Guiding Settler Jerusalem: Voice and the Transpositions of History in Religious Zionist Pilgrimage (original) (raw)
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ABSTRACT The ‘City of David’ in Silwan is on the original site of Jerusalem. Located in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, it is both an illegal Israeli settlement in a Palestinian neighbourhood and a popular international tourist destination. This article examines how the site is narrated by tour operators and tourists through fieldwork, interviews and analysis of tourist comments on the TripAdvisor site. It argues that Israeli settlers have successfully harnessed tourist discourse in order to present their vision of a Jewish Jerusalem in which Palestinian existence is ignored or treated as a threat. The site allows tourists to connect to and experience a mythical biblical past, something which answers to tourist desires to have an authentic encounter with the destination culture. In the site’s narratives, the presence of Palestinians in the area is elided over through spatial and linguistic separation and by denying their legitimate presence. This indicates how the congruence between Zionist and tourist discourses discursively legitimises Israeli colonisation of Silwan
EPHEMERA OF A PROMISED LAND: TWO TRAVEL GUIDES IN A RECONSTITUTED JERUSALEMITE FAMILY ARCHIVE
Mashriq and Mahjar, 2023
This article investigates Christian Palestinian involvement in tourism and Western pilgrimage in Mandate Palestine, and focuses on the tension between political identity and mercantile aspirations. It makes use of an ephemeral archive that highlights the possibilities of reconstructing a picture of Mandateera Jerusalem based on such transient documents. The article examines two 1930s travel pamphlets, published in English and co-authored or co-edited by a Greek-Orthodox Jerusalemite, George M. Sahhar (1901-1976). Sahhar tourism enterprises in Jerusalem catered to an English-speaking British and American clientele, some associated with the British-Israelite movement. Both guides offer insight into Christian tour operators and the tastes of their clientele and indicate Western appetite for biblical and pseudo-historical narratives of Jewish connections to Palestine. Together, they illustrate the ambivalent instrumentality of Christian Palestinian entrepreneurs in biblifying Palestine for the Western imaginary and even propagating ideas of Palestinian progress as facilitated by Zionist modernity, a strategy now implicated in normalizing Israel's 1948 creation and later deployed in Israeli national narratives.
Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East & North African Migration Studies
For British Anglican tourists, archaeological tourism in Palestine marked an expansion of a broader British cultural and religious relationship to Palestine as a land made familiar by a childhood of bible stories and nativity scenes, and one which played a role in the biblification of Palestine and the appropriation of its past to validate and strengthen a connection to Britain and the Mandate. Archaeology offered a direct link to the materiality of the biblical past, experienced via a “kairotic moment” in which the past meets the present. By examining reports of British travelers to Palestine, this article considers how materially embodied religious experiences not only drove tourist movement to Palestine but also functioned as a keystone in Britain’s relationship with Palestine during the Mandate period. Behind this growth in archeological tourism, however, is a story of tension, most notably between Mandate Palestine’s first director of antiquities, John Garstang, and the Mandate...
The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine
Journal of Palestine Studies, 2008
In this interdisciplinary work on the psychology of fundamentalism, the editors have incorporated a wide variety of authors and disciplinary perspectives, each of which focuses on an issue such as blame, victimization, paranoia, and apocalyptic mentality. While it is striking that such a wide variety of authors would share so much agreement over the existence and attributes of a fundamentalist mindset, a close reading of each is necessary to understand the striking nuances in interpretation from author to author. This work will have wide appeal to those engaged in work on religion and violence or in any area of the humanities or social sciences. The weakness of the book is the emphasis placed on the potential dangers of the fundamentalist mindset, with but a fleeting mention of its benefits. While the book succeeds in incorporating disparate perspectives and disciplinary paradigms, all of the authors rightly share a kind of trepidation over the potential dangers of the fundamentalist symptoms in spite of the fact that these very symptoms are also sparingly acknowledged by several authors and editors to be central to the healthy development and sustenance of a democratic world.
Religious Studies Review, 2011
In this interdisciplinary work on the psychology of fundamentalism, the editors have incorporated a wide variety of authors and disciplinary perspectives, each of which focuses on an issue such as blame, victimization, paranoia, and apocalyptic mentality. While it is striking that such a wide variety of authors would share so much agreement over the existence and attributes of a fundamentalist mindset, a close reading of each is necessary to understand the striking nuances in interpretation from author to author. This work will have wide appeal to those engaged in work on religion and violence or in any area of the humanities or social sciences. The weakness of the book is the emphasis placed on the potential dangers of the fundamentalist mindset, with but a fleeting mention of its benefits. While the book succeeds in incorporating disparate perspectives and disciplinary paradigms, all of the authors rightly share a kind of trepidation over the potential dangers of the fundamentalist symptoms in spite of the fact that these very symptoms are also sparingly acknowledged by several authors and editors to be central to the healthy development and sustenance of a democratic world.
