journalists use the term Arab Street to describe what they often imply is a volatile Arabic public opinion. This photo story travels through four Arab areas or Jordan, Qatar, Israel/Palestine and Egypt in order to show the diversity and complexity of each. The media’s tendency to lump all Arabs into one political block is detrimental to a true sense of cultural understanding that is required for peace.
Autonomy for Palestinian Women in Israel
(2014-11-12) Nandwani, Sarosh
Behind the Linguistic Landscape of Israel/Palestine : exploring the visual implications of expansionist policies
(2014-05) Carey, Shaylyn Theresa; Brustad, Kristen
The concept of the Linguistic Landscape (LL) is a relatively new and developing field, but it is already proving to illuminate significant trends in sociocultural boundaries and linguistic identities within heterogeneous areas. By examining types of signage displayed in public urban spaces such as street signs, billboards, advertisements, scholars have gained insight into the inter and intra-group relations that have manifested as a result of the present top-down and bottom-up language ideologies. This paper will apply LL theory to the current situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories through a discussion of the various policies that have shaped the Linguistic Landscape. It will begin by examining the Hebraicization of the toponymy after the creation of Israel, then discuss the conflict over the linguistic landscape, which can be seen in several photographs where the Arabic script has been marked out or covered. Moving forward, this work will address the grammatical errors on Arabic language signs, which reflect the low priority of Arabic education in Israel. Finally, this project will expand upon the LL framework by looking at the economic relationship between Israel and the Palestinian territories and how it is reflected in public places, such as supermarkets, which display an overwhelming presence of Hebrew. Through the use of photographic evidence of the LL from the region, which shows the prevalence of Hebrew place names, Israeli economic goods, and negative attitudes towards the use of Arabic on signage, this paper will take a multidisciplinary approach at examining the history and policies that shape the language used in public urban spaces. The relationship between the state and the Linguistic Landscape sheds light on the power dynamics of a multilingual space. As Hebrew is given preferential treatment, despite the official status of both Arabic and Hebrew, Israel continues to dominate the social space with the use of Hebrew in order to assert their claims to the land. In addition to investigating the power dynamics that are reflected on visual displays of language in this region, this work serves as a meaningful contribution to the Linguistic Landscape by expanding its methodology and units of analysis.
Border fiction : fracture and contestation in post-Oslo Palestinian culture
(2013-12) Paul, William Andrew; El-Ariss, Tarek; Grumberg, Karen
This dissertation delves into a body of Palestinian literature, film, and art from the past two decades in order theorize the relationship between borders and their representations. In Israel and Palestine, a region in which negotiating borders has become a way of life, I explore the ways in which ubiquitous boundaries have pervaded cultural production through a process that I term “bordering.” I draw on theoretical contributions from the fields of architecture, geography, anthropology, as well as literature and film studies to develop a conceptual framework for examining the ways in which authors, artists, and filmmakers engage with borders as a space to articulate possibilities of encounter, contestation, and transgression. I argue that in these works, the proliferation of borders has called into question the Palestinian cultural and political consensus that created a shared set of narratives, symbols, and places in Palestinian cultural production until the last decade of the 20th century. In its place has emerged a fragmented body of works that create what Jacques Rancière terms “dissensus,” or a disruption of a cultural, aesthetic, disciplinary, and spatial order. Read together, they constitute what I term a “border aesthetic,” in which literature, film, and art produce new types of spaces, narratives, and texts through the ruptures and fractures of the border. I trace the emergence of this aesthetic and the new genres and forms that distinguish it from earlier Palestinian literary, political, and intellectual projects through analyses of the works of Elia Suleiman, Sayed Kashua, Raba’i al-Madhoun, Emily Jacir, Yazid Anani, and Inass Yassin. In their attempts to grapple artistically with the region’s borders, these authors, directors, and artists create new codes, narratives, vernaculars, and spaces that reflect the fragmentation wrought by pervasive boundaries. These works, fluent in multiple mediums, genres, and languages, reveal both the possibilities and the limits of this aesthetic, as they seek to contest borders but nevertheless remain bound by them.
