cultural anthropologist, and an award winning teacher, researching linkages between culture and politics in Israel in the context of the Israeli military occupation and legacy of the Palestinian dispossession. I am the author and/or editor of five books in the field of anti-colonial Israel/Palestine studies: Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2021), which studies the Israeli military occupation in the age of the global smartphone and viral image; Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age (co-authored with Adi Kuntsman; Stanford University Press, 2015), which studies the ways that social media has altered the Israeli relationship to its military occupation, in both state and civilian contexts; Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism (Duke University Press, 2008) which considers the relationship between tourism, mobility politics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the coeditor of Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2005) with Ted Swedenburg; and the co-editor of The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005 with Joel Beinin (Stanford University Press, 2006).
Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism pdf by Rebecca Stein
InItineraries in Conflict, Rebecca L. Stein argues that through tourist practices—acts of cultural consumption, routes and imaginary voyages to neighboring Arab countries, culinary desires—Israeli citizens are negotiating Israel’s changing place in the contemporary Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted throughout the last decade, Stein analyzes the divergent meanings that Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel have attached to tourist cultures, and she considers their resonance with histories of travel in Israel, its Occupied Territories, and pre-1948 Palestine. Stein argues that tourism’s cultural performances, spaces, souvenirs, and maps have provided Israelis in varying social locations with a set of malleable tools to contend with the political changes of the last decade: the rise and fall of a Middle East Peace Process (the Oslo Process), globalization and neoliberal reform, and a second Palestinian uprising in 2000.
Combining vivid ethnographic detail, postcolonial theory, and readings of Israeli and Palestinian popular texts, Stein considers a broad range of Israeli leisure cultures of the Oslo period with a focus on the Jewish desires for Arab things, landscapes, and people that regional diplomacy catalyzed. Moving beyond conventional accounts, she situates tourism within a broader field of “discrepant mobility,” foregrounding the relationship between histories of mobility and immobility, leisure and exile, consumption and militarism. She contends that the study of Israeli tourism must open into broader interrogations of the Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian dispossession, and Israel’s future in the Arab Middle East.Itineraries in Conflictis both a cultural history of the Oslo process and a call to fellow scholars to rethink the contours of the Arab-Israeli conflict by considering the politics of popular culture in everyday Israeli and Palestinian lives.