instructive ritual

GENERAL ARTICLES

INSTRUCTIVE RITUAL The Arab Student Union and the Communitas of the Palestinian Israeli Educated Lauren Erdreich

Abstract: In spite of state efforts to limit public nationalist ritual of the Palestinian Israeli community, one ritual system, as this article details, is kept intact by the Arab Student Union (ASU). Based on an ethnographic study of the Hebrew University ASU, I show how this ritual system is instructive in a specific, educated Palestinian Israeli identity. Instruction revolves around the root paradigms of a specifically Israeli Palestinianness and of the national responsibility of the educated. The instructive ritual system arouses communitas of the educated Palestinian community through instruction carried out in the context of sacralized space and time and by means of the use of ritual art and events, the recruitment of ritual commentators, and the intermeshing of ethos and worldview. This ritual system can be understood as an indigenous Palestinian Israeli pedagogy for liberation. Keywords: communitas, identity, literacy, liberation, Palestinians, ritual, root paradigm, students

Each year, on 31 March, the Hebrew daily Haaretz runs an article covering the previous day’s events among Israel’s Palestinian population. Known as Land Day, 30 March is the anniversary of a demonstration against land appropriations in the Galilee in 1976 in which five Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed. It is one of the few public rituals celebrated annually by the Palestinian community within Israel’s borders. Reports on Land Day in the Hebrew press are usually brief. They cite the number of police forces held on stand-by near Palestinian towns and villages and sum up the events as “passed without incident” or “without disruptions of the public order.” That Land Day passes “without incident” or “without disruptions of the public order” reflects the Jewish population’s assumptions about Palestinian public gatherings and Social Analysis, Volume 50, Issue 3, Winter 2006, 127–145 © Berghahn Journals

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celebrations. These are viewed as threatening and potentially violent, something to be watched and controlled. For the Jewish population in Israel, national rituals are a central if not sacred part of society and schooling. Nationalist ceremonies based in Jewish religion and history organize life around a Zionist conception of time and define the collective Zionist cosmos (Handelman and Katz 1990). In schools, ritual ceremonies around national and religious holidays as well as birthdays and other events work to re-present the authority of the state and to emphasize belonging in the national collective over individual attachments to family and friends (Forman 1994; Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1990; LomskyFeder 2004; Weiss 1997). For the Palestinian Israeli community, public nationalist ritual is regulated by actual and internalized restrictions put in place by the state. This is especially so of schools and teachers, who are strictly supervised by the Ministry of Education and the General Security Service (Shabak). Teachers, who require Shabak authorization to gain and keep job appointments, are discouraged from celebrating and discussing nationalist issues. Non-formal educational arenas, such as community centers and summer camps sponsored by political parties, are less regulated, yet they reach a more limited constituency. Religious institutions, such as mosques and churches, also enjoy more freedom than schools, but they cater mostly to the adult population. In general, the history of military rule and over 50 years of restrictions on public expression of sentiments that could be construed as Palestinian nationalism have left their mark on the Palestinian Israeli community. Many people have internalized a fear of state surveillance and self-regulate their own participation in public ritual. This hegemonic control is viewed as hindering the formation of a Palestinian Israeli system for creating and/or reconfirming itself. Nonetheless, several recent studies point to semi-institutionalized arenas in which the Palestinian Israeli community manages to resist control and to express and instill a nationalist definition of community and values. Ben-Ze’ev and Aburaiya’s (2004) study of Islamic Movement pilgrimage activities in villages destroyed in 1948 and the ethnography of a private high-school graduation ceremony (Rabinowitz and Abu Baker 2002) present moments of nationalist ritual, hinting that a greater system of ritual may be in place in the community at large. This article details a system of nationalist ritual that reaches part of the Palestinian Israeli community—the Arab Student Union (ASU). Based on two years of fieldwork with Palestinian Israeli students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,1 I discuss the method by which university students are ritualized into a communitas of the Palestinian Israeli educated. In compensation for the suppression of Palestinian national communitas within Israeli and for the lack of socialization by the schools, the rites of the ASU ritualized community are instructive. The ASU ritual system instructs university students in a unique brand of Palestinian nationalism and in their role as its educated elite. This ritual system can be seen as a liberating literacy project—one that confirms a common past and morality with the Palestinian community in Israel, and that arouses a separate communitas based on the heightened political awareness of the educated elite.

