Palestine For Sale Imagine being forced out of your own home by an intruder, and this intruder takes away everything you once called your own. Said’s assignment is a real-live example of this situation, he uses images of specific examples of the happenings in Palestine. Palestinian life went from being highly posted to becoming a disrespected minority where it once stood tall. The main idea of Said’s assignment is to see how one can portray their experiences as going from the majority to becoming the “other”. States focuses on the experiences, and reactions of the majority becoming the minority. This is an example of an autoethnographic piece because its a self-reflective piece written with the intention of sharing the thoughts and ideas of the Palestinian people. Our author, Edward W. Said, helps the reader understand what the people of Palestine were going through when their land was taken …show more content…
The first photograph is a picture of a woman in a wedding dress surrounded by what is assumed to be her family and groom. She’s entering a Mercedes, one of the most-common and secondhand vehicles of the area, with a bland look on her face. “A rare luxury in the west, the Mercedes - usually secondhand and smuggled in - is the commonest of cars in the Levant.(11)” The vehicle has a “D” sticker on it, this sticker clarifies that the vehicle was smuggled in from Deutschland, also knocking at its credibility. She’s surrounded by what seems to be run-down buildings, and trash. This photograph symbolizes how a sacred event, such as marriage had now lost its delicate context behind it, and seemed as if it was something that would at one time be a special event, had now become something of mockery. “...the Mercedes, its provenance and destination obscure, seems like an intruder, a delegate of the forces that both dislocate and hem them
Oppression is not always brought on in a violent and oppositional way, it can take on a peaceful and silent form; however regardless of the way oppression is introduced, it maintains the same characteristics of “imposing belief systems, values, laws and ways of ...
The Middle East has since time immemorial been on the global scope because of its explosive disposition. The Arab Israeli conflict has not been an exception as it has stood out to be one of the major endless conflicts not only in the region but also in the world. Its impact continues to be felt all over the world while a satisfying solution still remains intangible. A lot has also been said and written on the conflict, both factual and fallacious with some allegations being obviously evocative. All these allegations offer an array of disparate views on the conflict. This essay presents an overview of some of the major literature on the controversial conflict by offering precise and clear insights into the cause, nature, evolution and future of the Israel Arab conflict.
The author argues that in order for oppression to be vitally explored, the factors that create oppression must be realized. Oppression gives material advantage to the oppressor. "All social relations have material consequences". The author argues that all identities must be considered interconnected.
In lecture, the Israel settlements were brought up. This has caused major conflict between Palestinians and Israeli’s. This settlement allowed settler homes to be built on private Palestinian land. This is like what happened to Talal and his family. His family home was going to be demolished and used to build a museum for Israeli. This museum was going to be built on private land that was owned by Palestinians. Also, when Talal’s home was being taken by the government for demolition, Talal and his community showed resistance. This refers to the reading of James Scott’s Hidden and Public Transcripts. He talks about the frontier between the public and hidden transcripts is a zone between the constant struggle between dominant and subordinate groups and dominant groups always prevail. The struggle over boundaries is the most conflict seen in ordinary life. This connects back to Talal and his house struggles because his family and himself were struggling over the boundaries of his house and they were the subordinate group. The Israeli government was the dominant group and it eventually prevailed and took the house away just as Scott had said in his article. In the article titled “Everyday Engagement with Politics and Resistance”: Exploration of a Concept and its Theories mentions how the unemployed, slum-dwellers, urban poor and lowest classes employ public and collective
The delineation of human life is perceiving existence through resolute contrasts. The difference between day and night is defined by an absolute line of division. For the Jewish culture in the twentieth century, the dissimilarity between life and death is bisected by a definitive line - the Holocaust. Accounts of life during the genocide of the Jewish culture emerged from within the considerable array of Holocaust survivors, among of which are Elie Wiesel’s Night and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. Both accounts of the Holocaust diverge in the main concepts in each work; Wiesel and Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their survivals. Aside from the themes, various aspects, including perception, structure, organization, and flow of arguments in each work, also contrast from one another. Although both Night and The Sunflower are recollections of the persistence of life during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their existence during the atrocity in their corresponding works.
