Post date: Nov 14, 2016 7:12:1 PM
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37895021
This article fits well with our recent conversations on identity and ethnicity. The title alone deserves analysis as it mentions a nation, ethnicity, and religion in one sentence. The main argument in the article gets at this clash of differences that are sensationalized from a western oriental perspective. The article has all the buzzwords for the Middle East; the Jewish versus Arab dichotomy, guns and violence, and eternal conflict. In this article social categories are both blurred and also made rigid as the author uses “Arab” exclusively as an ethnicity to describe Muslim Palestinians who live in Israel-Palestine. Therefore designating the identity of the Jewish population who are as “Israeli”, a national identity. This reflects the power structure of the occupation with the dominant group needing and fitting the national identity and the “Other” described by distinguishing ethnicity that makes them different.
There are many moments of conflicting statements where Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, are used interchangeably
“At a checkpoint between two Israeli settlements, Mohammed Ayashi, A Muslim solider, is stopping some Palestinian cars.”
In this statement, the religious differences distinguishes identity, implying Israeli soldiers are not Muslim and that Muslim soldiers do not fit in the IDF. Then the author distinguishes the driver of the car by a national identity “Palestinian” which seemingly connotes that Palestinian and Muslim are synonymous because contextually in the article it is a point of sameness. These ideas of rigid, but blurry ethnicities relate back to our reading from last week. In the Levy articles, the social differences of Moroccan Jews and Moroccan Muslims are rigid as even the beach is spatially divided by religious identity leading Levy to examine each category separately. Also, in The Rabbi’s Cat the more blurry identity and ethnic relationships are touched when Jews and Arabs are equally discriminated against as the Other of the French colonizers.