Books at Duke University Press

Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism
Rebecca L. Stein

232 pages (August 2008)
23 b&w photos, 3 maps

Cloth - $79.95	0-8223-4251-0
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4251-9]

Paperback - $22.95	0-8223-4273-1
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4273-1]

In Itineraries in Conflict, Rebecca L. Stein argues that through tourist practices—acts of cultural consumption, routes and imaginary voyages to neighboring Arab countries, culinary desires—Israeli citizens are negotiating Israel’s changing place in the contemporary Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted throughout the last decade, Stein analyzes the divergent meanings that Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel have attached to tourist cultures, and she considers their resonance with histories of travel in Israel, its Occupied Territories, and pre-1948 Palestine. Stein argues that tourism’s cultural performances, spaces, souvenirs, and maps have provided Israelis in varying social locations with a set of malleable tools to contend with the political changes of the last decade: the rise and fall of a Middle East Peace Process (the Oslo Process), globalization and neoliberal reform, and a second Palestinian uprising in 2000.

Combining vivid ethnographic detail, postcolonial theory, and readings of Israeli and Palestinian popular texts, Stein considers a broad range of Israeli leisure cultures of the Oslo period with a focus on the Jewish desires for Arab things, landscapes, and people that regional diplomacy catalyzed. Moving beyond conventional accounts, she situates tourism within a broader field of “discrepant mobility,” foregrounding the relationship between histories of mobility and immobility, leisure and exile, consumption and militarism. She contends that the study of Israeli tourism must open into broader interrogations of the Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian dispossession, and Israel’s future in the Arab Middle East. Itineraries in Conflict is both a cultural history of the Oslo process and a call to fellow scholars to rethink the contours of the Arab-Israeli conflict by considering the politics of popular culture in everyday Israeli and Palestinian lives.

“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 Empire

“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

Rebecca L. Stein is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is a co-editor of Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture, also published by Duke University Press.

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