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Ritual, Instruction, and Communitas Ritual is discussed explicitly as instructive only with regard to initiation rites; new initiates are instructed into new roles through a delimited series of rites. Instruction has also been analyzed as ritual; rituals in the everyday life of schools serve to pass on pedagogical messages. The latter studies examine the ritual nature of school, highlighting how the running of schools and the messages they convey are accomplished through an endless series of rituals (Akinnaso 1992; Fasick 1988; Gehrke 1979; Kapferer 1981; Lancy 1975; Lutz and Ramsey 1973; McLaren 1985, 1993). This article also makes connections between ritual studies and the ethnography of education, but from the opposite direction—not the ritual nature of instruction but the instructive nature of ritual. From both directions, rituals are seen as constructive and not merely reflective of society. Yet while studies of “rites of instruction” (McLaren 1993) focus on how teachers can disempower or liberate marginal students, my interest is in how marginal students use rituals for instruction in liberation. It is useful, then, to return to what we know about the instructive nature of rituals. Rituals instruct community members in the nature of the community’s world-view or cosmology, the roles that members are expected to play, and the meaning of symbols. The power of rituals for political socialization lies in their transmission of social knowledge, traditions, and norms (Lane 1981). Rites of passage, the ultimate example of instruction through ritual, are “events that model” (Handelman 1990) the social world, importing knowledge needed to preserve the group and ensure continued existence of the social order. As events, they are structured linearly: the entry of initiates into a ritual space, the learning of new knowledge, and the exit of the initiates with a new understanding of their status and identity in the group. Somewhere along this theoretically linear process, communitas forms among the initiates. Be it in initiation rites or political rituals, communitas is aroused not instructed. The instructive nature of ritual is the backdrop upon which communitas comes into being. The jump from instruction to communitas in schools, rites of passage, or political rituals is hard to explore, perhaps because of the non-rational nature of communitas. This jump, however, draws attention to the link between instruction/knowledge and communitas/identity. This is the same link drawn by ideological literacy theory and critical pedagogy. According to their basic post-structural assumptions, knowledge is inscribed with power relations, is hierarchized, and privileges hegemonic ideologies. Literacy—the learning and application of knowledge—involves making choices about how one relates oneself to the organization of power (Langer 1987; Street 1984, 1993). Thus, all literacy entails the (re-)definition of social positioning or identity. Critical pedagogy sees literacy as a tool of liberation for marginal groups—a means by which socially aware teachers can help guide students to form critical opinions of social reality and commit themselves to the transformation of oppressive social norms (Freire 1971; Gover 1990; Shor and Freire 1987). These theories add another angle to the knowledge-identity (instruction-communitas) link; they see the link not as


linear but as mediated by a social actor who creates a new identity based on the social power relations she or he reads in knowledge. In other words, how knowledge is employed by its consumer expresses social repositioning—an expression that can be contestatory. Following this line of reasoning, I suggest a new lens for looking at the ritual of marginal groups—that ritual can be viewed like literacy projects, as a pedagogical tool for creating a heightened consciousness of social power relations, a communitas of the aware. Through the lens of ritual as a pedagogical tool, I view rituals as instructive in a new community and as instructive to this community of its place in the greater society (both of the local national group and the state). Looking at ritual as a pedagogical tool may help us understand how constituencies are expanded and recruited to struggles for changing the social order from outside of institutionalized or public-ritual arenas. Specifically, this lens of emphasis serves as a frame for elaborating our understanding of the use of ritual by the Palestinian Israeli community in its own pedagogy of liberation.

