Between the 1960s and early 1980s, practitioners of physical anthropology and medicine increasingly regarded population genetics research as a powerful tool both to reconstruct the human past and to secure a healthier future. However, the structuring assumptions and interpretations of this new “molecular” or “genetic” anthropology were, and are, embedded in nationalist understandings of history. This paper examines how the practices and technologies of genetic research in this period, particularly methods of blood sampling, have provided a discursive venue for projecting Middle Eastern national narratives into the distant past. Case studies of research performed in Iran, Turkey, and Israel highlight how genetic anthropologists, physicians, and public health officials have navigated the tensions between civic and ethnic nationalism in three states possessing not only highly diverse populations, but also strong government ideologies promoting a homogenized national identity. These tensions generally emerged at the initial stage of defining a population appropriate for biological study. Depending on the priorities of the researchers, genetic data was gathered through one of two principal approaches: either by conducting targeted field surveys to collect blood directly from socially “isolated” ethnic/religious minorities, or by compiling “random” datasets from patients or donors at state-supported hospitals or blood banks. Drawing on published research reports as well as scientists’ professional correspondence and oral histories, I analyze when, how, and why geneticists in each country favored one approach over the other. Israeli geneticists consistently performed targeted surveys that subdivided the national population into small ethnically- and religiously-defined groups, while their Turkish counterparts generally defined their research subjects only in terms of administrative geography. Meanwhile, across the same time period, Iranian genetics research shifted from an emphasis on administrative populations toward investigations of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities. I demonstrate that these varying approaches toward breaking down human populations into genetic units represent the effects of different local political contexts and biological conceptions of the nation. I further argue that these trends reflect not a top-down imposition of state ideology upon scientific research, but rather the particular positionality of Middle Eastern geneticists acting simultaneously as technocratic elites within their own countries and as “native informants” within a Western-dominated global scientific community.

While many expected, at the end of the Cold War, that global capitalism, along with Neoliberal reforms that began taking place in many states since the 1980’s, would bring the decline of nation states and their cults, giving way to global and local identities; an examination of commemorative cults in the two most prominent national days in Israel and Turkey, Ataturk Memorial day (November 10th) and Memorial Day (Yom Hazikaron) in Israel in the 1990’s and 2000’s shows quite the contrary. In both states, not only did public interest in national cults not diminish, commemorative cults took on new forms and created renewed interest and debate around them. In doing that, these new forms and debates broadened circles of participation and established two of the most important founding myths in both nations (the image of Ataturk as the founder of Modern Turkey and the image of Fallen Soldiers in Israel) as inviolable realms where national identity is negotiated and contested even among groups that were initially marginalized or excluded from the national community. The Turkish debate took on a more political tone. In the mid 1990’s secular Turks reclaimed commemorative cults of Ataturk in reaction to what they saw as a takeover of political Islam in the country, which lead to mass participation in November 10th cults for the first time in decades. This mass participation did not just come from secularists but also from government officials, conservative and religious Turks, who infused their own agenda into these cults, stirring yet more anger and contestation between religious and secular in the country. In Israel, the struggle was more social, and revolved around the question of belonging to the “nation’s dead”, when a variety of groups demanded their equal symbolic and material place in “the family of the bereaved” as means to get accepted into the national community. Such groups in include bereaved families of Druze and Bedouin fallen soldiers, of holocaust survivors that fought in the 1948 War, of members of paramilitary revisionist pre-state organizations, of civilian victims of acts to terror, and even of Palestinians, who adopted bereavement discourse into their own narrative using it to interact with Israeli bereaved families as means for reconciliation.

Taking into consideration the closely-knit relation between the identity of a place, and the identification of the inhabitants populating it, the article examines Israel's mode of governance over the remaining Syrian residents of the Golan Heights after its occupation in 1967 as a geopolitics of identity and identification. First, and in order to erase the Golan's Syrian identity, Israel transformed the Golan's space through the systematic destruction of the territory's built environment while shaping it into one, which resembles post-1948 Israel. Second, the spatial transformation was configured with strategies that were deployed in order to govern the Syrian Druze who remained in the territory, and were similar to those Israel used vis-a-vis the Druze community residing within Israel, mainly during the period of internal military rule (1948-1966). Despite these efforts, the Syrian Druze in the Golan Heights resisted Israel's geopolitics of identity and identification by clinging to their Syrian identity in a way that partially undermined Israel's normalization strategy. For Jewish Israelis the Golan became Israeli, but for its Druze residents it remained Syrian.

Following Edward Said’s notion of a “permission to narrate” and adding a bodily dimension to the idea of censorship in performance, I define a “permission to perform” as the guaranteed ability to legally, physically, literally, and publicly perform the experience of the oppressed under a systematically oppressive structure. In this paper, I show the merit of adopting a performative dimension to Said’s politically charged idea as we consider performances of resistance in strong states, particularly when a national group struggles for representation in a heavily controlled environment. In my paper, I rely on documents from the Israel State Archive and ethnographic fieldwork from 2010 to 2012. The extensive record of controversial encounters between the Israeli authorities and Palestinian artists since 1948 suggests that the Palestinian theatre artists have contended with a constant stream of closures, bans, and arrests. The struggle for the “permission to perform” – which serves as a reminder of the disparity in power between the occupier and the occupied – characterizes the relationship between the occupied artists and the state of Israel. To perform, the Palestinian artists had to survive the cutting board of the Israeli office of censorship, but they also had to overcome restrictions imposed by various branches of the government. By reconstructing the performance conditions of El-Hakawati’s 1982 production of Mahjoob Mahjoob, I examine the antagonistic relationship between the theatre artists and the Israeli authorities, then I suggest that this relationship played a significant role in the development and in some cases, the de-development of Palestinian theatrical production. The journey of El-Hakawati’s production of Mahjoob Mahjoob from Jerusalem to Palestinian cities and villages to an international tour in Europe provides an example of the influential power of censorship on the history of Arab cultural production in general and Palestinian theatre in particular. But, upon deeper exploration, it also suggests that the Israeli censorship’s official performance permit did not necessarily offer Palestinians the ability to perform freely. Official approval of the play became but one step in El-Hakawati’s struggle for a more encompassing “permission to perform.” Beyond the experience of El-Hakawati at home, their performances in Europe demonstrate that even on the international stage, in free and democratic societies, the Palestinians have seldom had the privilege of such permission.