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Begin New Search Political Geography Egypt Journal Journal of Palestine Studies

1. From the Editor

Author:
Rashid I. Khalidi
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
AT FIRST GLANCE the contents of this issue of the Journal appear disparate, ranging as they do over the Israeli settlement project, Tony Blair's tenure as Quartet Middle East representative, the role of Islamic Jihad, and the effect of recent upheavals in the Arab world on the Palestinian issue. But taken as a whole they show how much the contemporary Middle East-with the Palestine question at its center-is in dialogue with its history. Although history may not repeat itself, there are nevertheless striking parallels and linkages between past and current events.
Topic:
Islam and War
Political Geography:
Middle East, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt

2. From the Editor

Author:
Rashid Khalidi
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
As A wAve of revolution, unrest and upheaval sweeps slowly across the Arab world, one question has arisen repeatedly. This is the place of the question of Palestine in these ongoing tectonic shifts in the political map of the region. It has long been an article of faith for partisans of the status quo from which Israel benefits that this is an unimportant question, artificially sustained by corrupt unpopular regimes in order to distract their oppressed citizens. In her article on the place of the Palestine question in Egypt's revolutionary upheaval, Reem Abou-El-Fadl shows that in the case of Egypt the political forces that made the revolution (and those that have emerged in its aftermath) have long been deeply involved with the cause of solidarity with the Palestinians and opposition to the regime's policy of normalization with Israel. This important article highlights how central the question of Palestine and Israel is in Egypt, in spite of the overwhelming emphasis on domestic factors since the January 2011 revolution.
Political Geography:
Israel, Arabia, and Egypt

3. The Road to Jerusalem through Tahrir Square: Anti-Zionism and Palestine in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

Author:
Reem Abou-El-Fadl
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article addresses an aspect of Egypt's 2011 revolution almost entirely ignored in most Western media accounts: Israel and Palestine as prominent themes of protest. In reviewing Egyptian mobilization opposing normalization and in support of the Palestinian cause starting from Sadat's peace initiative of the mid-1970s, the author shows how the anti-Mubarak movement that took off as of the mid- 2000s built on the Palestine activism and networks already in place. While the trigger of the revolution and the focus of its first eighteen days was domestic change, the article shows how domestic and foreign policy issues (especially Israel and Palestine) were inextricably intertwined, with the leadership bodies of the revolution involved in both.
Political Geography:
Israel, Palestine, and Egypt

4. Uncovering Jerusalem

Author:
Mick Dumper
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The short sixty-three years of Ayyubid rule in Jerusalem between 1187 and 1250 left few architectural and monumental traces, yet its impact on the city has been quite remarkable. Not only did the foundations of Mamluk Jerusalem lie in the construction work of the Ayyubids, as one of the contributors to Ayyubid Jerusalem, Mahmoud Hawari, concludes, but it was also a period in which the centrality of Jerusalem in Islam was reestablished. The Kurdish general and founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, Salahed Din, while basing himself in Egypt, made the liberation of Jerusalem a pious duty and the prime goal of his life's work. Reference to the contemporary revival of jihadi rhetoric around Jerusalem may be stretching too far the parallels that are suggested by this period, but it nevertheless pro-vides a rich context for understanding the power of the city in the imaginations of believers, as a range of Muslim leaders from the Hashemites to Shaykh Ra'ed Salah of Umm al-Fahm will attest. As interesting as this dimension is, we should not overlook the solid postliberation work undertaken by Salah ed-Din and his successors to consolidate the Muslim presence in the city through building works, endowments (waqfs), and incentives for migration. Both geography and the competing claims of other faiths appear to make this a never-ending task in Jerusalem.
Political Geography:
Egypt

5. Settlement Monitor

Author:
Geoffrey Aronson
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This section covers items-reprinted articles, statistics, and maps-pertaining to Israeli settlement activities in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Unless otherwise stated, the items have been written by Geoffrey Aronson for this section or drawn from material written by him for Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories (hereinafter Settlement Report), a Washington-based bimonthly newsletter published by the Foundation for Middle East Peace. JPS is grateful to the foundation for permission to draw on its material.
Political Geography:
Washington, Middle East, Israel, and Egypt