Developing the Desert: A Case Study of Israeli Infrastructure Privatization
(2020-05) Rajesh, Ananya
In the face of mounting hyperinflation in the 1970s and 1980s, Israel underwent a stabilization program focused on reducing the size of its public sector. The principles of the program, influenced heavily by neoliberal thinking, were a radical shift away from the collectivist ethos Israel had been built on. This paper focuses on the impact of the ensuing privatization of infrastructure-related state assets. Given the primacy of these assets to the public’s standard of living, infrastructure is of particular interest to any government. As Israel moved away from state ownership, it involved the private sector to various degrees. In telecommunications, the privatization of government company Bezeq was imperfectly executed, resulting in economic concentration that mirrors wealth inequality found in other parts of Israeli society. In water, Israel utilized more limited forms of privatization to greater success. The national water carrier, Mekorot, operates as a government company, but may sell a minority stake. Doing so would provide liquidity while maintaining the state’s decision-making authority over a scarce resource. Similarly, the use of public-private partnerships in major desalination plants has balanced the risk between the public and private sectors, tapping into private sector expertise while guaranteeing sustainable water output. The three cases studied demonstrate different approaches to economic liberalization in essential assets. For the most part, Israel’s modes of privatization, at least in infrastructure, have reduced the state’s burden while maintaining the public interest.
Digging through time: psychogeographies of occupation
(2015-12) Simblist, Noah Leon; Reynolds, Ann Morris; El-Ariss, Tarek; Mulder, Stephennie; Di-Capua, Yoav; Flaherty, George
This dissertation is about the relationship between contemporary art and politics in the case of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Specifically, I look at the ways that artists have dealt with the history of this region and its impact on the present, using four moments as the subject of the following chapters: ancient Palestine, the Holocaust, The nakba, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The historiographical impulse has a particular resonance for artists making work about the Middle East, a political space where competing historical narratives are the basis for disagreements about sovereignty. I focus on works by Avi Mograbi, Gilad Efrat, Ayreen Anastas, Amir Yatziv, Yael Bartana, Omer Fast, Khaled Hourani, Dor Guez, Campus in Camps, and Akram Zaatari. A number of patterns emerge when we look at how these artists approach history. One is the tendency for artists to act like historians. As a subset of this tendency is the archival impulse, wherein artists use found photographs, film or documents to intervene in normative representations of history. Another is for artists to act like archaeologists, digging up repressed histories. Another is to commemorate a traumatic event in a way that rejects traditional forms of memorialization such as monuments. At the core of each chapter are examples of artistic practices that use conversation as a medium. I analyze these conversations about history as a dialogical practice and argue that this methodology offers a uniquely productive opportunity to work through the ideologies embedded within the psychogeographies of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Within these conversations and other aesthetic structures, I argue that these artists emphasize the all too common challenge in producing new forms of civic imagination – the tendency to address historical trauma though repetition compulsion and melancholia. They react to this challenge by engaging collective memory, producing counter-memories and, in some cases, produce counterpublics.
"Dr. Condoleezza Rice Speaks at Los Angeles Town Hall"
(Office of the Press Secretary, 2003-06-12) U.S. Government
Ecstatic feedback : toward an ethics of audition in the contemporary literary arts of the Mediterranean
(2014-12) Raizen, Michal; Grumberg, Karen; El-Ariss, Tarek; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; Seeman, Sonia; Atwood, Blake
Ecstatic Feedback explores narrative and thematic engagements with the concept of “audition” in works from Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Morocco. My use of the term audition encompasses the act of listening, the trials and tribulations of hearing, and the performative aspects of lending an ear. The locale of Ecstatic Feedback is the contemporary Mediterranean, a designation that reflects both the geographical and linguistic orientation of the works discussed and the emergent disciplinary interest in Mediterranean Studies. The regional specificity of this project is framed by my discussion of ṭarab, a musical phenomenon akin to ecstasy. I argue that ṭarab, as a musical form with a culturally-specific contextual base and a sui generis communicative mode capable of producing context, points to an acoustic geography that predates current sociopolitical mappings of the Mediterranean. In its literary and cinematic iterations, ṭarab presents a challenge to compartmentalized geopolitical and cultural visions of a Mediterranean structured around divisions such as secular/sacred, premodern/modern, or Mashriq/Maghreb. The works discussed in Ecstatic Feedback use ṭarab as a narrative structure, casting it at the same time as a way of rethinking the historical traumas of the twentieth and twenty-first century Mediterranean. Emile Habibi’s vignettes The Sextet of the Six Days (1968); Hoda Barakat’s novel Disciples of Passion (1993) and her series of essays The Stranger’s Letters (2004); Eran Kolirin’s film The Band’s Visit (2007); and Elia Suleiman’s film The Time That Remains (2009) all make explicit references to the world of ṭarab and its practitioners. Edmond El Maleh’s A Thousand Years, One Day (1986) situates ṭarab more abstractly, as a concept with tremendous performative and communicative potential in both its popular and mystical iterations. With a focus on Arab Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and exiles of the Lebanese Civil War, my project attends to the processes that underwrite a literary and cinematic intervention into the regional soundscape, with its attendant silences and elisions. By foregrounding instances of ṭarab and exploring the intersubjectivity inherent in the dynamic between muṭrib (a performer who elicits ṭarab) and listener, these diverse texts combine to highlight a line of cultural-regional poetics based on audition.
