Tourism, as both a performative act and lucrative economy, actively shapes the way Jewish history and the contemporary concept of a Jewish nation-state is understood in the diaspora. Having established itself as the ostensible homeland of an exiled people returning to their place of origin, Israel cultivates tourist experiences based on the marketing of goods and services that sidestep—or altogether destroy—competing histories of indigeneity. In this paper, I will demonstrate how Israeli boutique commodities play an integral role in the ways in which middle- and upper-class Jews of the diaspora conceive of their attachment to the state and their ability to play a part in shaping contemporary Israeli society through personal consumption and taste. Though recent research has explored the fashioning of Israeli identity through architecture, archaeology, and art, it is yet to take into account the role of the largely diasporic Jewish population in shaping identity through tourist consumption. By analyzing the Jewish tourist’s experience in Israel, my research examines the ways in which differing narratives of Jewishness vie for representation through commodities marketed to diasporic visitors and, in turn, the means by which such products strengthen the tourist’s connection to the state. While engaging with critical theory that addresses tourism and diaspora studies and the cooptation of indigenous ephemera for the purpose of marketing, this project utilizes interviews and site visits conducted in Israel/Palestine to explore trends in luxury consumption—from the purchasing of Dead Sea products to the expansion of luxury wineries across the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights—as integral to ways in which visiting Jews build connections to Israel as a contemporary, dynamic state during tourist experiences. Influenced by scholarship that considers sites such as archaeological digs and museums as loci of colonial knowledge in their attempt to establish scientific and indisputable evidence about the society at hand, I examine the ways in which concepts of belonging are mobilized in the construction of tourist sites to prove Jewish indigeneity and exalt Jewish history and contemporary culture. Crucial to my analysis is how high-end souvenirs, artisanal products, and experiences such as tour packages act as a contemporary iteration of the Zionist trope of “working the soil with one’s own hands,” thus allowing vacationers to feel as though they are personally partaking in the continuation and flourishing of the Jewish homeland, and collectively fortifying dominant narratives of a Jewish right to the land.

Of all of the cities that fell under Jordanian control as a result of the Palestine War in 1948, Hebron and Bethlehem came under special circumstances in 1948-1949 due to the vagaries of war. During the fighting, the Arab armies had little organization among themselves in defending Palestine against the forces of the newly established state of Israel. Egypt had both its regular army and unofficial forces of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, including in Bethlehem Hebron, and Jordan had its Arab Legion forces in the country. These two states both ended up occupying these two important southern Palestinian cities, by 22 October 1948, after segments of Egypt’s forces got cut off from the rest of its army following an attack by Israel on Egypt’s positions in the Naqab at which time Jordan’s forces came to help stabilize control over those cities. The result came to be called the “Dual Era,” or, in Jordanian documentation al-‘ahd al-thunā’ī. This arrangement was unusual to these cities, indeed, seemingly unique in all of Palestine. Each country competed for the backing of the Palestinian population, the latter left without a local leadership and stuck between two countries vying for control in cities where war with Israel seem to have been only one priority. Their control also seems to have extended to Bi’r al-Saba`, but, based on the writings of Jordanian, Palestinian, and Egyptian chroniclers and Palestinian diarists of the period, as well as Jordanian documents, the sources examined in this paper, Hebron seems to have been the focus of the military and political administrators. This study explores the Dual Era in Hebron, which lasted until May 1949, and Jordanian-Egyptian relations vis-à-vis each other and the Palestinian population over which they ruled. The paper also examines how the bureaucracy might have functioned during this uncertain period, which followed the British Mandate-era during which Palestinians staffed the administration. The very title of “Dual Era” suggests that there might have been collaboration and cooperation with two militaries and two military governors overseeing Hebron. Preliminary analysis of the sources, however, demonstrates tension more than cooperation between the two ruling entities in Hebron, a sentiment transmitted to the indigenous Palestinian population who felt they had to take a side in this charged environment.

In May 2013, hundreds of human remains were discovered in a mass grave at the local Muslim cemetery in the city of Jaffa. As the news of the grim discovery circulated in the city, many residents turned to their elders for answers to the question on everyone’s mind: who are those buried in a nameless tomb and how did they get there? The consensus reached by Palestinian historians, dignitaries and Islamic movement officials is that the remains should be traced back to 1948, to the period just before and following the fall of the city to Zionist hands and the mass exodus of its residents. In the age of ‘free flowing information’ and the opening up of public access to knowledge about the past, how come, then, that a local story of massacre remained hidden and unknown so long, claimed doubters? Indeed, just like the skeletons, this buried history of catastrophe and trauma had to be excavated and revealed in order to become public knowledge. This paper is about the ways in which the post-Nakba Israeli state enabled these processes of public forgetfulness that produced, on the one hand, a tangible reality of occupied urban spaces and the ability to “bury” histories of mass expulsion, organized violence and en-masse appropriation of material goods, houses and lands, on the other. These processes, produced through the projection of the state’s military and political powers, aspired to reshape material realities, reconstitute Jaffa, a Palestinian-Arab urban centre, into a Jewish-majority decrepit suburb of Tel Aviv, and moreover – make this transformation assume the guise of normality. The making of the “new normal” in Jaffa, then, constitutes normalizing occupation, in ways that convincingly submerged the “newness” of a rapid and radical urban transformation. The work that the “new normal” does is turning urban residents into active agents in maintaining the status quo on behalf of the state; at the same time, this project also aims to foreclose alternative visions for the city and its people.

Many scholars have argued that the spirit of protest that animated student activists worldwide in the 1960s and 1970s passed over Israel's student population aside from a limited few leading radical groups on the margins of Israeli political life. However, the "spirit of 1968" manifested itself quite prominently in Israel in the 1970s in groups who chose to channel dissident political initiatives through traditional venues of student organization. One such group, the Jewish-Arab group called "Yesh", won a commanding electoral victory in the Student Union of the University of Haifa in 1972. Unlike most Israeli Student Union factions at the time, however, Yesh neither associated with outside parties or groups, nor did it restrict its agenda to matters explicitly relating to students’ interests. Instead, the group issued a vocal call for comprehensive change in Israeli society that was reminiscent of the “spirit of 1968.” Moreover, Yesh`s rhetoric and activities contrast with widely-held notions about Israeli Student Unions, organizational frameworks that both scholarly and popular observers have disregarded as ineffectual bodies that are usually subjected to the co-optation of mainstream Israeli political parties. Not only was Yesh comprised of broad coalition of Arab and Jewish Zionists, non-Zionists, and anti-Zionists, the group attained a level of electoral support in the Haifan Student Unions that was proportionally much higher than that of contemporaneous far left-wing factions in Israel’s Knesset and than that of radical extraparliamentary movements like Matspen and Siah that have received considerably more scholarly attention. Drawing on documents from the Israel State Archive and student newspapers, this paper will also illustrate two broader points. First, it shows how traditional institutions like Israeli Universities and their Student Unions can be appropriated as venues of political dissent and divergence from the behavioral conventions and partisan associations of a state's mainstream political culture. Second, based on previously classified documents, this study will use the rise of Yesh as an example of how the Israeli General Security Service`s (Shabak or GSS) attempts at political pressure and control have at times resulted in the utter opposite of their intended effect.