Liberating Christian Pilgrimage in Israel
Hiking in Israel has a long and rich tradition, and is an element of Israeli society that has only recently begun to attract scholarly attention. More broadly, various scholars have commented on the importance of the act of walking in asserting ownership over contested territory. Yet the phenomenon of “walking the Land,” which comes largely out of a European nationalist tradition, is not limited to Zionist efforts to conquer the ancient Jewish homeland. Pilgrimage literature also provides a framework for walking and its significance in the pilgrimage experience, particularly in Israel. For territory as bitterly contested as that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, walking and hiking add a new dimension to ways that individuals and groups alike can stake their religious or political claim. This paper examines some of the elements of Christian tourism and pilgrimage in Israel and the Palestinian territories through this lens of “walking the Land.” It looks beyond the more established modes for pilgrimage and tourism to recent grassroots efforts led by Palestinian tour and pilgrimage groups targeting a western Christian clientele. While the scholarly literature on Christian pilgrimage in Israel is sparse, and this new development in that field even more so, the paper uses recent books, articles and especially webpages and brochures to explore the ways that these Palestinian companies attempt not only to provide an alternative option for Christian pilgrimage in the Holy Land, but also to assert their own narrative to counter the more dominant Zionist narrative most western Christians experience. Thus, the paper ends with an exploration of the possible implications this growing pilgrimage movement may present for the State of Israel.
The Political Ends of Tourism: Voices and Narratives of Silwan/the City of David in East Jerusalem
Amsterdam: Elsevier Publications. Pp. 27-41., 2012
Imagine that you wake up one morning and realize that your house and your neighborhood are now part of a tourist site located inside a National Park. Worse yet, you are now residing inside a highly ideological heritage site, the narrative of which has you playing the role of a rival, of an enemy. Reminiscent of a Kafkaesque tale, things -even if not yourself -have transformed irrevocably. In this chapter I examine how tourism discourses and practices are effectively put into use for political objectives. I hold that commonly both tourism scholarship and tourists overlook the pervasive political aspects associated with tourist sites, attractions, and discourses, which are the way that the industry serves in promoting and perpetuating hegemony. Empirically, the study explores a Jewish heritage site located in Occupied East Jerusalem. It exposes the mechanisms by which the site serves political aims, and how these aims are effectively depoliticized for the benefit of the sovereign authority and ideology. The chapter also documents the initial phases of my own move into political activism in the context of the Israeli Occupation of East Jerusalem, and my appreciation of how the tourism industry, with its awesome powers of worldmaking, plays a role in this affair of which significance cannot be undermined.
Silwan (Jerusalem), Biblical Archaeology, Cultural Appropriation, and Settler Colonialism
Jerusalem Quarterly, Summer 2022, Issue 90, 75-97, 2022
Archaeological excavations in the village of Silwan, southeast of the Old City of Jerusalem, began more than 150 years ago and have revealed multiple layers of civilizations dating from as early as the fifth millennium BCE until modern times. The site was identified by some European and Israeli archaeologists as the biblical "King David's city" of about three thousand years ago, yet no significant remains from this period were unearthed. Since the occupation of Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has implemented policies aimed at imposing a Jewish demographic majority and strengthening its control over the city. Since the early 1990s, the Israeli authorities, and their satellite right-wing settler organizations, have been immersed in a large-scale project in Silwan: the establishment of a Jewish colony with a biblical-archaeological theme park for tourism in the heart of the village. The strategy to achieve this project is twofold: to carry out extensive archaeological excavations in order to uncover structures and artifacts that are related to "biblical" times, particularly from King David's reign; and to appropriate and demolish hundreds of homes, forcibly displace their Palestinian residents, and replace them with Jewish settlers. This article focuses on how Israel weaponizes archaeology to create an invented "biblical" narrative centered on the so-called "City of David" to justify its settler-colonial project in Silwan. This contradicts the ethics of accepted archaeological practice and presents a biased narrative of the site as "biblical" and "Jewish," while ignoring its diverse multi-faceted history.