66 results
10 - Drag kings at the totem Ball: the erotics of collective representation in Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud
- from Part II: - Symbols, rituals, and bodies
- Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University, Connecticut, Philip Smith, Yale University, Connecticut
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- The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim
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- 28 April 2008
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- 26 May 2005, pp 239-273
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Summary
Politics has a sex because sex is our first politics, our first agency, our first subjection. Over the long sweep of history, collective representation, the capacity to stand for the collectivity, to speak in its name, has been gendered. Men have historically dominated the public sphere, their bodies massed, displayed, and sacrificed as the primary medium and content of collective representation. Women are absent, off-stage, or more recently, play minor parts. If the public sphere, and the collective body conjured into symbol there, is male, it presumably has a penis; but the fact is that its sex, its erotic energies, have gone largely un-theorized. If we are to understand the logic of collective representation we must align its symbolization with its sex.
In this chapter, I wish to explore the sexuality of collective representation as achieved in ancient rituals as interpreted by Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, the founders of sociology and psychoanalysis respectively. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ([1912] 1995) (hereafter Elementary Forms) and Totem and Taboo ([1913] 1946), both studied the “totemism” of the aboriginal tribes of Australia which they argued was the simplest and hence the earliest religion. For both, collective representation was the creation of a collective body through the individual bodies of men. While scholarship has accumulated requiring revision of the empirical materials upon which they based their theories, their theories are still studied and taught without reference to it, as modalities of thinking, as our own totemic representations.
10 - Defensible Borders
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 213-242
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Like most Israelis, Jewish settlers regard Israel's pre-1967 borders as indefensible; “Auschwitz borders,” Abba Eban once called them. This is not just a strategic assessment. The religious nationalists of Gush Emunim consider these frontiers to be morally indefensible.
When a people uses violence, it is an instrument, a tool by which to try pry loose resources unobtainable by other means. But violence is also an expression of commitment, a demonstration of what one holds most dear. Violence leaves bloody traces: wounds and corpses. It marks a community's values on human bodies, through blood sacrifices that only make sense in terms of the purposes for which they were offered. Violence is a language; force simultaneously a physical and a moral phenomenon. Efforts to decompose it must inevitably crumble.
Terms of Engagement
The row houses of Ofra, a Jewish suburb to the north of Jerusalem, are planted in deep red soil at the foot of Ba'al Hatzor, the highest mountain in Samaria. It should be an easy commute to Jerusalem, not unlike that separating the San Fernando Valley from Westwood; Hertford from London; or Melun from Paris. But to travel these fifteen miles along the ridge descending into the city, one has to drive through miles of Palestinian villages, smack through Ramallah and El-Bira, a major Arab metropole. Commuting to Jerusalem's Jewish suburbs has been dangerous for a long time.
Years before the intifada, everyone had traumatic stories. Endlessly repeated and strung end to end, these stories transformed a short drive into an ordeal. Every bend in the road could conceal a young man with a Molotov cocktail. Schoolchildren clustered at the road's edge could metamorphosize into a hostile gang.
Part III - Birth of a Nation
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 243-244
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Part I - The Two Zions: Jews Against Zionism in Jerusalem
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 47-48
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13 - A State of Mind
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 297-345
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A man without a wife is like a kitchen without a knife.
A kiss without a moustache is like food without salt.
An intifada without troubles is likewise impossible.
– a Palestinian proverbWhen the Palestinian uprising exploded on December 8, 1987, it shocked everybody. The Israelis initially didn't think it was anything unusual. Three days into the confrontation, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin flew off to the United States; on his return, he briefed reporters that Syria and Iran were behind it. The intifada, or “shaking off,” as the Palestinians call it, reconfigured what was politically imaginable. None of Israel's intelligence services had anticipated a civil uprising. There weren't even any contingency plans for such an event. Routinely drilled for military confrontation with Syria or Iraq, Israeli soldiers had neither the training nor the materiel to do daily battle with young men and teenagers who, en masse and, unlike their parents, were willing to risk beatings, gunshot wounds, arrest, destruction of their homes, ruination of their family's businesses, deportation, and death to liberate at least some part of Palestine.
It was not just the Israelis who were stunned. The intifada also caught the PLO completely off guard. When it broke, top PLO United Nations officials were jetting abroad for the Christmas holidays. It took ten days for the PLO to get its first handbill into Gaza's streets. The intifada also stunned Jordan's King Hussein. In its first months, King Hussein's supporters in Jerusalem privately complained to the Israelis that insufficient force was being used to put down a revolt that further threatened their already dwindling influence.
