tourism in palestine

In the East Jerusalem office of Near East Travel, Hani Abu Dayyeh recounts a myth: at the height of the Intifada, a group of Christian tourists encountered a confrontation between the Israeli army and the local shabab [young boys of the Palestinian resistance] on a walk through Bethlehem. It was a typical exchange of stones and rubber bullets with the chartered tourist bus parked in the middle. Noticing the foreigners, the shabab shouted for a cease fire. The army obliged, allowing them to pass. As the bus pulled away the confrontation began again.

This narrative, told in the summer of 1994, situates tourism in a political field. The politics of this tourist presence are departicularized, void of national bias, to which both soldier and shabab are prepared to yield. Nonetheless, the tourist is staged as a political actor whose body intervenes in an arena of regional conflict. The story should be situated in the history of the Intifada and protection mandated for foreign visitors by the Unified Leadership of the Uprising. It is also marked by the time of its telling -- a post-Oslo Middle East anticipating an unprecedented flow of capital across states in the emerging regional economy and a dramatic rise in tourist traffic to a Holy Land without borders. To tell a story of tourist politics in 1994 is to talk about the reconfiguration of the Middle East of which regional tourism is both product and progenitor.

After the Lebanon War in 1982, and increasingly after the outbreak of the Intifada, the Occupied Territories became the site of a new kind of foreign travel. Following the tradition of North American solidarity travel to Vietnam, Cuba, and Latin America, U.S. citizens began visiting the West Bank and Gaza, in delegations and as individuals, as a means of education and protest. Such visits catalyzed North American support for the Palestinian national movement and spawned a literature of Palestine political tourism.

Sherna Berger Gluck's An American Feminist in Palestine: The Intifada Years joins this tradition. Her text recounts four month-long visits to the Occupied Territories between 1988 and 1991, first as a delegation member and later on her own. Through narrative accounts of home-stays, interviews, and informal conversations with (predominantly) Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories, the text charts the heterogeneous changes wrought by the Gulf War, the Oslo Accords, and the waning of the Intifada. Gluck is an adept storyteller, providing vivid portraits of local lives and communities framed by the history of the Palestinian-Israeli occupation and the socio-economic effects of occupation. Gluck situates herself as a feminist traveler, as the title suggests, and much of the text is dedicated to the stories of Palestinian women and the PLO-sponsored women's committees that rose in popularity and prominence during the uprising. The text is imagined less as a scholarly history of the Intifada years, as the absence of an index attests, than an eye-witness account of situated changes in Intifada lives.

In an 1993 epilogue to the text, Gluck offers a measured critique of the peace process. Can a just and lasting peace, she asks, be delivered amidst the play of international interests? Can the "democratic spirit" of the Intifada's popular committees be sustained in the transition to a nation-state? While I question the telos of peace-process to nation-state, I read Gluck's critique of the peace-process as a counter-hegemonic political statement that radically departs from the "euphoria" that characterized popular U.S. responses to the Oslo Accords. Although the virtually monolithic support for the State of Israel among North American Jews has been steadily eroding since 1982, Gluck's commitment to the Palestinian national movement is, as a Jew, all the more courageous.

Yet despite her critical interventions, Gluck's "feminism" is radically delimited. She borrows from a white, North American tradition which has historically ignored the multiple axes of oppression that pluralize and differentiate "feminist" projects. Her text shuttles between scenes of Palestinian women's activism and images of 1960s North American activism and second-wave feminism in undifferentiated nostalgia. ("The mood was reminiscent of the 1967 anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in San Francisco"[116]; "Eit felt all too familiar, like a women's gathering in Los Angeles"[114]; or "It was reminiscent of the Freedom schools that civil-rights activists had founded in MississippiE"[81].) That this analogic strategy arises out of solidarity with the Palestinian women's movement is indisputable. Analogy does the work of translation, rewriting a potentially incomprehensible Palestinian political landscape for her North American readers. Yet Gluck offers little critical assessment of this analogic practice, blurring the radical discrepancies between (internally heterogeneous) U.S. politics and Palestinian nationalisms and feminisms. Her reminiscences construct a telos of progressivism which culminates in a white, Western politics whose epistemological blind spots are untroubled. Missing from Gluck's text is an account of the history of differences that these translations displace.