Watching US Television From Palestine-A. Bishara

Watching U.S.
Television from the Palestinian Street: The Media, the State, and
Representational Interventions
Author(s): Amahl Bishara
Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Aug., 2008), pp. 488-530
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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WATCHINGU.S. TELEVISION FROM THE
PALESTININlAN STREE: The Media, the State,
and Repr n . tational Interventions
...... . E. i.:....... . . .. . . . . .............
... ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ..........
AMAHL BISHARA
University of Chicago
Anthropologists and other scholars of media have attended to the role of

media representations in the production and reproduction of national iden
but they have less consistently examined the role of governing authoritie
the state not just as regulators of media but also as representational instit
acting on the same terrain as the media institutions themselves. Governm
and media representations are coimplicated both in terms of political stra
and on-the-ground processes. Journalists rely on officials for quotes, and o
rely on journalists for their broadcasting networks. Rather than seeing m
and political institutions of representation as potentially or ideally indepe
from one another as we might in the model of an "objective" or even a "f
press I propose the examination of media and governing institutions a
engaged in overlapping projects. The ultimate prizes of such projects includ
the capacity to produce truth and also the ability to make other things h
alongside the production of truth, like the maintenance of order in a cro
the provisioning or withholding of foreign aid. This dynamic functions in diff
ways for strong states like the United States as compared to weak states or s
institutions like the Palestinian Authority (PA), but it deserves examinati
both kinds of locations. Global media institutions that manage distinct relati
with various states are an especially interesting locus for investigation. W
foreign correspondents live and work in one society while regularly writ
their audiences in another, which is usually their long-term home. Moreo
covering diplomatic developments they often must gather information from o
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 23, Issue 3, pp. 488-530. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. (C
the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10. 1525/can.2008.23.3.488.
U.S. TELEVISION FROM A PALESTINIAN STREET
of their base country as well as of the country in which they are stationed. Media
often act as conduits through which these officials carry out their relationships with
each other.
In this essay, I analyze two events: PA President Yasser Arafat's funeral
in November 2004 and the subsequent presidential elections of January 2005.
Both events thrust Palestinians into a global spotlight and, unlike Israeli invasions
or Palestinian suicide bombings, also offered PA officials a coveted opportunity
to proactively shape news narratives for the U.S. press. It will become clear
that in these events, U.S. media were as much actors as audience, whether or
not journalists and editors intended to be so. These connections between the
foreign press and official Palestinian representatives were further complicated by
the participation of other Palestinians, who were ostensibly the subjects of both
representational projects, although in different ways. The content of international
media representations of the funeral and the elections hinged to a considerable
degree, but by no means entirely on Palestinians' collective public actions, as
did the forms of political representation that emerged from these events. What
Palestinians did on these two occasions must be seen in the context of their political
relationships to the PA and to foreign media institutions. Palestinian actions were
in part a response to their variable assessments of the worth of local popular
participation, on the one hand, and the value of performing for an international
audience, on the other hand. These were two competing local regimes of value
that, it seemed, could not always be seamlessly integrated.
According to widespread epistemologies in the United States and elsewhere,
the press and the government ideally engage in two separate kinds of representation,
such that the goal of the government is to represent by acting on behalf of its
constituencies, whereas the press primarily represents by depicting the world
in a transparent and referential manner (Peterson 2001). These institutions may
encounter criticism if they overstep their presumed representational boundaries.
When a government becomes too involved in depicting the world for the purposes
of promoting itself, this is sometimes derisively called "spin."' When a media
institution is accused of not representing issues transparently, it is often said to be
"biased," or to be practicing "advocacy journalism" (Rosen 1999). The normative
form of governmental representation corresponds to what Bruno Latour calls
"the ways to gather the legitimate people around some issue" (Latour 2005:16)
whether through a state, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), or the PA a
kind of representation generally legitimized by the processes of representation, like
voting. I call this representation-as-gathering. Media representation corresponds to
489
CULTUML ANTHROPOLOGY 23:3
Latour's description of a second basic kind of representation that "presents or

rather represents what is the object of concern to the eyes and ears of those who have
been assembled around it" (Latour 2005:16). I call this representation-as-depicting.

Of course, these two forms of representation regularly comingle with one another,
and not just for news media and governments. This is, indeed, part of Latour's
point, that these two kinds of representation "have been kept separate in theory
although they have remained always mixed in practice" (Latour 2005:16).2 Any
depiction, like a photograph or a painting, gathers its elements together in a single
frame; many gatherings, like protests and congresses, are performative in that they
are consciously envisioned by their participants to be future depictions. However,

by distinguishing these two processes at the outset of the paper, it becomes easier
to track the ways in which they are interwoven in practice.
In differentiating between these two forms of representation, Latour is most
interested in challenging presumptions about what kinds of representations-as

gathering are most legitimate. He suggests that perhaps the intermingling of these
two kinds of representation should be recognized, and that spaces of gathering
should be legitimized precisely by the things that are depicted-the matters of
concern rather than by prestructured processes, in what he calls an "object
oriented democracy." The object-oriented democracy bears a similarity to Fraser's
concept of the transnational public sphere (Fraser 2003, 2005), as both concepts
are concerned with issues that gather people together across state boundaries, like
global warming, representations of Muhammad, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Latour notes that although people are brought together by these matters of concern,
this by no means guarantees harmony, because people approach them with disparate
passions and ideas.
He calls for object-oriented democracies because, in his estimation, forms of
politics legitimized by predetermined processes and official spaces such as legis
latures and UN sessions have failed too often. For instance, he is critical of the
representational ideologies that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on
when he delivered his 2003 speech to the UN Security Council justifying the U.S.
invasion of Iraq. Powell, speaking as a representative of the only superpower in a
preeminent locus of international diplomacy, enjoyed tremendous authority dur
ing and, indeed, by way of these gatherings. Yet, what he said with this clout did
not actually depict the world accurately. Latour comments on Powell's speech:
"[Powell's slide presentation] was prefaced by these words: 'My colleagues, every
statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not
. assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid
490
intelligence' ([Latour's] emphasis). Never has the difference between facts and
assertions been more abused than on this day" (Latour 2005:18). Latour suggests
that we revive our analytics of rhetoric and sophistry, asking, "Can we trace again
the frail conduits through which truths and proofs are allowed to enter the sphere
of politics?" (2005:19).
In lieu of practices that rely on presanctioned authority of representation
as-gathering to abuse powers of representation-as-depiction, Latour's proposed
object-oriented democracy takes advantage of "those makeshift assemblies we call
markets, technologies, science, ecological crises, wars and terrorist networks"
(Latour 2005:37) as locations for doing politics, even though each of these as
semblies contains many divisions. News media, which are not a focus of Latour's
article, also function as makeshift assemblies, bringing together the people and
governments represented in the news, those who write and edit the stories, and
those who read the stories, whether for entertainment, knowledge, or as a basis
for policymaking. However, news media do this work of gathering and depicting
in ways structured by journalistic values, the exigencies of journalistic practice,
and the legal frameworks and broader cultural norms of the locations in which
journalists work. They thus have complex relationships to the formally legitimized
locations of representation-as-gathering about which Latour issues his caution, such
as states.
The structural authority of Colin Powell's modes of representation made his
assertions seem credible although they were not. Palestinians are in the opposite
predicament. For decades Palestinians have faced significant problems of represen
tation, both in terms of gathering and depiction. From the time of the founding
of the PLO in 1964 through the late 1980s, one of the PLO's primary struggles,
led by Yasser Arafat, was to establish that Palestinians were a national group, and
that the PLO represented them (Khalidi 2006; Said 1992). With U.S. recognition
of the PLO in 1988, and with the establishment of the PA in 1993 following
preliminary negotiations with Israel, Palestinians gained a relatively stable means
of representing themselves to and within a world of states, and it became widely
acknowledged that Palestinians were a national group.
Since the breakdown of negotiations between Israel and the PLO in July 2000
and the beginning of the second intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occu
pation, in September 2000, Palestinian leaders' ability to appropriately represent
their people has been called into question. Just a few weeks after the collapse
of negotiations, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who had been Arafat's
negotiating partner, suggested that Israel might have "no partner" on the Palestinian
491
CUTJURAL ANTHROPOL-OGY 223::3
side with whom to make peace (Deutsche Presse-Agentur 2000), and he hardened
this rhetoric at the start of the second intifada (Weymouth 2000a). This phrase was
also picked up by U.S. columnists after the second intifada began, as when New
York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asked, "What do you do when there is no
partner for peace and there is no alternative to peace? Mourn the dead. Mourn
the dead and pray that after this explosion of hatred is over, the parties will find a
way to live apart" (Friedman 2000; see also Will 2000). In July 2001, Ehud Barak
published an op-ed entitled "Israel Needs a True Partner for Peace" (Barak 2001),
and his successor, Ariel Sharon adopted this claim as well (Ephron 2002). During
the intifada, Israeli leaders and their supporters mobilized this assertion that they
had no one with whom to negotiate to justify Israel's attacks on Palestinian cities
(Gordon 2004).
Similarly, in 2002, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak drew on long-standing
stereotypes of Arabs to contend in an interview published in the New York Review of
Books that Arafat and his people were naturally inclined to lie. He suggested that this
explained their failure to come to a peace agreement. Interviewer and prominent

