Palestinian Towns Research Articles

Conservative ethnic minority LGTBQ+: Facing the challenge of intersectionality in an inhospitable environment

AbstractLGBTQ+ suffer from intolerance everywhere, but in certain conservative minority communities, intolerance is especially high. This study explores how non‐minority organizations—government and nonprofit—might support minority LGBTQ+ individuals on the backdrop of tense majority‐minority relations. While the extension of external support responds to LGBTQ+ plight, it is also likely to provoke community backlash. Research is based on a qualitative case study, which includes document analysis and 17 in‐depth interviews focusing on the institutional support system addressing the plight of LGBTQ+ Palestinian citizens of Israel. The research suggests that an outside‐inside strategy could be effective: A range of services outside of Palestinian spaces is adapted/established to support individual LGBTQ+ and inside Palestinian towns gradual progress is achieved by training local public workers to work with LGBTQ+. This approach contrasts with bottom‐up and straightforward top‐down approaches to intervention.

The Palestinian-Israeli market: ‘feels like somewhere else’

ABSTRACT This article explores the relations between Israel’s Mizrahi Jews (Middle East and North African countries’ descendants) and Palestinian citizens as manifested in the popular open-air market of Kafr Qasim, a Palestinian town in central Israel. The town’s market is a unique space where Jews and Palestinians work, shop, and hang out side by side. This article argues that visitors, vendors, and market owners perceive the market as a space offering an alternative social and political order for various groups suffering from oppression within Israeli society. Specifically considering settler colonialism implications and the status of Mizrahi Jews in Israeli society. Following findings from an ethnography conducted in Kafr Qasim between 2016–2019, it is argued that the town’s market carries elements such as perceptions of shared cultural space and elsewhereness that allow both Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian citizens to feel more comfortable than in other public places in Israel.

Place and displacement: Historical geographies of Israel's largest landfill

This article explores the role of space in facilitating forms of political power, as shown in the destruction of landscape in the center of Israel by the Hiriya landfill. That failed infrastructure wrecked the delicate legacies of mankind and nature, thus sealing the area’s fate as a city’s repellent dumping ground that attracted all kinds of liminal activities. After the 1948 war, which resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel, the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages and the erasure of their people’s legacy, Tel Aviv begun dumping its household waste near an Arab village, the residents of which had been expelled during the conflict. The authorities promised the local inhabitants — Jewish newcomers and refugees in the nearby transit camp, as well as local city dwellers — a new and modern compost plant, but the plant’s opening was repeatedly postponed. This article reveals the rapid changes that occurred in the early 1950s in the Hiriya area, and how insistence on a modern, technologically based solution to waste treatment, suffused with Zionist ideology, resulted in the creation of an infamous site that became a symbol for environmental, infrastructural, social and health hazards. Drawing from diverse unexplored textual and visual archival sources, including aerial photographs, historical maps, printed texts and interviews, we argue that this combined method of landscape reading is crucial for understanding such a tragedy of landscape. Our study of the Hiriya landfill points to the challenges posed by infrastructure, and contributes to future research into post-industrial sites, including landfills, quarries, airfields, mines and factories.

Perceptions of violence and mistrust in authorities among Palestinians in Israel, an unrecognised public health crisis: a cross-sectional study

