MIDDLE EAST BOOKS REVIEW

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Mother of Strangers: A Novel

By Suad Amiry, Pantheon Books, 2022, hardcover, 344 pp. MEB $27

Reviewed by Ida Audeh

Suad Amiry’s first work of fiction is nominally a story of thwarted teenage romance told against the backdrop of the fall of Jaffa and the surrounding villages in 1948, when Israel was created and Palestine was violently dismembered. The narrative covers a four-year period beginning in June 1947, as tensions were building in the period before the end of the British Mandate, and ending in 1951, with the Palestinians who remained in Jaffa corralled into a ghetto trying to find their way as an unwanted minority in a triumphalist Jewish state.

Mother of Strangers describes graphically one of the consequences of forcible exile during war—not only the (obvious) loss of home and town, but also the fragmentation of nuclear families. Amiry offers as much historical background as the uninitiated reader needs to understand the unfolding events. But even readers who understand the loss of Palestine in geopolitical terms may not be familiar with how an abstract concept like settler colonialism plays out in the lives of its victims. The book makes the human consequences painfully clear.

Anyone familiar with even the broad contours of Palestine’s 20th century history knows from the opening pages that 15year-old lovestruck Subhi is going to be disappointed in his pursuit of Shams, the 13year-old village girl of his dreams. Our knowledge of the disaster that awaits Jaffa in 1948 infuses our reading with sadness for the earnest, hormone-driven teenager who thinks that with the right suit he can win the girl’s heart. We suspect (correctly as it turns out) that he will never have a chance to find out.

Jaffa, too, doesn’t stand a chance. Nicknamed “the mother of strangers,” a tribute to its hospitality, the city has another nickname, “the bride of the sea,” and that is the metaphor that comes to life in the first part of the novel. Amiry reclaims and maps Jaffa as it once was, before it was taken over by newcomers determined to erase all traces of its original residents. She recreates communities and streets that no longer exist: the cafes, neighborhoods of note, the names of families who owned orange groves. She describes the political discussion that dominated Palestinian life in the months before the Nakba and the class differences between city people and villagers. Regional traditions come to life in the cluster of chapters that end part one, in which Amiry describes the Nabi Rubin season, a much-anticipated period on the calendar that drew thousands of area residents to the shrine of the prophet Rubin. For three weeks or so, families took to the coast and camped out, barbecuing their food and enjoying the carnival atmosphere and sea breeze.

Part two begins in January 1948, and describes a sequence of atrocities that contributed to the mass panic and flight in April of that year. After the city’s fall, demoralized and defeated Jaffans watch helplessly as Arab homes are looted methodically by organized Jewish gangs. They become a barely tolerated minority in their own country.

In parts three and four, people are on the move, trying to escape Israel’s clutches while searching for their loved ones. Shams and her sisters are separated from their parents during the chaos of the flight from Jaffa, and as the parents separate to look for their daughters among groups of refugees, borders tighten; Shams never sees her mother again. Subhi is separated from his family and ends up in Jordan. His rakish uncle lives in the new state until circumstances force him to leave for Lebanon, but even there he is not safe; he is killed in combat when Israel invades that country in 1982.

The circumstances that prompted Amiry to write this book are revealed at the end, lending a twist to an already moving story. The daughter of a refugee who grew up in Jaffa and never got over the loss of his home, the author made the trek to Jaffa decades later to find it, but the guidance she was given was insufficient in a state that makes it a point to obliterate all traces of Palestinian life predating 1948. When a cab driver learned of her unsuccessful search, he introduced her to his aunt, who is none other than the real-life Shams, whose story led Amiry to track down Subhi, living in a refugee camp in Jordan.

Whereas Amiry had intended to write a personal account about the search for her father’s home, she was led to a bigger story: the fall of Jaffa and the loss of Palestine as experienced by two teenagers who survived the catastrophe but lost a great deal in the process. Now grandparents, they were willing to talk about the trauma they experienced, which the author’s father had never been willing to do.