ASU Ritual Life Since its beginnings in 1958, ‘Arab’ student politics at the Hebrew University has always had a highly national character and has added to the nurturing of an awareness of the nationally based discrimination of Palestinian citizens in Israel (Landau 1993; Leesh 1971; Lustick 1980). The Hebrew University ASU, the first of several ASUs founded on campuses around the country, is composed of sub-groups connected to the major Arab political parties.2 Each year, Palestinian students vote for party lists on their own campuses and at the national level. All current major Palestinian Israeli political figures were once active in the ASU, and they continue to support, guide, and advise student leaders in planning activities. As opposed to the Student Union (SU), the ASU is an officially unrecognized student group, but it is allowed to conduct activities on campus grounds. The ASU has criticized the SU for not representing Palestinian students and has cited the university’s denial to recognize it as part of larger discriminatory state policies toward Palestinian citizens. From its inception, the ASU has espoused a declared aim to identify with national issues both inside and outside Israel. The ASU provides a full cultural life for students. Often even before they arrive on campus, students are contacted by the ASU. Contact continues through the delivery of information sheets on the political situation, newspapers, posters with national slogans and pictures, and notices of activities sent to dorm rooms. The ASU provides art for decorating dorm-room walls, chooses music and teaches it to anyone who wants to learn it, and distributes the artwork of poets and artists. ASU events instruct on the value of this ritual art and the community for which it is meaningful. We can understand the ASU events as working toward instructing in symbols and paradigms that aim to produce what Turner (1977) characterizes as


an “ideological communitas.” Communitas is an inherent complement to social structure that can serve as an escape venue from alienating social structures. It is “ideological” when a subset of a group based on a social category (e.g., the educated within the Palestinian Israeli community) withdraws and “seeks the glow of communitas among those with whom they share some cultural or biological feature they take to be their most signal mark of identity” (ibid.: 47). At universities in Israel in which most Palestinian students live away from home and board in the dormitories, this subset is brought together as a packaged audience. The ASU plays an active role in tapping into this resource and instructing in-gathered students into a new identity and role. Although the ASU manages to reach almost all Palestinian students, it is not free from criticism. Some students believe that it is too political and not attuned to students’ needs at the university, that it is splintered by rivalries among political groups, or that it is run by opportunists whose main concern is their own future political careers. Nonetheless, the artwork it distributes is accepted and consumed even by its critics, and criticism does not prevent students from attending ASU events. In other words, the ASU enjoys a large base of support and manages to reach and speak to the majority of the Palestinian student body. The ASU ritual system inducts students into the larger Palestinian culture, while drawing borders around them as Israeli Palestinians—the others in a Jewish state. It conveys to the students their obligation as the educated class to identify with and further national pride and awareness. The ritual system of the ASU works by sacralizing space and time, providing ritual art and events, presenting ritual commentators, and connecting between the ritual ethos and a specific world-view. To explore how this system creates communitas among the Palestinian Israeli educated, we will begin by looking at how ASU rituals are situated in the university experience of Palestinian Israeli students.

The Sacralization of Time and Space ASU activities are organized in a time and space that are both connected to and separate from the profane daily work of being a student. Being a student at the Hebrew University means reading and hearing lectures in Hebrew, studying with a majority of Jewish students and lecturers, and living in dorms and studying in buildings named for Jewish philanthropists. ASU activities set a collective rhythm to Palestinian Israeli student life that separates out Palestinian students and marks them as a distinct student body among the primarily Jewish students and faculty. The ASU calendar of ritual events includes the opening of the school year; commemoration of the Kufur Qassem Massacre, Land Day, and Il-Nakba; Student Day; and Ramadan festivities.3 For students whose daily lives are ordered by their participation in a Jewish educational institution, these rituals mark out a time for students to experiment with nationalist symbols and status. These rituals are “liminal” in that they are collective and construct a socially structured cycle outside of everyday student life at the university. Rituals that mark