Israeli historian Benny Morris describes how Ehud Barak recounted the events:
"Repeatedly ... Barak shook his head in bewilderment and sadness-at what he
regards as Palestinian, and especially Arafat's, mendacity: 'They are products of
a culture in which to tell a lie . . . creates no dissonance [Morris's ellipsis]. They
don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture"'
(Morris 2002). This accusation drew on long-standing Orientalist stereotypes
(Moughrabi 1978) that are finding renewed circulation, as evidenced by the recent
reissuing of one of the key texts making such claims, Raphael Patai's The Arab
Mind (2002). As these examples show, many debates about Palestinians' ability
to represent themselves have happened in and by way of elite U.S. news media
outlets like the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Washington Post.
These are relevant forums because the United States exerts considerable power
over both Israel and the PA, and because U.S. news discourse is an important
point of departure for discussions carried out by U.S. political scientists and policy
makers in other venues.
This network of official statements, news media publications, and political
actions is difficult to trace, and often taken for granted. Moreover, scholars often
reproduce journalists' tendency to focus on elite actors. Hence, in this essay I
approach international media by ethnographically studying the sites of connection
among the U.S. media, the statelike government of the PA, and its constituents.
My own fieldwork on journalistic practices in the West Bank has been enriched by
492
other multidisciplinary scholarship on journalism. Classic sociological studies have

examined how U.S. journalists work within media institutions (Fishman 1980;
Gans 1979; Tuchman 1978), and anthropological approaches have considered the
relationships among news media, the state, and national cultures (Boyer 2005b;
Hasty 2005). Both anthropologists and journalists have analyzed the work of for
eign correspondents (Garrels 2003; Hannerz 2004; Hedges 2002; Pedelty 1995;
Rosenblum 1979). In studies of domestic U.S. journalism, scholars have examined
the relationship between the media and the state in various ways, for example by
analyzing how news coverage has shaped political movements (Gitlin 1980) and
policy debates (Gans 2003; Hertsgaard 1988; Mermin 1999). Robert McChes
ney has argued that the U.S. media, which are often imagined to be independent
because of the relative lack of regulation of media companies, have nonetheless
been shaped by liberal and neoliberal policies that have lead to commercialization
and consolidation of media (McChesney 2004). This reminds us that even when
there seem to be few tethers between the government and the media, a great
need for interrogation of this relationship remains. Similar to my argument, al
though with disparate methodology and topic matter, political scientist Timothy
Cook contends that in the United States, the news media and the government are
coproduced (Cook 1998).
For the Palestinians, unlike for most Americans, the media of another society
is of tremendous significance.4 These media do not only represent what the PA
does; U.S. media, through their discourse and through Palestinians' imaginings
of their discourse, affect PA actions and how Palestinians constitute themselves
as a polity. In quite a different way than most Americans, Palestinians are both
aware of the significance of the U.S. news media, and wary of the limits of
media and political representation. Viewing elite political debates alongside street
politics elucidates both kinds of processes, and allows us to analyze "how the
state tries to make itself real ... [and] how the state appears in everyday and
localized forms" (Hansen and Stepputat 2001:5). Likewise, doing an ethnography
of U. S. world news that is ensconced on location in a foreign society helps us
to understand international journalism as a set of practices structured by U.S.
institutions, professional ideologies, and global politics, but carried out through
day-to-day endeavors that necessitate contact between journalists and those they are
depicting. Pressing Latour's insights onto new terrain, we find that comingling the
two forms of representation does not always result in democratic forms, because
when people gather around an object of concern, they do so with such different
tools at their disposal.5
493
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:3
PERFORMING STATEHOOD ON THE WORLD STAGE

For a long while, many Palestinian leaders and elites-with a telling exception
in the contemporary Hamas leadership-have been very responsive to certain
external views of the Palestinians.6 Especially since the 1990s, the Palestinian
leadership has had "a pragmatist, instrumental approach to the potential role of
the United States" in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Mansour 2005:162;
see also Said 2000:51-52). Palestinian leaders' approach apparently springs from
their belief that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a U.S. or international
priority, and thus that concessions will yield positive results for Palestinians (see
Textbox).
Palestinian Elites: NGOs and the Palestinian Authority (PA)

Contemporary Palestinian political elites are primarily housed in two distinct but
overlapping sectors, those in PA, and those in the secular NGO sector. Both rely on
connections with wealthy external institutions. Both are regarded with skepticism by many
Palestinians, because they are viewed as corrupt or as more accountable to Western funding
organizations than to local Palestinians. Political scientist Joseph Massad provocatively writes
of Palestinian intellectuals as having a role in the "import-export" sector:
They export opinion polls, sociological data, official apologies, and personal memoirs,
in addition to their own voices and images, which are featured in the New York Times, on
CNN television, and on speaking tours in the United States. They import International
Monetary Fund (IMF) ideas, World Bank plans, international invitations, USAID
sponsored training, Western funding for their local institutions, and Western public
and media accolades. [Massad 1997:35]
Massad suggests that this representational work has had concrete rewards for individ
uals, but that these exports have not actually helped Palestinian society in its primary goal of
ending Israeli occupation.
The category of the elite, which is difficult to translate into Arabic in terms of both
denotation and connotation, can be contrasted with the Palestinian concept of "sha'bi," or
"the popular," a term with moral as well as social weight in Palestinian society. The popular is
associated with the poorer classes and notions of the traditional. It is also closely linked to the
popular resistance of the first intifada (1987-93), which is often called an intifaada sha'biyya.
In contrast to the second "armed intifada" (int!faada musallaha), this popular uprising actively
involved wide segments of the population in both protests and NGOs that did everything
from organize home schools to provide health care. Moreover, the first intifada is known
to have been led by Palestinians from the popular classes, and indeed to have shifted social
hierarchies in Palestinian politics for this reason.
Many of the PA's political elite, especially those often referred to as Fateh's "old
guard," or "older generation," are PLO officials and activists who were permitted to return
494
U.S. TELEVISlON FROM A PALESTINIAN STREET
to the West Bank and Gaza from other parts of the Arab world as part of the Oslo Accords in
1993. Therefore, most of them did not participate in the first intifada. They dominated the
PA until Hamas wrested control of Gaza in June 2007, and they continue to occupy positions
of power in the West Bank. In part because of their lack of participation in popular politics,
they have increasingly been viewed with skepticism by those who grew up in the Occupied
Territories and who led the first intifada (Tamari 2002). The PA has also been known for
corruption, which was a major political issue before and during the second intifada. The
PA leadership has always depended on Western powers for legitimacy and economic aid,
but their dependence increased exponentially during the economic collapse of the second
intifada. Politically, too, the intifada put the PA leadership in an especially difficult position.
They never fully supported armed operations in part because to do so would risk their foreign
support and thus their institutional survival. But lacking popular credentials, they were also
unable to halt armed attacks or to redirect the energies of the intifada to an unarmed uprising.
The secular NGO sector works on issues as diverse as women's rights in Palestinian
society, human rights abuses of the PA and Israel, health care, popular political organizing,
and cultural affairs. This sector has been transformed since the period of the first intifada
by waves of PA repression of political opposition and also by the growing prospects for
international funding under the Oslo framework. Secular NGOs are populated in large part
by former activists from the first intifada, and especially by leftists whose parties have been
severely weakened since 1993. Larger NGOs are sometimes seen as distant from popular
movements because they are funded primarily by international organizations that, according
to popular perceptions and some analysts, come to guide their priorities (Allen 2007; Hanafi
and Tabar 2005). Although they are not generally accused of being corrupt in the same sense
as the PA, critics suggest that some of these organizations are like dakaakin, or shops, more
concerned about their institutional success than their missions. This group of NGOs can be
distinguished from Islamist NGOs, which have a more prominent role in Gaza, and which
have continued grassroots support. Evaluations of these NGOs, in which supporters praise
incorruptibility and willingness to serve people's basic needs, demonstrate that the notion of
the popular still resonates powerfully in the Occupied Territories as a measure of legitimacy,
though mapping its terrain is a complicated endeavor.
The PLO leadership's decision to sign the Oslo Accords in 1993 and establish
the PA can be seen as a prime moment in a pattern of seeking the succor of powerful
foreign bodies. After support from revolutionary movements and Third World
countries had waned, the PLO, which defined itself as a revolutionary liberation
organization, largely ceded its space on the world stage to the PA, an administrative
body merely in control of domestic matters in parts of the West Bank and Gaza.
The millions of Palestinians living outside of PA limits, as in Lebanon, Jordan, and
Israel, were politically marginalized. This marked a portentous transition in terms
of the Palestinians' representation-as-gathering. Before the establishment of the
PA, the PLO had gathered virtually all Palestinians under the same umbrella, but,
495
CUL.TURAL ANTHROPOLOG(SY 3
deemed a terrorist organization for most of its existence, it was generally unable
to speak for Palestinians in the places that mattered. The PA won the Palestinian
leadership the authority to speak for Palestinians in multiple rounds of negotiations
with Israel, but effective power and real statehood remained elusive.
PA leaders essentially decided to perform statehood and their belonging in the
"national order of things" (Malkki 1995), despite ongoing Israeli occupation. Under
the PA, the "state-in-waiting" or "state-in-exile," as Palestinian analysts had dubbed
the PLO's decades-long enterprise of institution-building in Lebanon and Tunisia
(Aruri 2003; Sayigh 2000), came to resemble a kind of "theater state" (Geertz 1980;
see also Coronil 1997; Hasty 2005; Wedeen 2003). Unlike in Geertz's instance,
the theater was most effective for an outside audience. As internal critics pointed
out in interviews with me, during the Oslo period, PA officials had little use for
the word "occupation," because PA leaders were gaining not only official titles but
also, in many cases, company franchises and luxury cars from their positions in the
PA. Their failure to emphasize that Israeli occupation had not ended was one reason
that the very word "occupation" made only rare appearances in U.S. journalism
(Ackerman 2001).
Reporters for Western news organizations, in carrying out conventional jour
nalistic practices, tacitly contributed to this performance. These reporters included
Palestinians, North Americans, and Europeans (Bishara 2006). For years, journal
ists attended press conferences in Ramallah that produced the same style of news as
press conferences in any capital city, and they wrote about Arafat as the "president"
of the PA. Most journalists rely to a great extent on official sources because they offer
readily available and, by definition, newsworthy material (Fishman 1980:51; Gans
1979:283; Mermin 1999; Pedelty 1995:87); as a result, officials' statements and
their institutions accumulate power by way of news publications. The norms of
news writing, which favor events like press conferences and explosions, did not
generally permit inclusion of details and explication of long-term trends that would
communicate to international readers how the PA was in fact much less than a state,
and Arafat less than a president. It was easy to write about what PA officials did and
said, but much harder to write about the limitations of their power, despite the
fact that these limitations were eminently visible in everyday life in the West Bank.
While Western journalists were covering the high diplomacy of negotiations that
were supposed to lead to statehood, Palestinians could observe that Israel was con
tinuing to build settlements and roads in the Occupied Territories. A British study
revealed that in 2001, only 9 percent of polled newsreaders in Britain knew that
Israelis were the occupiers of the Palestinian territories, and that the settlers were
496
Israeli rather than Palestinian (Philo and Berry 2004:217). These misconceptions
were spurred in part because of news writing conventions common to U.S. and
British news that privilege the creation of a balanced narrative of two similar sides,
and often neglect historical contexts (McChesney 2004; Philo and Berry 2004).
These conventions that define what constitutes news can make structures of
political representation, like the PA, seem more secure than they actually are. In
another context, sociologist and journalist Olav Velthuis describes a situation in
which journalists understood that they could not report on certain material that
exposed gaps in officials' basic ability to represent. It was impossible to note in
print, for example, that Zambia's ambassador to the World Trade Organization
read a statement at a press conference that had been written by Oxfam, and not by
his own government, even though his speech was almost the same as a press release
issued by the NGO, and even though Oxfam workers were better able to answer
questions after the ambassador spoke than he himself was (Velthuis 2006:142).
Journalism scholar Timothy Cook correctly emphasizes that these processes are
an effect of journalistic norms, rather than individual journalists' intentions: "By
following standard routines of newsmaking, journalists end up hiding their influence
not only from outside actors but also from themselves" (Cook 1998:5; see also
Fishman 1980:84). These journalists' labor is part of the work that defines the
state in relation to the society and the "community of nations" (Ferguson and
Gupta 2002; Mitchell 1991), even, or especially, when the state's existence is so
profoundly up for debate.
"ARAFAT IS ALL OF THE PEOPLE, AND THE PEOPLE CANNOT DIE"

