The present book emerged following my investigations into various branches of Palestinian culture and my studies of specific manifestations of Arab-Jewish identity and culture, as well as in light of the recent theoretical contributions on identity by major cultural theorists and sociologists. Among them, I have been mainly guided by insights introduced by the Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014), who argues that “the question, and the theorization, of identity is a matter of considerable political significance, and is only to be advanced when both the necessity and the ‘impossibility’ of identities, and the suturing of the psychic and the discursive in their constitution, are fully and unambiguously acknowledged.” The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness by the British historian Paul Gilroy (b. 1956) also inspired me: “Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness,” says Gilroy, but “saying this, I do not mean to suggest taking on either or both unfinished identities necessarily exhausts subjective resources of any particular individual.” The writings of poststructuralist professor of rhetoric Diane Davis (b. 1963) have played a role in the development of my arguments on the notions of inessential solidarities, particularly her question: “Is there a way to activate a sense of solidarity among singularities—a way to say ‘we’—that doesn't automatically exclude, that doesn't just ask for trouble by simultaneously feeding this craving for communion, for Gemeinschaft (in the name of which any number of ‘we's have committed the most horrific atrocities in recorded history)?” Likewise, the insights of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) have been very helpful for my investigations and studies, mainly his The Coming Community, which starts out by stating that “the coming being is whatever being,” and ends with the following: “Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the state. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.”