BackgroundBetween 1948 and 2020, Palestinians living in Israel have seen an 11-times increase in population density. Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI) comprise 20% of the population, restricted to living in 2·7% of the land. The effects of the resulting overcrowding are spatial, political, cultural, economic, and administrative and are also associated with intracommunal crime and violence. Between 2000–17, from 122 annual homicide cases in Israel, 79 (65%) victims were PCI. Palestinians have a 5·5 times higher risk of dying from homicide than Jewish citizens of Israel. 2021 saw a peak in homicide rates, where 126 (74%) of the 170 homicide cases in Israel were among PCI. 83% of homicides among PCI were a result of gunshots, with more than 400 000 illegal firearms estimated to circulate among the Palestinian community in Israel. Yet, only 23% of homicide cases among PCI were solved by the police compared with 73% of cases among Jewish citizens of Israel. This study examines the attitudes of PCI towards violence, crime, safety, and trust in the Israeli police. MethodsWe did a cross-sectional study; the survey form included demographic data and questions about exposure and attitudes towards safety, violence, crime, and the police and government handling of crime. Participants were all PCI living in Palestinian towns and in mixed cities in Palestinian neighbourhoods. Participants were randomly chosen from 68 towns, and conducted in private homes by trained surveyors. The study sample was a stratified multi-stage random sample, divided into four levels of stratification: region (north, centre, or south of Israel), community size (small [<5000], medium [5000–15 000], or large [>15 000]), locality classification (cities or villages), and locality type (recognised and unrecognised as official towns by the state). The main outcomes assessed were participant perceptions of the prevalence in violence among PCI and the authorities’ commitment to curb it. The Galilee Society Ethics Committee approved the study and informed consent was obtained from all participants. FindingsInterviews were done in 2040 households housing 7985 family members, recruited and interviewed in 2018. Personal interviews were conducted with one person per family. Of these 2040 interviews, 1970 interviews were included in the analysis. 1283 (65·1%) of 1970 participants estimated the prevalence of violence as being high or moderate in their towns. 958 (48·6%) participants estimated that violence has increased in their town during the past year. 1062 (53·9%) participants that they could be a possible target of violence. 1027 (52·1%) participants reported that crime is the biggest problem that the Palestinian community in Israel faces, followed by racist laws (436 [22·1%]) and the difficult economic situation (282 [14·3%]). 1474 (74·8%) participants reported that the use of weapons has become normal in everyday disputes. 1496 (75·9%) reported that the state is interested in the spread of violence in the Palestinian towns in Israel. 1728 (87·7%) participants stated that an absence of governmental interest in addressing the problem of unauthorised weapons is the cause of their spread, and 1634 (82·9%) participants stated that police complicity is a cause of the spread of unauthorised weapons. 1411 (71·6%) participants disagreed with the statement that the Israeli police deals with violence seriously. InterpretationPCI perceive a high exposure to violence within their communities, with most participants reporting that communal violence is linked to the Israeli government and police being disinterested in addressing the problem, and the complicity of the Israeli police (which reflects a mistrust in the Israeli government and police force, and that crime among PCI becomes a justification to further criminalise, stigmatise, and police these communities). Given that violence, crime, and homicide are major causes of morbidity and mortality and thus urgent public health problems, every effort should be made to advocate for addressing these problems among PCI, especially among medical and health-care communities. FundingGalilee Society and Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Mixing and segregation: a cross sectional study of violent and safe spaces for Palestinians in Israel

BackgroundThe role of residential segregation and spatial separation of population groups along racial or ethnic lines is well documented as a factor contributing to health disparities, such as rates of homicide and crime in African Americans. Most of the two million Palestinian citizens in Israel live in segregated, exclusively Palestinian towns, whereas approximately 132 000 live in mixed Jewish Palestinian cities that were Palestinian cities before the Palestinian exodus, in 1948, when most inhabitants were expelled, turning the Palestinians who remained into a minority. Despite having higher employment rates, Palestinians in so-called mixed cities live in enclaves with higher poverty, poorer educational facilities, and more intracommunal crime than Palestinian communities in segregated towns. The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of trust in the Israeli government and in police commitment in crime fighting among Palestinian citizens in Israel in different towns. MethodsData were collected in 2018 using a stratified multistage random sample of 2040 households (n=7985 adults). A scale was computed measuring reports on trust in the government and in the police's commitment in curbing crime (Cronbach's α=0·92). Bivariate analyses were done to test for significant associations between the dependent variable of trust in police or government and associated factors. Binary logistic regression was done to check for confounders. The Galilee Society Ethics Committee approved the study. FindingsParticipants living in mixed cities were more likely to report high levels of violence in their communities (OR 4·3, P=0·001) and were less likely to trust the police or the government in curbing crime (odds ratio [OR] 0·32 [95% CI 0·19–0·54]; p<0·05) than participants in segregated towns. Compared with participants older than 35 years, younger people were more likely to trust the police or government (1·39 [1·12–1·72]; p<0·05). Muslims were less likely to trust the police or government than Druze and Christians (0·51 [0·35–0·75]; p<0·05). Those living in communities unrecognised by the Israeli government were less likely to trust the police or government than those living in recognised communities (0·33 [0·22–0·49]; p<0·05). Those living in large towns (ie, with more than 15 000 inhabitants) and medium-sized towns (with populations of 5000–15 000) were less likely to trust the police or the government (OR 0·47 [95% CI 0·34–0·66]; p<0·05 for inhabitants of large towns and 0·65 [0·46–0·91]; p<0·05 for inhabitants of medium-sized towns) than people living in small-size towns (ie, with less than 5000 inhabitants). Those unable to cover daily expenses were less likely to trust the police or the government to control crime than those who could cover daily expenses (OR 0·68 [95% CI 0·55–0·85]; p<0·05). Other variables were not significant. InterpretationPalestinians living in mixed cities view their environment as more violent and have less trust in the government or police's commitment to fight crime. A pattern of urban segregation with urban violence and breakage of social cohesion that is spatially expressed as urban enclaves or so-called purified localities has been used to describe the Palestinian lived experience in mixed cities, and might contribute to worse public health effects than completely segregated Palestinian towns. The lived experience of mixed and segregated livelihood for Palestinian citizens in Israel is substantially different from that of African Americans in the USA, and requires further research. Because violence, crime, and homicide are important public health problems, every effort should be made to measure the prevalence of crime in various communities and uncover its underlying causes so that crime can be effectively reduced. FundingThe research was funded by the Galilee Society and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Fifty shades of kosher: negotiating kashrut in Palestinian food spaces in Israel