The funeral of Yasser Arafat was a public, obviously newsworthy event during
which officials and other Palestinians endeavored to gather in ways they saw as
legitimate. They knew these gatherings would simultaneously produce depictions
that might-or might not be appealing for influential outside audiences. During
my fieldwork, I realized that to do an ethnography of U.S. journalism, it was
essential for me to spend time with Palestinians in ways that U.S. journalists and
even many of the Palestinian reporters who held top positions with these U.S.
institutions did not. I had decided that in addition to reading press reports and
talking to journalists about the funeral, I should experience it with Palestinians
who would be involved with whatever gathering might take place, who were not
journalists and who did not regularly traffic in connections with influential outsiders.
It was these Palestinians who were in a sense being courted for representation by
both the U.S. media and the Palestinian Authority.
497
CULTUML ANTHROPOLOGY 23:3
Thus, the evening before Arafat's funeral, I was with a group of Bethlehem
refugees in the home of one of their sisters in Ramallah, where the funeral would
be. The people I chose to accompany to the funeral occupied an important position
in the landscape of contemporary Palestinian politics. All of them were refugees
whose parents or grandparents had left their villages in 1947-48 under duress and
who had never been allowed to return by the newly formed Israeli state. Palestinian
refugees number more than 4.4 million, including approximately 1.7 million living
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Refugees' claim of a right to return is perhaps
the most contentious issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has been a major
precept of Palestinian nationalism, and yet the vast majority of Israelis believe that
the return of these refugees is untenable because a potential influx of so many
Palestinians would mean the end to a majority Jewish state (Pappe 2006). Today,
many pragmatist PA leaders speak about the idea of the right of return, but at
the same time hint at approaches to the refugee problem that would not lead to
the actual return of refugees to their home villages and cities, such as an Israeli
recognition of Palestinian refugees' right to return paired with compensation to
Palestinians for their displacement (Said 2005).7
Not only do refugees as people who often identify with and are categorized
by this political identity index this contentious political debate, but refugees,
especially those living in refugee camps, also inhabit a particular place in the social
fabric of the West Bank and Gaza. More than 650,000, including my contacts
from Bethlehem, live in spatially segregated, overcrowded, and disproportionately
impoverished refugee camps (Al-Saleh 2007). Although refugees are symbolically
important to the Palestinian struggle, the camps are viewed by many of their
Palestinian neighbors as sites of chaos and stagnation, and they are viewed as having
a problematic relationship to international aid (Feldman 2007). Refugees often
point out that although they have made many sacrifices for the nation in both the
first and second intifadas, they remain marginalized within Palestinian society.
My contacts were in a position to offer thoughtful critiques of contemporary
Palestinian politics. All had been politically active, and the older two, in their
mid-thirties, had spent years in Israeli prisons for their participation in the first
intifada. Now, all volunteered in a politically independent youth center, and no one
except the youngest, a teenager, took part directly in party politics. For teenagers
from the refugee camp, involvement in party politics and active resistance was not
only a rite of passage (Peteet 2000), it was also a primary mode of sociality. The
others, though, were reluctant to invest their energies in a political structure that
seemed so empty. Indeed, by this time in the second intifada, many Palestinians had
498
grown cynical about PA politics (Allen 2006). For all of the men, work with the
youth center was their way of promoting positive social and, they hoped, eventual
political change outside the framework of existing parties. One, Jawad, who had
been a leader of the first intifada, was especially ardent in articulating that he had
established the youth center because he found party politics to be so corrupt and
so hopeless.
These men's desire to attend the funeral might seem to be in conflict with
their skepticism about contemporary Palestinian politics, but it also emerged from
their convictions and their biographies. Having lived their entire lives with Arafat
as a political leader, they saw his passing as a major life event. They also simply
wanted to show him respect, although they did not approve of all of his decisions
as a leader. Moreover, it was obvious from their frequent attendance of martyr
funerals, protests, and rallies, and even their constant and active gathering of
information during the hottest of Israeli military incursions, that they enjoyed
being in the thick of things. They valued participation for its own sake. This seemed
to be both a personal proclivity and a political stance, given the shift in the second
intifada away from the popular forms of uprising prized during the first intifada,
and toward forms of resistance that actively involved a smaller number of people
(Bishara 2008; Johnson and Kuttab 2001). Their zeal to be on the scene was, on
this and other occasions, my good fortune.8
The night before the funeral, we settled down with Jawad's sister and her
family to watch one of the most popular Ramadan serials of the year, Taghriba
Filastiniyya (The Palestinian Diaspora). Ramadan serials are one of the most popular
forms of entertainment media in the Arab world, and the West Bank is no exception
(Abu-Lughod 2005). While in Egypt, national productions have dominated this
media form, PA television does not have the resources for such undertakings, and
so Palestinians tend to watch serials produced in other parts of the Arab world
on satellite television. This Syrian-produced epic, broadcast on the premier Saudi
satellite station MBC, chronicled a Palestinian family's experiences as villagers
near the coastal city of Haifa in the early 1920s, as refugees in the Jordanian
controlled West Bank from 1948 to 1967, and finally as subjects of Israeli occupation
immediately after the 1967 war. By coincidence, this episode considered the proper
behavior of Palestinians in relation to foreign journalists.
In the show, a Western photographer had come to take pictures in the fam
ily's refugee camp. One Palestinian man was showing him around, pointing out the
crowded, substandard housing, the open gutter running through the middle of the
camp, an inadequately clothed toddler playing in the street. A younger Palestinian
499
CUJLTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23 3
man castigated the guide for showing off their misery. He mocked the photogra
pher with exaggerated expressions of destitution, anger, and powerlessness that
he thought epitomized what the journalist desired. I was captivated especially
because my hosts occasionally gave similar tours of their refugee camp to visiting
internationals as part of their volunteering with the youth center. Did they feel
castigated? By the end of the episode, I was relieved to see that the younger man
who had made fun of the journalist had reconciled with his friend the guide, and
admitted that his behavior had been impulsive and foolish.
There were several reasons why a scene about eliciting Western journalists'
attention was so resonant. Palestinians understand that they cannot effect signif
icant change-for example establishing a Palestinian state or even changing the
route of the separation barrier by way of the structurally feeble PA (Roy 2001) .9
This, along with the PA's own repression of journalists,10 weakens the role of the
Palestinian national press, which ideally would be a forum for bringing different
perspectives on issues of national importance within the view of PA leaders (Jamal
2005). Palestinians and here, as in most of the essay, I am referring primarily
to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza, and not
to Palestinian citizens of Israel likewise know that there is no clear mechanism
by which they can lobby the Israeli government about these crucial issues. Many
Palestinians, for somewhat different reasons than their leaders, have therefore
come to believe that their political futures will likely be shaped by outside ac
tors, the United States foremost among them, whether this is in a positive or a
negative way, whether because of these institutions' action or inaction (Mansour
2005). "
Another reason that Palestinians continue to regard the international com
munity (often glossed in Arabic as "the world," a]-'aalim) with interest is that
the international community, often in the form of the Western media, so thor
oughly persists in showing them regard. Palestinians living in Ramallah, Bethlehem,
Nablus, or Gaza can expect to see journalists regularly, and it is not unusual for
Palestinians to be interviewed, if they are prominent activists, if tragedy has struck
their families, even if a child passing by a journalist's camera is particularly eager.
Even though many Palestinians have ascertained that global coverage has not aided
them in recent years, many continue to insist to the journalists that they meet
that they should cover their political situation in a sympathetic way. Palestinians'
widespread accord with the argument that "the world" must be convinced of the
justice of their cause enables an extraordinary role for the Western press, as we
will see.'2
500
This diffuse concern for foreign representation also informs my choice of