Mother of Strangers describes the price paid in human lives when exclusivist states are created violently. It is also the story of

refugees around the globe—and there are so many of them today, fleeing war, poverty, gang violence, climate catastrophe—forced to abandon everything that roots them and to find their footing in an often hostile or at best indifferent world.

On Zionist Literature

By Ghassan Kanafani, translated by Mahmoud Najib, Ebb Books, 2022, paperback, 188 pp. MEB $20

Reviewed by Steve France

Fifty years ago, Israel assassinated the novelist, writer and icon of militant resistance Ghassan Kanafani. But publisher Ebb Books doesn’t cite that anniversary as the reason for this first-ever English translation of On Zionist Literature. Nor do readers learn why the slim volume had languished untranslated since 1967.

Regardless, the book is supremely relevant today, when Israel and its Western supporters are digging in ever deeper to reinforce the self-professed Jewish state that oppresses the Palestinians. Following suit, critics of Israel are going deeper in documenting Israel’s apartheid, settler-colonial nature. But, as Kanafani well knew, facts need a strong narrative frame before they can change deeply held attitudes and notions. Put another way, with its unprecedented assertion of ethnic supremacy, Israel is relying ever more heavily on narrative, rather than facts, to justify its brazen racism. The Zionist narrative must be countered by a stronger one.

In 1967 it was easier in the West to believe in a basically benign Israel, but Kanafani knew firsthand the deadly racism at the heart of the state’s ideology. Seeking to “know his enemy,” and knowing it was not the Jewish people, he studied Zionism.

Displaying Kanafani’s narrative gifts, On Zionist Literature traces the emergence in 19th century Europe (among Jews and non-Jews alike) of a new vision to revive the lost glory of the Jewish people. “Zionist literature,” he found, had falsely portrayed Zionism as a dramatic liberation movement against “anti-Jewish oppression,” as well as a natural expression of Judaism’s intense religious focus on Jerusalem and Jewish “chosenness.”

“Oppression was not what gave rise to the Zionist movement,” Kanafani writes. “The opposite seems to be the case.” Zionist ideas arose just as the leading nations of Europe were steadily “emancipating” Jews, who were immigrating in large numbers to more tolerant and prosperous countries. Western cultural leaders sought “social integration” in line with the humanist ideals of Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers. In literature, complex and sympathetic Jewish characters began to replace the anti-Semitic “Shylockian” stereotypes of the past, he says. Maria Edgeworth’s 1817 novel Harrington, Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel Ivanhoe and the poetry of Byron and Shelley are a testament to the move away from anti-Semitic tropes, Kanafani argues.

He suggests these trends might have led to a social integration such as was achieved in the U.S. But, in his telling, integration was not enough for a new class of “socio-economically privileged Jews,” who “at the expense of the oppressed Jewish minorities,” fashioned a restive, new Jewish identity that fused religion, race and nationalism and soon cried out for a state of its own in Palestine.

Kanafani says the greatest literary gift to Zionism came from George Eliot, a lapsed Christian, in the form of her 1876 novel Daniel Deronda—a fact that highlights how quickly Zionism found favor with influential non-Jews. Eliot was an idealistic individual and so her Jewish heroes impart an altruistic element to Zionism as they assert, “[The] Jews were chosen by God for the

Steve France is an activist and writer affiliated with Episcopal Peace Fellowship, Palestine-Israel Network.

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sake of other people.” One Jewish character, Mordecai, goes further, saying, “Israel is the heart of mankind,” but “our separateness will not…have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality.” This Jewish version of the “white man’s burden” was to be enacted in Palestine, but Eliot overlooked what that might mean for Palestinians.

The book also exposes the fabrications and literary flimsiness of later novels, such as Exodus by Leon Uris, which depicted the Zionist destroyers of Palestine as saintly heroes and their victims as backward brutes. But it is in the story of Zionism’s invention that Kanafani’s brilliance shines.