religious holidays or address current events and political issues are “liminoid” in that they are not central to the ASU calendar, are crafted by known individuals, and speak to certain groups within the Palestinian student body, yet sometimes have collective or “mass” effects (Turner 1977). They can be fragmentary in that they appeal to specific tastes, compete for audiences within the student body, and propose different versions of the nature of the collective (the religious umma versus the secular nation, for instance), yet they sometimes still play a role in the greater pedagogical project of the ASU. The placement and timing of ritual events infuses them with a sacred-like character, creating a sensuous experience that connects consecration with the participants’ status as students. ASU events are held at night (around 8:00 or 9:00 PM) on the margins of the campus in the Science Lecture Halls. At these hours, official studying time is over and the darkness of night has fallen. Cafeterias have closed and the last classes have let out. To get to the Halls, students have to leave the lights and noise of dormitories full of students settling in for the night. Groups of Palestinian students climb the hill back to the main campus, gathering friends along the way. They become a noisier and more present force as they reach the security guard and gate, where they present IDs and bags for inspection. The campus is mostly empty except for the last stragglers studying in the library, which closes at 10:00 PM. To get to the Halls on the far outskirts of the campus, students walk through an empty campus or through the dark botanical gardens, then take a stairway down into a long corridor that leads into the building that houses the Halls. Inside, one is greeted with light, the busyness of gathering bodies, and, most uniquely to the Hebrew University setting, the sound solely of Arabic-speaking voices (although always intermingled with Hebrew words, especially those connected to studies). Inside the Halls is a typical lecture setting—long benchlike tables with attached chairs arranged on a gradual incline facing a table, lectern, and blackboard. But unlike in typical lecture settings at the university, the blackboard is prepared not with academic messages in Hebrew letters, but with cultural announcements, political messages, and/or holiday well-wishes in Arabic script. The lecturer’s space in front becomes a stage for cultural performances, and the static seating arrangements are sometimes abandoned for more active stances—standing and clapping or singing along with music. The space is transformed by its ritual use yet retains its profane character, situating the ritual event as part of the greater social milieu of university education. This venue is the setting for the patterned nationalist rituals that make up almost the entirety of ASU activities. These usually consist of a lecture by a politician followed by a film or a cultural performance of national character involving musicians, theatrical groups, and/or stand-up comedians.4 The patterned structure is ritualistic: it is formalized in place and time, it is repetitive, it makes use of symbols, and it relies on a psychologically powerful induction into participation in a set drama, which helps participants see themselves as playing a certain role (Kertzer 1988: 9–12). Its national character connects them to the history, politics, and culture of Palestinians, while its placement in the university singles them out as related to this group in a certain way.


The conservative pattern of the ritual events creates a sense of historical continuity for the Palestinian sub-group of the educated. To understand how this ritual system instructs in community and arouses communitas, I will show the means by which the ASU instills root paradigms of Israeli Palestinianness and responsible awareness of the educated.

Ritual Art and Events Root paradigms are a higher-order concept than symbols, and they exist in the minds of major social actors in rituals. As symbols condense meaning, root paradigms condense themes (Turner 1979). They are culturally induced scripts that govern or guide behavior and world-view and can be equated with dominant pedagogical themes of the hidden curriculum. To understand the root paradigms that instruct on what it means to be an educated Palestinian Israeli, we should begin with the symbols. The ASU takes care to bring the sacred into the profane space by the use of ritualized art that it delivers to students’ dorm rooms and then instructs about at events. The ASU artwork in the dorm room I lived in with three Palestinian women included a “Marseil Halifa—We are with you” poster (Jabha), two “Write down I am an Arab” posters (Jabha), a “Happy Ramadan” calendar with a picture of the Dome of the Rock (Il-Risali), and a door-length poster of a small child loading a stone into a slingshot, which read “53 years of occupation” (Itijamu).5 The Marsel Halifa poster had been acquired at an event commemorating the Kufur Qassem Massacre, and became a constant reminder all year as his trial was in the news. Reem6 even bought a tape of his songs from the Old City. The “Write down” poster quoted in entirety the Mahmud Darwish poem “Investigation.”7 In the background was a picture of Naji Il-Ali’s character Handela, used by all parties on T-shirts and posters.8 Durkheim ([1915] 1965) analyzed religious iconographic art as designed to take action on the mind and symbolize the moral order. Kertzer (1988) observed that ritualized political art can serve as an expression of allegiance. These posters and T-shirts have similar effects and purposes: they influence the minds of students, symbolize the moral order that the ASU is advocating, and, by their acceptance, express allegiance either to a specific party or to the ASU community and ideas. The posters mentioned above were displayed on the walls of countless other students; they were so thoroughly consumed by students that I could not collect copies for myself. Their popular consumption indicates their relevance to the existential experience of young Palestinians in a Jewish state. The posters filtered art for the women, guiding them to Palestinian nationalist singers, poets, and artists. They politicized art, making it a matter of the oppression of Palestinians and the occupation, as well as opposition. They formed the basis of the root paradigms of being Palestinian in Israel and of the responsibility of the educated to the national collective. Yet the symbolism of ritual art remains at the level of representation of cultural ideas. Alone, these posters are not enough to instruct in root paradigms, to form the basis for the active processes of cultural reasoning. Root paradigms


