close this window
Complete the following form to e-mail a copy of this event to a friend.
Hello, The following event may be of interest to you: "Pastoral in Palestine," A Talk by Neil Hertz Tuesday, April 17, 2012 Hertz: Afterword to “Pastoral in Palestine” (February, 2012) As for the nomad Arabs, camel and sheep herds, dwellers in black booths and curtains of hair cloth, we may see in them that desert life, which was followed by their ancestors in the Biblical tents of Kedar. While the like phrases of their near-allied and not less ancient speech are sounding in our ears, and their customs, come down from antiquity, are continued before our eyes, we almost feel ourselves carried back to the days of the Hebrew Patriarchs. Charles Montagu Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) “Near-allied and not less ancient”: Doughty is talking of the kinship of Arabic and Hebrew speech, but the phrase could well apply to the two peoples contending for land and water in this narrow strip of Asia Minor between a river and a sea. And Doughty reminds us that, unlike many such contentions, this one is characterized by the likeness of the contesting parties. Suppose that a Jewish homeland had indeed been established in East Africa—a proposal brought to the Zionist conference at Basel in 1903 by the British government—or in Madagascar, an early solution to the “Jewish Problem” considered by Hitler in 1938. European Jews would then certainly have found themselves, as colonists, in conflict with the indigenous peoples, whom they might well have stigmatized as “irrational” and “tribal,” but they would not have had to deal with the embarrassing possibility of recognizing themselves in their antagonists, prompting the “paradoxes and contradictions” that Eyal Weizman described in his discussion of vernacular architecture, or the puzzle of who is historically entitled to worship at the Cave of the Patriarchs. That is what gives the struggle in Palestine its particular “pastoral” inflection. It is true that a quite calculated (“rational”) appropriation of Palestinian land and water has been successfully conducted over the years and under various administrations by the State of Israel. This has been and continues to be, as the phrase goes, a land-grab, but the motivations behind it are not exhausted by calling it that. On both sides of the frontier, a spectrum of imaginary investments, ranging from theological zeal down through the various intensities of nationalist sentiment, to the more ordinary complacencies of people who just want to live their lives untroubled, has shaped the course of this conflict in ways that have made it seem intractable. Certainly no one I spoke with in either Israel or Palestine expressed much hope for a solution. It is The Situation. One lives with it. I’ve tried to set down, in these pages, what “living with it” looked like, last winter and spring. Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102 Sponsor: Human Rights Project Phone: 845-758-6822 If you would like to see more events please visit the following URL: http://inside.bard.edu/campus/calendar/