This paper will explore the events of the 1933 massacre in Iraq through the Assyrian narrative. Arguments around nationalism and conflict between the Assyrians and other elements of Iraqi society will be borrowed from Sami Zubaida and Sargon Donabed, who have both considered the impact of nationalism on Assyrian–Iraqi relations. But, by utilizing Assyrian eyewitness accounts and accounts of the political wrangling in the run-up to the events of August 1933, the paper will argue that neither Assyrians nor the Iraqis saw the other side as a legitimate political adversary. In fact, the Assyrians saw the demands and concerns expressed by the Iraqi state as baseless and irrational. On the other hand, Iraqi government officials saw the grievances and actions of the Assyrian community after the end of the British mandate in 1932 as being based on colonial rhetoric that was contrary to the aspirations for independence of the Iraqi people. The paper will first introduce previous academic and non-academic writing on the subject of the Simele massacre. Although the massacre has been studied by a small number of academics, they have generally made use only of colonial British documents to analyze the events of the massacre. This paper will discuss not only the massacre but also the August 1933 battle of Dearaboun, that preceded the larger events in the summer of 1933 and is generally thought to be its precursor. I will analyze the events by making use of Assyrian, Iraqi, and British sources, which will be able to provide a more holistic view of the political and social narrative that led to the outbreak of violence against the Assyrian community in the Simele region by the Iraqi army. I will argue that, by making use of documents from the various perspectives involved in the conflict, it is possible to shed new perspective on the massacre and on various political debates that have not been discussed by academics previously. Discussing and analyzing the massacre particularly from an Assyrian perspective, the paper will shed new light on the violence that took place in 1933. It will also contribute to the non-state narrative that analyses the formation of the modern Iraqi state.

What constitutes “Israeli food”? Cultural history often overlooks the role played by food, but food products can often become symbols of national identity. For example, rice is entwined with the history and identity of the Japanese, while cheese is a symbol of France. In the case of a new nation like Israel, a connection between the people and a common land and history has to be created artificially. Food was one of many cultural products that were used by the Jewish nationalist movement to establish and enhance the ties that would bond the Jewish people to Palestine, or the land of Israel. This paper will look at how the humble falafel went from Arab peasant food to one of Israel’s national symbols, using the symbolism of falafel as a case study to examine the manipulation of food products as instruments in the creation of national identity. Early Jewish immigrants to Palestine adopted certain local Arab cultural practices in a deliberate attempt to relinquish diaspora habits in favour of a new existence in Palestine. These halutzim (“pioneers”) of the Second and Third Aliyas chose to adopt certain Arab models that they imagined as the continuation of a Jewish existence in a mythical past of their own invention. As a street food, not a sophisticated cuisine, falafel was more readily accepted by the Jewish community in Palestine at a time when home cooking was seen as part of the bourgeois existence the halutzim had left behind in Europe. As the importance of agriculture diminished and the demographics of the Jewish population changed - following Israel’s independence in 1948, a much larger percentage of non-European immigrants began to arrive. Falafel could now be linked to Jewish immigrants who had come from the Middle East and Africa, allowing it to shed its Arab association in favour of an overarching Israeli identification. Nowadays falafel can be found everywhere in Israel - from ready-made supermarket mixes to modern fast-food chains, and it is consumed at all levels of Israeli society. Falafel is often presented as a proud national symbol on postcards, tourist publications, and at meals served abroad. The key questions this paper seeks to answer are: how are non-state actors in Israel such as the Arab and Mizrahi Jewish populations marginalised in the development of falafel as a national symbol? What does the emergence of falafel as a national symbol illuminate about Israeli national identity?