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the negotiation over kashrut in Palestinian food businesses in Israel reflects Palestinian citizens’ attitudes toward Israel and Israeli Jews. I illustrate my argument by demonstrating practices in which Palestinian food business owners adjust or merely present their foods according to the Israeli-Jewish dietary laws, tastes, and culture. I also offer an interpretation of the meanings they attribute to serving dishes with certain shades of kosher. By closely examining the negotiations held in food spaces in Kafr Qasim, a Palestinian town in central Israel, the following questions arise: How do business owners perceive the concept of kosher? What meanings do they attribute to their actions? And what can we learn about the relationship between Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel from this behavior? I will answer these questions by suggesting three typical patterns of negotiations as they manifest in Palestinian food businesses: Interceding Kashrut, Declarative Kashrut, and Official Kashrut. Lastly, I suggest that these patterns – especially the third – create new hybrid foods representing the roots of an innovative and controversial “Palestinian-Israeli food.”

The Linguistic Landscape of Palestinian C Towns: The Case of Shop Signs in Huwwara

This study looks at the linguistic landscape in Huwwara, a Palestinian town in the north of the West Bank located in Area C, which is, in line with the Oslo II accord, under Israeli control. Two areas on the main street of Huwwara were investigated: Huwwara center and Huwwara outskirts. Bottom-up signs in both areas were classified according to the languages they were written in. The signs were further classified according to language choice on the signs of businesses in each area. The aim of this study was to investigate the presence of different languages in the linguistic landscape of a Palestinian town where Arabic, English and Hebrew are in contact. A total of 297 signs were analysed. It was found that Arabic is the most prevalent language in the linguistic landscape in the two investigated areas. In addition, it was found that there is a strong presence of Hebrew on the outskirts of Huwwara, mainly on signs of automotive and household businesses. English, on the other hand, was found to have a moderate presence in Huwwara with no difference between the two areas investigated. These results suggest that the use of Arabic has both an informational and a symbolic function, whilst the use of Hebrew has an informational function, and the use of English has a symbolic function.

Intifada Cows and Israeli National Security: Reanimating Civil Resistance in the Wanted 18

The Wanted 18 narrates the story of a Palestinian town whose residents assert their autonomy by purchasing 18 cows and producing their own milk during the first intifada. In response, the Israeli military declares the cows a ‘threat to the security of Israel’ and hunts down the ‘wanted 18.’ This article provides an analysis of The Wanted 18, focusing on the human-animal interactions. It demonstrates how film directors Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan deploy animal protagonists as a means of exposing anti-Palestinian prejudice, critiquing Israeli occupation and the Palestinian authorities who undermined civil resistance during the first intifada, and elucidating the transformative impact of human-animal companionship and creative resistance in a humorous manner that appeals to a global audience.