18 - Heart of Stone
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 464-490
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It began with knives and a swelling pool of blood. On the verge of an apparent peace Israelis were being stabbed to death by Palestinians who enfold seedlings in the earth of Israel, scrub pots in its kitchens, and spread mortar in its new suburbs. On March 31, 1993, Israel closed the arteries linking Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to its sovereign body – a closing out, not in. The closure of Israel to almost all Palestinians from outside became a permanent feature of the landscape. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who used to work or shop in Jerusalem were forbidden to cross into Zion from the West Bank. Although a few thousand had their jobs taken by new Russian immigrants desperate for employment, about fifty thousand Arabs – mostly construction and agricultural workers – were eventually given permission to go in and out of Israel each day, a fragile privilege that could be revoked at any moment.
It is December 1993 and the hopoe birds, feathered in funereal shades, scavenge in twos and threes in the Jerusalem hills. Rabin and Arafat are bickering over the implementation of the Declaration of Principles, and still Jerusalem is forbidden to most Palestinians, closed to all but the very old and the very young. A couple of Palestinian flags hang limply over the major hotels in the Arab downtown. A furniture store sells a big office chair, its leather carefully ruled into red, green, black, and white. The boisterous waving, the explosive display, of longforbidden Palestinian colors is over.
2 - Zion Against Zionism
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 49-67
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It is ironic that Jerusalem lent its name to the Jewish nationalist movement, for Zionism was built largely outside Zion, in the countryside and along the coast. Theodor Herzl wanted to build the capital on Mount Carmel, not within Jerusalem. The city was filled, he wrote, with “musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance and uncleanliness.” Poets and politicians – Bialik and Ben-Gurion, for example – avoided the city. Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, felt uncomfortable there and wanted to exclude the Old City in Britain's first partition plan. Jerusalem did not loom large in early Zionist imagery. In the early postcards celebrating Jewish settlement in Palestine, there are few images of Jerusalem.
The Zionists purchased little land in, or even around, the city. This was not because land was unavailable for purchase. Both the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and the Catholic Church were acquiring property in Jerusalem. Prominent Arab families were also more than willing to sell to Jews, as their enemies repeatedly charged. When statehood came, Israel owned little in the city, not even a plot on which to build their new capital, which they constructed on expropriated Palestinian lands.
To grasp Zionist discomfort with Jerusalem, it must be understood that the religious Jews of Zion opposed Zionism with all their might. The city's devout Jews fought to defend Judaism's sacred center against the secular nationalists whom they understood as a profaning presence. Although many religious Jews have accommodated, and even embraced, the Jewish state, the relationship between Judaism and Zionism is still an uneasy one. And it remains most difficult in Zion itself.
7 - Staking the Claim in Judea and Samaria
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 163-179
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Israelis entered the 1967 war feeling alone, inhabitants of a vulnerable sliver of territory. Yet in the wake of its tremendous victory, the Labour government's first impulse those first months was to exchange much of the land that had been won for a separate peace, not with the Palestinians, but with King Hussein's Jordan. Prime Minister Eshkol pressed for a formal peace treaty with all the Arab states. While the government was already planning strategic settlement on the Jordan River and around Jerusalem, Abba Eban, Israel's foreign affairs minister, was telling Arab leaders that “everything” was negotiable. Three months after the war, the Arab world's answer at Khartoum was an unequivocal no: no to negotiations, no to peace, no to recognition.
In the face of this implacable Arab hostility, most Israelis felt it was their right to take what history had given them by no fault of their own. “The feeling in Israel,” Mordechai Gur told us, “was ‘OK, so maybe that's how history decides it should be.’” The Labour government was nonetheless internally divided, as it has always been, over the negotiability of the territories. Whereas many Labour leaders saw much of the land as bargaining chips to be exchanged for demilitarization and Arab concessions on Jerusalem, others argued there was no going back. They had fought for keeps.
Zionists had always sanctified the land, had cultivated a profound sense of moledet, or birthplace. Boy Scout troops criss-crossed the countryside; schoolchildren learned to identify each species of bird and flower; young men and women trekked through the deserts with little water.
