Review: Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, edited by Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor

Nicolas Tourtechot Known as Granger (ca. 1680 - 1737) and The Discovery of Upper Egypt A French doctor, who travelled up of the Nile in the first half of 1731, wrote Relation du voyage fait en Égypte […], published in 1745 (soon his book was published in English and German). Tourtechot, during his transit to the south, noted and described several monuments. He realized that in Luxor and Karnak he was seeing the remains of the ancient Thebes, although he presumably never reached the west bank of the Nile, and the information referring to the Theban necropolis was drawn by him from indirect sources. He intended to go further to the south, but in Edfu local riots made him go back. In his report Tourtechot put Greek inscriptions which he had found in several places (Qus, Esna, Akhmim, Sheikh Abade); in the following years these inscriptions were included in specialist studies. Tourtechot’s information about Coptic monasteries which he had visited during his voyage are also considered important (he managed to visit the monasteries of St. Anthony and St. Paul on the Red Sea, which were difficult to reach). He wrote a great deal about the details of everyday life, nature and customs. Dangerous moments and specific curiosities described by Tourtechot make his simple and unpretentious writing more vivid and appealing for the reader. Tourtechot’s work constitutes an important part in the history of studies on the art and topography of ancient Egypt.

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Occupation, Sight, Landscape: Visibility and the Normalization of Israeli Settlements

International Political Sociology ◽

10.1093/ips/olab012 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Jakub Zahora

Keyword(s):

Visual Field ◽

Everyday Life ◽

West Bank ◽

Ethnographic Study ◽

The West ◽

The Public ◽

The People ◽

The Everyday ◽

Political Conditions ◽

Stark Contrast

Abstract This article contributes toward the understanding of social and political mechanisms that work to normalize and naturalize contested political conditions on the part of privileged segments of the public. I engage these issues via an ethnographic study of Israel's so-called non-ideological settlements in the occupied West Bank, which attract Israelis due to socioeconomic advantages rather than a nationalistic and/or religious appeal. Nonetheless, the settlers’ suburban experiences are in stark contrast to the geopolitical status of their communities as well as the local and international resistance they generate. I draw empirically on interviews and observations conducted in the settlement of Ariel to make sense of this dynamic. Utilizing insights from critical investigations of visuality and landscape, I argue that the normalization of everyday life in the settlements is achieved through the operation of a particular scopic regime linked to the landscape formations in the West Bank. Employing these concepts to investigate the everyday politics of seeing, I show how they channel the settlers’ sight in a way that makes the Israeli rule seem uncontested, naturalized, and even aesthetic in three registers: the depth of visual field, the surroundings, and the people who inhabit the settlements’ landscape.

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The Occupation after 51 Years

Israeli Studies Review ◽

10.3167/isr.2018.330309 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 33 (3) ◽

pp. 140-151 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Ian S. Lustick

Keyword(s):

Everyday Life ◽

West Bank ◽

Harvard University ◽

University Of California ◽

American Jews ◽

Indiana University ◽

The West ◽

Half Century ◽

Intractable Conflict

Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor, eds., Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 244 pp. Hardback, $90.00. Paperback, $35.00. Sara Yael Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 368 pp. Hardback, $39.95. Gershon Shafir, A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 296 pp. Hardback, $26.95.

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