terminology here. I have used several terms Western media, international me
dia, and U.S. media to refer to the foreign media in question. Although these
categories are both internally diverse and quite distinct from one another, this mul
tiplicity of terms reflects Palestinian views of and practices regarding the foreign
press. In the West Bank, the lines were often blurred between different European
and North American presses, which were the primary media that constituted the
foreign press corps. Palestinian journalists sometimes worked for more than one
of these media organizations. Likewise, Palestinians who spoke to representatives
of the international media did not always know the nationality of the organization
that they were addressing, especially if it was a Palestinian reporter conducting
the interview. The growing importance of wire service agencies and the trend
toward media convergence further complicates distinctions among international
media institutions; an article written by a wire service agency could be published
almost anywhere in the world (Baisnee and Marchetti 2006; Boczkowski in press;
Klinenberg 2005).
It is also possible that Palestinians spoke of the importance of "world" public
opinion not because they could not evaluate the differences among various media,
because many could, but because to delve into the specifics made their arguments
weaker, even to their own ears."3 For example, Palestinians tended to agree that
U. S. media were the most crucial of all the foreign presses, because of the U. S. role
in the Middle East, but they also generally thought that U.S. media organizations
were the least sympathetic to their perspectives. Thus to expect too much from the
U.S. press might be seen as naive. For these institutional, practical, and ideological
reasons, the overgeneralized categories of "international media" or "Western media"
had local salience.
In Ramallah the night before Arafat's funeral, my hosts saw the episode of
Taghriba Filastiniyya as a matter-of-fact reflection of the contemporary conundrums
they faced as they hosted internationals. These problems in some ways echoed quan
daries of newsmaking. They gave tours regardless of the enduring and unfounded
accusations from neighbors that they were receiving financial remuneration from
the visitors. At the same time, as tour guides they also had to manage the various
suspensions of pity, suspicion, surprise, and judgment that clouded the air when
Western visitors sized up the camp in relation to their expectations. During the
tours, visitors encountered poverty but not, in the case of this Bethlehem camp,
destitution; damage and decay, but not devastation.14 Not all political and eco
nomic troubles were visible on the surface of things. The lived realities of decades
501
of dispossession and occupation, and by this time even the aftermath of the major
Israeli invasions of Bethlehem and other cities in 2002, lacked the sharp edges
of new violence; things were worn down, less distinct. These same aspects that
rendered giving a tour of the camp difficult also made the camp less newsworthy,
given the tendency of news media to cover novel and explosive events rather than
long-term trends. The television episode about the visiting journalist passed almost
without comment, perhaps because news itself was routine. We talked and laughed
about small things, went to sleep late, and woke up tired, matching the mood of
the West Bank that fall of 2004.
Likewise, Arafat's death-although by all means a major news story had
the rundown quality of a death for which people had been waiting, and not only
because Arafat's health had been poor. Arafat had been a Palestinian leader for
40 years, and a major international figure for almost as long. After decades of U.S.
isolation on the basis of charges that Arafat was a terrorist, in 1988 U.S. President
Ronald Reagan authorized a dialogue with Arafat. Just six years after being invited
into the circle of international legitimacy, he won the Nobel Peace Prize, along
with Israeli leaders Shimon Peres and Yizhak Rabin, for signing the Oslo Accords.
However, by 2004, after accusations that he had directed suicide bombings during
the second intifada, his reputation in the West had once again plummeted. For
the last two years of his life, under Israeli threats of arrest or worse, he did not
leave his walled Ramallah compound, the Muqaata'a, except to be evacuated to a
Paris hospital shortly before his death. His reputation among Palestinians was also
tattered because of the PA's record of bad governance and his inability to protect
his own people during the last four years of the second intifada.
As Arafat's political and physical incapacity became more and more pro
nounced, Palestinians' disappointment in Arafat was leavened by their sense that
he at least suffered alongside them, abstemiously and under military siege, and at
least he appreciated their presence. In this sense Arafat could be considered a pop
ulist (sha 'bi) leader. Some of the same attributes for which Arafat was ridiculed for
example, his generous bestowal of kisses on visitors were at the same time part
of his charisma. The frivolous kisses were but damp mementos of his keenness for
receiving guests, even when, in semispontaneous gatherings, Palestinian visitors
arrived by scaling the walls of his compound against the wishes of his guards, as
happened on a few occasions during the second intifada. These were not sanctioned
or official representations-as-gatherings, but Arafat welcomed his people. Arafat
gathered and stood for his people in an intimate but not always effective fashion.
. In his death, Palestinians identified with the father of their nation more than they
502
lionized him, in wide recognition of the fact that he had failed in such significant
ways to represent them. After all, many Palestinians who had been involved in
national struggle felt that they had failed, too.15
The new PA leadership, consisting primarily of people who had returned
to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from exile during the Oslo period, was
much less populist and even more pragmatic in its orientation than Arafat. For
the funeral, these leaders had planned a private event in which Arafat's body was
to be flown in from abroad, following small formal ceremonies in France and
Egypt, and buried in the Muqaata'a. This plan did not fulfill Arafat's stated wishes
to be buried in Jerusalem, which Israeli officials forbade. So Palestinian officials
declared the gravesite to be a temporary one, imported soil from Jerusalem, and
proclaimed that Arafat's body would be moved to Jerusalem once a Palestinian
state was established. Officials and dignitaries alone were invited to witness the
burial. Only after Arafat had been interred was the Palestinian public to be allowed
to form a line to pass by the grave.
This plan incorporated none of the rituals of a Palestinian martyr's funeral,
which normally consists of a large public procession accompanying the body from a
town center to its final resting place. 16 Many observers presumed that with this plan,
PA officials sought an orderly event rather than a procession in which mourners

might chant slogans unappealing to Western audiences. Officials might even have
feared, as my hosts speculated, that were there to be a procession, the people
might march not to the "temporary grave" in Ramallah, but to the checkpoint on
the way to Jerusalem in an attempt to carry out Arafat's last wishes. Leaders whose
international stature depends on the maintenance of order would surely wish to
avoid such risks.
My hosts and I had arrived in Ramallah the night before the funeral, because
we were unsure whether or not the checkpoints would be open the next day.
Israeli checkpoints were a perpetual concern. During this period, the UN Office
for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) counted 57 checkpoints in
the West Bank, an area slightly smaller than the state of Delaware. With my U.S.
passport, navigating my way to Ramallah from Jerusalem through two checkpoints
had been relatively simple. But for the four men who lived in a Bethlehem refugee
camp, the trip required considerably more exertion. They had been at a procession
for Arafat in Bethlehem when they learned that the funeral would be the next day
in Ramallah. They heard that the roads were already beginning to close down as
permanent checkpoints became more restrictive regarding who would be allowed
to pass, and as the Israeli army erected temporary or "flying" checkpoints in
503
CULTURL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:3
other locations. Without stopping home, they were on the road. What, without
checkpoints and other forms of closure, would have been a 45-minute car ride
took around six hours. They took several taxicabs short distances and walked
large portions of the trip over parched autumn hills to avoid the checkpoints. In
the more dangerous areas, one person from the party would go ahead, and then
call back to the others on his cell phone to tell them if it was clear of Israeli
soldiers.7 Under occupation, representation-as-gathering demanded stamina and
commitment.
In contrast, the hundreds of journalists who arrived to cover the funeral had
flown in from around the world on foreign passports that, like my own, facilitated
mobility. "Parachute journalism," in which top foreign correspondents fly into
a location for a brief time to cover a major story, is often identified as the least
contextual kind of journalism, as compared to foreign correspondents' or stringers'
reporting (Hannerz 2004; Pedelty 1995; Rosenblum 1979). Parachute journalism
allows senior correspondents to cover more of the most important stories, but it
also reflects a preference in U.S. journalism for correspondents who are deeply
aware of the orientations of their audiences, rather than correspondents who know
the country where they are working with that same depth. 18
The morning of the funeral on November 12, parachute journalism took
on a new meaning. It looked in some places as though journalists had actually
been airdropped onto the prime elevated locations around the Muqaata'a: rooftops
of homes, streetside scaffolding erected for the occasion, the upper floors of an
unfinished apartment building. Journalists working on the cheap were getting a
boost from the detritus of yesterday's news, standing on piles of rubble on the
sides of the road. The visible presence of all of these foreign journalists-of their
tripods and telephoto lenses, of their powerful camera lights shining in the bright
sun only confirmed Palestinians' sense that influential foreigners were concerned
with Palestinian politics (see Figure 1).
Palestinians-of all ages and genders, but predominantly young men-were
scrambling for a view, too, joining journalists on the rubble, climbing on rooftops
that had not been rented by journalists, perching themselves on walls and atop
electricity poles (see Figure 2). Many, like the journalists, brought cameras. Some
brought signs made by political parties, village councils, or companies. A few
brought children dressed for the occasion. One toddler was wearing a kaffiya,
Arafat's trademark scarf, and holding an olive branch and a toy gun, in reference
to Arafat's famous 1974 speech at the United Nations in which he noted that both
were symbolically at his disposal. As the child's parents surely had anticipated,
504
>._rV
Muqataa rnteo t spcetoeevso crw s. In th West Bank, iwasualyetrIrei
t
&~ ~~~Poorp byt th author.
elbows.- .4
FIGURE 1. The owners of an unfinished apartment building across t

Muqaata'a rented out space to television crews. In the West Bank, it wa
military sites or, more occasionally, journalists' cameras that generate
Photograph by the author.
the child attracted both international photojournalists and

tinians with cameras. Processes of watching and performin
gathering overlapped with each other and all involved both
elbows.
505
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23.3
FIGURE 2. Palestinians gathered on any elevated spaces they could reach to watch the
helicopters that bore Arafat's body land. Photograph by the author.
Perhaps because of their ambivalence about Arafat, or about the effectiveness

of performing for the Western media, the refugees from Bethlehem did not want
to be in the news. They wanted to see for themselves what was going on, and they
wanted to analyze how journalists were going to cover the funeral. Jawad cannily
spotted a journalist's interpretation as it unfolded. An international journalist it
was not clear where he was from was trailing an armed Palestinian police officer
who was trying to convince people to climb down from the walls around the
Muqaata'a. The journalist was capturing what I read as an atmosphere of contained
disorder. There was no sense of actual danger, but the general thrum of thousands
of people's desires to mark the occasion the way they wanted to, to gather and to
depict, was a reminder to the authorities that they might not control the day. Jawad
noticed what the journalist was doing and remarked with notable foresight and
some consternation that the journalist was going to tell a story about Palestinian
lawlessness. Like the character from Taghriba Filastiniyya, the Ramadan serial, savvy
Palestinians had their eyes out for "negative" coverage in the raw, reading headlines
before they were written, even though those headlines were slated for an indistinct
Western audience, rather than a Palestinian one. Jawad was straining to watch U.S.
television from the Palestinian street. 19
Likewise, in the midst of the clamor, a PA official used Palestinians' sense
of being watched by the international press to keep order at home. This weak
506
quasi state did not have the power to survey and discipline its people, but it could
piggyback on the many lenses and eyes of the immense international press presence.
Somewhat ironically, Western press accounts captured a PA official on the scene