must manifest themselves in behavior that seems to be freely chosen by its participants but is patterned and structured (Turner 1979). To illustrate how this ‘artwork’ was mobilized into the work of root paradigms, I will contextualize the Halifa poster. The Halifa poster was distributed at a Jabha event commemorating the fortythird anniversary of the Kufur Qassem Massacre. Approximately 250 people attended the event, which was held in the Halls, the ASU’s usual venue. Upon entry, the students were handed a poster and a flier that read “Jerusalem— Palestine’s bridegroom.” Nadir, a Jabha student leader, emceed the event. He opened with a few words comparing Sabra and Shatila (Israeli army–initiated massacres in two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon) to Kufur Qassem and Land Day “in this country” (f’il bilad). Although referring to the two major historical events in which Palestinian Israelis have been killed (prior to the October Events of 2000), he used the word b’lad (country) and not ‘Israel’. Member of the Knesset (MK) Muhammad Bariki then spoke animatedly. Reem, who sat next to me, criticized him for being too political and not relating enough to Kufur Qassem. An Israeli-made film about Kufur Qassem, with subtitles in Hebrew and Arabic, was then shown.9 The film is quite critical, presenting the Israeli army as rash and the Israeli establishment as patronizing, while the villagers are portrayed as unjustly wronged and fairly powerless. During the first moments of the film, army orders are given to “arrest nobody and injure nobody”—with the implication being to shoot to kill. In the next scene, an old woman tells how they had sent her brother, the youngest boy, to the fields to tell an older brother of the curfew. The army kills the young boy before he can speak to his brother. Survivors and buriers of the dead are interviewed. Throughout the film, the audience was intently quiet except for the sucking in of breath. At the pictures of the government-initiated sulha, a tradition of reparations between fighting groups, almost everyone laughed bitterly at the irony of the coercion and co-option of this tradition. When the lights came on, most of the women wiped tears from their eyes. The next item on the program was readings about Kufur Qassem from the poetry of Mahmud Darwish and Tawfiq Ziad, interspersed with oud and drum music. Then Marseil Halifa songs were played, and many people clapped and sang along. At the conclusion, Nadir announced very solemnly, “Marseil Halifa, we, the students of Hebrew University are with you.” Beginning with the opening speech, we can witness root paradigms being put into process by the major actors (the organizers or ritual providers). The speech situated the students in relation to the historical event at hand and in relation to the history of the Palestinian collective. The analogy to Sabra and Shatila put Kufur Qassem on a par with two of the most accepted symbols of injustice and suffering of the Palestinian people. The film itself provided the visual and emotional basis for this claim. Nadir’s emphasis that such events happen “in this country,” without referring to Israel by name, relayed the message that this suffering and injustice is part of the ‘Israeli’ Palestinian experience and should also be a reason for opposing Israel ideologically. The


appearance of an MK who works within the Israeli system, however, is seen to condone using Israeli democracy in practice. Reem’s criticism of the gap between commemoration and current politics touches on the contradiction in these two messages: on the one hand, emotional empathy with national suffering at the hands of the state; on the other hand, attachment to the state as the venue for civil reconciliation. The state is presented both as the enemy to be detested and as the reference body for participation. This event provides both a “model of” the relationship between the students and the greater Palestinian collective and a “model for” the desired relationship of struggle between the students and the state (Geertz 1973: 93–94). The poetry/music section also moves along this general Palestinian–Palestinian Israeli axis. The poetry familiarizes the students with famous Palestinian Israeli poets, and, with instrumental music belonging to the Arab world, the evening slowly builds into a crescendo of Palestinianness with the songs of Halifa. The final declaration distinguishes the students as specifically connected both to Israel—“students of the Hebrew University”—and to the Palestinian collective—“with” Halifa. The full emotional drama of the evening, complete with a time for crying and a time for clapping, serves as a ritual that prescribes the appropriate conduct in the presence of sacred objects (songs and symbolic images). The poster and music of Halifa become ‘sacred’ symbols of the students’ ‘authenticated’ connection as educated Palestinian Israelis to the Palestinian collective. Through ritual events and art, the ASU instills two root paradigms of the educated Palestinian Israeli collective: Palestinian Israeliness as a specific but integral part of the Palestinian national experience, and the role of the educated as leaders in the struggle for Palestinian liberation in Israel. ASU rituals in general situate the students in Palestinian history, while simultaneously appropriating Israeli claims of democratic inclusion. The combination of these two paradigms instructs that being part of the Palestinian educated requires a conflation of civil action with national duty.