Preface
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp xi-xiv
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Jerusalem is at war – with itself. In this city Judaism, Christianity, and Islam fought their defining battles. Here, in this century, two nations have declared themselves. Israelis and Palestinians both claim the city as their capital.
Rival prophets, warring nations. The war for Jerusalem has multiple fronts. At the edge, between forests to the west dropping precipitously to the Mediterranean Sea and deserts to the east stretching throughout the Arab world, lies a stone city creased by deep valleys. In reality, it is just a small, slightly dusty provincial town, cut of gray and pink stone, astride a small mountain range. But its air is seeded with pine pollen, the powder of bone, and memory. This last bends the light and makes the city a luminous medium of dream and nightmare.
The city is a central stake, a battleground, an ineffable symbol, not just to those who live within it, but to peoples and powers around the world. The conflicts that consume it reverberate in Washington, Rome, and Jeddah. And conversely even the smallest geopolitical shifts can shake its streets.
The contest between these larger nations and religions shows itself in Jerusalem, not just as ideology, but as life, in the daily struggles between the city's neighborhoods, which consider each other alien and dangerous zones. The city threatens always, everywhere, to crack into pieces or explode; yet it seems to grow inexorably, driven by the very forces that would tear it apart. And one must never forget that Jerusalem is also just a place whose residents must make do.
6 - A Few Footsteps for the Messiah
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 143-162
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In 1967, Israel won a war and power over new places. The Jewish state finally controlled Jerusalem, indeed all the lands the United Nations had laid out in 1947 as a Palestinian state. These captured spaces provided strategic depth and bargaining chips for the negotiations Israel believed would soon follow. But the soils of war were also symbols with a power all their own.
Conquest can transform the conqueror. In this case, Israel's victory and the failure of the vanquished to sue for peace set in motion social forces that transformed Israel's political culture, its understanding of itself and its place in the family of nations. Those, religious and secular, who believed in the Jews’ singularity – that Israel could not and should not be like other nations – came forward to take the land.
Zionism had been a largely secular affair, grounded in a belief that statehood would birth a new people, an exemplary, but normal nation, who would take its appointed place in the region and the world. Judaism was a cultural fact, not the metaphysical basis of statehood. But two decades after Israel declared a state in a Tel Aviv movie theater, Israel's 1967 victory ignited the fires of messianism. A marginal group of rabbis whom David Ben-Gurion had brought inside the state were able to reactivate the messianic meanings of the land and its settlement that had so moved the Jews of the old yishuv. These men and women did more than build houses and roads. Fired by God's historical instruction, the religious nationalists captured the commanding heights of a oncesecular, but territorially maximalist Revisionist Zionism.
Introduction
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 1-14
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In Jerusalem, Israelis and Palestinians must confront each other, and the faithful must deal with those who do not believe. Its neighborhoods are divided among rival nations and religions. Although their residents may ride the same buses and walk the same streets, buy and sell from one another, draw their water and electricity from the same sources, they all strive to insulate themselves from those who live differently. Each community is enclosed within its separate spaces, inhabited by those who order the world in the same way.
Contacts between communities must be carefully managed. The most uncomfortable encounters are often among kinsmen, within Jewish and Arab communities, not between them. Blood enemies evoke a mutual invisibility, fear, or hatred when one oversteps accepted boundaries. But fellow Jews and Arabs who violate the deeply felt commitments of their kinsmen are more likely to elicit disdain and anger.
On her way downtown, for example, a young Israeli woman takes a shortcut through an unfamiliar Jerusalem street. The hamsin, hot desert winds that will sweep the midday streets clean of people, are blowing from the east. She is wearing a t-shirt, blue denim skirt, and open leather sandals; her skin is the color of burnished leather; and one can just make out a flowered pattern on her brassiere.
Orthodox Jewish men in their late teens and early twenties stand around, cloaked in black. Their skins, alabaster from study, glisten with sweat. Side curls dangling, they hiss as the woman passes. One spits at her feet. Averting her eyes, she clutches her purse, hurrying to regain modern ground.
5 - To Control the Center
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 122-140
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Mayor Teddy Kollek entered the Persian synagogue in the Bukharian quarter with the best intentions. Attending services in a haredi neighborhood on the last Shabbat before the municipal elections wouldn't give him any votes. Many people in these neighborhoods didn't vote. And if they did, they wouldn't vote for him. This act of respect by a mayor who believes in mutual tolerance would soon become a grim reminder of the city's fault lines.