exhorting the crowds to calm down by invoking the international press: "Our image
to the world is very important.... No slogans, no chants" (Radin 2004). ... "The
whole world is watching us on television" (Bishop 2004). This official was using the
idea of an international public mediated by the Western press-to keep order
at home. Anticipated representations-as-depiction were being used to strengthen
the PA's efforts at representation-as-gathering. And this tableau was almost surely
caught for the foreign correspondents by Palestinian fixers and translators with
incisive political sense.
These moments epitomize Palestinian concern with and frequent sophistica
tion about foreign representation. They also demonstrate that despite institutional
structures that would shape Western narratives about Arafat's funeral, on the
scene of media production, Western journalists did not have the last word. Both
as journalists and otherwise, Palestinians did their own interpretive work on these
imagined texts, either critically or in service of the PA. This highlights the extent to
which media representations are not reflections of the world but part of it. At these
sites of production, media are susceptible to reinterpretations and reframings. This
initial elasticity contrasts with the structured forms of social and political power
these media obtain as they circulate in their published forms, usually in relation
to long-standing journalistic narratives, and quite out of reach of Jawad or the
street-level PA official.
As the crowds waited for Arafat's body to arrive from abroad, police were
indeed endeavoring to prevent people from entering the Muqaata'a. Standing on
a garage rooftop we had staked out, we watched their ultimate failure. Palestini
ans had their own idea of what a legitimate form of representation-as-gathering
was on this historic day, and they would not be kept from Arafat's grave. Peo
ple poured over the retaining walls and into the open square of the Muqaata'a,
until there was little room for the helicopters that would bear Arafat's body
to land. All of us the mourners, the journalists, the curious internationals
braced ourselves when the helicopters came roaring in. Wind and dust and dirt
thrashed into our faces. But once the helicopters were on the ground, it seemed
as though the two yellow giants had no advantage over the assembled masses.
People were virtually pressed up against the helicopters, making it difficult for
officials to move Arafat's body to the grave. Former Prime Minister Ahmed
Qurei, who had been on one of the helicopters, shooed them away with indignant
507
FIGURE 3. Once Palestinians flouted authorities and entered the Muqaata'a, the half-destroyed
compound where Arafat lived his last two years and was finally buried, they occupied every
surface, high and low. Photograph by the author.
swats of his hand, wanting an easy burial. Quickly, then, the officials saw their
chance and Arafat's body disappeared below the ground, without the crisp military
salutes he had received in France, without the solemnity of the small funeral in
Egypt, and without, most notably, any kind of funeral procession involving the
tens of thousands of his compatriots who had come to carry him this last bit of
the way.
But by this point, Palestinians were standing on every surface of Arafat's
compound, on every rooftop and slab of busted cement, in the trees, and on the
outside walls (see Figure 3). They were chanting, "Arafat kul ash-sha'b, wa ash-sha'b
ma biymut" lArafat is all the people, and the people do not die]. In the presence of
the new Fateh leadership's ideological and physical distance from their people, this
was an eminently populist statement. After the burial, even more people flooded
into the Muqaata'a. Militants' gunshots rang out into the air, in salute or threat or
both. One European freelance journalist who wrote features rather than breaking
news told me that he was going to go home because he could just as well watch the
rest on television without the risk of falling bullets. The day met no one's hopes
for an honorable funeral, and yet there was a sense that a small victory had been
won in the midst-or perhaps by way-of the disarray, because Palestinians had
___ insisted on involving themselves in this momentous gathering.
508
As Jawad had anticipated, the Western media did cover this event in part
through an established narrative about the PA that tracked a particular question
over time: In the face of growing Palestinian militancy and in the wake of Israeli
destruction of PA institutions, is the PA in control of events on the Palestinian
street? Like the debates about why peace negotiations had failed, this narrative
centered on whether or not the PA was able to represent Palestinians effectively,
and it had implications about whether or not negotiations would resume under
the new Palestinian leadership. Moreover, journalists tended to depict a disorderly
Palestinian public without attempting to explain why Palestinians had acted as
they did. In U.S. news, the events were described as "chaotic," and people's
actions as "frenzied." Several journalists wrote of Palestinians "swarming" the
Muqaata'a (Bennet 2004; Bishop 2004; Radin 2004). The Washington Post article
began:
The helicopter carrying Yasser Arafat's body touched the ground Friday,
and the Palestinian leader's impassioned mourners surged forward. By the
thousands, they clambered over concrete walls, burst through police lines,
trampled each other and flung themselves against the chopper's metal skin.
'He's here!' a man bellowed, his face contorted as he charged the helicopter.
Desperate and angry, Palestinian security forces fired wildly into the air.
Black-masked gunmen answered with louder bursts. Momentarily panicked,
people closest to the aircraft dived for the ground in a tangle of sweating
bodies, intertwined limbs and lost shoes. Seconds later, they were back on
their feet chanting, screaming, cursing, demanding Arafat's coffin. [Moore
and Anderson 2004]
Such vivid passages were written by top U.S. foreign correspondents who
knew the situation well. They reflected the drama of the scene. It is clear both
from their reporting and from my interviews with similarly positioned foreign
correspondents that their political analysis of the situation can be deft. Some have
spent a great deal of time in the region speaking to people with diverse experiences
of the conflict. However, words like "swarming" and "angry" used to describe
Palestinian crowds likely evoke entrenched preconceptions about a senselessly
violent Palestinian public for a U.S. audience that is less knowledgeable about
the context of events. For example, it is not clear from the above passage in the
Washington Post why Palestinians are so angry, if, indeed, anger was the best word
to characterize the emotions of the day. Notably, this coverage, at least as much as
Palestinians' experience of the funeral, was politically significant. It had an effective
509
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:)
status in the world: Whether or not Arafat's funeral would really bring a new era
in Palestinian politics depended at least as much on what U.S. journalists said
about the funeral and subsequent political events as it did on Palestinian actions. As
former journalist, editor, and journalism scholar Ben Bagdikian writes, the media
industry is similar to other industries in many ways, but they "are unique in one
vital respect. They do not manufacture nuts and bolts: they manufacture a social
and political world" (Bagdikian 2004:9; see also Hall 1985:104).
U.S. news is produced as much in the context of institutional norms, as well as
U. S. values and perceived interests, as it is in reflection of the events on the ground
in the West Bank and Gaza. As noted above, research on U.S. journalism has found
that news narratives and frameworks are often influenced by the priorities of U. S.
officials. U. S. news from other countries remains heavily tied to U. S. authorities for
its driving narratives (Pedelty 1995:183; Rosenblum 1979:42). Moreover, U.S.

journalists generally write with the concerns of their audiences in mind, rather than
attempting to translate the perspectives and experiences of the people about whom
they write (Hannerz 2004). Americans have long considered U.S. security to be
linked to Israeli security (McAlister 2001), and this has shaped U.S. assessments of
the second intifada, especially because it coincided with the War on Terror. For
all of these reasons, the PA is often covered in relation to concerns about whether
it will be able to guarantee Israel's security. To put it simply, a naive perspective
might presume that the PA takes actions, which the international press covers and
to which international authorities react. Actually, though, there is a complex loop
of external authorities affecting both Palestinian politics on the ground and Western
news media on the issue.
A particular view of the Palestinian public both as it constitutes itself in
embodied forms at specific events and in the abstract is in play in these news rep
resentations. Palestinian public opinion, and Arab public opinion more generally,
are often glossed in U.S. press and political discourse as "the Arab (or Palestinian)
Street." The expression carries the suggestion that Arab public opinion is irrational,
unruly, and stagnant, and that it expresses itself only through violence (Bayat 2003;
Lynch 2003; Regier and Khalidi n.d.). This characterization of the Arab street draws
on a familiar depiction of the Orient as a space of barbarism and disorder, and also
on liberal assumptions that the public sphere must be rational and disembodied.20
As Paul Manning writes, in liberal political thought, "the passions of street oratory
are the opposite of dispassionate, reasoned communication" (Manning 2007:193).
The coverage of Arafat's funeral discussed above evokes this view of the Arab
street as a deeply flawed version of the public sphere. Most journalists did not try
510
to explain why events had unfolded as they had, because the idea of a disorderly
Arab street did not seem to require explanation.
Yet, Arafat's funeral demonstrates that the street should not be seen as
illegitimate because it stands outside of sanctioned forums for representation,
limited as these are in the Palestinian context. As Latour points out, although it is
commonly imagined that politics happen in spaces of perfect symmetry, like under
the domes of European parliaments, in fact, politics happen in real-world practices
that take the form of struggles over quite uneven geographies, some spanning
much greater distances than any street. Neither the PA nor the U.S. -dominated
Western media alone, nor the two of them together, have adequately integrated
the two kinds of representation gathering and depicting-in a way that promotes
a democratic Palestinian politics. It is thus imperative to examine how Palestinians
have constituted their own kinds of gatherings around matters of shared concern.
Palestinians' takeover of the open space around and within the Muqaata'a
in response to PA attempts to restrict their attendance demonstrates that publics
are always constituted through embodied practices that are structured by larger
political frameworks. This is the case whether those practices are conversing in
bourgeois coffee houses as in Habermas's model (Habermas 1989), chewing qat in
Yemen (Wedeen 2006), listening to Islamic cassette tapes against the cacophonous
soundscape of Cairo (Hirschkind 2006), participating in street protests during the
Rose Revolution in Georgia (Manning 2007), or walking long distances and scaling
walls to take part in an event of national importance as Jawad and his friends did.
Whether eminently obvious or pressed into obscurity, the embodied practices and
material contingencies of politics are of great consequence (Boyer 2005a; Keane
2007); the body should not be pathologized when it becomes visible in politics.
ELECTING PUBLICITY, MEDIATIZING AUTHORITY

A few months after Arafat's funeral, the first PA Presidential Elections in nine
years were under way to choose Arafat's successor. Although there were several
major candidates, it was clear by Election Day on January 9, 2005, that former
Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, of Arafat's Fateh party, was sure to win, especially
because the strongest opposition party, Hamas, had decided not to participate in
these elections.
Even though these were to be the first elections in nearly a decade, they
constituted a site for Palestinians' performance of themselves as a certain kind
of political community more than they comprised a forum for internal political
change. These elections were taking place in the context of the U.S. campaign
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23 3
for democratization in the Middle East. Palestinian legitimacy was at stake after
Arafat's extended physical and diplomatic isolation by Israel and the United States.
Palestinian officials' goals of conducting successful public relations with the Western
media a process of representation-as-depiction and of winning the elections
a process of representation-as-gathering overlapped with each other. Palestinian
candidates and election institutions aimed to promote not only themselves, but
also the Palestinian people as a whole, and at the same time to highlight the
injustice of Israeli occupation. At times, it seemed that candidates aspired to win
the international public relations campaign by way of winning the election, and
sometimes it seemed they intended to win the election by way of winning a public
relations campaign aimed at the Western press.
This dynamic was evident in the campaigns of the two leading candidates,
Fateh candidate Mahmoud Abbas and progressive independent candidate Mustafa
Barghouthi. Despite being the frontrunner, Abbas was not especially popular. Dur
ing his 2003 stint as prime minister under Arafat's presidency, he had attained the
moniker of "the Palestinian Karzai" because he was regarded as a lackey appointed
to assuage the United States, which had stipulated that the PA should create the
position of prime minister to minimize Arafat's power. In fact, after the elections,
some Palestinians said that one reason Abbas had been such a successful candidate,
eventually winning more than 60 percent of the vote, was that he had U.S. and
Israeli support. Palestinians desperately needed a period of stability, and they knew
that no leader without external support could negotiate with Israel, not even on
relatively small issues like the removal of checkpoints or the release of prisoners.
So, the argument went, some voted for stability by voting for the U.S. and Israeli
candidate, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Western media also had a role to play for Mustafa Barghouthi, the
progressive candidate and medical doctor who had established-and established
himself in-a preeminent Palestinian health NGO, the Union of Palestinian Medical
Relief Committees. One way by which Barghouthi attracted attention during the
campaign was to court Israeli arrest by entering Jerusalem illegally.21 Soon after
he would come into Jerusalem for a press conference, Israeli police would arrest
him. Broadcast images of these arrests, handcuffs and all, were compelling to
Palestinian voters. Moreover, Palestinian leftists and intellectuals, Barghouthi's
core constituency, were sensitive to how Palestinians were represented abroad. I
was with a Palestinian journalist watching BBC News on satellite TV when we saw
images of Barghouthi's arrest. Palestinians who saw this likely judged it a positive
image that showed basic facts of Israeli occupation to foreign audiences my
$ 12
journalist companion certainly did. Barghouthi's strategy thus seemed to include

