middle east journal M 499
ARAB-ISRAELI
CONFLICT
Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestin-
ians, and the Political Lives of Tourism,
by Rebecca L. Stein. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008. x + 152 pages.
Notes to p. 178. Bibl. to 204. Index to p.
219. $79.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.
Reviewed by Glenn Bowman
This is an intelligent and exciting book
that maps the post-Oslo extension of Is-
raeli tourism into the Arab world. The book
uncovers logics of place, leisure, and con-
sumption which ensured that this “opening”
would rapidly collapse into closure and bel-
ligerent isolation. Based on Stein’s anthro-
pological fieldwork, Itineraries in Conflict
focuses on changes in Israeli conceptions
of nation, territory, and coexistence that,
between 1993 and 2000, encouraged Ash-
kenazi Israelis to “view the Middle East as
a unified geography of leisure” (p. 25). That
perception was grounded on the assump-
tion that Israelis could finally experience
“authentic Arab culture without political
threat” (p. 2). Stein shows through a theoret-
ically sophisticated and politically informed
analysis that Israeli tourism after Oslo (and
before the al-Aqsa intifada) produced a fan-
tasy version of the Middle East for Israelis
in which they would be able to engage with
Arabs and consume Arab culture (the book
is rich with terms such as “edibility” [p. 99])
without either extending rights or privileges
to Israeli Arabs (much less West Bank and
Gazan Palestinians) or giving up on the
desideratum of a “Jewish state.” When the
Israeli failure to respect the concessions
made in Oslo brought the “peace” crashing
down, “Jewish Israeli society … renounced
the politics of coexistence, returning to the
conflict paradigm that had characterized Is-
rael’s relations with neighboring states prior
to the onset of regional diplomacy” (p. 150).
Israel’s brief courtship with its Arab neigh-
bors, and with the Arabs resident within its
own borders, was broken off by mutual con-
sent, and Israelis returned to seeing them-
selves as enclaved residents of “a European
nation-state out of place in the Arab Middle
East” (p. 144).
While Stein looks briefly at Israeli views
of Arab tourism to Israel as both a promise
of business and a threat of cultural infiltra-
tion and illegal labor migration, the chief
focus of the book is on the ways Jewish
tourists and agencies conceptualized Arabs
from surrounding countries and Israel itself
as objects for touristic consumption. Here
Stein uses the concept of “national intelli-
gibility” — “that which is recognizable ac-
cording to the dominant national script” (p.
3) — to good effect, analyzing in Chapter
One the way Jordan, Egypt, and Syria were
presented and perceived as “uncharted” (p.
31) territories that, while open to penetra-
tion by Israeli markets, were simultaneously
so culturally distinct that they served to “sta-
bilize the Israeli border as both a geographic
and a cultural divide” (p. 37). It was only
after tourism to neighboring countries took
off (Stein notes that an earlier history of
Jewish travel to these regions, some preced-
ing the founding of Israel, was effectively
“forgotten” in the post-Oslo period in sup-
port of the myth of the “new” Middle East),
that Israelis turned their attention to Arab
neighbors within Israel (the West Bank and
Gaza, visited before the first intifada, never
re-entered Israeli tourist itineraries). Chap-
ter Three investigates Israeli tourism’s quest
for “authenticity” within Israeli Arab villag-
es, noting that, insofar as “authenticity was
palatable only in the absence of Palestinian-
inflected politics” (p. 59), Palestinians desir-
ous of attracting the cash and development
that tourism brought into a systematically
peripheralized economy were forced “not
to be themselves but to be somebody like
themselves” (p. 62). Here Stein discusses
the state’s post-1948 de-urbanization of
Palestinians as a disavowed backdrop to
tourists’ orientalist recognition of the time-
less authenticity of Arab village life; she
also shows how Israeli projects of remak-
ing Arab villages as tourist destinations
emphasized “interiority” (p. 72), display-
ing Arab culture as taking place within the
confined spaces of homes and courtyards.
