Arab Settlement Of Kakun, in the Sharon valley, with carriage of European visitors, 1911
Many tourists flocked to the Holy Land in the 19th and early 20th centuries, not to mention the people who lived there. Quite a few took along cameras. There is a major archive of photographs of late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine here. The photographs are separated by area. It is well worth a look.
Bedouin camp in Jericho, 1893
Top of page from 1347 CE copy of Miftah al-‘ulum of al-Sakaki in the al-Aqsa Mosque Library
The British Museum is sponsoring a project to digitalize Arabic manuscripts in the al-Aqsa Mosque library of Jerusalem. Details below and at their website:
EAP521: Digitisation of manuscripts at the Al-aqsa Mosque Library, East Jerusalem
The main goal of this project is to preserve the historical manuscript collection housed at the Al-aqsa Mosque Library in Jerusalem. The Al-aqsa Library located at the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem serves as a primary research center for Islamic studies and as a reference library for scholars and students from Jerusalem and other Palestinian cities. The library’s rare and most valuable collection consists of approximately 2000 manuscripts. The manuscripts were acquired by the Al-aqsa Library from prominent scholars, private collections, and from libraries in Palestine that have ceased to exist. The materials selected for this project represent 119 manuscript titles in the most immediate need of preservation.
EAP521/1: Al-Aqsa Mosque Library Collection of Historical Manuscripts [12th century-19th century]
“This manuscript collection contains 119 Arabic language titles that span over several Islamic periods from the 9th century CE to the end of the Ottoman rule in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century. Most of the manuscripts relate to aspects of the Islamic religion, but also cover Arabic literature, the Arabic language, logic, math and Sufism and provide a unique insight into centuries of Arabic culture in Palestine. The numbers of pages of original material represent double pages, often librarians of islamic manuscripts use one number for every two pages. ”
Digitisation is planned primarily as a means of preservation in order to create high-quality archival digital copies of the original source materials that are at risk of deterioration. Environmental factors, wear and tear of manuscripts due to poor storage conditions, the lack of security at the library, and the unstable political situation in Jerusalem contribute to the sense of urgency and make digitisation of these unique manuscript materials a top priority. Continue reading Al-Aqsa Arabic Manuscripts Going Online
Austerity and sequestration are the dismal economic buzzwords of the day. While thousands of airline passengers in the United States waited for late flights due to a lack of air traffic controllers, and while tens of thousands of Israelis protested the latest cutbacks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had his own solution. He flew to the funeral of Margaret Thatcher last month in a specially fitted plane. There are obvious perks to being a leader, especially a sleepy one. So why not rent a retrofitted El Al superliner to take 75 guests to London for a mere $427,000 from the national treasury. It was not the latest in security secrets that upped the price, but rather a newly installed rest cabin in which a $127,000 bed was installed for his wife and himself for a five hour trip. I am not sure if Bibi has ever watched the Lialda ad that warns a man to consult his physician if he experiences an erection lasting over four hours. No doubt some Israelis feel as though Israel has suffered enough from electoral dysfunction throughout his tenure.
Sleeping With the Enemy? Review of “”Would You Have Sex With an Arab?
By Clara Abdulaziz,http://ta3beer.blogspot.com, April, 19
“One in five Israelis is an Arab, but it is difficult to find places where they touch fingertips.â€
In her latest feature-length documentary, French filmmaker Yolande Zauberman ventures out into the nightlife of Tel Aviv and asks the people she meets a deceptively simple question: “Would you have sex with an Arab?†It is clear that sex serves merely as a proxy to grapple with a much larger question: can individuals transcend identities rooted in long histories of conflict, or is identity so rigidly constructed that it in fact defines one’s humanity?
Zauberman has said that she produced the film to “give space for awareness.†It is meant to be “a little bit sexy, a little bit funny.â€
It is also, quite frankly, pretty depressing.
Zauberman’s choice of Tel Aviv for her film was not arbitrary. It is famous for its non-stop club scene, and is one of the most LGBT and queer-friendly cities in the world. She shows that even here, where most young residents seem more concerned with partying than religion and politics, the boundaries of Jewish and Arab identity remain stubbornly situated within the larger Arab-Israeli conflict. Continue reading Would You Have Sex With an Arab?
BY Karim Sadjapour, Foreign Policy, June 15, 2011
How a couple of cows explain a changing region: equal opportunity offender edition.
In the early years of the Cold War, in an effort to simplify — and parody — various political ideologies and philosophies, irreverent wits, in the spirit of George Orwell, went back to the farm. No one really knows how the two-cow joke known as “Parable of the Isms” came about, but most students of Political Science 101 have likely come across some variation of the following definitions:
Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes one of them and gives it to your neighbor.
Communism: You have two cows. The government takes them both and provides you with milk.
Nazism: You have two cows. The government shoots you and takes the cows.
Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
Over the years, the parables gradually expanded, using the two-cow joke to explain everything from French unions (You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.) to the Republican Party (You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. So what?). While in its original iteration the cows were a metaphor for currency, capital, and property, they later began to take on different meanings.
Today, the Middle East has replaced the Cold War as America’s primary foreign-policy preoccupation. As opposed to the seemingly ideologically homogenous communist bloc, however, the 22 diverse countries that compose the modern Middle East are still confusing to most Americans. Why can’t the Israeli and Palestinians stop fighting already? What’s the difference between Libya and Lebanon again?
Herewith then is a satirical effort to simplify the essence of Middle Eastern governments so that, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, “the boys in Lubbock” can read it. And, rather than symbolizing property, the cows here symbolize people, which — funny enough — is how most Middle Eastern regimes have traditionally viewed their populations.
Saudi Arabia
You have two cows with endless reserves of milk. Gorge them with grass, prevent them from interacting with bulls, and import South Asians to milk them.
