Category: Focus

ABSTRACT
This paper aims at offering valuable insights into the complex encounter between 19th-century Western travelers and the urban landscape of Palestine. The first part shows that, despite their efforts to distance themselves from the religious overtones of their predecessors, visitors tended to shove aside what they considered as ‘inauthentic’ or the product of acculturation in favor of a more conventional portrayal drawing on biblical imagery. This idealized vision was bound to struggle with disappointment, and the second part of this paper looks at how the representations of the city moved in the course of the 19th century from a purely pictorial transposition to a more practical and informed understanding of otherness. Travel writers began to devote considerable portions of their narratives to various aspects of life in the oriental town, while still predominately focusing on what they viewed as exotic and remote in comparison to European, and to a larger extent, Western culture.

ABSTRACT
This article analyses perceptions of the Holy Land through the pictorial representations of Jewish holy places in the Romanian Moldavia synagogues from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. These images implied the sanctity of the biblical land and the belief in its messianic revival by the Jewish people. Some synagogue artists ‘domesticated’ their paintings of a never-seen land by depicting those remote places according to features characteristic of familiar local landscapes.

ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 20th century, Ottoman Palestine became a popular destination for tourists, and their number rose significantly during the British Mandate. In particular, Jewish tourists increasingly visited Palestine and among them a new typology of travelers developed, i.e. Zionist travelers. This article draws on travelogues published in the 1920s and 1930s and aims at demonstrating that these travelogues, while presenting personal and direct experiences of Eretz Israel, corresponded perfectly with – and bolstered – the narrative that Zionism was using to describe its enterprise.

ABSTRACT
In recent years, graphic novels have staked a claim for cultural respectability, especially through their often-bold analysis of divisive social and political issues; for instance, in travelogues exploring today’s Israel and Palestine. This article analyses Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993-6) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010), and Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2012) to demonstrate how graphic artists update the long cultural tradition of travel to the Holy Land representations. I argue that graphic novels are a contemporary chapter in portrayals of what the corpus describes as a decidedly unholy land of conflict.

ABSTRACT
This article focuses on a recent turning point in the history of gazes in and of Jerusalem. For decades, the Muslim structure of the Dome of the Rock and the Jewish Western Wall served as a primary (dual) image for Jerusalem. Yet since the 1990s, there has been a transition towards framing the city as exclusively Jewish, with a focus on the Tower of David as the new icon. This transition embodies the political shifts to an ethno-national agenda combined with the neoliberal zeitgeist.

ABSTRACT
Taking account of the original meaning of ‘inextricability’ among Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis, the paper aims at exploring whether joint Palestinian and Israeli Jewish viewpoints should be considered as a feasible scenario. With the purpose of deconstructing conventional approaches towards resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the leitmotiv of the study is centered on the critical examination of the most prominent intellectual debates and historic examples that have challenged a daily reality developed around fear and hostility directed against the so-called Other. In this way, whilst recognizing a number of failures experienced by the majority of joint initiatives, I suggest how this type of political perspective has made it possible for potentially useful initiatives to emerge within the worsening context of military occupation and conflicting narratives.

ABSTRACT
In 1970, after a long genesis, the joint Israeli and Palestinian experience of the village of ‘Neve Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam’ (‘oasis of peace’) began. Among the decisive figures for the start of this project, Father Bruno Hussar (1911-1996) was the most important, although his life has not yet been explored by historiography. Born in Egypt to assimilated Jewish parents, during his studies in France he converted to Christianity. In 1953 he was sent to Israel in order to open a Dominican centre for Jewish and Christian studies. During those years the idea of a place where to experiment a direct form of coexistence between Jews, Christians and Muslims in Israel took shape in Hussar’s mind. My paper aims to investigate his complex figure, combining Judaism, Christianity, adherence to Zionism and commitment to peace. The analysis will be carried out mainly using three types of sources: the documents gathered in different archives, the association bulletin and the texts published by him.

ABSTRACT
Israeli and Palestinian women played a vital role in the difficult process of achieving peace and restoring dialogue. Meeting and organizing away from the spotlight, women held discussions with each other and proposed ways to bring about reconciliation, as well as constructing alternatives to violence and war.
Women from both sides of the Green Line and within Israel were particularly active during the first Intifada, building a genuine women’s peace movement while being engaged in protest activities, lobbying and solidarity actions. These grassroots organizations, which were clearly anti- occupation, took part in non-mixed activities and occasionally subverted and deconstructed national identities. In addition to these innovative and intensive activities in the field, political women and social activists tried to develop women’s diplomacy at international meetings. Important joint declarations were endorsed at these pioneering conferences, which helped to prepare the ground for future international peace agreements. The outbreak of the El-Aqsa Intifada, and the disillusionment with the Oslo process, lead Israeli women to re-launch their activities in a more radical way, while the peace camp was demobilized. This new shape of activism included a broad spectrum of protest activities, combining the fight against occupation, feminist issues and anti-militarism.
The most durable legacy from women’s peace activism was the formulation of new political discourses which defined peace in terms of a global concept that clearly links gender oppression and national oppression and creates an alternative discourse strongly opposed to violent and militarist options.

ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the history, organization, networks and political outlook of the state of Israel’s first conscientious objectors (COs) in the 1950s, and the consequences they confronted, individually and as a group. Despite it being a very unlikely period for the foundation of such a movement, a small branch of ‘War Resisters’ International’ (WRI, 1921) was established in Israel in 1947. This paper discusses what can the attitudes towards COs tell of the early history of the State of Israel, especially at a time when conscientious objection was not recognized as a right almost anywhere. The history of the first Israeli COs breaks a number of assumptions, albeit contradictory ones: on the one hand it strengthens the image of Israel as a militaristic country; on the other, it shows that institutions were in Israel more tolerant towards COs than other countries; it shows that COs were the supporters of an non ethnically homogenous society and, most of all, that, even in a decade such as the 1950s, a different and deep voice was trying to make itself heard. This paper is based on primary sources from the WRI archives and on the correspondence that Israeli COs entertained with WRI in the 1950s