University
of Nebraska Press
Shofar
- Books Received
Shofar
- Advertising &
Mailing List Info
Shofar
- Book Reviews |
Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism, by Rebecca L. Stein. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 232 pp. $22.95.
Itineraries in Conflict stands out as a superb, original study that addresses aspects of Israeli cultural experience and practice rarely examined by scholars while offering some challenging, thought-provoking conclusions. Drawing on fieldwork spanning a decade, cultural anthropologist Rebecca Stein seeks to invert common understandings of the territorial dimensions of Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reveal how geopolitics and the tensions within the Zionist project are embedded in everyday practices of tourism, travel, leisure, and consumption.
In a series of readable, well-crafted chapters, Stein layers a recounting of contemporary developments and telling first-person ethnographic vignettes with capsules of historical background that contextualize the action while revealing the underlying tensions that define what is being said and left unsaid. The text is framed by the rise and decline of the Oslo peace process (1993–2000) and explores how shifts in Israel’s diplomatic and security relations redefined the terms of Israeli leisure practices. Stein builds her case inductively by reading everyday details, activities, and speech to identify the terms of what she calls “national intelligibility,” which refers to protocols of recognition that regulate and filter perceptions and specify what subjects can be recognized. In short, she argues that only when the 1993 Oslo Accords and the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan helped normalize Israel’s position within the Arab world did Jewish Israelis begin to recognize, consume, and “desire” places, cultural tourist experiences, and foods associated with Israel’s own (Palestinian) Arab community. At the same time, Stein is critical of the very limited and contingent nature of the protocols of national intelligibility that only recognized de-contextualized and seemingly apolitical experiences that functioned to shore up rather than challenge what Stein views as aspects of Zionist nationalist mythology.
Chapter 1 recounts how Israeli tourism was transformed by the rise of what Shimon Peres dubbed the “New Middle East” and the Israel-Jordan treaty that permitted Israelis to freely visit Jordan. Stein argues that the mainstream Israeli press related the experiences of Jewish Israelis visiting Arab locales in terms of “first contact” narratives emphasizing notions of a geographic and cultural divide between a homogenous Israeli nation-state and the Arab world at a moment of increasing anxiety about more open borders. Illustrating her point with historical photos, Stein observes that such narratives required ignoring and suppressing historical traces of Yishuv-era Jewish travel to Arab lands and the cultural ties Israel has with these places though its own Arab Palestinians and Jews of Arab origin.
Chapters 2 and 3 consider the mid-1990s rise of Jewish Israeli interest in “ethnic” tourism within the Palestinian towns and villages of the Galilee. She views the practice as representing “a recalibration of the terms of [Palestinian] symbolic inclusion within the [Israeli] nation-state” (p. 46). Noting that state officials who promoted ethnic tourism and most Israelis drawn to it viewed themselves as enacting peace and coexistence, Stein highlights its limits, as “[m]ost Jewish Israeli clients sought Arab culture stripped of recognizable Palestinian histories and sentiments” (p. 48). More critically Stein interlaces her ethnographic account of Israeli tourists, tourism planners, and government officials with historical and contextualizing details about the Palestinian locales and communities visited. Stein argues that the experience of ethnic tourism naturalized the rural, isolated, and underdeveloped characteristics of these communities, which can be understood as, in part, legacies of previous Israeli state policies of neglect, repression, and dispossession that the new era of peaceful coexistence sought to bury. What I found particularly fascinating in Stein’s account is how efforts to present more “authentic” tourist experiences—consisting of home-cooked meals, private musical performances, and picturesque village landscapes—only functioned to enhance this effect. They helped associate Palestinian spaces with “interiority” and worked to “fix Palestinians in space” where they seem naturally rooted thus mollifying Jewish Israeli fears about the accommodation required for coexistence.
Chapter 4 provides a contrast by exploring the simultaneous proliferation and popularity of restaurants serving Arabic food in the town of Abu Ghosh. Located inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, Abu Ghosh is known for its political alignment with the Israeli state. Stein recounts how Abu Ghosh’s residents and restaurateurs constantly reiterate this allegiance, arguing that such identification is one condition sustaining the “edibility” (for Jewish Israelis) of the food it serves. While referring to Abu Ghosh as a “Palestinian” village, Stein recounts how its residents as well as Jewish Israelis do not think of it as “Palestinian” nor, in some cases, as “Arab,” even as they might acknowledge that the food served is Arab. In her usage of the term “Palestinian,” Stein seeks to complicate how readers might understand it. She challenges those predominantly leftist scholars who always equate Palestinian with “resistance” while noting the inherent limits of Abu Ghosh’s identification with the Israeli state, evocatively referring to it as “melancholic citizenship.”
Chapter 5 traces the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and escalating violence of the second Palestinian intifada through a reading of the Israeli discourse lamenting the decline of everyday practices of Israeli consumer culture. In the wake of murderous café bombings, crowds disappeared from European-style cafés as well as shopping malls, cinemas, and other locales of public leisure activity. In a stinging critique, Stein argues that this focus on the image of a “depopulated urban landscape” (p. 145) allowed Jewish Israelis to view the ongoing conflict as no longer about territory but as a “civilizational war” (p. 144). She concludes that these narratives foreshadowed the increasing popularity of right-wing views advocating the transfer of Israel’s Palestinian Arab population.
On the last page of the postscript, Itineraries in Conflict reiterates the central claim behind its critique. Before Israeli protocols of national intelligibility, for a time, recognized its internal Palestinian dimension, “Israel was already a heterogeneous place . . . it was already an Arab place . . . both Palestinian and Mizrahi” (p. 152). She argues that Oslo-era tourism and leisure practices, including the influx of Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origin, threatened to expose and even unseat the prevailing “fiction” that it was not. Readers who find Stein’s central claim “unintelligible” will likely not absorb her critique, while those who want to follow it might feel uncertain about where it leads. Throughout the text Stein emphasizes the malleability of such protocols as they must be sustained and can be altered through everyday practices. In each chapter she includes examples of efforts and utterances that challenge the existing protocols such as the Palestinian Heritage Museum in Sakhnin. It portrays a counter-geography of Palestinian identity and community that crosses borders and checkpoints and “exposed the fiction of an Arab citizenry stripped of its Palestinian markings” (p. 68). But any assessment of the possibility for a more radical, sustainable transformation of protocols of national intelligibility would have to consider how such recognition interacts with Israeli politics and regional geopolitics. Moreover, the various, often equally problematic, Arab and Palestinian codes of national intelligibility are barely addressed. Nevertheless, Itineraries in Conflict is an elegant, path-breaking excursion into a hitherto underexplored dimension of Israeli society during an era of difficult transformations.
Waleed Hazbun
Department of Political Science
Johns Hopkins University
|