Digesting the Massacre: Food Tours in Palestinian Towns in Israel

Guided food tours of Israeli Jews to Palestinian towns in Israel are increasing in popularity in recent years. Indeed, the relations between Jews and Palestinians in Israel are often negotiated through the plate, and such food tours allow these relationships to be examined by both local Palestinian hosts and their Israeli-Jewish guests. In this article, I argue that food tours in Palestinian towns in Israel allow Palestinian citizens of Israel to express controversial sociopolitical messages and discuss them with Israeli-Jewish participants thanks to the unique characteristics of food tourism: a multisensory experience for tourists that creates value for the destination and its residents. I demonstrate how the practice of exploring and blurring symbolic boundaries through these tours creates a space that facilitates the delivery of explicit and implicit messages regarding civil rights issues, and even highly explosive topics such as national identity. The innocuous and ostensibly apolitical nature of food allows Israeli-Jewish tourists to come to terms, at least to a certain extent, with messages that may contradict some of the significant Zionist-Jewish narratives. This article is based on ethnography conducted from 2015–17 in Kafr Qasim, a Palestinian town in Israel. I joined “Ramadan Nights” tours that sought to present the customs of the month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar in which, according to religion, Muslims fast from morning until nightfall. I show how the tour facilitates the “digestion” of messages that many Israeli Jews would otherwise find hard to accept, such as the massacre of forty-nine dwellers of Kafr Qasim by the Israeli military in 1956. I conclude by discussing the use of food and hospitality as a means of creating intimacy and challenging power relations and their role in facilitating the digestion of difficult messages.

A means to an end: Israeli-run heritage sites in the West Bank of Palestine

The following is a study of the manner in which Israel develops its heritage claims in the West Bank of Palestine, as well as the way in which tourists on Israeli tours experience the region. Heritage sites become venues of socio-national memory and commemoration, and their archaeological nature reveals that memory as truth. The semi-exclusive roads between them homogenise the landscape into a Judeo-Christian narrative, a process that may result in the creation of Palestinian towns and villages as non-places in the tourist imaginary. Representations made on these tours then become tangible and all the more seductive as tourists are guided through Israeli national-historical narratives.

A means to an end: Israeli-run heritage sites in the West Bank of Palestine

The following is a study of the manner in which Israel develops its heritage claims in the West Bank of Palestine, as well as the way in which tourists on Israeli tours experience the region. Heritage sites become venues of socio-national memory and commemoration, and their archaeological nature reveals that memory as truth. The semi-exclusive roads between them homogenise the landscape into a Judeo-Christian narrative, a process that may result in the creation of Palestinian towns and villages as non-places in the tourist imaginary. Representations made on these tours then become tangible and all the more seductive as tourists are guided through Israeli national-historical narratives.

Contact-induced change in Jaffa Palestinian Arabic: The case of (ʕ)

One of the most salient features of Arabic is pharyngeality. It is prevalent in its phonemic inventory both in primary articulation – voiced /ʕ/ – and voiceless /ħ/ – and in secondarily articulated phonemes known commonly as “emphatic” consonants.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a result of the 1948 occupation of Palestine by Zionist forces, Jaffa, and much of the Arabic-speaking population of Palestine elsewhere, has transformed from a monolingual speech community into a bilingual one, having acquired Modern Hebrew as its L2. While many Palestinian towns and villages have remained segregated, Jaffa has become a “mixed town,” in that Palestinians and Jewish Israelis have been living there side by side for the past 65 years. One of the linguistic consequences of this bilingual (or indeed multilingual) cohabitation is structural borrowing (cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988). Of particular interest to this study are the variable lenition and/or deletion of the voiced pharyngeal fricative among native speakers of Arabic, who are also L2 speakers of Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In order to test the hypothesis that structural change, especially in the phonology of Jaffa Palestinian Arabic, has been under way as a result of contact with Hebrew, sociolinguistic interviews were carried out in both Jaffa itself and in the West Bank communities of Ramallah and Jerusalem. The latter two were used as a control group, as West Bank speakers nowadays are much less exposed to Hebrew than their Jaffa counterparts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the structural change in question has more than one possible “application” in the variable rule paradigm, various quantitative models have been applied to assess the effect of contact on language variation and change in this instance. The bar bar graph above illustrates a simple crosstabulation of speaker and the dependent variable across the two speech communities, with two different types of application: full deletion and any type of lenition of the pharyngeal. We see that both the high-contact Jaffa speech community and the low-contact West Bank community have garden varieties of lenition, but the Jaffa community, especially younger speakers, tend more to apply the full lenition rule.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;When isolating the Jaffa community and conducting a multivariate analysis of the data from that community alone using Rbrul (Johnson 2009), having recoded the dependent variable as a continuous one on a scale from 0 (total deletion) to 4 (full pharyngeal realization), the best models emerge with several social and linguistic factors contributing the most to the application of the variable rule. Most salient among the social factors appears to be language of schooling, whereby speakers who were schooled predominantly in Hebrew tend, unsurprisingly, to lenite their pharyngeals more than those educated in Arabic. The most salient linguistic factor (though this is yet to be refined) is position of the variable in the word; coda position prefers lenition over onset and consonant clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The paper addresses additional fine-grained explanations and hypotheses regarding language contact and its effects on phonological change both within the Jaffa community and across Palestine in general.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt; &lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

