Page 175 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 169

exacerbation of Israeli/Arab antagonisms as creating the condition of possibility
for a radical transformation of social and cultural relations in the region:
[m]any realities and realizations (a growing awareness of Israel/Palestine as
the country of the people living in it, rather than some ever-expanding ‘home’
for all Jews; the progressive re-localization of the Arab-Israeli conflict and
its dwindling significance on the international agenda; an altered Israeli
economy relying more on an internally colonized local Arab market than on
the undated blank check of American aid), have all contributed to the creation
of a potential for one of those ‘significant cleavages in history where a cut
will separate different types of happening.’ This cut (a truer rapprochement
between Israelis and Palestinians and the Levantine and Arab worlds that
could turn the potential into the actual, reconnect old and familiar routes,
and realign the cultural constellations of the region) has little to do with
current ‘official’ discourse. Despite the bleakness of the present climate…
the very desperation involved serves as an indication of precisely how high
the stakes are.
(p. 110)
This analysis of the possibilities of transformation emerging precisely out of the
intensification of antagonisms, though, is grounded more in categories of cultural
analysis, like those addressing the transformation of ‘modernity’ into
‘postmodernity’, than in any sustained economic or social theorization of these
possibilities—in other words, it is an idealist rather than a materialist dialectic.
That is, how will the ‘New Levant’, as a ‘space that can propose new models for
a world rapidly losing sight of the dependence of each part upon every other
part’ (p. 281) contribute to the production of political practices which address in
a progressive way the ‘re-localization’ of the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially since
this process, and the ‘interdependencies’ it foregrounds, are every bit as likely to
aggravate and deepen, rather than alleviate the conflict. The problem here is that
Alcalay understands the process by which the Israeli/Arab conflict took shape and
intensified as an instance of the installation of the regime of modernity in
opposition to premodern cultural articulations. For example, Alcalay argues that
it was the collision between Jewish and Arab nationalisms which allowed the more
‘unofficial’ connections and intersections between Jewish and Arab cultures to be
suppressed by ‘modern’ regimes interested in a ‘homogeneous’ national
population (p. 91).
Alcalay’s argument thus depends upon a binary opposition between ‘official’
discourse and culture, such as that of the state and related institutions, which is
seen as externally imposed (by colonialism, Zionism, or new ruling classes within
the Arab world), and more complex and variegated cultural articulations
between peoples, which resist these impositions. Alcalay contrasts the more
immediate and reciprocal relations of the communal and experiential to the
presumably more abstract and alienating relations of the ‘national’, while at the