winning local votes by sending an international message about the occupation.
The Central Elections Committee (CEC), whose official role was to ensure that
the elections ran smoothly and to disseminate information about elections results,
also promoted a carefully crafted image of Palestinians to the foreign press during the
elections. In an established and functioning democracy, this institution's job would

be almost transparent, but in the Palestinian context its role was performative:
to make possible a depiction of Palestinians as viable democratic subjects, to
demonstrate for the assembled press that they could gather properly. As an elections
official whom I interviewed told me, the elections were "an important opportunity
to showcase Palestine." There were local stakes to this as well, because the CEC
also highlighted the accomplishments of reformers like Mahmoud Abbas in having
established the guidelines for the CEC.22
The CEC's elections headquarters were at the Ramallah Cultural Palace, an
upscale new theater in the PA's most cosmopolitan city. The Cultural Palace
was accessible only by car, which, paradoxically, meant that many of the usual
constituents of the Palestinian "street" would have trouble making an appearance.
During Arafat's life, I had become accustomed to attending press conferences at
the Muqaata'a without having a press pass. I would simply walk in with another
journalist, or sometimes just nod to the armed guards at the gates of the compound.
However, in preparation for the elections, the CEC had been issuing laminated
press passes with reporters' photographs on them, and they were checking these
passes at the door of the Cultural Palace. Fortunately, I had been able to apply for
and obtain the necessary passes. On registration, journalists received a packet of
materials in either English or Arabic about the candidates and the procedures of
the elections. The logo of the elections, printed on the folder of materials we all
received and on banners inside the auditorium, was of a smiling computer-drawn
cartoon figure wearing a kaffiya, holding a ballot, and stepping forward as though
from offstage (see Figure 4). The neat booths and brochures suggested that a new
era of law and order had dawned in the PA. On Election Day, the Cultural Palace
was a tidy exhibition for foreign journalists of the strength of Palestinian democracy,
the basic appeal of Palestinian society, and the injustice of Israeli occupation.
The walls of the Cultural Palace were decorated with elections material that
showcased the apparent burgeoning of "democratic culture" in the Palestinian
Authority. Never mind that Palestinians' will to sovereignty substantially predated
the computer-generated cartoons promoting voting, that minimalist democratic
duty. Framed election posters encouraged Palestinians to register and vote. One
5 13
4~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~i
FIGURE 4. The folder CEC officials distributed to journalists showed a

Palestinian as though he were walking into view. Photograph by t
read filastin 'ala mow 'id ("Palestine on time"), suggresting th

fulfilling the universal responsibility of democratic citizensh
older hand passing a sapling tree to a child's hand, and read,
al-mustaqbal ("Hand in hand, we will build the future"). The t
progress, literally hung on the wall for Western journalists'
At the door, journalists also received a set of maps of the W
These maps, produced by OCHA, provide the most detailed a
on the location and number of checkpoints, roadblocks, earth
forms of Israeli closure, which at that time numbered 7
alone. Available in many restaurants and offices frequented by f
were clearly oriented toward visitors rather than local Pales
in English and also included photographs of what each of the
___looked like. This was the first time I had seen a bound a
514
district maps, and it featured the logo of the CEC. The checkpoints had to do with
the elections only peripherally.23 However, the issue of the closures, which had
dire economic and social effects, was arguably of greater consequence than the
elections. The CEC had taken advantage of the presence of the hundreds of foreign
journalists to distribute this information.
The CEC's headquarters also asserted the cultural richness and comfort of
Palestinian society. The food was catered by Al-Dar, a chic new Ramallah restau
rant. Along with the registration materials, CEC hosts were distributing a hand
some DVD of photographs and music called "This Is Palestine," with photographs
by Arab-American photographer George Azar that showcased exuberant faces, rich
traditions, and beautiful scenery from Palestinian society.24 Between press confer
ences, this DVD provided a striking slideshow in the auditorium that contained but
a few hints of political conflict or occupation. Foreign correspondents who might
have been discomfited by the uncontrolled crowds and gunshots fired in the air at
Arafat's funeral could relax while watching the slideshow in cushioned seats.
In its press conferences, the CEC reported on procedural matters, emphasizing
the orderliness of the elections, and presenting statistics about the relatively high
turnout of women voters. One of Mahmoud Abbas' statements from the day also
emphasized women's high participation. Palestinians know that Western audiences
have often judged the Arab world by the status of women (Abu-Lughod 2002).
However, for journalists, this did not obscure a more general issue. Turnout overall
was low; in a controversial move, the CEC kept the polls open for two extra hours.
Unlike at Arafat's funeral, the presence of "the Palestinian people" was not just
acceptable; it was imperative. This time, rather than having been cordoned off
from the politicized space, Palestinians had been recruited to perform the PA.
Palestinians' reactions to the day were mixed. Some were enthusiastic, others
amused. A Palestinian journalist I accompanied reported to his editor by phone
that everyone was dressed in their nice clothes, as though for a holiday. Some were
cheerily testing the durability of the ink mark they received on their thumbs as a sign
of having voted. Those who refused to participate did so quietly, but maintained
that elections under occupation were unproductive at best, and legitimizing of that
very occupation at worst. Of the four men with whom I attended Arafat's funeral,
who had all hiked miles of desert hills to make sure they would arrive in Ramallah
from Bethlehem, at least two, including Jawad, declined to vote because they
rejected the notion that anything significant could change while Israeli occupation
continued. They regarded as spurious the kind of representational gathering that
appeared most legitimate in U.S. news coverage.
SS
This time, U. S. news narratives showed the effectiveness of Palestinian public

relations labor. The New York Times quoted Mahmoud Abbas as stating, "This process
is taking place in a marvelous fashion, and is an illustration of how the Palestinian
people aspire to democracy," and opposition candidate Barghouthi declared "I felt
my dream is coming true. This is a great step for the Palestinian people, a good test of
our institutions and proof to the world that we can establish an independent state"
(Erlanger 2005). Headlines declared that the elections "[stir] hope for Mideast
peace" (Ephron 2005) and constituted a "new start for the Palestinian people"
(Maclntyre 2005). A New York Times editorial following the elections read, "There
was much to celebrate about the way the Palestinians managed a free, fair and
democratic election in occupied territory, moving beyond mourning for Yasser
Arafat and giving Mahmoud Abbas a broad mandate as the Arab world's sole
democratically elected leader" (Editors, New York Times 2005). After years of
intifada, the performance of statehood seemed to be back on track.
To a certain extent, the main messages of the elections that the PA was
stable and democratic, and that the elections constituted a step forward-was
one that satisfied both local Palestinians and the international community, just
as Barghouthi's arrest "looked good" both for him locally and for Palestinians
internationally. intifada-weary Palestinians thought that a positive image on the
world stage would help advance the campaign for ameliorative adjustments that
they were seeking. Palestinians were also anxious to see what would become of the
PA after Arafat's death. However, this international message of progress affected
local outcomes in a way that privileged some Palestinian sectors more than others.
In promoting Palestinian progress and stability during the elections, the CEC, a PA
institution closely linked to Fateh, Abbas's party, was also shoring up power for
the PA and Abbas.
A NEW CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION

As it turns out, in the following months, the modest improvements Palestinians
had expected Abbas's election to yield did not come to pass. There was no major
prisoners' release, and the removal of checkpoints was minimal. Performing for
the international media did not prove rewarding. A year later, on January 25,
2006, PA parliamentary elections results startled many international and Palestinian
observers. Hamas, the opposition Islamic party that Palestinians knew to be on the
U. S. and Israel's lists of terrorist organizations, won a majority of seats and the right
to appoint a prime minister to work alongside Abbas. Palestinian commentators
have concluded that Hamas' success was in part a result of Fateh's inability to
516
produce results in negotiations with Israel. Certainly Palestinians were not voting
for the United States's favored candidate in these elections.
Even before Hamas formed a cabinet, Israel stopped handing over PA taxes that
it collects. The United States and the European Union also quickly mobilized against
Hamas, cutting off aid to the PA. Although there was some debate in U.S. media
about how the United States could encourage democracy and then reject the result
of elections, the notion that it was impossible to deal with "terrorists" remained
powerful. The New York Times editors supported the isolation of the PA: "America
cannot bankroll a Hamas government that preaches and practices terrorism, denies
that Israel has any right to exist, and refuses to abide by peace agreements signed
by previous Palestinian governments. That should be blindingly obvious. America
is engaged in a global armed struggle against terrorism" (Editors, New York Times
2006).25 Importantly, decisions to sever financial ties were based on dominant
political discourses in which Hamas was deemed a terrorist organization, and less
on Hamas's recent actions: Hamas had ceased attacks inside Israel over a year
earlier, and its officials spoke of a long-term truce. The ensuing crisis interrupted
the PA's basic administrative functions and crippled the Palestinian economy. The
PA was unable to administer its territory, and the 1 3-year-old negotiations process
that had been designed to lead to Palestinian statehood continued to languish.26
The 2006 elections that brought Hamas into power yielded perhaps the starkest
crisis of representation yet. Palestinians could represent themselves in that they
carried out certifiably free and fair elections. They gathered themselves under the
dome of electoral democracy through legitimate processes. Yet, the government
that they chose went unrecognized. As a result, the PA could neither represent
Palestinians effectively in the international arena nor govern its people.
CONCLUSIONS
This study of practices of representation-as-gathering and representation
as-depiction demonstrates that the U.S. press, the PA, and politically involved
Palestinians depend on each other to create media and governmental representa
tions, although they do not necessarily share concerns or goals. Arafat's funeral
and the PA presidential elections stand as two distinct moments in Palestinians'
struggle for the right to represent themselves. Both officials and crowds antici
pated that the Western press would be covering the funeral in terms of a narrative
of law and order. PA officials appealed to the importance of Palestinians' global
image to encourage Palestinian crowds to follow their directions. Yet, for many
Palestinians, the struggle of the day was for the right to gather as they saw fit, a 517
517
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23.3
momentary democracy of assembly. Palestinians' determination to take part in the