Haredi children who saw the mayor enter the synagogue told their parents. When he emerged, hundreds of young men from different anti- Zionist communities were waiting for him. What began as shouting of insults ended in mob violence. Kollek, a barrel-chested senior citizen, landed a few punches of his own. He was thrown repeatedly to the ground, kicked, spat upon, and beaten, along with others who accompanied him. For the rest of the the 1983 electoral campaign, he walked with difficulty, using a gold-tipped cane to support himself.
Moshe Hirsch, the anti-Zionist Neture-Karta activist, returned home to find police waiting to take him away. “I don't mind,” he told us, “I like to help out a fellow Jew.” Haredim had violated Shabbat's sacred time to mug the mayor. The Edah Haredit, the umbrella organization of anti-Zionist Jews, was unrepentant about the behavior of Jews who looked to them for leadership. “I am not upset about what happened,” its secretary remarked. “He is considered by us as a religion hater and a hater of Judaism. We have many unclosed accounts with him. In my opinion, he deserves more punishment than he got. Those who attacked him weren't behaving correctly because it is for heaven to judge, not man.”
1 - A Fearful Fusion
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 15-46
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Zionists and Palestinian nationalists have both fought for Jerusalem as a symbol and sovereign site of their respective nations. Fashioning those nations has led them not just to bloody battles with each other, but into ferocious culture wars with their fellow Jews and Arabs who have understood their identities, and hence Jerusalem, in radically different ways. The struggles within the Israeli and Palestinian communities have often been just as intractable and uncompromising as those between them. Nation building has not been easy for either side.
The Israelis and the Palestinians confronted obstacles inside and out as they sought to forge their nations. Internally there were divisive conflicts between those who would follow the law of a sovereign people and those who would cleave to the law of God. Neither people could keep politicians and priests apart, nor could they establish a relationship between nationalism and religion that their citizens could abide.
From the outside, other countries refused to treat Israel or Palestine as they would nations like Brunei, Zimbabwe, or Albania. Both nations were picked out for exquisite scrutiny, either as a particular evil to be contained or as a supreme good for which one felt compelled to fight. In the 1948 war that gave it birth, Israel was unable to capture the Old City of Jerusalem enclosing the sites sacred to the world's three monotheisms. Particularly since 1967, when Israel recaptured this stone warren from the Jordanians, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has been subjected to global gaze and judgment. Neither has ever been allowed to understand itself as just another people.
9 - Suburbs of the Messiah
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 200-212
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The Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful,” dedicated to populating the land of Israel, moved outward from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The success of this settlement movement lay in its ability to recast Israel's foundational myths religiously. Gush Emunim claimed to reincarnate the hero of Israeli history – the pioneer – and to be the vital, expansive successor to the kibbutz settlements they founded. For decades, the religious Zionists, who had a kibbutz movement of their own, had been looked down on by the Labour Zionists as not measuring up to the ideal of the new Israeli, somehow tainted by their continued attachment to Torah, holding to traditions of exile. As the religious nationalist movement grew and held tenaciously to one place after another, the settlers’ claim that they were the true embodiment of the Zionist settlement did not go unheeded.
The Ancien Regime
The pious Jewish families who have braved Palestinian violence and the hostility of their own government to live in Jerusalem's remote suburbs see themselves as the natural heirs of the pioneers who endured considerable hardship and broke British law in the prestate years to carve out a place Jews could call their own. Religious nationalist Jews led the drive to resettle Judea and Samaria; secular Jews who shared their territorial objectives followed their lead.
Eliakim Ha-Etzni was a party leader and polemicist for Tehiyah, the political party established in 1979 with the support of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, in response to Begin's signing of the Camp David Accords granting Palestinian autonomy in Judea and Samaria. Tehiyah was intended to unite all those, religious and secular, who were most zealous about the land.
To Rule Jerusalem
- Roger Friedland, Richard Hecht
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996
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Compelling historical and ethnographic account of the twentieth-century struggle for Jerusalem. The volume examines how Jerusalem is doubly divided, on the one hand between Israelis and Palestinians, each of whom ground their national identities in the city, as well as within each nation between those who put primacy in the democratic decisions of their nations and those who would yield to a higher divine law. Professors Friedland and Hecht explore how Jerusalem has figured as a battleground in conflicts over the relation between Zionism and Judaism and between Palestinian nationalism and Islam. Based on hundreds of interviews with powerful players and ordinary citizens over the course of a decade, this book evokes the ways in which these conflicts are experienced and managed in the life of the city.