Ritual Commentators The latter paradigm of the role of the educated is more evident in speeches by MKs and village mayors at ASU events. MKs in particular are certainly ritual providers, but their role can be seen more as that of ritual commentator, similar to the role of sportscasters who provide a constant, real-time monologue on the flow of the game, the players, and their connection to other games and the history of the sport. At a small meeting (of about 40 people) organized by Jabha prior to a demonstration of Arab municipalities against budget cuts in the Arab sector, Faisal Azayzi, mayor of Daburieh, said: This strike is important for putting the new [Barak] government to a test … The budget is a translation of intentions. There does not need to be affirmative action, but there must be equality for Jewish and Arab municipalities. So the


new government has already failed the first test. Now we are trying to tell them this is not just a matter of money. They always allocate a little more here and there and say it is better than before so that people will shut up. That’s not good enough … Our forefathers, under martial law [applied to Palestinian Israeli villages until 1966] just wanted to work however they could and to provide food for their children. Now we are in the university, in political parties, and we see more. So we ask, “When?” After 50 years we want to be equal in everything.

Interspersing his speech with Hebrew and English words, Azayzi appropriates a liberal democratic discourse to focus the students on their civil collective rights—their rights as an othered group. He explains discrimination as a violation of collective rights and opposes it to the individualistic focus of the forefathers. Furthermore, he makes the demand for collective rights the explicit responsibility of the educated class—at the university and in political parties.10 While drawing a connection to the past, Azayzi and others repeatedly advocate a break with the past and a differentiation of the educated group. Despite making a link with the past history of the Palestinian struggle in Israel, they subtly challenge the hegemonic discourse of the previous generation—that social mobility and the end of oppression can be acquired through acquiescence to the state, obedience, and personal gain. These comments speak to the increasing awareness of the oppression of Palestinians in Israel and to the growing discourse of democratic collective rights. When they are repeated, ritualized, and directed to the educated, they instill a root paradigm that obligates initiates to support, if not work toward, change through civil action. MK Azmi Bishara of Itijamu was even more direct in a speech that he gave before a jam-packed audience in an opening event. In what can be considered a sort of pre-game commentary, he explicitly instructed the audience on their role as educated Palestinian Israelis. The event and his talk were titled “The Educated Man: Between Ideal and Reality.” Azmi, as he is affectionately called by active and non-active students alike, jumped between the two paradigms of the obligation of the educated and the specific Israeli version of Palestinian national suffering. First, Azmi used Max Weber to ‘academize’ his claim that students need to act as an elite. According to Weber, he explained, a democratic elite with democratic institutions is more exigent for the transition from a conservative to a democratic society than are the democratic masses. Yet there is no elite among Arabs in Israel, he criticized; people study and return to their towns to be elected by family associations. Students should be part of the enlightened elite, Azmi asserted: “Sure you have papers and exams, but there is no such thing as ‘they taught me that way.’ Go and learn. There is a library—go in and read.” He then cited the lack of Arab culture in Israel as another indication of Arab cultural stagnancy, based in acquiescence to Israeli hegemony. Arabs in Israel have no culture aside from bringing out the taboun (traditional oven) and chubs (pita bread), but this is mere folklore of the felaheen (farmers, i.e., not of the educated class). This folklore is a product of the historical exodus of