funeral of their leader was an expression of the lengths to which they would go to
carry out an important social ritual in accordance with at least some of the cultural
values surrounding that ritual, in this case, popular participation. As expected,
though, the U.S. press coverage of Arafat's funeral portrayed Palestinians' failure
to gather properly according to Western notions of public ritual decorum, their
unwillingness to abide by the processes set out for them by their government. Their
overt use of their bodies in making a political statement was discrediting in these
depictions: it was depicted in a way that suggested that Palestinians exuded anger
and chaos. In U.S. press accounts, the presidential elections, in contrast, seemed
like a moment of progress. Key Palestinian elites were only too happy to promote
images of well-dressed voters in orderly lines, because they, after all, were the
ones being elected. But other Palestinians rebuffed this story.
Representational projects intrude on one another in practice. It is significant
that journalists and Palestinians stood side by side on piles of rubble during Arafat's
funeral so they each could watch events as they unfolded. At such sites, those
involved with projects of depiction of all different scales and those who have
gathered to make a political statement are susceptible in similar ways to the
exigencies of representation, even though their representational projects are quite
different. There is space for interaction at such sites; large media organizations do
not consistently have the last word. Foreign correspondents often rely on local
journalists or small-time media makers in one way or another. As we saw in the
case of Jawad, who was trying to watch U.S. television from the Palestinian street,
journalists are subject to interpretation by those they depict.
Yet, once stories and photographs are published, media created in these West
ern news organizations generally trump local commentary on those media forms.
For Palestinians, it is often a particular view of Palestinian actions-published
the day after an event that influences Palestinian politics, at least as much as
those Palestinian actions themselves. The representations-as-depiction created by
U.S. media in some ways have greater effective status in terms of establishing
conditions of possibility for future political actions than the representations
as-gathering carried out by Palestinians. The U.S. press coverage of PA politics
gathers Palestinians and U.S. readers together, but at the same time it shapes the
relationships among them in ways that reinforce global structures of power and
local Palestinian hierarchies. Given journalistic practices that center on government
officials and state institutions, and given Western liberal assumptions about political
expression, the PA has more representational authority than the Palestinian street.
$18
Media practices constitute the state in multiple ways, helping weak states and state
like entities to perform sovereignty. Because of the global dominance of Western
media, these media can be vehicles for spreading certain kinds of values and norms
about what kinds of states and other gatherings are most legitimate. Tracing the
local effects of global news organizations is a crucial task for anthropologists of
media.
Latour encourages us to find the unexpected moments when representation-as
gathering and representation-as-depiction come together in a world where formal
processes of representation are often deeply flawed. He advises, "Instead of the
radiant citizen standing up and speaking his mind by using his solid common
sense, as in Rockwell's famous painting Freedom of Speech, should we not look for
an eloquence much more indirect, distorted, inconclusive?" (Latour 2005:30).
Arafat's funeral was chaotic and harmful to Palestinians' world image in the short
run. It was rowdy and male dominated. Palestinians themselves hardly see it as
an ideal moment of self-determination or self-representation. However, Arafat's
funeral, in which people refused to bend themselves into neater public shapes for
the sake of appearances, keeps us asking what constitutes an effective means of
gathering or composing a public without assuming that those publics that do arise
are the ideal ones.
Yet, recognizing the potential of these alternative political spaces is only a first
step. Latour does not adequately account for global structures of power in his vision
of the object-oriented democracy. People gathering in Palestinian streets may be
able to bring together processes of gathering and depiction in creative and perhaps
even emergently democratic ways, but Palestinians require the legitimization and
amplification of the PA and U.S. media institutions to give these moments effective
power in the world.
The state and the news media can be connected in myriad complex config
urations: by a journalist's coveted inside source who can breed complicity as in
the case of New York Times reporter Judith Miller (Garfield 2005; Van Natta et al.
2005), by an army's bullet or missile hitting a journalist or a news bureau, by
journalists who promote the authority of a postcolonial state by mobilizing long
standing cultural values (Hasty 2005), or even by an apparent lack of government
regulation (McChesney 2004). In Western media coverage of global issues, the
possibilities are further compounded, such that the figure of the journalist might
be called to stand in for powerful foreign governments by a weaker state or local
authority. Global news institutions can mediate relationships among weaker and
stronger states and their publics, and they help to constitute the state itself, both _19
CULTURAL ANTHROPOL-OGY 23:3
for news audiences and for those on the scene of news production. Yet, such
processes may spur dissent, as they did in the Palestinian case. In these instances, it
is essential to study ethnographically the constellations of authority that are created
and re-created in representational contests among media, governing institutions,
and the publics they are representing. We must not foreclose the possibilities for
democratic combinations of gathering and depiction, but we should continue to
examine the dynamics of participation and mediation as they solidify into fact.
ABSTRACT
This article tracks contests of representation among the Palestinian Authority (PA),
the U.S. news media, and the Palestinian public regarding thefuneral of PA Presi
dent Yasser Arafat and subsequent presidential elections. It is popularly assumed that
governments primarily represent by gathering people and implementing actions in

their names, whereas media represent by depicting the world. Latour has calledfor
"object-oriented democracies" that reintegrate gathering and depiction in ways that
eschewformal structures of political legitimation, which have so often been abused. This
enables recognition of emergently democraticforms. However, even in these provisional
assemblies, established institutions of legitimating representation, like states and elite

media institutions, continue to exert authority. This demands an ethnographic examina
tion of connections among the state, the press, and the public. Palestinian officials and
the public alike identify the U.S. media as influential conduits to powerful outsiders.
Thus, Palestinian officials may use the Western press as an executiveforce, to encourage
Palestinians to perform nationhood in an orderly manner. Palestinians may determine
that neither the U.S. media nor the PA adequately represent them, and thus carry out
political actions according to local political traditions. U.S. media depicted popular
forms of gathering in the street at Arafat'sfuneral as chaotic, whereas they depicted
voting, about which some Palestinians had important reservations, as a progressiveform
of gathering. As officials and journalists do their representational work, the ostensible

subjects of representation, the public, often undertake their own projects of gathering
and depicting, but these are reincorporated into-and transformed by authorized
representational institutions.
Keywords: Media, journalism, Palestinian Authority, public sphere, protest,