Kanafani’s widow, Anni, in a moving personal preface, says, “He was always busy, working as if death was just around the corner.” Had he lived longer, he doubtless would have worked more on the book’s thesis. As it is, he was not able to marshal enough sources and scholarship in this first foray to go beyond offering a powerfully intriguing glimpse of the veiled origins of Zionism. Still, the book, now available in English, should inspire further scholarship that can help Israel, its supporters and its critics overcome the European fever dream of Zionism.

Hollywood and Israel: A History

By Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman, Columbia University Press, 2022, paperback, 368 pp. MEB $35

Reviewed by Walter L. Hixson

This deeply researched study leaves little doubt about the sweeping and highly successful efforts of the Israeli government and American Zionists to propel pro-Israel sentiment emanating from the entertainment and celebrity capital of the world. As professors Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman note, “Hollywood engaged in Zionist philanthropy many years prior to Israel’s creation and went on to embrace the Jewish state fully” thereafter.

Organized chronologically, the book demonstrates conclusively that “the Israeli government worked tirelessly” and received the full backing of American Zionists in “forging and magnifying pro-Israel sentiments in American society on screen and lobbying for the Jewish state away from it.” Hollywood, in sum, has been of “inestimable value to Israel and its American supporters” throughout the history of the special relationship.

Scholars and students of Hollywood history have long been aware of Zionist influence, but this book is the most well-researched and detailed study to date. It draws on national and international archives and offers deft analysis of myriad films and events across a long history. The book chronicles Zionist efforts to promote the Israeli cause while swiftly condemning and containing any production, actor, director or studio executive—no matter how prominent—if they appeared remotely critical of Israel. Even Steven Spielberg, the dedicated Jewish Zionist and director of “Schindler’s List” (1993), came under fire for his subsequent film “Munich” (2005).

The movie, which celebrated the assassination of the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Olympic terror attack, was criticized for vaguely referencing the roots of Palestinian rage.

Hollywood and Israel analyzes film, television shows, series, award shows and various campaigns and anniversary celebrations over several decades. Early chapters focus on World War II and the biblical epics of the 1950s, which affirmed the righteousness of Israel’s occupation of the Holy Land. As other studies have previously explained, this phase culminated with the powerful impact of the film “Exodus,” released in 1960. Before the decade was out, and especially in the wake of the June 1967 war, Israeli-Zionist domination of Hollywood had been cemented.

By the end of the 1970s, a decade in which the Holocaust became widely publicized in film and throughout American culture, Zionist influence reached its peak. Israel came under modest challenge in the wake of the brutal invasion of Lebanon in 1982, but then and in subsequent years—despite Israel’s occupation, repression and rejection of the two-state peace process—Zionist influence remained dominant in Hollywood. As the authors note, “the love affair between Hollywood and Israel has proven resilient.”

It would require a very long review merely to name all the prominent Hollywood actors, directors, producers and studio executives who resolutely supported Israel and condemned the few of their colleagues who dared to criticize the self-proclaimed Jewish state. The detailed accounts of artists and countless films, television events and the various controversies that erupted make for fascinating reading. The overwhelming majority of the individuals chronicled—not only prominent Jewish Americans, but also Catholics and Protestants, liberals and conservatives—rallied behind Israel and policed dissent virtually no matter what the circumstances. Very few individuals, notably Vanessa Redgrave, had the courage to engage in persistent criticism of Zionist oppression of Palestinians.

Hollywood support for Israel may not be as monolithic today as it was by the end of the 1970s, yet as the authors conclude Hollywood still appears to “love Israel as much at the ripe old age of 70 as when it was a vibrant 30 years old.”

Hollywood and Israel is a straightforward scholarly account in which the authors eschew direct advocacy, though the evidence they present makes it clear that the entertainment capital has continuously embraced and promoted a lopsided pro-Israeli perspective. The language employed by the authors is sometimes simplistic, as when they repeatedly reference the asym-

Contributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy, along with several other books and journal articles. He was a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor.

metrical Israeli warfare and slaughter perpetrated in Gaza in 2014 in benign terms as the “row over Gaza.” Overall, however, this is an excellent and perhaps definitive study of the indisputable fact of Zionist domination of Hollywood.

Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India

By Kalyani Devaki Menon, Cornell University Press, 2022, paperback, 216 pp. MEB $30

Reviewed by Zakaria Clark-Elsayed

As the name of this anthropological study suggests, Kalyani Devaki Menon explores the possibilities for contesting the increasingly violent and outspoken Hindu right and their intolerance toward Indian Muslims. Detailing her extensive research in the historically Muslim section of Old Delhi, she focuses on the different lives of Muslims across class, sect, religiosity and gender, illustrating how the area’s Muslims traverse religious discrimination.

The book offers a comprehensive introduction to urgent social and religious issues throughout India and South Asia that are rarely covered in American and Western media. Shedding light on employment discrimination, arbitrary arrests and the recent rise of lynchings and other forms of violence toward Muslims, Menon

Zakaria Clark-Elsayed is an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. He is completing his bachelor’s in religious studies with a focus on Islam and Buddhism.

They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri, One World, 2022, hardcover, 288 pp. MEB $25.

Ahed Tamimi is a world-renowned Palestinian activist, born and raised in the small West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, which became a center of resistance to the Israeli occupation when a Jewish-only settlement blocked off its community spring. Tamimi came of age participating in nonviolent demonstrations against this and other illegal Israeli actions. Her global renown reached an apex in December 2017, when, at 16 years old, she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier who refused to leave her front yard. The video went viral, and Tamimi was arrested. An essential addition to an important conversation, They Called Me a Lioness shows us what is at stake in the Palestinian struggle and offers a fresh vision for resistance. With their unflinching, riveting storytelling, Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri shine a light on the humanity of not just occupied Palestine, but also the people struggling for freedom around the world.

The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice by Dilar Dirik, Pluto Press, 2022, paperback, 384 pp. MEB $30.

The Kurdish women’s movement is at the heart of one of the most exciting revolutionary experiments in the world today: Rojava, the Kurdish Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Forged over decades of struggle, most recently in the fight against ISIS, Rojava professes a radical commitment to ecology, democracy and gender equality. Taking apart superficial and Orientalist frameworks, Dilar Dirik offers an empirically rich account of the women’s movement that helped form Rojava. Drawing on original research and ethnographic fieldwork, she surveys the movement’s historical origins, ideological evolution and political practice over the past 40 years. Taking the reader from the guerrilla camps in the mountains to self-organized refugee camps, the book invites readers around the world to engage with the revolution in Kurdistan, both theoretically and practically, as a vital touchstone in the wider struggle for a militant anti-fascist, anti-capitalist feminist internationalism.

The Slow Road to Tehran: A Revelatory Bike Ride Through Europe and the Middle East by Rebecca Lowe, September Publishing, 2022, hardcover, 416 pp. MEB $26.95.

In 2015, as the Syrian war raged and the refugee crisis reached its peak, Rebecca Lowe set off on her bicycle across the Middle East. Driven by a desire to learn more about the region and its relationship with the West, Lowe’s 6,800mile journey took her through Europe to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, the Gulf and finally to Iran. Lowe’s adventure was an odyssey through landscapes and history that captured her heart, but also a deeply challenging cycle across mountains, deserts and repressive police states. Plagued by punctures and battling temperatures ranging from 20 to 118 degrees Fahrenheit, Lowe was rescued frequently by farmers and refugees, villagers and urbanites alike, and relied almost entirely on the kindness and hospitality of locals to complete her journey. This book is her evocative, deeply researched and often very funny account of her travels, and the people, politics and cultures she encountered along the way.

argues that these developments are inseparable from the emergence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brand of Hindu nationalism. The author explains how Hindu nationalists have discarded Muslims and other minorities as being incompatible with India. In doing so, they popularize narratives of Muslims being violent, impure and unpatriotic in order to justify their exclusion from society.

