Nadeem Karkabi

Mista‘arvim – Jewish-Israeli soldiers who masquerade as Arabs – and Hista‘arvut (the act thereof) hold a special place in Jewish-Israeli culture. By analyzing popular television programs – a thriller titled Fauda (Arabic for “chaos”) and documentaries by journalist Zvi Yehezkeli – we argue that “cultural Hista‘arvut” is a powerful reflection of Zionist perceptions of Palestinian and Arab Others. Cultural Hista‘arvut helps frame the paradox of a Jewish-Israeli society that is located inside the Middle East but maintains distance as a superior outsider that is not of the region. In this sense, the act of impersonation emphasizes the hierarchy of Jews over Arabs and cements the alleged dichotomies between them.

The Mistaʿarvim are Jewish undercover agents who masquerade as Arabs in order to infiltrate Palestinian and other Arab societies in the service of the Israeli military. The first Mistaʿarvim unit, which served in the pre-1948 Palmach Zionist militia, was based on Jews of Arab origin. Arabs in appearance and in speech, these undercover Jewish agents masqueraded as Arabs to blend into Arab communities without raising suspicion. They successfully executed their operations only by transforming their Arab selves into a performative imitation of ‘Arabs’ as Others. Complying with the Zionist binary separation between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’ as two different identities, they broke their originally hyphenated Jewish-Arab identity, and in return they gained heroic acceptance into the exclusively Jewish nation in Israel. In this article, we examine how the military-oriented tactic of histaʿarvut (the infinitive form of acting as Mistaʿarvim) sheds light on performative acts in the field of popular music, whereby a Jewish Israeli identity is asserted through a ‘masked’ performance of Arabs. As an act of self-imitation, ‘cultural histaʿarvut’ includes symbolic borrowing of visual, linguistic, or musical elements from Arab and Palestinian cultures in order to stage a masked performance that ‘crosses’ the cultural lines to ridicule or demean Arabs and their culture, as a means of Jewish Israeli entertainment. Drawing on this, we introduce the term ‘sonic masquerading’ to elaborate on the specific performative uses of the Arabic accent and musical features as an example of cultural histaʿarvut in the work of the Israeli musicians Shefita, Daniel Saʿadon, and Tuna.

Nasreen Qadri is an Israeli pop singer of Palestinian-Arab origin whose professional achievements came in return for her loyalty to Israel. Successfully crossing cultural lines, Qadri claims Mizrahi identity, challenges the Ashkenazi-Zionist definition of Jews and Arabs as antagonistic ethnonational binaries, and helps Mizrahim reclaim their Judeo-Arabic heritage. However, following her controversial attempts to convert to Judaism, she fell short of crossing into religious-national privilege in Israel-Palestine. Qadri’s failure to overcome colonial segregation testifies to how Israeli racism is based on a perceived religious blood community, which is anchored in state laws and to which non-Jewish women are mostly exposed. Qadri’s case demonstrates how racialized politics of conversion are related to demographic considerations that show the fragility of the Zionist settler-colonial project. Finally, this article suggests that Palestinians in Israel may face elimination, if they seek racial and religious equality with Jews based on a shared Arab culture with Mizrahim.

This article explores the meaning of taharrur (self-liberation) in an emerging Palestinian rave scene in Israel, which includes dancing to electronic music and consumption of illicit drugs. While identifying how the Israeli state enforces soft power on its Palestinian citizens by producing complicit and resistant Palestinian subjectivities, the article explains the connection between Palestinian nationalist and social religious moralities towards the ravers' unproductive pleasures. Shaped by the liberal discourse of individual rights in regard to pleasurable activities, taharrur is described by Palestinian ravers as an act of disengagement from both Israeli state biopower and conservative moralities in their own society. Drawing on Bataille's work, the article argues that the potency of excessive pleasure lies in extreme sensual acts of self-loss, the endurance of risk, and involvement in illicit activities to claim internal feelings of authority. Based on literature on play, sociality, and the experience of ecstasy in raves, I further argue that an intended process of subjectification occurs when ravers reduce their individuality to the rhythm of the group and external agency of drugs, to transgress their subject position and conjure a reality in which self-liberation can be momentarily felt. This experience may

According to Command of Arabic among Israeli Jews, a report by Shenhav et al. (2015), the vast majority of the Jews in Israel neither speak nor understand the Arabic language. Proficiency in Arabic has declined dramatically with succeeding generations. While slightly more than half of the participants in the study believe that knowledge of Arabic is important, the majority of the participants also stated that its importance is security related. This bleak picture of Arabic as a vanishing language among Israeli Jews is related to the protracted ethnonational conflict, which has divided “Jews” from “Arabs.” This is in contrast to the recently expanding number of Jewish Israeli musicians, mostly of the third generation (the grandchildren) of migrants from Arab countries, who sing in Arabic and receive wide local and international exposure. In this article I examine the discrepancy between the low rates of proficiency and interest in the Arabic language and the growing number of singers and audiences in Israel who appreciate music sung in Arabic. I first summarize the findings of the report. I then examine Jewish Israeli musicians who perform in Arabic, focusing on Neta Elkayam and Ziv Yehezkel, to consider the possibilities of a cultural dialogue between Israeli musicians and local Palestinian, as well as regional, Arab audiences. I discuss the political significance of these performances, both in the context of Mizrahi identity among the third generation and in relation to local and regional Arab audiences. In the last section, I tie these musical performances to the policy of the right-wing government in Israel and the rise of a new Mizrahi Zionist discourse in relation to the Arabic language and culture. Finally, I point to the possible negative consequences of this cultural shift for Palestinians.

With the growth of Palestinian original cultural productions and independent performance venues in Haifa, its residents have dubbed it the “Palestinian cultural capital in Israel.” An important cosmopolitan center prior to the loss of its majority Palestinian population in 1948, how have Haifa's Palestinian residents today revived the city and claimed this ambitious new title? What factors have enabled this development to take place specifically in Haifa? And, what can it tell us about Palestinians’ imagination of national space under Israel's dominance? In this article, I address these questions and argue that the appearance of a new generation of a Palestinian urban middle class and the regression of Haifa's centrality in Israeli geopolitics have allowed educated and affluent Palestinians to (re)create a decidedly Palestinian civic sphere through cultural activities. I further argue that this imagining of Haifa demonstrates the ways cultural production can assert belonging to the Palestinian nation.

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