elections, democracy, the Arab street, funeral
NOTES
Acknowledgments. Fulbright-Hays and National Science Foundation fellowships allowed me to
complete the fieldwork necessary for the writing of this essay. A Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship
in the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago has provided an excellent space in
which to continue developing this material. I benefited from comments offered on this paper by
audiences at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the University of
Chicago, and the University of California, Davis. I am very grateful to Kim and Mike Fortun and
_ three anonymous reviewers for their thorough readings and productive critiques of this essay. I
520
also thank Lila Abu-Lughod, Hussein Agrama, Lori Allen, Summerson Carr, Jessica Cattelino, Jean
Comaroff, John Comaroff, Paja Faudree, Faye Ginsburg, Rohit Goel, Sherine Hamdy, Thomas
Blum Hansen, Terry Regier, and Robin Shoaps for their insightful comments on various versions of
this article.
1. There are of course circumstances in which the state is expected to produce reliable depictions,
as when it conducts a census or undertakes an investigation of anything from the 9/11 attacks
to steroid use in professional baseball. However, these ventures are not generally imagined to
be central work of government; rather, these depictions are generally meant as aids to facilitate
the government's ability to act on behalf of its constituents.
2. The distinction Latour draws between these two kinds of representation in "From Realpolitik
to Dingpolitik" is similar to that which he draws between scientific and political representation
in We Have Never Been Modern (1993:27'-29).
3. The interview was a response to an earlier article in the New York Review of Books by Hussein
Agha and Robert Malley that accounted the failure to reach an agreement to a poorly planned
negotiations process and a history of mistrust that had accumulated throughout the previous
seven years of negotiations (Agha and Malley 2001; see also Sontag 2001). Agha and Malley's
account ran counter to the established and durable narrative that Arafat had turned down the
most generous offer Israel was likely to make, a narrative spurred by comments made by
Clinton immediately following the Camp David meetings (e.g., Editors, New York Times 2000;
Hockstader 2000; Perlez 2000; Sontag 2000; Weymouth 2000b).
4. Palestinians are not unique in their regard for a foreign media. Mark Pedelty has written of how
the U.S. administration set the agenda for Western?not only U.S.?news coverage of the
war in El Salvador in the 1980s (Pedelty 1995). The Zapatista movement has also been oriented
around garnering international support via media, although its leaders have often focused on
the "alternative" media rather than on "mainstream" Western news outlets (Froehling 1997).
Manning analyzes the "branding" of the color revolutions for export in Eastern Europe and
Central Asia (Manning 2007). Indeed, in places where there is a highly developed human rights,
development, or transitional democracy project, people are often aware of the importance of
Western media coverage of their local events. The Palestinian case may be distinguished by the
amount of coverage it has received over such a long period of time (Hannerz 1998), but it is
not unique.
5. I am also aided in my formulation of this problem by Webb Keane's theorization of semiotic
ideologies and his concern about the material dimensions of representation (Keane 1997,
2007). Certainly, at a site where media headquarters have been invaded by the Israeli army,
and Palestinian journalists have been shot by Israeli authorities, imprisoned by the PA, and
beaten by Israeli settlers, all of which have been extensively documented by the Committee to
Protect Journalists (e.g., Campagna 2002), the material aspects of representation are urgent
and obvious. Keane's work suggests a bridge between Latour's call to examine the relationship
between representation-as-gathering and representation-as-depiction and the ethnographer of
media's concern about media practices.
6. One reason that Hamas has been exceptional in this regard is that until recently, it does not
seem to have been particularly concerned with legitimizing itself for Western powers. It was
engaged primarily with winning Palestinian support. Since its establishment in the 1980s, it
has been considered a terrorist group by the United States and Israel. It became the majority
party in the PA in January of 2006, and thus earned the right to appoint a Palestinian prime
minister. Since then, it has made efforts to ameliorate its image abroad. For example, after
wresting power from Fateh in Gaza in June 2007, Hamas leaders immediately negotiated and
claimed credit for the release of kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston after his 114 days of
captivity at the hands of a fringe group of radical militants. It is significant that when Hamas
did attempt to establish international legitimacy, it did so by securing the freedom of a foreign
journalist, thus gesturing toward a liberal right to a free press.
7. Many of these leaders have signed onto nonbinding model peace agreements that would severely
minimize the right of return, such as the Nusseibeh-Ayalon Agreement of 2002 and the Geneva
Accords of 2003. _
521
8. It is worth noting that certain women in the refugee camp also offered astute political analysis
of current events and of refugees' relationship to the rest of Palestinian society. Some had also
spent time in prison for political involvement before and during the first intifada. However,
many of these women did not have, or felt compelled to suppress, that desire to be on the scene
of action. Whether as mothers or daughters, many had family responsibilities that prevented
them from leaving Bethlehem on a whim. This is how it happened that I spent the funeral
with a group of male contacts, and this informs why the funeral itself was a male-dominated
space.
9. For example, the PA was slow to mobilize regarding the separation barrier, and largely
ineffective when it did begin advocacy. This gap stimulated the organization of NGOs that
address the issue, often with some component that involves or reaches out to Western visitors
or audiences, including protests and media work (Lagerquist 2004).
10. The Palestinian Parliament passed a press law in 1995 that harshly restricted forms of protected
speech, excluding, for example, anything that might threaten "national unity" or "accepted
morals" (Jamal 2005:92). Under the PA, journalists have been detained and imprisoned for
broadcasting material critical of the PA (Campagna 1997), and even during the second intifada,
journalists were beaten for revealing images the PA found unsavory. Journalists complained
that self-censorship had become a norm in the Palestinian press, both during the Oslo period
(Musa 1996) and, I found in my interviews, during the second intifada.
11. The notion that foreign states would play a decisive role in shaping Palestinian futures was not
a universally or unambiguously held conviction. Nor did those who ascribed to it thus fall into
political complacency. Rather, many Palestinians felt that the importance of these external
powers meant that they should orient some of their activism and media work toward interna
tional and Israeli audiences (Bishara n.d.). Laleh Khalili and Lori Allen explicate Palestinians'
views on the influence of outside states and institutions, and how these views have affected
Palestinian politics in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories, respectively (Allen n.d.; Khalili
2007).
12. Palestinians did not as commonly imagine the Israeli press to be an important audience for
their narratives. During the second intifada, Palestinians did not regularly encounter Israeli
journalists working independently in Palestinian areas. Many Israeli journalists would not go
to the Occupied Territories on their own in part out of concern for their safety. As of 2003,
there was only one Israeli journalist working on Palestinian affairs who lived in the West Bank
or Gaza. Amira Hass, a columnist for Haaretz, is widely known and admired among politically
active Palestinians. However, for most Israelis and Palestinians, the second intifada was a period
of extreme separation, quite distinct from the decades that preceded it.
13. Palestinians who dealt with foreign media frequently, including Palestinians employed by
foreign media institutions and also activists and officials, had acute analyses of different media
organizations. They evaluated Fox News differently than CNN and the BBC, judging Fox News
to be more conservative and more pro-Israel than CNN. Those who worked closely with
journalists or in public relations also had impressions of individual journalists and their politics.
A handful of prominent European journalists were recognized as being unusually critical of
Israel, but some of the best known of these, like Robert Fisk and Jonathan Cook, were either
not based in Israel or the Occupied Territories or no longer did daily reporting.
14. The West Bank is significantly less poor than the Gaza Strip, and the central West Bank cities
of Ramallah and Bethlehem are also known for their relative prosperity.
15. Poll numbers indicated renewed approval of Arafat following his death (Shikaki and Mustafa
2004).
16. Palestinians generally consider anyone who dies in the process of struggling for the nation or
who is killed by Israeli forces to be a martyr. Given the controversy surrounding how Arafat
died?the official cause of death was not made public?Arafat's status as a martyr was not
based on this general definition. Rather, he was considered a martyr because of his eminence
and his life of struggle for the Palestinian people.
17. Cell phones are extremely common in the West Bank, which is ranked among the World
Bank's group of lower-middle income areas, despite a drastic increase in poverty during the
_ second intifada. Those lacking financial stability can avoid monthly payments and long-term
522
contracts by paying as they go. In many instances, cell phones are important tools for managing
the unpredictable aspects of life under military occupation, such as checkpoints and other forms
of closure.
18. For this reason, it is conventional for U.S. foreign correspondents to move to new locations
every three to five years, to maintain a fresh perspective. Yet, there are trade-offs to this
practice. Journalists who relocate regularly tend to know less about local politics and priorities,
be less likely to know difficult languages like Arabic or Hebrew, and be less able to explain
local perspectives as an ethnographer might do (Hannerz 2004). Many European institutions,
however, privilege foreign correspondents' thorough knowledge of their location, and thus
might station a journalist in the same place for longer periods.
19. It is worth examining whether Jawad could actually watch U.S. television, and, if U.S.
television was out of reach, what his other options were. Especially in the last 15 years,
Palestinians' media landscape has grown much richer. After the establishment of the PA,
Palestinians for the first time obtained their own public and private broadcast media, having
previously watched Israeli, Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese broadcasts that happened
to reach Palestinian televisions (Batrawi 2001). Israeli prior censorship of print media was also
eliminated when the PA was established, although the PA has a spotty record of protecting
press freedoms. Finally, over the past decade, Palestinians have benefited from the flourishing
of satellite media in the Middle East. According to a 2003 survey by the Jerusalem Media
and Communications Center (JMCC), Palestinians watch more satellite television than local
television. CNN International is available on major Palestinian satellite services, but other U.S.
news networks are less accessible. The JMCC poll found that Al-Jazeera is by far the most
popular television channel for Palestinian audiences, mentioned as the most viewed station by
51.7 percent of respondents, followed by the Abu Dhabi satellite network with 14.2 percent,
and compared with only 3.7 percent for the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, the official
PA station. CNN International was not included in the survey, and it is not a popular source
of news, first because of most people's lack of fluency in English, but second because most
Palestinians believe that stations like Al-Jazeera offer high-quality news. Moreover, regional
satellite stations like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia cover Palestinian issues?including both the
Palestinian?Israeli conflict and internal concerns?quite thoroughly (Maiola and Ward 2007).
20. The expression is used in Arabic as well. However, in the Arab world it is more likely to be
used in a positive sense as when people who have few formal routes by which to influence
autocratic governments take to the streets to express populist and Arabist sentiments (Regier
and Khalidi n.d.).
21. Palestinians carrying identity cards from the West Bank and Gaza like Mustafa Barghouthi
are not allowed to enter Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem without a permit. Moreover, Israel
prohibited campaigning inside Jerusalem because it claims sovereignty over the entire city.
22. Kimberly Coles's article on elections in Bosnia?Herzegovina also analyzes how the procedural
and technical sides of an election communicate both to the international community and to a
citizenry about a nation's democratic values and strength (Coles 2004), whereas Lisa Wedeen
analyzes the performative aspects of elections in Yemen that actually foreclosed democratic
possibilities (Wedeen 2003).
23. There had been debate in local and international media before the elections about whether or
not the checkpoints would impede voting.
24. This project, sponsored by the UN Development Programme, is available on-line at
http : / / thisispalestine. y vod. com /.
25. Although analyzing in full the news discourse regarding the Hamas elections and their rela
tionship to U.S. government actions is beyond the scope of this article, it is clear that the War
on Terror and concern about regional religious movements remained a powerful frame (e.g.,
Sha vit 2006; Zuckerman 2006). Journalists and editors drew this connection between the
U.S. War on Terror and Palestinian politics despite the fact that Palestinians have consistently
distanced themselves from militant groups that have attacked the United States and its military.
Often in the same articles, U.S. media also covered the elections in relation to Bush's stated
initiative of democratizing the Middle East (e.g., Friedman 2006). As the United States sought
to discredit the elections, this yielded obvious contradictions, which U.S. media explored _
523
(e.g., Editors, Washington Post 2006). In a move that spurred criticism, the New York Times and
the Washington Post did publish a number of op-eds by Hamas officials (e.g., Haniyeh 2006;
Yousef2007).
26. The extent to which the United States was involved in undermining the autonomy of the
elections and PA decision making has only recently come to light. An investigative report
found that the United States had not only pushed the PA to hold the parliamentary elec
tions of January 2006 against the advice of Fateh leaders, but also that the United States
had provided arms to Fateh to provoke a Fateh coup of the elected Hamas government
(Rose 2008). Apparently contrary to U.S. intents, this led to a Hamas takeover of Gaza in
June 2007.
Editor's Note: Cultural Anthropology has published a range of essays on media and politics. See
for example, Charles Briggs's "Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relations between Narrative
and Violence" (2007), Liisa Malkki's "National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the
Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees" (1992), and George
Lipsitz's "The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class and Ethnicity in Early Network Television
(1986). For a list of CA articles on media, see http://culanth.org/?q=node/19.
Cultural Anthropology has also published essays on voting, elections, and other practices of
democracy. See, for example, Clare Ignatowski's "Multipartyism and Nostalgia for the Uni
fied Past: Discourses of Democracy in a Dance Association in Cameroon" (2004), Julia
Paley's "Making Democracy Count: Opinion Polls and Market Surveys in the Chilean Po
litical Transition" (2001), and Renato Rosaldo's article on cultural citizenship and educa
tional democracy (1994). For a list of CA essays on democracy, elections, and voting, see
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Watching US Television From Palestine-A. Bishara

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Watching U.S.

American Anthropological Association, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

Anthropologists and other scholars of media have attended to the role of

Latour's description of a second basic kind of representation that "presents or

been assembled around it" (Latour 2005:16). I call this representation-as-depicting.

are consciously envisioned by their participants to be future depictions. However,

interested in challenging presumptions about what kinds of representations-as

explained their failure to come to a peace agreement. Interviewer and prominent

other multidisciplinary scholarship on journalism. Classic sociological studies have

PERFORMING STATEHOOD ON THE WORLD STAGE

Palestinian Elites: NGOs and the Palestinian Authority (PA)

"ARAFAT IS ALL OF THE PEOPLE, AND THE PEOPLE CANNOT DIE"

This diffuse concern for foreign representation also informs my choice of

PA officials sought an orderly event rather than a procession in which mourners

&~ ~~~Poorp byt th author.

FIGURE 1. The owners of an unfinished apartment building across t

the child attracted both international photojournalists and

Perhaps because of their ambivalence about Arafat, or about the effectiveness

Somewhat ironically, Western press accounts captured a PA official on the scene

its driving narratives (Pedelty 1995:183; Rosenblum 1979:42). Moreover, U.S.

ELECTING PUBLICITY, MEDIATIZING AUTHORITY

journalist companion certainly did. Barghouthi's strategy thus seemed to include

elections. In an established and functioning democracy, this institution's job would

FIGURE 4. The folder CEC officials distributed to journalists showed a

read filastin 'ala mow 'id ("Palestine on time"), suggresting th

This time, U. S. news narratives showed the effectiveness of Palestinian public

A NEW CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION

momentary democracy of assembly. Palestinians' determination to take part in the

governments primarily represent by gathering people and implementing actions in

assemblies, established institutions of legitimating representation, like states and elite

of gathering. As officials and journalists do their representational work, the ostensible

Keywords: Media, journalism, Palestinian Authority, public sphere, protest,

Editors, Washington Post

Shikaki, Khalil, and Ayoub Mustafa

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