The Social Texture of the Baqa Well:Drawing History from an Old Well in a Palestinian Arab Town in Israel

Water sources have always played a significant role in Palestinian rural life. Springs and wells are frequently depicted in orientalist sources, yet they have barely been studied from the perspective of oral history. This article explores the social texture of an ancient well, located in the Palestinian Arab town of Baqa al-Gharbiyya in Israel, by using fragmented memories of the old women and men who drew water from that well more than half a century ago. This study examines the well as a powerful reservoir of local memories, focusing on the feminine experience that was formed at the well, on its symbolic meaning in the lives of Palestinian women, and on a silent language of implicit expressions that was once used at the well.

Sites of Assimilation into Urban Life: Rural Migrants' Clubs in Haifa under the Mandate, 1939–48

Culture clubs and social associations were a common social setting in Palestinian towns and in some large villages during the Mandate period. Drawing on a micro-historical approach, this article focuses on four organisations established in Haifa by rural migrants. These organisations are examined as sites of assimilation in the city and they are used as a vantage point from which to observe the daily life experience of their members. The findings suggest that clubs and associations were not only a setting for sports and cultural activities, social gathering or charity. They were an arena for public activity where rural migrants negotiated their position in urban society and participated in developing Palestinian culture.

Samakh: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Arab Town on the Shores of the Sea of Galilee

This article deals with the story of the rise and fall of Samakh. This town, which was founded by Algerian migrants at the end of the nineteenth century, quickly became one of the most prosperous towns in the Jordan valley. Its strategic location at the meeting point where the borders of Palestine, Jordan and Syria intersect, and its proximity to the water sources of Lake Tiberias and two rivers, gave it all the advantages of a transit town with its crossroads and train connections. The number of its inhabitants rose by the score up to about 4,000 towards the end of the Mandate period. The upsurge in growth and expansion of Samakh which continued until the war of 1948 constitutes a testimony for the processes of transformation and development that Galilee had enjoyed in those days. At the same time, the bitter end and destruction which that war brought upon the town testifies to the catastrophe suffered by the Arab population in this region.

Queering Palestine: Piercing Eytan Fox's Imagined Bubble with Sharif Waked's Chic Point

In this piece I address the construction of male homosexuality in Eytan Fox's The Bubble (Israel, 2006) in contrast with its presentation in the artist Sharif Waked's short film, Chic Point (Palestine, 2003). Examining the tensions between Palestinian and Israeli masculinity and homosexual desire, I espouse a narrative about the dualities of representing Palestinian queerness. I argue that the very nature of Palestinian daily life is queer. That is, if we utilize the word in the now anachronistic adjectival sense whereby the word queer describes a sense of strange(ness) or even the life of a stranger. The forced and unpredictable movement of individuals from the now depopulated Palestinian towns, villages, and holy sites into refugee camps and diasporas evidences the queering of modern Palestinian identity in this sense. The emotion or impression that one is a perpetual stranger in one's birth land, without an inherent or stable representation of community identity, encourages one to cling vicariously to “the imagined.” Similarly, the possibility of a secure and collective Palestinian citizenship currently exists only in a fictive guise, as the narrative of perpetual conflict continues to shadow any vision of what a peaceful reality might look like. Thus it is increasingly difficult to speak of sexual politics without reference to grander institutional schemas.

