In Berlin the popo are keeping a close watch on kufiya wearers.
The kufiya, they seem to have determined, is a sign of anti-Semitism.
(posted May 20, 2022)
Showing posts with label Nakba. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nakba. Show all posts
Friday, May 20, 2022
Monday, May 16, 2022
Saturday, September 04, 2021
New publication: "Sounds of Resistance," in Voices of the Nakba
I have a piece in this new book, about to be released from Pluto Press, edited by Diana Allan.
The book is already a winner of an English PEN Award 2021.
And here is a description:
During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’ - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight.
Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it.
The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Love amid the ruins
I learned about this amazing and appalling vid from Edo Konrad, writing for the great +972 blog.
The vid features the Nahal Band (Lahakat HaNahal), a well-known music and theater group attached to the Nahal Group, combat units in which military service was combined with agricultural work on new agricultural settlements and kibbutzim. That is, we're talking about an music group sponsored by the Israeli military.
The video shows members of the group singing a love song and driving their jeep around over rugged, first on land where prickly pear cactus (sabr in Arabic, sabra in Hebrew) is growing. Palestinians would of course immediately recognize the cactus as the sign that this was the site of a Palestinian village, as Palestinian peasants typically planted sabr as a kind of fencing around their communities. (And the prickly pear is a delicious fruit.) Then we see the Nahal Band singing on the site of a ruined Palestinian village, one of the some 418 Palestinian villages and towns destroyed in the wake of the 1948-49 war.
I have no idea which of the many destroyed villages it is (I saw several when I did my fieldwork in 1984-85). According to Konrad, the film was probably shot in the mid-60s. The ruins, characteristically, are made to look quite old, so as not to give any impression that the inhabitants would in fact have been evacuated (in an act of ethnic cleansing) less than 20 years prior to the shoot.
The love song is “He Didn’t Know Her Name” by the celebrated songwriter and poet Haim Hefer, who died just a year ago. He was a canonical composer associated with the "heroic" years of the Zionist movement, who wrote for the Palmach, for the Nahal Band, and for classic Israeli films, including famous ones that date with Israel's Mizrahi (Jewish Arab) population, Salah Shabbati and Kazablan. (I've blogged about the latter and how it manages to simultaneously evoke and erase the Arabness of Jaffa, where it is set, and the "Eastern" character of its protagonists, who are Moroccan Jews. Hefer's compositions for the film, which are very far from the kind of music that Moroccan Jews in Israel were actually singing and performing at the time, play a role in this erasure/evocation.) Hefer was also the composer of another canonical Zionist song, "The Red Rock," a song about Petra, the famous Nabataean city in southern Jordan. According to Rebecca Stein, "Petra was a place long immortalized in Israeli myth, the subject of collective longing, popular song [most notably Hefer's], and children’s stories. Beginning in the 1950s, clandestine travel to this Nabatean city had been a virtual rite of passage for young Israeli men who risked their lives in enemy Jordanian territory for a glimpse of the city’s celebrated red sandstone cliff."
Fitting, then, that, given who Hefer was, that he be buried in Ein Hod Artists’ Village, in accordance with his wishes.
Ein Hod, as anyone who has read Susan Slyomovics' book The Object of Memory or seen Rachel Leah Jones' documentary 500 Dunam on the Moon knows, was founded in 1953, on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Ayn Hawd, whose residents had been expelled. The charm and beauty of the artists' colony is largely a product of the original Palestinian village architecture, which was restored and remodeled according to the new residents' preferences. Imagine that the ruins we see in the video above were transformed into a quaint, bohemian artists' abode. That's what Ein Hod is, and this has been the fate of many Palestinian "ruins" throughout Israel, in West Jerusalem (for instance Ein Karem), Safad, Jaffa...
The video is a potentially a great teaching tool, particularly if you are using texts like Slyomovics or Rochelle Davis' Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced or chapter two ("Scenes of Erasure") of my book, Memories of Revolt.
I wish someone who reads this would identify the village in the Nahal Band video.
The vid features the Nahal Band (Lahakat HaNahal), a well-known music and theater group attached to the Nahal Group, combat units in which military service was combined with agricultural work on new agricultural settlements and kibbutzim. That is, we're talking about an music group sponsored by the Israeli military.
The video shows members of the group singing a love song and driving their jeep around over rugged, first on land where prickly pear cactus (sabr in Arabic, sabra in Hebrew) is growing. Palestinians would of course immediately recognize the cactus as the sign that this was the site of a Palestinian village, as Palestinian peasants typically planted sabr as a kind of fencing around their communities. (And the prickly pear is a delicious fruit.) Then we see the Nahal Band singing on the site of a ruined Palestinian village, one of the some 418 Palestinian villages and towns destroyed in the wake of the 1948-49 war.
I have no idea which of the many destroyed villages it is (I saw several when I did my fieldwork in 1984-85). According to Konrad, the film was probably shot in the mid-60s. The ruins, characteristically, are made to look quite old, so as not to give any impression that the inhabitants would in fact have been evacuated (in an act of ethnic cleansing) less than 20 years prior to the shoot.
The love song is “He Didn’t Know Her Name” by the celebrated songwriter and poet Haim Hefer, who died just a year ago. He was a canonical composer associated with the "heroic" years of the Zionist movement, who wrote for the Palmach, for the Nahal Band, and for classic Israeli films, including famous ones that date with Israel's Mizrahi (Jewish Arab) population, Salah Shabbati and Kazablan. (I've blogged about the latter and how it manages to simultaneously evoke and erase the Arabness of Jaffa, where it is set, and the "Eastern" character of its protagonists, who are Moroccan Jews. Hefer's compositions for the film, which are very far from the kind of music that Moroccan Jews in Israel were actually singing and performing at the time, play a role in this erasure/evocation.) Hefer was also the composer of another canonical Zionist song, "The Red Rock," a song about Petra, the famous Nabataean city in southern Jordan. According to Rebecca Stein, "Petra was a place long immortalized in Israeli myth, the subject of collective longing, popular song [most notably Hefer's], and children’s stories. Beginning in the 1950s, clandestine travel to this Nabatean city had been a virtual rite of passage for young Israeli men who risked their lives in enemy Jordanian territory for a glimpse of the city’s celebrated red sandstone cliff."
Fitting, then, that, given who Hefer was, that he be buried in Ein Hod Artists’ Village, in accordance with his wishes.
Ein Hod, as anyone who has read Susan Slyomovics' book The Object of Memory or seen Rachel Leah Jones' documentary 500 Dunam on the Moon knows, was founded in 1953, on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Ayn Hawd, whose residents had been expelled. The charm and beauty of the artists' colony is largely a product of the original Palestinian village architecture, which was restored and remodeled according to the new residents' preferences. Imagine that the ruins we see in the video above were transformed into a quaint, bohemian artists' abode. That's what Ein Hod is, and this has been the fate of many Palestinian "ruins" throughout Israel, in West Jerusalem (for instance Ein Karem), Safad, Jaffa...
The video is a potentially a great teaching tool, particularly if you are using texts like Slyomovics or Rochelle Davis' Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced or chapter two ("Scenes of Erasure") of my book, Memories of Revolt.
I wish someone who reads this would identify the village in the Nahal Band video.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
John Lennon kufiya dress in Tel Aviv + Nakba
A friend who was in Israel in summer '09 sent me this, and I'm finally getting around to posting it. Look closely: John Lennon, rendered with a kind of green kufiya on his head. At least that's what I "imagine."
He also sent me this one, also shot in Tel Aviv, which says, well, everything.
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