Sheikh Jarrah

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Unlike “A Jerusalem Courtyard”, Behar does not internalize Jerusalem in order to portray its symbolic representation of the Mizrahi struggle in “Sheikh Jarrah, 2010” (Behar, 51-55). Instead, Behar uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to represent the Mizrahi struggle by globalizing the conflict to the broader Arab-Israeli conflict by focusing on a political protest that occurred in East Jerusalem from 2009-2011 (McCarthy). Sheikh Jarrah is a Palestinian neighborhood that was subject to becoming an Israeli settlement, displacing Palestinians by evicting them from their houses and giving them to Israeli citizens (Wildman). Due to a 1970 Israeli law, Palestinians are required to present proof of ownership and residency prior to 1948 in order to retain their property. The poem begins with the protest slogan for Sheikh Jarrah, “There is no sanctity in an …show more content…

He instead makes it general enough so every person is included, down-playing the concept of “the other.” He then follows up with the concept of actively forgetting one’s identity, which throughout the poem has been an implied trope as Behar ping-ponged between identifying as more Arab or more Jewish in the nine previous stanzas (Snir, 170). However, in the final stanza Behar meets an old student of his who is working as an officer (Eliahu; Morganstern). In an interview Behar released that this student was also a Mizrahi Jew, but his military education pushed him to neglect his Arab identity in its entirety. The fact Behar is referred to as a teacher draws a parallel between him and Shimon the Righteous; almost as if he is stating that if they are not students of Shimon, then someone must attempt to revive his

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