Fact, Fallacy, and Foreign Policy: A Conversation about Israel and the Truth
(2018-12-12) Romanow, Nicholas
Gender and feminism in the Israeli peace process : beyond UNSCR 1325
(2016-05) Bennett, Amanda Jane; Rodríguez, Victoria Elizabeth, 1954-; Golan, Galia
In 2000, the United Nations passed Security Council Resolution 1325, calling for the inclusion of women in peace negotiations. Although preliminary research has found positive outcomes from peace processes where women’s groups have had influence, the mechanisms to explain how women’s inclusion can positively contribute to peace remain undefined. This paper examines existing “women and peace” theories, and proposes a theory to explain how including women, giving them influence, and including feminist perspectives can lead to more lasting peace. This theory is then tested using the case of the Israel/Palestine conflict, incorporating the results of interviews conducted by the author with Israeli peace activists from October 2015 to January 2016. The paper examines, in the context of this theory, why feminist Israeli peace activists and groups such as Jerusalem Link and the International Women’s Commission have struggled to obtain influence in past peace processes, and what contemporary women’s groups such as Women Wage Peace and Itach-Maaki have been doing to change that in the next one.
Haredi Judaism & COVID-19: A View on Religion and Health from Israel
(2022-05-10) Daly, Sean; Rosenberg Weinreb, Amelia
Ideas — BDS, Israel, and a Very Expensive Headache
(2019-05-01) Masucol, Ethan
Impartial allies : American policy in Palestine during the Truman administration
(2015-05) Stewart, James Clyde; Suri, Jeremi; Di-Capua, Yoav
American policy toward Palestine during the Truman administration was influenced by a number of factors, but none carried greater weight than the unfolding cold war. Because the Middle East carried so much strategic weight, American leaders were determined to ensure that the entire region remained allied with the United States. As a result, the Truman administration strove to maintain good relations with both Arabs and Israelis throughout the period. American policy did not, as many allege, favor Israel, but in fact pursued the middle-of-the-road.
The influence of religion on the character and conduct of the Israel Defense Forces : a review of selected works
(2010-12) Chernick, Erica Susan; Pedahzur, Ami; Weinreb, Alex
In light of an ever growing gap between Israel’s religious and secular communities, it is perhaps inevitable that the phenomenon would come to capture the interest of Israel-oriented scholars. Yet efforts to address the extent to which religion affects the nature and operations of the Israeli army and the degree to which that influence is advantageous – or perhaps detrimental – have been far from comprehensive. A manifestation of the religious-secular conflict, the religious-military cleavage within Israeli society has long been at the heart of Israel-focused research. Scholars have remained intrigued by the conflicts that arise when a soldier’s religious background is at odds with the inflexibility of army life. Many researchers have sought to measure the degree to which religion affects army cohesion and success in war, and determine whether or not religious influence on the State’s force is largely harmless or a looming threat. While scholars of both camps have posited credible theories crafted out of sound analyses, a review of selected scholarship on the subject suggests that the influence of religion on the Israeli military is benign. Opponents of religious influence on the military have failed to appreciate the benefits of integrating devout troops into the force and the successes of mediating mechanisms that have become instrumental to the IDF. Such mediators may have been implemented in an effort to accommodate religious soldiers, but the entire force has stood to benefit.
