Description
Book SynopsisArgues that through tourist practices - acts of cultural consumption, routes and imaginary voyages to neighboring Arab countries, and culinary desires - Israeli citizens negotiate Israel's place in the contemporary Middle East. This work analyzes the meanings that Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel have attached to tourist cultures.
Trade Review“
Itineraries in Conflict is a subtly devastating book. Deftly weaving Jewish Israeli tourist practices into the wake of the Oslo Process, Rebecca L. Stein demonstrates how political orders sediment into personal tastes, social identities, and regional desires. By showing how drinking coffee might be an act of peace or a theater of war, this book marks an ambitious new itinerary for the study of consumption, tourism, and nationalism.”—
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of
The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality“A remarkable ethnography. In this lyrical study, Rebecca L. Stein dissects the histories, economic realities, and state practices underlying Israeli tourism into Palestinian areas. She evokes the political longings that animate such tourism while never forgetting the dense histories of power that structure its logics. Impressive in its originality, Stein’s riveting challenge to simplistic assumptions about Israeli and Palestinian politics is ultimately an incitement to hope.”—
Melani McAlister, author of
Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000“An enormously important book. While Rebecca L. Stein’s work contributes to a growing literature on the technologies and discourses of Zionist domination, both historical and contemporary, it stands out for its brilliant and subtle account of the post-Oslo construction of the Israeli Jewish ‘desire for the Arab.’ Her analysis of the making of Palestinian people, spaces, and activities into sites of Jewish tourism is careful, compelling, and disturbing.”—
Wendy Brown, author of
Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and EmpireTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction: Itineraries and Intelligibilities 1
1. Regional Routes: Israeli Tourists in the New Middle East 19
2. Consumer Coexistence: Enjoying the Arabas Within 45
3. Scalar Fantasies: The Israeli State and the Production of Palestinian Space 71
4. Culinary Patriotism: Ethnic Restaurants and Melancholic Citizenship 97
5. Of Cafes and Terror 129
Postscript: Oslo's Ghosts 149
Notes 153
Bibliography 179
Index 205