This “fix[ed] Palestinians in space, … di-
minishing their perceived threat in the era of
a newly transnational Middle East” (p. 73)
500 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
and was structurally opposed to tourism to
Israeli locales which “trafficked in exterior-
ity and spatial expansiveness, stressing both
outdoor leisure and spiritual awakening”
(p. 90). Chapter Four examines the “melan-
cholic citizenship” (p. 98) of the residents
of Abu Ghosh, a village with a long history
of collaboration with Zionism, in their re-
buffed attempts to be treated as co-nationals
of a state which both uses and rejects them.
The villagers’ attempts to produce food pal-
atable to the “culinary patriotism” (p. 97) of
Israelis are presented as counterpoint “to the
resistance paradigm which has dominated
scholarly work on Palestine” (p. 99) as well
as to “the literature of performativity with
its disproportionate investment in the resis-
tive effects of iterative processes” (p. 100).
The final chapter moves forward to 2002
and examines the effects of Palestinian
bombings of civilian targets within Israel.
Stein claims that the media, in line with a
particular class agenda, concentrated on
attacks on cafes rather than on buses, and
“told a story about Israeli consumption un-
der attack” (p. 130). Israelis shifted from a
discourse “remaking Arab spaces as proxi-
mate” (p. 8) to one once again emphasizing
the “civilisational war” (p. 133) between
European society and the Middle East.
Stein, imbricating cultural theory and eth-
nographic instantiation in a highly readable
text, shows that this retreat into antagonism
was an unavoidable consequence of seeing
peace as an opportunity for consumption
rather than as a time for concession, com-
promise, and understanding.
Glenn Bowman, Senior Lecturer in Anthro-
pology at the University of Kent in Can-
terbury, United Kingdom, has worked in
Palestine since 1983.
EGYPT
The Power of Representation: Publics,
Peasants, and Islam in Egypt, by Michael
Ezekiel Gasper. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009. xi + 255 pages.
Notes to p. 261. Bibl. to p. 281. Index to p.
294. $55.
Reviewed by James Jankowski
“Peasant” is a word that has had different
connotations at different times and in differ-
ent contexts. Such has certainly been the case
in Egypt. The Power of Representation ana-
lyzes the diverse understandings of the Egyp-
tian fallah, and occasionally the fallaha, as
expressed in elite literature from the late 19th
until the early 20th century. But it does more
as well: Through a close examination of rep-
resentations of the peasantry, it also offers
an illuminating account of the emergence of
Egyptian national identity as well as a valu-
able emphasis on the continuing presence
and significance of Islamic sensibilities and
concepts in much of the era’s thought.
Originally a doctoral dissertation, the
study is based on a wide assemblage of orig-
inal sources, some previously untapped by
Western scholars (including some relatively
unknown periodicals of the late 19th centu-
ry, manuals of agricultural instruction, and
short stories and picaresque literature of the
period). Solidly informed by the perspec-
tives found in contemporary anti-colonial
scholarship, the study is remarkably skillful
at teasing meaning out of these diverse ma-
terials. The result is an original and sophisti-
cated reinterpretation of the formative era of
Egyptian modernism and nationalism.
The work’s primary subject is the elite’s
changing understanding of the Egyptian
peasantry from the 1870s to the first decade
of the 20th century and how the peasantry
eventually became one of the mechanisms
through which a modern nationalist under-
standing of the “imagined community” —
to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term — of
the Egyptian nation took shape. Successive
chapters trace a fascinating evolution. Elite
images of the Egyptian peasant and his con-
dition in the 1870s and 1880s were over-
whelmingly negative: The Egyptian peasant
was backward, benighted, and badly in need
of “reform” directed by Egypt’s literate
‘afandi class. With a growing awareness of
Egypt as an agricultural country whose des-
tiny was in the hands of its rural cultivators,
by the 1890s a more positive assessment of
the fallah developed. The peasantry, while
still in need of reform and guidance from
above, was now portrayed as representative
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