Intimate invasions : gender, violence and the politics of belonging at the Jerusalem border
(2017-05) Ihmoud, Sarah Emily; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Browne, Simone A; Ali, Kamran A; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera; Costa-Vargas, Joao H
While the violence of the Israeli/Palestinian context is often most visible in the spectacular moments of militarized struggles over land and power, this dissertation contends that ongoing violence operates through invasion of the mundane spaces of everyday life—native Palestinian’s sexualities, homes, families, bodies and the sacred—what I term intimate invasions. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research in occupied East Jerusalem before, during and in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 Israeli military invasion of the occupied Palestinian territories, my research documents intimate state violence as a primary means of political control. Intimate invasions, I argue, form part of a sexual economy of violence that energizes the Israeli state’s project of racial domination; this argument, in turn helps reveal how mundane, embodied forms of gender and sexualized violence are constitutive of settler colonial violence. The sexualized performativity of state power is often rendered elusive in its everyday manifestations, yet becomes hypervisible in a time of war, when the native female body is symbolically vested as a territory that should be violated, invaded and raped, and the male body as a threatening marker of sexual and gendered difference. Such discourses, and the military strategies that accompany them, are critical in the production of racial differences between Palestinian and Jew, structuring belonging or nonbelonging to the “Jewish nation”, and thus, disparate forms of social and political inclusion or exclusion. At the same time, Palestinian resistance in the post-Oslo era is unintelligible without a focus on the intimate. For Jerusalemites, who straddle the liminal space between citizen and “impossible subject” in the eyes of the Israeli state, and who have no recourse to political representation from the official guardians of the Palestinian national body, the intimate provides fertile grounds for contesting the social, political and racial exclusion faced in everyday life. In the intimate praxis of remaking home, maintaining familial and social bonds, and defending sacred space while being excluded, terrorized and relegated to a space of death, Jerusalemite Palestinians refashion political identities and forge a politics of belonging to the city.
Iranian-Israeli relations in light of the Iranian Revolution
(2010-12) Vessali, Behrang Vameghi; Aghaie, Kamran Scot; Pedahzur, Ami
This thesis considers the transformation of Iranian-Israeli ties following the 1979 Iranian Revolution from a Western-allied relationship to a covert, scandalous relationship, specifically in the context of the Iran-Iraq War. I also look at the Iranian and Israeli narratives and compare the religious, historical, ideological and psycho-political underpinnings that reveal significant similarities between these two superficially diametrically opposed states, and ultimately shaped the complex and misunderstood relationship between the two countries.
Israeli-Arab authors claiming Hebrew identity : the case of Anton Shammas and Sayed Kashua
(2019-05-07) Scott, Emily Tobia; Grumberg, Karen
Anton Shammas and Sayed Kashua present two very different examples of Israeli-Arab authors writing in Hebrew. They belong to different generations, utilize different styles and media, and hold different reasons for writing in Hebrew. Yet, these two authors share some goals. Both seek to represent Israeli-Arab stories for a Hebrew-speaking audience by writing in Hebrew. I argue that Shammas and Kashua use different strategies to make their work palatable to this Israeli audience, and both succeed in securing a wide readership, despite the critical nature of their writing. In this thesis, I look at the different approaches they adopt to gain entrance to mainstream Israeli discourse. Shammas uses elevated Hebrew and writes in a sophisticated style that renders his work unimpeachable. Kashua uses humor, sarcasm, and absurdity to appeal to readers and utilizes popular media such as television and journalism. Despite their vastly different approaches and styles, both critique Israeli centers of power in their writing and manage to engage the dominant culture by using the language of the majority.
Jerusalem in Israeli Politics, 1947-1967
(2018) Gupta, Mohit
Letter to I.G. Sohn from H.B. Stenzel on 1968-10-11
(1968-10-11) Stenzel, Henryk B.