Iran
You have two cows. You interrogate them until they concede they are Zionist agents. You send their milk to southern Lebanon and Gaza, or render it into highly enriched cream. International sanctions prevent your milk from being bought on the open market.
Syria
You have five cows, one of whom is an Alawite. Feed the Alawite cow well; beat the non-Alawite cows. Use the milk to finance your wife’s shopping sprees in London.
Lebanon
You have two cows. Syria claims ownership over them. You take them abroad and start successful cattle farms in Africa, Australia, and Latin America. You send the proceeds back home so your relatives can afford cosmetic surgery and Mercedes-Benzes.
Hezbollah
You have no cows. During breaks from milking on the teat of the Iranian cow you call for Israel’s annihilation. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: The Cynical Dairy Farmer’s Guide to the New Middle East
Gaza’s war-damaged Palestine Stadium
Israeli measures fuel international anti-Israeli soccer protests
By James M. Dorsey
A series of Israeli measures against Palestinian soccer culminating in an attack on a stadium in Gaza during last month’s confrontation with Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian group that controls the heavily populated strip along the Mediterranean, has fueled growing international soccer opposition to the Jewish state’s policies.
In the latest expression of discomfort, 62 professional players have called for depriving Israel of the right to host European soccer body UEFA’s 2013 Under-21 championship. Israel has already employed the championship to counter the image of being an area dominated by war and conflict that was reinforced by last month’s hostilities with Hamas that killed more than 150 Palestinians and five Israelis.
“In June we have the Under-21 here in Israel. I hope that everything will be quiet until then and we can show the different sides of Israel,†said Maccabi Tel Aviv defender Omer Vered in a BBC interview.
The statement by the players follows protests earlier this year by world soccer body FIFA, UEFA and players’ group FIFPro against Israel’s handling of a hunger strike of an imprisoned Palestinian player, Mahmoud Sarsak, accused of being a member of militant group Islamic Jihad, and the arrest of two other players suspected in involvement in violent anti-Israeli actions. Continue reading The Soccer Stadium that was
by Daniel Martin Varisco
[Originally posted on Anthropology News.]
Civil unrest continues to grip the Middle East. Adding to the battle to remove Syria’s Russian-backed Assad and the political infighting following the ousting of dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen is a recent flare up in Gaza, leaving more than 160 Palestinians dead before a fragile ceasefire took hold just before Thanksgiving Day.
Politics can often mirror geography, especially in a land considered holy by three major religions. The lowest geographical point on earth is the Dead Sea, a critical juncture point of Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. But not far away sandwiched between Israel and Egypt is the narrow strip of Gaza, which is perhaps the lowest moral point in the current political strategy of the Israeli government and its vaunted IDF.
To say that the Gaza Strip is over populated and under resourced is an understatement. An estimated 1.7 million Palestinians live in a beleaguered area of 141 square miles, isolated and walled off like a Bantustan oasis. Before the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, this was a sparsely populated area with few resources to attract settlement, but some 200,000 Palestinians fled here at the time. Formal occupation of Israel, following the 1967 6-day war, officially ended in the mid-90s with the Oslo Accords. But there has been no peace in Gaza, whether under the control of the PLO or Hamas.
Pundits flood the airwaves with condemnation of Hamas, as though calling it a terrorist organization means open season on any Palestinian living in Gaza. So why does Hamas not sue for peace, given the obvious fact that a slew of puny missiles lobbed at Israel only brings more retaliation? A potent symbol of peace in the “Holy Land†is the olive branch. Students still read about this peace symbol in Virgil’s first century BCE Aeneid, so the need for such a symbol has certainly been around along the shores of the Mediterranean for a long time. Defenders of Israel’s continuing bombing strikes and assassinations in Gaza argue that Israel has a right to defend itself because Hamas is out to somehow destroy Israel. Hence Israel’s expensive prophylactic “Iron Dome†symbolically trumps an olive branch on the cable news. But it is hard to expect Palestinians to wave olive branches when there are so few olive trees left standing in Gaza. The recent “Pillar of Cloud†military campaign that rained down on Gaza occurred during the height of the olive harvest and processing season.
For the rest of this post, click here.
A Palestinian man walks on his property overlooking the Israeli settlement Har Homa in the Israeli-occupied West Bank; photograph from the Christian Science Monitor
Lob missiles in the direction of Tel Aviv, drop a bomb on a Hamas official, strap on a vest and blow up an Israeli bus, tear down Palestinian houses and build a wall, teach your children to hate the oppressor and get a symbolic upgrade in the UN: how can this seemingly intractable dilemma of “World of Warcraft: Land of Abraham” Israel vs. Palestine scenario ever get settled. One unilateral way is to settle it with yet more settlements. As The New York Times notes in today’s edition, the current Israeli government has their own kind of settlement in mind:
A day after the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to upgrade the status of the Palestinians, a senior Israeli official said the government would pursue “preliminary zoning and planning preparations†for a development that would separate the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem. If such a project were to go beyond blueprints, it could prevent the creation of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.
The development, in an open, mostly empty area known as E1, would connect the large settlement town of Maale Adumim to Jerusalem. Israeli officials also authorized construction of 3,000 housing units in parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The Obama administration, which backs virtually everything Israel does, is barking about how this is unhelpful, stopping short of the political bite that could be called condemnation. But some American diplomats see the danger in this mood: “This is not just another few houses in Jerusalem or another hilltop in the West Bank,†said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel and Egypt. “This is one of the most sensitive areas of territory, and I would hope the United States will lay down the law.â€
That law has about as much chance of being laid down in the current political climate as the law west of Pecos in America’s own landgrab days. Continue reading That settles it