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1. Palestine Comes to Paris: The Global Sixties and the Making of a Universal Cause

Author:
Yoav Di-Capua
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
In the early 1960s, Israeli diplomats based in Paris noted that student life there had become political in new ways that threatened to undermine Israel’s image and standing in the public mind. In an effort to understand the growing international student body and its nine thousand wellintegrated Arab students, the embassy asked Israeli students to spy on their colleagues and submit detailed reports about their political associations, thoughts, opinions, connections, whereabouts, and much else. Using the reports and other auxiliary material that the Israeli diplomats collected, this article examines the formation process of a unique, student-led intellectual and political ecosystem. Specifically, it shows how, in tandem with the rise of the New Arab Left and other transnational student collaborations, the Palestinian question grew from a marginal and marginalized issue to a major cause that was deeply entwined with other contemporaneous causes of universal resonance, such as those of South Africa, Rhodesia, and Algeria.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Intellectual History, and Students
Political Geography:
Israel, France, and Palestine

2. ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL VOL. XXV, NO. 2

Author:
Ifdal Elsaket, Suhad Daher-Nashif, Nisa Ari, Tamer ElGindi, Manfred Sing, Nader Atassi, Sophia Azeb, Deen Sharp, Nicholas Simcik Arese, Charles Anderson, Kristi N. Barnwell, and Charles Wilkins
Publication Date:
09-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Arab Studies Journal
Institution:
Arab Studies Institute
Abstract:
In this issue, we are proud to feature a series of groundbreaking interventions. Ifdal Elsaket explores anti-Blackness in Egypt through the genre of “jungle flms.” She lays bare the racial and imperial fantasies that informed these flms’ popularity. Elsaket exposes a process of racialization through which Egyptians positioned themselves as superior and modern, at a time when Egypt’s claims to Sudan took on a greater urgency and Blackness marked otherness. Tis deeply engrained vision of Africa as a place of inferiority would continue to infect flm and visual culture long afer decolonization. Suhad Daher-Nashif interrogates the national-civic service which has successfully targeted young Palestinian women who are citizens in Israel. Her ethnographic study carefully details the complex web of considerations, interests, and strategies that shape the national-civic service as a “trapped escape.” Women’s participation in the service reveals the mutually constitutive nature of Israeli colonial and Palestinian social structures. By showing how women use a colonial apparatus to escape patriarchal norms DaherNashif rethinks Palestinian experience in Israel as well as the imposition of and resistance to gender norms more broadly. Nisa Ari explores the interaction between local and foreign artistic communities in early twentieth century Palestine. She focuses on the work of Palestinian artist Nicoal Saig (1863-1942) who copied photographs that the American Colony Photo Department (ACPD) produced. Te relationship between Saig and the ACPD, Ari shows, reveals a multidirectional artistic exchange between local and foreign. She uncovers a world in which a diverse group of artistic agents employed diferent practices, produced and sold religious representations and object, and formed a vibrant economic market in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Palestine. Tamer ElGindi tackles the World Bank’s assessment of the massive uprisings that rocked Egypt and Tunisia as “puzzles,” given both countries’ achievements in poverty rates, access to education, child and maternal mortality, and infrastructure services. Trough a close reading of various inequality measures from the developmentalist era of Gamal Abdel Nasser to the subsequent neoliberal eras of Anwar al-Sadat and Husni Mubarak, ElGindi shows that macroeconomic improvements never “trickled down.” Energy and food subsidy systems in particular benefted the wealthiest instead of targeting the needy. He urges for a comprehensive understanding and measurement (of the monetary and the non-monetary) as a prerequisite to understanding and ameliorating inequality. Manfred Sing revisits the wave of Arab social criticism that marked intellectual life afer the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Trough a careful rereading of fve intellectuals Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm, Yasin al-Hafz, Mustafa Hijazi, Nawal El Saadawi, and Hisham Sharabi, Sing traces the normative shif in Marxist thought away from a critique of capitalist society and towards theorizing the absence or failure of revolutionary mass movements. Following neither the admirers of Arab criticism nor their countercritics, Sing maps a social criticism that was timely, provocative, polemic, disenchanted, and marred by heuristic fallacies. Tis issue also features the usual robust array of book reviews.
Topic:
Race, History, Arts, Socialism/Marxism, Women, Inequality, Film, and Intellectual History
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, Palestine, North Africa, and Egypt

3. Reut Yael Paz. A Gateway between a Distant God and a Cruel World: The Contribution of Jewish German-Speaking Scholars to International Law.

Author:
Robert Howse
Publication Date:
04-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
This rich and erudite work provides a valuable scholarly apparatus for understanding the writing and teaching of four important figures in international law and international relations. Three of them, Hans Kelsen, Hans Morgenthau and Hersch Lauterpacht, are well known; the fourth, Erich Kaufmann, much less so. The general thesis of the book is that to understand fully the personal and intellectual trajectories of all of these figures, one needs to appreciate the specific German–Jewish experience, from emancipation through the Shoah, the particular situation of the Jews in the legal profession and the academy in Germany, and the responses of these thinkers to experiences of persecution, discrimination and exile due to their Jewish family backgrounds as well as to the establishment of the State of Israel.
Topic:
International Relations, International Law, Judaism, History, Intellectual History, and Zionism
Political Geography:
Europe, Germany, and Israel