“… a compelling, original and well written piece of scholarship, and also a work of real passion and subtlety. Zionist Arabesques focus(es) on the material, experienced reality of Zionism, its phenomenology in the Israeli/Palestinian landscape. Evil or bad intentions lose meaning and instead we focus on grids and trees, cows, borders, documents, narratives. In this way, the impact of Zionism ... Read moregains a new meaning: a specific form of interaction of the modern and the non-modern (in the contradictory aspirations and worldviews of Zionist settlers between spatial geometry, markets and romanticism), meeting yet another form of interaction of the modern and non-modern (in the experience of the Palestine/Israeli landscape). As such, Zionist Arabesques should be of interest to a wide audience, including not only anthropologists but also historians, critical theorists and the general public interested in the fates of Zionism – or of modernism.”
Reviel Netz, Professor of Classics, Stanford University "A most subtle and penetrating ethnographic study of transformations in land, nature, and agriculture in Israel in light of the expropriation of Palestinian villages. A crucial, imaginatively researched contribution."
Yael Navaro-Yashin, Senior Lecturer, University of Cambridge Show Less