In contrast to these present developments, Menon begins the book by looking back at the historical status of Old Delhi before British colonial rule, when there was a degree of peace between Muslims and Hindus. By providing alternative visions and expectations for religious coexistence in South Asia, she suggests that Indians and the international community should not see the present religious tensions as inevitable.

Menon also looks within Old Delhi to highlight how Muslims have continued to exist despite discrimination. As the former capital of the Islamic Mughal Empire, Old Delhi has historically been a cultural center for Muslims. It has also become home to many Muslim migrants from the rest of Delhi and India who have fled their native regions for myriad reasons since the 1947 British partition. Thus, Menon’s work consciously deals with the historical emergence of Old Delhi as a stable place for Muslims within India, and as a future home for Muslims who are afraid to live in majority Hindu neighborhoods and cities.

Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Edward Said, among many others, Menon argues that the identity of Indian Muslims emerges from innumerable factors. Their sense of belonging and stability is challenged by cultural expectations on the local level, and by economic and religious forces on the transnational level.

For instance, Menon intertwines anthropological and social insights with her personal experience living with Muslim women to detail how traditional and secular Muslim practices, as well as Hindu culture, all impact a woman’s sense of identity, and challenges naïve narratives about Muslim women. Similarly, she describes how the lives of many Muslims unable to find stable jobs because of hiring discrimination are inseparable from the expanding informal economy in India shaped by neoliberalism and global economic patterns. Importantly, she suggests that Muslims are always in the process of making a place for themselves, not just within India, but also within the global economy and the Muslim world.

The stories of Old Delhi Muslims that Menon includes in her book include children chopping nuts in their living room to help their aging parents, sex workers supporting their drug-addicted or unemployed husbands and a club of women teaching the importance of a more engaged and active form of Islam. In all these instances, she highlights that these individuals have developed a sense of identity in Old Delhi. As such, these stories show the possibilities for Muslims to live within India and contest the pressure of Hindu nationalism.

At times the book is perhaps overly academic; the many stories and lives of Indian Muslims are overshadowed by extensive academic analysis, which does well in challenging assumptions about Muslim narratives, only at the cost of preventing the reader from becoming attached or fully sympathizing with their lives and stories. Nonetheless, the book is an incredibly important addition to academic discussions of Indian Muslims.

Although the situation may seem bleak for Indian Muslims, Menon insists that by working in the informal economy to feed their families or by challenging ignorant interpretations of the Qur’an and Muslim practices, Indian Muslims navigate religious conflict and present an identity to the world that defies stereotypical understandings.

Football in the Middle East: State, Society and the Beautiful Game

Edited by Abdullah Al-Arian, Oxford University Press, 2022, paperback, 336 pp. MEB $40

Report by Dale Sprusansky

an event on Aug. 15 to commemorate the release of Football in the Middle East: State, Society and the Beautiful Game. The book launch was held at the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum in Doha.

Abdullah Al-Arian, a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and editor of the 12-chapter volume, said the book explores the political, social and economic dynamics of football (“soccer” in American vernacular) in the Middle East. Football, he explained, impacts all levels of society in the region, both guiding migrant labor flows and attracting major investments from sovereign wealth funds. The all-encompassing nature of the sport makes it a highly attractive vehicle through which scholars can study any number of socio-political phenomena. Football has “showcased changes in national identity formation, helped highlight gender inequality and the plight of society’s most vulnerable,” among other issues, Al-Arian noted.

Unsurprisingly, the sport has played a significant role in the dynamics of the Middle East for quite some time. “Football has a rich history in the region that goes back to the colonial area, when nationalists invoked their domestic football leagues in the course of their struggles for independence,” Al-Arian noted. “Its role in political mobilization, whether by authoritarian rulers or popular protest movements, has continued well into the present day.” He expounds upon this more in his chapter, “Beyond Soft Power: Football as a Form of Regime Legitimization.”

Thomas Ross Griffin, a professor at Qatar University, discussed his chapter

on the identity of the Qatar national football team. He noted that the squad is often depicted as “little more than a team of mercenaries, players cherry-picked from across the globe to represent Qatar.” This assertion was true several years ago when the team had an inordinate number of players poached from Latin America, but today the roster is largely comprised of players who have deep roots in Qatar and a strong sense of national pride, he said.