Photo Essay

Photo Essay Manzer Foroohar Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Wall in Bethlehem: I was in Palestine for research in March and April of 2008. I was based in Bethlehem but had to go to East Jerusalem often for my research. Bethlehem is a suburb of Jerusalem (about six miles away), but the trip could take about one hour. You can only go to Jerusalem with “proper” identification papers, which most of Bethlehemites don’t have. To get to Jerusalem, you have to take a taxi from the center of Bethlehem and go to the wall. (above picture) [End Page 861] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Check point crossing in Bethlehem: Then you have to walk through several fenced corridors (above) before getting to the gate. [End Page 862] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Wall in Bethlehem: Another section of Bethlehem wall and watch tower. [End Page 863] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. Wall in Bethlehem: Bethlehem kids walking and playing next to the wall. [End Page 864] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 5. Wall in Bethlehem: The wall has been built in the middle of the street in front of this house and goes around the back to cut the backyard. Now a part of the family’s backyard is on the other side of the wall. [End Page 865] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 6. Bypass road in the suburb of Jerusalem: It divides a Palestinian town. Since Palestinians don’t have access to the road and are not allowed to travel on the road, they have to go under the road or take the dirt road to travel from one side of their town to the other. [End Page 866] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 7. Checkpoint: A Palestinian ambulance waits behind an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank. Many Palestinians have died behind the checkpoints, due to delays and/or the lack of a permit to cross the checkpoint to go to hospital. [End Page 867] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 8. The wall from the Israeli side: In contrast to the Palestinian side of the wall, which is very close to and visible from Palestinian houses, schools and businesses, the Israeli side of the wall is not close to settlers’ houses or bypass roads in the West Bank. It is built in a way which is not clearly visible from the road, or in some cases it is painted with murals, such as the above picture. [End Page 868] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 9. Qalandiya: This is the beginning of the wall and the watch tower separating East Jerusalem from Ramallah. The distance between the two cities is a few miles, but it could take more than two hours to get from one to the other, and that is only if you have “proper” papers. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians living in Ramallah haven’t been able to travel to Jerusalem for years. Many families have been separated by the wall with no prospect of visiting one another. [End Page 869] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 10. Qalandiya: Palestinians paint on the wall and write messages about the situation. [End Page 870] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 11. Qalandiya: This painting on the wall demonstrates the Palestinian dream of breaking down the wall. [End Page 871] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 12. Wall (fence) and gate in Jayyus: In rural areas, the wall takes the form of an electronic fence which separates Palestinian farmers from their farm land. Every several miles the fence has a gate which is opened a few hours each day to let Palestinians go to their farms. The gates are usually closed for Jewish holidays and when there is any sign of political unrest. Sometimes the gates remain closed for weeks, preventing Palestinians from working on their farm land. [End Page 872] Copyright © 2010 The American Studies Association

Traumatic dental injuries and related factors among sixth grade schoolchildren in four Palestinian towns

Traumatic dental injuries (TDI) are recognized as an important dental public health issue among children. The West Bank, a part of the Palestinian Authority, is in immediate neighborhood to Israel. There are inadequate epidemiologic data among the Palestinian people, on dental health issues. To determine the occurrence of TDI to permanent teeth among sixth grade Palestinian schoolchildren living in four large towns of the West Bank and to investigate associations with anatomic and demographic factors. Eight hundred and four children were sampled and examined in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and Jericho. Data collection included clinical examinations in schools and questionnaires for demographic and socio-economic background. The prevalence of traumatic dental injuries was 17.7%. Enamel fractures and injuries involving dentine accounted for 41% and 42.5% of all injuries, respectively. The most affected teeth (89%) were upper central incisors. Only 5% of the injured teeth were treated. Results of multiple logistic regression confirmed that TDI were significantly (P < 0.001) more prevalent among boys, children presenting incisal overjet larger than 5 mm, and incompetent lip coverage. The relative high prevalence and very low levels of treated TDI identified in this study suggested that both prevention and treatment of TDI in the West Bank were inadequate.

Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism (review)