6. Palestine in Egyptian Colloquial Poetry

Author:
Noha Radwan
Publication Date:
07-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Shi'r al-'ammiyya is a poetry movement whose emergence in Egypt in the early 1950s coincided with the heyday of Nasser's revolution, when the Palestine question was a national concern. With numerous practitioners today, the movement has yielded a large corpus of colloquial poetry that has become a significant part of Egypt's cultural landscape. This article presents a historical survey of shi'r al-'ammiyya's best known poets—Fu'ad Haddad, Salah Jahin, and 'Abd al-Rahman al-Abnudi—and their poems on Palestine. Among the essay's aims is to dispel the common misconception that the use of colloquial Egyptian ('ammiyya denotes parochial rather than pan-Arab concerns, with the standard (fusha) Arabic seen as a signifier of pan-Arab identity. In an essay on the poetics of Arab nationalist literature, Palestinian scholar Yasir Suleiman recalled a scene from his childhood: I remember as a little boy going to see an Egyptian film about Jamila with my cousins in . . . Jerusalem in the late 1950s. The whole cinema was in tears and people spoke about Jamila's legendary courage and the barbarity of the French for weeks after that. The film helped make the struggle of the Algerian people 'real' and made us all feel 'Algerian.' When we related the story of the film to my mother, she said 'We are all in the same boat.' We all understood what she meant: Algeria is Palestine and Palestine is Algeria. As a tool of mobilization, the film was very successful indeed. < The film to which Suleiman is referring is Jamila al-Jaza'iriyya (Jamila The Algerian, 1958) by the Egyptian director Yusuf Chahine. That the movie was a “tool of mobilization” against the Zionist occupation of Palestine as well as against the French occupation of Algeria was not an accident, any more than was the choice of Egyptian colloquial, 'ammiyya, for the movie dialogue. There is no need to speculate about whether the Algerian people's struggle would have been any less “real” for the Jerusalem audience if Chahine had chosen to use the literary, fusha, register for his film, or about whether the Jerusalemites would have identified more with the “Algerians” had the actors spoken the Algerian dialect, impenetrable to Palestinians. It is enough to point out that the choice of the Egyptian colloquial seemed so “natural” that it did not even warrant mention by Suleiman, whose interest in the film lay in its emotive and political impact on a Palestinian audience. Chahine's Jamila spoke to the entire Arab audience from the “ocean to the gulf” in a language familiar to them from Egypt's robust cinema industry and radio, the period's most powerful tool of mass communication. As Albert Hourani wrote, This was the age of radio too. Radio sets were imported on a large scale in the 1940s and 1950s. By 1959 there were 850,000 in Egypt and half a million in Morocco, and each set might be listened to by dozens of people, in cafes or village squares. . . . Every government had its own radio station. . . . A large proportion of the programmes sent out by all stations—talks, music and plays—originated in Cairo, and they too spread a knowledge of Egypt and its ways of speech. . . . Certain Egyptian voices became familiar everywhere—that of the country's ruler, Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir, and that of the most famous of Egyptian singers, Umm Kulthum; when she sang, the whole Arab world listened. It was in this sociolinguistic milieu that shi'r al-'ammiyya al-misriyya, an Egyptian poetry movement, one of whose main characteristics is its use of colloquial Egyptian, emerged in the early 1950s. A Modern Movement and Its Antecedents Shi'r al-'ammiyya poets wrote on a variety of themes, but the poems analyzed in this article concern only the Zionist occupation of Palestine, its calamitous consequences, and Arab reaction to these events. These poems establish their authors' commitment to the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the role Egypt must assume in this struggle, a commitment taken here as signifying an embrace of a pan-Arabist political agenda. Any ostensible discrepancy between embracing a pan-Arabist agenda and the choice of the colloquial over the literary language hailed as a hallmark of Arab identity can be dispelled through knowledge of the special status enjoyed by the Egyptian colloquial since the 1940s. On the literary spectrum, it is important to note that shi'r al-'ammiyya is not an extension of earlier traditions or movements using colloquial verse. Rather, it is a modern movement that originated in the 1950s in the poetry of Fu'ad Haddad (1927–1985) and Salah Jahin (1930–1986), poets infused by the new poetic sensibilities of the wider movement of modern/modernist Arabic poetry of the late 1940s. Colloquial poetic expression has existed in multiple folkloric forms at least since the early Abbasid period in the ninth century, and many of these forms continue to enjoy wide popularity in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world. As will be seen below, the poets of shi'r al-'ammiyya at times engage these colloquial traditions, but as part of the engagement with tradition shared by modern/modernist Arabic poetry movements as a whole. In this respect, it is important to distinguish shi'r al-'ammiyya from two earlier movements of colloquial Egyptian verse that were part of the Egyptian cultural landscape at the time when shi'r al-'ammiyya's emerged. The first is a modern manifestation of the poetic genre zajal as practiced by Bayram al-Tunisi (1893–1961) and an earlier generation of zajal composers whose works were widely published between the mid-nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. The second is best represented by the poems of Louis 'Awad (1915–1994), an Oxford-educated Egyptian writer, critic, and professor of English literature in his collection Blutuland wa qasa'id ukhra (Plutoland and Other Poems), in which several of the poems are in the colloquial register. The zajal genre had been most popular during the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries in many parts of the Arab world and survives today, especially as a Lebanese folkloric tradition. In mid-nineteenth-century Egypt, zajal reemerged in a large number of popular newspapers. Its practitioners, known as zajjalun, were mostly urban and well versed in the literary register, but they found in zajal's colloquial register an effective medium of communication and mass mobilization in the service of social and political reform. Among the best known zajjalun of that period were 'Abdallah al-Nadim (1854–1896) and Ya'coub Sannu' (1839–1912). But it was in the hands of al-Tunisi that the Egyptian zajal, deployed in the service of social reform and the assertion of the Egyptian national character, reached an unprecedented degree of versatility and popularity. A number of al-Tunisi's zajals remain an important part of Egyptian popular culture. In contrast, Awad's poetry was part of a short-lived call by some Egyptian intellectuals to adopt the colloquial as a means to disengage Egyptian literature from the larger Arabic literary tradition and thus give it a distinctive and separate Egyptian national character. This went counter to the Arab nationalist identity then gaining ground, which insisted on the use of a common literary Arabic. Sati' al-Husri's (1880–1968) statement that “Every Arabic-speaking people is an Arab people” remains the most widely accepted definition of Arab identity. Al-Husri regarded the colloquial as divisive and called upon all Arab literati “to understand fully the umma's (nation's) need for a unified and unifying language and to hold on to fusha.” Resistance to this linguistic affiliation was fomented in Egypt by writers and intellectuals such as Salama Musa (1887–1958), who argued that “standard Arabic cannot serve as a medium of the national literature of Egypt and should therefore give way to a refined colloquial language.” 'Awad's call in his introduction to Blutuland for a break from Arabic poetics and the standard literary Arabic was a continuation of this ideological stance, but neither Awad's poetry nor his larger cause found much appeal with the Egyptian public.
Political Geography:
Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt

7. From the Editor

Author:
Rashid I. Khalidi
Publication Date:
03-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Since ISRAEL' S winter 2008–2009 offensive against the Gaza Strip, it has seemed that we are living through a period of après-Gaza. Whether it was because of the brutality of that offensive with its lopsided 100-to-1 casualty ratio, the unusually critical media treatment of Israel that eventually emerged, a greater international awareness of the pernicious nature of the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Strip, or the ongoing impact of the Goldstone report, echoes of what happened then in Gaza have lingered on. It is of course too early to make a definitive judgment of the impact of the war on Gaza, but at least in the short term, it appears to have been a turning point.
Political Geography:
Israel and Egypt

8. Lead-Up to Cast Lead: Gaza at a Glance

Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Inhabited from the 4th millennium B.C., and later a strategic and commercial crossroads linking Egypt and Mesopotamia (and Africa and the Arabian Peninsula), Gaza became the center of one of the 16 districts of Mandate Palestine under British rule in 1922. The Gaza Strip constitutes that part of Palestine held by the Egyptian forces at the end of the 1948 Palestine war and then administered by Egypt from the signing of the 1949 Egyptian-Israeli Armistice Agreement to the June 1967 war. The Strip comprised 1.3% of Mandate Palestine, 27% of the Mandate's Gaza district. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip during the June 1967 war. In 1994, the Palestinian Authority assumed territorial and civilian jurisdiction over the Gaza Strip (except for the settlements and military areas) under the Gaza-Jericho agreement, signed that year by Israel and the PLO. Israel unilaterally withdrew all military installations and settlements from the Gaza Strip in August–September 2005, but retained control of airspace, territorial waters, and entry and exit points; consequently, it remains the occupying power.
Political Geography:
Israel and Egypt

9. Reflections on the War on Gaza

Author:
Camille Mansour
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This essay looks at the Gaza war of winter 2008-2009 within its broader politico-military context. At the political level, Israel's post- 2005 disengagement policies and initiatives with regard to Gaza (and Egypt) and their implications relative to the future of the West Bank are emphasized. Militarily, in examining the background and objectives of the war, the author gives particular importance to the testing of lessons drawn from the past, especially the summer 2006 war on Lebanon, in the aim of regaining a kind of "Dahiya" deterrence based on reprisals against civilians rather than on battlefield victory.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Israel and Egypt

10. Feldman: Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule

Author:
Rochelle A. Davis
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule provides a fascinating and sophisticated examination of the foreign governing systems enacted by civil servants in the Gaza Strip during the periods of the British Mandate over Palestine (1917-48) and the Egyptian administration of the Gaza Strip (1948-67). The mainstay of Ilana Feldman's book is what she calls "the tenuous domain of the everyday that was never entirely lost" in the "ruptures of Palestinian history" (p. 2). Feldman is both an anthropologist and a historian, and thus her book, an "ethnographic history," examines both the "government at work" and what it meant for people to "work for the government." Her analysis encompasses historical material currently held in archives in four different countries, enriched with oral histories of civil servants, and made sense of by her own experiences of living in Gaza amid the modern-day bureaucracy of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israeli occupation authorities.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
Gaza and Egypt