For instance, the Qatar team that won the 2019 Asian Cup “had a long history of playing with each other at an underage level,” Griffin pointed out. “They were born in this country, they speak Arabic with a Qatari dialect, they went to school here— their entire lives were here.”

While many of the players didn’t have Qatari blood, he said this reality is completely in line with the country’s demographics, as an estimated 90 percent of people living in Qatar are foreign nationals. “This team has become a mirror to the society that Qatar is today,” he said. One glaring omission, however, is the absence of South Asians on the football team, given that migrant workers from the region make up more than half of the country’s inhabitants. In fact, many laborers from South Asia have helped build the infrastructure for the upcoming World Cup, often working and living in questionable environments.

Aside from the Qatari national team and general regional trends, chapters in the book include: assessing the relationship between football and the global Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; the role of women’s football in Turkey; the politicization of the sport in revolutionary Algeria; the intersection of football and social change in Iran; a modern history of football in Egypt; an exploration of the issues surrounding Qatar’s successful bid to host this year’s World Cup tournament; and an assessment of how the game has impacted broadcasting in the Middle East and beyond. ■

Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria by Muriam Haleh Davis, Duke University Press, 2022, paperback, 288 pp. MEB $30.

In Markets of Civilization, Muriam Haleh Davis provides a history of racial capitalism, showing how Islam became a racial category that shaped economic development in colonial and post-colonial Algeria. French officials in Paris and Algiers introduced what Davis terms “a racial regime of religion” that subjected Algerian Muslims to discrimi natory political and economic structures. These experts believed that introducing a market economy would modernize society and discourage anti-colonial nationalism. Following independence, convictions about the inherent link between religious beliefs and economic behavior continued to influence development policies. Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella embraced a specifically Algerian socialism founded on Islamic principles, while French technocrats saw Algeria as a testing ground for development projects elsewhere in the Global South. Highlighting the entanglements of race and religion, Davis demonstrates that economic orthodoxies helped fashion understandings of national identity on both sides of the Mediterranean during decolonization.

The City Always Wins: A Novel by Omar Robert Hamilton, Picador, 2018, paperback, 320 pp. MEB $18.

The City Always Wins is Omar Robert Hamilton’s debut novel from the front line of a revolution that captures the experience like no news report could. Deeply enmeshed in the 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square, Mariam and Khalil move through Cairo’s surging streets and roiling political underground, their lives burning with purpose, their city alive in open revolt. The world is watching, listening, as they chart a course into an unknown future. They are—they believe—fighting a new kind of revolution, players in a new epic in the making. From the communal highs of night battles against the police to the solitary lows of postrevolutionary exile, Hamilton’s bold novel cuts to the psychological heart of one of the key chapters of the 21st century. Arrestingly visual, intensely lyrical, uncompromisingly political and brutal in its poetry, The City Always Wins is a novel not just about Egypt’s revolution, but about a global generation that tried to change the world.

Sumac: Recipes and Stories from Syria by Anas Atassi, Interlink, 2021, hardcover, 248 pp. MEB $35.

The Syrian kitchen, shaped by influences from neighboring countries, has deep historical roots and evolved to perfection over thousands of years. This new cookbook, Sumac, is filled with traditional and contemporary Syrian recipes that were inspired by personal stories. The gorgeous photography illustrates how beautiful Syria was and still is, and family photographs add depth to the author’s history. Each chapter is filled with Atassi’s memories of family celebrations and the country that inspired the book. He tells stories of traditional weekend breakfasts in his grandmother’s garden and of the mezze his mother cooked for family gatherings. There are memories of the rich aromatic flavors of the Syrian kitchen where fragrant spices like the lemony and deep red sumac are prized ingredients. Sumac contains more than 80 recipes, inspired by the author’s family recipes and his travels, and includes beautiful location photography by Rania Kataf, who developed the “Humans of Damascus” Facebook page.