This paper is concerned with the erasure of Assyrian history and identity in Iraq. Historical context is vital to the study of the contemporary politics of any state. The common story of the Iraqi state has been most frequently told chronologically through periods. This well-rehearsed story takes the student of Iraqi politics through the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the formation of the state in 1932, the British colonial period, independence in 1933, the periods of violence and political instability through to the revolution of 1958, the Ba’ath period, the 2003 invasion and subsequent regime change. These narratives are problematic because they not only perpetuate the myths of Iraq as a homogenous nation but also offer a limited understanding of Iraqi society. Specifically, this history revisionism has resulted in the erasure of the Assyrian identity, reducing them to a religious minority. There is a great deal of scholarship concerned with the processes of nation-building and democratization in post-2003 Iraq. A critical engagement with contemporary Iraqi politics requires a break and a deconstruction of these metanarratives in order to compose a more inclusive re-telling of Iraqi history, which lays a stronger foundation for ‘democratization from below’. Historically, Iraq’s nation-building project, as all nation-building projects, has attempted to construct a homogenous national identity through the exclusion of segments of society considered not to belong. One such mechanism is enacting policies aimed at re-writing the history of the Iraqi state to construct an exclusively Arab national identity. This historical revisionism has resulted in the marginalization of various religious, linguistic, cultural and ethnic minorities. To narrow the scope of the paper, I use the case of the Assyrian identity to argue that oftentimes, those on the margins or the periphery allow for a more accurate depiction of the politics on the ground. Using a genealogical method of narrative analysis, the aim of this paper is to first, disrupt common narratives of the Iraqi state and second, to re-tell this story by re-inserting the Assyrians, Iraq’s indigenous minority into the fabric of Iraqi politics. A genealogical method is appropriate for this research because a fuller understanding of democratization in post-2003 Iraq requires a more complete and contextualized picture of Iraq’s history and its peoples.

Arab Artists in Cold War Capitals: Travelogues and Visual Narratives of Moscow and Beijing Throughout the third quarter of the twentieth-century, Arab states were still negotiating their alignments with, against, or between the cold war superpowers, in cultural as well as political terms, the ostensibly polarizing, albeit fading memories of both the Baghdad Pact and the Bandung Conference of 1955 notwithstanding (Matthews 2011; Bashkin 2011; Cook 2012). Arab painters, sculptors, illustrators, and cartoonists were often important exponents of the cultural policies of their newly independent states and helped forge identities that resonated in international and domestic terms (Winegar 2006; Hijris 2005; Gershoni and Jankowski 2004; `Iraq 2002). Arab artists embarked on journeys to communist countries as part of cultural missions in both unofficial and official capacities. The celebrated Egyptian editorial cartoonist Taha Ibrahim al-`Adawi, aka “Zuhdi” (1917-1994), and the renowned Iraqi graphic artist Rafa` al-Nasiri (1940-2013), made visits to Moscow and Beijing, respectively. Of particular note, they also published illustrated travelogues of their journeys which graphically document the cultural political climate in these cold war capitals from perspectives unfamiliar to Western observers. Furthermore, both works provide vivid textual narratives and illustrations of the country, the people, and the artists they encountered and constitute examples of hybrid literary genres. Zuhdi’s account Fannan fi Mosku (1973) graphically and verbally details the artist’s four-week stay in the Soviet capital for the Second International Exhibition of Caricature for Liberation and Peace. The core of Al-Nasiri’s Rihlati ila al-Sin (2012) revolves around his four-year stay studying art in China from 1959-1963 and his return visit in 1989. No less than for their perspectives of the host countries, these accounts are of interest for their reflections of views of the politics, economy, and culture of the United States. To be sure, al-Nasiri’s memoir, benefitting from hindsight, presents a more subtle and critical discussion than Zuhdi’s “dispatch.” Neither al-Nasiri nor Zuhdi appear to embrace wholesale the ideological rhetoric of these environments, however. The visual dimensions of their accounts convey subtle inter-textual nuances to the narratives. As such, both serve as important examples of late twentieth-century travelogues, worth comparing with the accounts of earlier modern Arab travelers from al-Tahtawi onward, and reveal how the developing Arab text-image discourses of the time were not as starkly colored by the jargons of contending cold war alliances as they are often portrayed.