“Farewell to thee, land of the beloved, land of the dear ones, when will we meet again?” These are the last words that nineteen-year old Alexander Svoboda uttered in Arabic as he left his native home of Baghdad and embarked on his first westward journey to the cultural capital of Europe—Paris—on April 15th, 1897. Svoboda maintained a diary of the journey in Arabic. In 1900, however, when he made his return journey to Baghdad with a new French wife, he narrated his experiences in English. Svoboda appeared to be a changed man after his time in Europe, a man who began to reevaluate his identity as he was leaving Paris as it was gearing up for the 1900 Exposition Universelle for Baghdad. What is immediately striking about the two diaries is that they are written in two different languages: the first in a mixed dialect of Arabic spoken in Baghdad and the latter in an unmastered English riddled with grammatical and spelling errors. The two journals however, are not merely examples of Svoboda expressing himself in different languages. Rather, they reference distinct systems of cognition, specifically demonstrating an evolution of how he understands and hierarchically orders his once beloved homeland vis-à-vis European cities. His diaries provide a micro-narrative of how an individual with a highly contested and complex identity at the turn of the twentieth century negotiated his class, religious, geographic and linguistic identities when faced on the one hand by the accelerated modernization in Europe, and on the other hand, by the rise of nationalist ideologies in the Ottoman realm.

The story of Magda Haroun (1952-present) and Nadia Haroun (1954-2014), the most recent leaders of the Jewish community in Egypt and the daughters of the Egyptian Jewish lawyer and intellectual Shehata Haroun (1920-2001), deserves to be told for several reasons. First, their story makes concrete the persistent struggles of a Jewish minority historically recognized in and inextricably linked to the Egyptian nation. Cognizant of Egyptian Jews’ long history and their forced emigration en masse in the mid-twentieth century, this story confronts the reality of the remnants of a once diverse and largely middle-class religious minority and its efforts to stay integrated as much as it can in a predominantly Muslim nation. Why and how this religious minority persisted to simultaneously confront colonialism, Zionism, and anti-Semitism in Egypt are all important questions to understand minority agency and its limitations in Egyptian history. Discussing this minority agency and its limitations, this study will show how the Haroun sisters’ belief in a Jewish minority’s full integration within Egyptian society, a belief they inherited from their father, led them to remain in Egypt despite the odds. The study will first give an overview of Egyptian Jewry’s social and political diversity during the twentieth century, highlighting the majority Jewish middle-class to which the Harouns belonged, as well as Jewish Communists, including Shehata Haroun, and their political activities on behalf of the Egyptian lower and middle classes. It will then look closely at the Arabic writings and interviews of Shehata Haroun from the 1970s onwards, namely his memoir A Jew in Cairo, and will highlight his intellectual, social, and political legacy, one that his daughters staunchly adhered to, about being Egyptian, Jewish, and anti-Zionist in Egypt after 1948. It will then move generationally to Magda and Nadia Haroun, both born in Egypt after the Free Officers’ Revolution in 1952, and through interviews given by both, will assess their work as Egyptian lawyers and Jewish community leaders in light of their vision for the integration of Jewish lives and memories within Egypt and Egyptian history. In conclusion, this paper argues that even in the face of serious limitations, the Haroun sisters’ example sheds light on the opportunities for minority agency in post-colonial Egypt. Thus, it also intervenes in and nuances scholarly debates about post-colonial Egypt’s purported ultra-nationalist and/or ultra-religious break with its cosmopolitan past.

This paper explores the spatial perceptions and practices of Druze citizens of Israel vis-à-vis their Lebanese and Syrian co-religionists before, during and after the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon (1982-2000). During these eighteen long years, Israel controlled parts of Lebanon and enabled the re-emergence of a reality in which on a daily basis thousands of South Lebanese crossed the border to Israel and Israelis crossed the border to Lebanon, although on a much smaller scale. Israeli Druze were one of the communities that benefited the most from the opening of the border. For the first time since the 1948 war they had access to their religious leaders and centers in Lebanon as well as to their extended families. From 1982 to 2000 thousands of Israeli Druze visited Lebanon, reestablishing communal ties with their Lebanese brothers (as well as with Syrian Druze) and in fact transforming their collective identity inside Israel. Cross-border marriages, licit and illicit trade, and religious studies, to mention a few examples, reconnected Israeli Druze with their religious community in Lebanon (and Syria to a lesser extent). Additionally, during these years, hundreds of Lebanese Druze worked inside Druze villages in Israel strengthening cross-border ties with their coreligionists. With the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Druze citizens of Israel launched a public campaign urging the state to allow them continued access to Lebanon and Syria. Many of them disobeyed state prohibition and crossed the border to Syria and Lebanon via Jordan. It was only the civil war in Syria that put a temporary halt to their campaign to open the border for them and allow them to visit their religious centers and families in these countries. By using this case study, the paper draws attention to space and scale in scholarly studies of the Middle East, critiquing the tendency to focus on the bounded state as the primary spatial unit of analysis. This case demonstrates that supra state identities and spatial perceptions and practices are crucial for the understanding of the contemporary Middle East. As coined by the political geographer John Agnew, it is essential that we don’t fall into “the territorial trap of the state.” Rather, we should incorporate into our spatial analysis historical (the element of change) and regional (the element of space that exceeds state boundaries) dimensions.

This paper compares and contrasts photojournalistic discourses in the image-word representations of David Douglas Duncan and editorial coverage of Life on the Palestine Territories of 1946. As Life magazine’s correspondent to the Middle East, Duncan photographed the British mandate of Palestine between June and October 1946. Duncan compiled his coverage in seven files; five of them include images and caption books, from which Life issued the following editorial stories, respectively: “Blood runs in Palestine violence,” “Civil war threatens in Palestine as British start ‘Operation Igloo,’” “Life photographer gets into Jaffa street battle” (alternatively “Shooting in Jaffa”) and “Palestine: new type of peasant Jew fights for a homeland.” Through critical discourse analysis of these editorials and Duncan’s own image-word representations, we examine components of each text. In this, we seek to identify intended meanings, locate messages these meanings generate, reveal imposed ideologies in the text, and uncover linkages between power, context, and reproduction. This paper relies heavily on unpublished materials collated from the David Douglas Duncan Archive at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, representing a myriad of photographs and their associated captions. Captions in photo essays and written stories alongside news photographs inform audiences on how the image “ought to be read” (Brennan & Hardt 1-10). News photos present themselves as objective actualities; however, editorial curation is non-objective, it presents ideological themes. Selected photographs inflect the message editors wish to impose on audiences (Hall 242 & Messaris, 181-195). We used critical discourse analysis as discourse is studied not only as “form, meaning and mental process, but also as a complex, hierarchical structure of interaction, as social practice and their functions in context, society and culture” (van Dijk, 6). In this qualitative study, we employ critical discourse analysis as our methodology and use Nvivo-10 to answer research questions dealing with the editorial intent within the magazine’s reproductions, Life’s mediation of Duncan’s intents, and narratives of power and public perception on the British mandate of Palestine. Works Cited Brennen, Bonnie, and Hanno Hardt, eds. Picturing the past: Media, history, and photography. University of Illinois Press, 1999. Hall, Stuart. "The determinations of news photographs." The manufacture of news: Social problems, deviance and the mass media, Communication and society. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications (1973): 176-190. Messaris, Paul. "Visual" manipulation": Visual means of affecting responses to images." Communication (1992). van Dijk, Teun Adrianus, ed. Discourse as social interaction. Vol. 2. Sage, 1997.