Reviewed by: Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism Waleed Hazbun Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism, by Rebecca L. Stein. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 232 pp. $22.95. Itineraries in Conflict stands out as a superb, original study that addresses aspects of Israeli cultural experience and practice rarely examined by scholars while offering some challenging, thought-provoking conclusions. Drawing on fieldwork spanning a decade, cultural anthropologist Rebecca Stein seeks to invert common understandings of the territorial dimensions of Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reveal how geopolitics and the tensions within the Zionist project are embedded in everyday practices of tourism, travel, leisure, and consumption. In a series of readable, well-crafted chapters, Stein layers a recounting of contemporary developments and telling first-person ethnographic vignettes with capsules of historical background that contextualize the action while revealing the underlying tensions that define what is being said and left unsaid. The text is framed by the rise and decline of the Oslo peace process (1993–2000) and explores how shifts in Israel's diplomatic and security relations redefined the terms of Israeli leisure practices. Stein builds her case inductively by reading everyday details, activities, and speech to identify the terms of what she calls "national intelligibility," which refers to protocols of recognition that regulate and filter perceptions and specify what subjects can be recognized. In short, she argues that only when the 1993 Oslo Accords and the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan helped normalize Israel's position within the Arab world did Jewish Israelis begin to recognize, consume, and "desire" places, cultural tourist experiences, and foods associated with Israel's own (Palestinian) Arab community. At the same time, Stein is critical of the very limited and contingent nature of the protocols of national intelligibility that only recognized de-contextualized and seemingly apolitical experiences that functioned to shore up rather than challenge what Stein views as aspects of Zionist nationalist mythology. Chapter 1 recounts how Israeli tourism was transformed by the rise of what Shimon Peres dubbed the "New Middle East" and the Israel-Jordan treaty that permitted Israelis to freely visit Jordan. Stein argues that the mainstream Israeli press related the experiences of Jewish Israelis visiting Arab locales in terms of "first contact" narratives emphasizing notions of a geographic and cultural divide between a homogenous Israeli nation-state and the Arab world at a moment of increasing anxiety about more open borders. Illustrating her point with historical photos, Stein observes that such narratives required ignoring and suppressing historical traces of Yishuv-era Jewish travel to Arab [End Page 160] lands and the cultural ties Israel has with these places though its own Arab Palestinians and Jews of Arab origin. Chapters 2 and 3 consider the mid-1990s rise of Jewish Israeli interest in "ethnic" tourism within the Palestinian towns and villages of the Galilee. She views the practice as representing "a recalibration of the terms of [Palestinian] symbolic inclusion within the [Israeli] nation-state" (p. 46). Noting that state officials who promoted ethnic tourism and most Israelis drawn to it viewed themselves as enacting peace and coexistence, Stein highlights its limits, as "[m]ost Jewish Israeli clients sought Arab culture stripped of recognizable Palestinian histories and sentiments" (p. 48). More critically Stein interlaces her ethnographic account of Israeli tourists, tourism planners, and government officials with historical and contextualizing details about the Palestinian locales and communities visited. Stein argues that the experience of ethnic tourism naturalized the rural, isolated, and underdeveloped characteristics of these communities, which can be understood as, in part, legacies of previous Israeli state policies of neglect, repression, and dispossession that the new era of peaceful coexistence sought to bury. What I found particularly fascinating in Stein's account is how efforts to present more "authentic" tourist experiences—consisting of home-cooked meals, private musical performances, and picturesque village landscapes—only functioned to enhance this effect. They helped associate Palestinian spaces with "interiority" and worked to "fix Palestinians in space" where they seem naturally rooted, thus mollifying Jewish Israeli fears about the accommodation required for coexistence. Chapter 4 provides a contrast by exploring the simultaneous proliferation and popularity of...

GETTING BY THE OCCUPATION: How Violence Became Normal during the Second Palestinian Intifada

The second Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation, which began in September 2000, saw Palestinian areas repeatedly invaded and shelled by Israeli forces. A long history of war and targeted cities is told along the thoroughfares of Palestinian towns; memories of past battles and defeats inscribed in street signs recall massacres in places like Tel Al-Za'atar and Deir Yasin. But recent events were more important than any official marker and formed the most relevant base by which Palestinians organized their lives. Commemorative cultural production and basic acts of physically getting around that became central to the spatial and social practices by which reorientation and adaptation to violence occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories. This article analyzes the spaciotemporal, embodied, and symbolic aspects of the experience of violence, and the political significance of cultural practices whereby violence is routinized. Such an approach provides a lens onto the power of violence in Israel's colonial project in the occupied territories that neither necessitates an assumption that violence is all determining of Palestinian experience, nor a championing of every act of Palestinian survival as heroic resistance. Memorialization that occurs in storytelling, in visual culture, in the naming of places and moving through spaces is one way in which this happens. The concept of “getting by” captures the many spatial and commemorative forms by which Palestinians manage everyday survival. The kind of agency that is entailed in practices whereby people manage, get by, adapt, and the social significance of getting used to it may be somewhat nebulous and unobtrusive as it develops in the shadow of spectacular battles and bloodshed. I demonstrate that this routinization of violence in and of itself, the fact of getting by, just existing in an everyday way, is socially and politically significant in Palestine.