16 - Al-Quds and Tunis
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 411-435
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There has always been a tension between Palestinians inside the territories and the PLO abroad, a tug-of-war between a people and an organization claiming to speak in its name. The struggle between those who have spent their lives building a national society from their Jerusalem, al-Quds, and a grizzled war-horse who has directed a nationalist movement from Tunis was becoming increasingly acute. Organizing from Jerusalem, the Palestinians under Israeli occupation forced the PLO to make peace. But after Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, these Palestinians understood they would still have to fight the PLO to make the Palestine for which they had given their lives.
The PLO chose its path after the failure of another war. Iraq's defeat made Israeli-Palestinian peace a requirment of American power in the region; it also weakened the PLO sufficiently to make that peace possible. Arafat's alliance with Saddam Hussein was a disastrous move. Iraq, the Palestinians’ last, most powerful patron, was reduced in places to rubble. In Lebanon PLO militias were being systematically defanged by the Syrians. The possibility of “armed struggle” was closing down.
The war put Palestinians working in the Gulf in a precarious position. The postwar grafitti in Kuwait – “Amman, 1970; Beirut, 1982; Kuwait City, 1992” – foretold yet another Palestinian exodus. Palestinians who had worked for years in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia wanted to return to Palestine even though they knew there were no jobs waiting for them. PLO taxes on Palestinian wages and salaries would no longer be collected by these Arab states.
14 - The Islamic Challenge
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 346-384
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Within an hour of King Hussein's speech relinquishing the Hashemite claim of sovereignty over the West Bank, Israeli intelligence officers accompanied by police and soldiers drove from the Russian compound, its walls looped with concertina wire, to Faisal Husayni's home and ultimately to the Arab Studies Center, Husayni's research organization. Husayni's staff, who were still in the office, were used to such surprise visits. The Israelis had repeatedly closed the center, claiming its real function was to coordinate PLO activities in the West Bank and Gaza.
In his secretary's unlocked desk drawer the Israelis found the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Husayni, who had just been released from detention, was thrown back into prison, where he would remain without trial for the next half year. Husayni had planned to declare statehood in the Old City on the haram al-sharif the “Noble Sanctuary,” with all its Islamic symbolism, and in front of the tomb of his father, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni. There, assembled with a hundred prominent individuals to be included in the new Palestinian National Council, he would read the declaration. The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza intended to proclaim a Palestinian state from the Temple Mount.
To the Likud government, the site of the reading must have been just as disturbing as what would have been read. Husayni, a life-long partisan of al-Fatah, wanted to locate the legitimacy of the new state in its Islamic center, on that platform where Palestinians believe the Prophet leaped to heaven.
Notes
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 29 March 1996, pp 491-540
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15 - Baghdad, Berlin, and Jerusalem
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp 385-408
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After more than twenty years of trumpeting its intention to destroy the “Zionist entity,” in 1988 the PLO accepted a small Palestinian state sandwiched between Israel and Jordan. Tunis was reacting to the Palestinians in Jerusalem, rather the reverse. A large segment of the Israeli public was willing to talk about some kind of Palestinian government. Likud and Labour, locked together in a “unity” government, settled on the conditions under which the Palestinians would participate in “regional” elections in the West Bank and Gaza to generate a non- PLO delegation to negotiate the final status of the territories with Israel. While Likud backed away, Labour was willing to negotiate with supporters of the PLO, who, they understood, would unofficially consult Arafat. Faisal Husayni, Fatah's man in Jerusalem, was briefing Israel's Labour Party and figures across the Israeli spectrum. “I've never been in a room with so many security forces when I wasn't manacled,” Husayni quipped at one meeting where a few Israeli intelligence men were present. Ziad abu Zayyad was being invited to lecture to Israeli soldiers. Because Arafat had spoken the forbidden words acknowledging Israel's right to exist, America began to talk officially to the PLO. It was the Reagan administration's last diplomatic act before passing the Oval Office to George Bush in 1989. As Israel stalled over negotiations, an about-to-be-united Europe threatened economic sanctions against Israel, which feared being shut out of its most important market.
Acknowledgments
- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Hecht, University of California, Santa Barbara
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- To Rule Jerusalem
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- 13 May 2010
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- 29 March 1996, pp xv-xvi
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