There are so many different texts that are out there. People from different cultures and communities write texts that we usually do not take seriously. We don’t want to see their point of view about things. We just want them to understand our point of view but not theirs. “States” is a transcultural text. A contact zone is the space in which transculturation takes place. Mary Pratt defines “Transculturation as a process whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant metropolitan culture” (323). Palestinians are surrounded by dominant cultures. Pratt uses “transcultural” to describe the dominant groups or cultures because there are so many
Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish
This struggle against marginalization is one of the principal elements that bind their sense of community, ...
A somewhat controversial publication by Chris Hedges, titled A Gaza Diary, illustrates to the reader his vivid experiences during his weeklong stay in what is know as the Gaza Strip. Hedges’s travels, with illustrator Joe Sacco, start in Jerusalem and proceeds down south through the Gaza strip to a Palestine camp refuge called Khan Younis, where they stay for the majority of the trip. They venture over to Mawasi, also a Palestine village, located on the coast. In both these locations he describes the constant unrest and turmoil that residents face everyday and every night.
Laird’s “Kitchen” and Dater’s “Ms. Clingfree” were two pictures I thought were similar. If you laid the two side by side, you would see nothing in them that was remotely similar. One is of a young attractive housewife sitting on the kitchen counter, cheerily showing off the fruit bowl. The other is of an older housewife, perhaps one who has been married many years and is starting to feel the stress taking its toll on her. In that sense, the pictures are of the same person (a housewife) as she goes through the years. Laird shows her when she is happily married and everything is sunny and bright. Dater shows the woman after the years have taken their toll and she is tired of it all.
From the child in Omelas to a slaving factory worker, those who struggle from oppression have channeled their worth and refuse to remain pushed to the side and neglected.
The film explores how resistance, to the Israeli occupation, has taken on an identity characterized by violence, bloodshed, and revenge in Palestinian territories. Khaled and Said buy into the widely taught belief that acts of brutality against the Israeli people is the only tactic left that Palestinians have to combat the occupation. In an effort to expose the falsity of this belief, Hany Abu-Assad introduces a westernized character named Suha who plays the voice of reason and opposition. As a pacifist, she suggests a more peaceful alternative to using violence as a means to an end. Through the film “Paradise Now,” Abu-Assad not only puts a face on suicide bombers but also shows how the struggle for justice and equality must be nonviolent in order to make any significant headway in ending the cycle of oppression between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
The Palestinian exile of 1948 marks the beginning of an ongoing identity struggle of a population of displaced persons sans a homeland. The devastation brought about by the initial expulsion of the Palestinian people is compounded by near-constant armed warfare both within the territories and in refugee camps in nearby nations that house Palestinian refugees. These constant bombardments are a detriment to collective and individual Palestinian identity, which has in turn become defined to a large extent externally (and internally to some degree) by armed resistant to Zionist influence solely, leading to a deficit in traditional, more positive national identity. The diaspora Palestinian population additionally faces complex struggles with acceptance
Edward Said “States” refutes the view Western journalists, writers, and scholars have created in order to represent Eastern cultures as mysterious, dangerous, unchanging, and inferior. According to Said, who was born in Jerusalem at that time Palestine, the way westerners represent eastern people impacts the way they interact with the global community. All of this adds to, Palestinians having to endure unfair challenges such as eviction, misrepresentation, and marginalization that have forced them to spread allover the world. By narrating the story of his country Palestine, and his fellow countrymen from their own perspective Said is able to humanize Palestinians to the reader. “States” makes the reader feel the importance of having a homeland, and how detrimental having a place to call home is when trying to maintain one’s culture. Which highlights the major trait of the Palestinian culture: survival. Throughout “States”, Said presents the self-preservation struggles Palestinians are doomed to face due to eviction, and marginalization. “Just as we once were taken from one habitat to a new one we can be moved again” (Said 543).
Elia Suleiman’s cinematic reflexivity and poetic structure provide him the means to work through the crisis of mimesis while attending to political particularities of the Palestinian occupation. His style resists totalizing and appropriation by other narratives. It effectively critiques Israeli state violence by opening the violence up to questioning and reinterpretation, but the film does not move beyond questioning. In leaving his film open to interpretation, Suleiman refuses to provide answers to the questions he opened in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Any attempt at providing an answer to the questions raised in the film would push the film towards a totalizing narrative and weaken the poetic structure of the film.