educated people in 1948—leaving “us in Israel” with no Arab cinema, books, or songs—and a result of the capitulation to the image of Arabs that Israelis like to portray: “You open your eyes, and there is no Arab state here. It is a Jewish state. In an Arab state you hear Arab voices. All the life is Arab. Culture requires books and the like … We go to Jordan, and when they ask, we say we are Israeli Arabs.” At this point everyone laughed, and someone shouted out, “We speak Hebrew!” The laughter and irony with which this comment was received reflected an acknowledgment of the ‘truth’ in Azmi’s commentary. The audience reaffirmed that his words were indeed reflective of their experience of life in Israel and that the present situation is ironic or undesirable. In other words, they accepted his message that the role of the educated elite should be to flush out Israeli Arabness and replace it with a more nationalist character. As a ritual commentator, Azmi added context to the emotional aspect of ritual and communitas. He appealed to the students’ intellect from an emotional standpoint. He worked on their new status or renewed status after the summer break as university students and their desire to fulfill this role. It is not by chance that MK Bishara is referred to casually as “Azmi.” He is a charismatic man, embodying the figure of the successful rebel who has won on the enemy’s home court. He is educated (having earned a PhD in philosophy) and has published in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. He has been elected to the Knesset and has used his position to travel to Arab countries and make ties with Arab leaders. Combining academic arguments with politics, his speech to the students demystified power relations in Israel; he showed how Jewish hegemony works and continues to suppress Palestinian Israeli ideological development. His theoretical or academic remarks also helped ‘prove’ the natural role of the educated class as history and sociology have revealed it. His speech, presented just as the students were considering their own role for the academic year and in conjunction with their initial experiences of the university as a Jewish institution, offered an anti-ideal of the meaning of being educated—a view that considers being educated not as a means for personal advancement but as a social position that morally obligates the educated to work toward national improvement. Azmi’s involvement in ASU events can certainly be understood as ritualizing the authority of his view of society and its future needs and as sacralizing his own personal authority. Yet his participation also furthers the ASU’s root paradigms. By bringing him to campus, student leaders use his charisma and the sacralization of his authority to fuse instruction and inspiration. His role is not just to comment and direct, but to inspire and arouse communitas around content. When veteran students bring ritual commentators to ASU rituals, they channel emotional communitas into an articulated awareness. They encourage the Palestinian Israeli educated person to identify with a history of oppression and with those who fight it; to differentiate themselves from those who have acquiesced to oppression; and, as the educated elite, to be responsibly aware of how oppression works.


Ritual Fusion of Ethos and World-View The ASU ritual system does not work in a vacuum. Students have experiences outside of and previous to their university life.11 Part of the power of ASU ritual for Palestinian students studying in a Jewish institution situated in the heart of the Jewish symbolic landscape (Jerusalem) lies in the way ASU rituals cater to an emotional and psychological need for locus of identity. Even if this need is itself part of a cultural discourse on identity, authenticity, and psychological wholeness, it can still be the backdrop for the power of ritual. Above and beyond answering to this psychological need, however, ASU ritual works by reifying its messages in the very structure and experience of the events it hosts and by recruiting the socio-political backdrop of ‘real life’ to further root paradigms. In other words, ASU ritual connects between the ethos of ritual (the values exemplified in its symbols) and the world-view (the view of the way things are) that it instructs. Several types of events, held off campus or outside of the Halls, actively engage real life and are part of the ASU ritual system: the two secular parties (Itijamu and Jabha) host occasional cultural events (often one of the calendar rituals) at the El-Hakawati Palestinian national theater in East Jerusalem; Student Day is held in cities of the Palestinian Authority or in East Jerusalem; and political demonstrations are staged near the Knesset or Jerusalem Municipality. These events ritualize the whole of Jerusalem and its surroundings—not just the campus—as a sacred space of national expression and struggle for the Palestinian Israeli educated. Student Day festivities are part of the ASU calendar. They are held on the same day as SU festivities. Both SU and ASU festivities include DJs, dancing, and musical performances—each with their own Hebrew or Arabic character. The official reason for separate festivities is the continued SU policy of holding its main events at Atractsia, an amusement park in the occupied territories that has different rates and hours for Arabs and Jews. In 1999 and 2000, the ASU held festivities at the Orient House and a Jericho resort. We can read the separation of these festivities as an instance of the struggle for authority through ritual. Social groups challenge each other over ritual and who provides ritual services because ritual itself confirms authority and social order (Dirks 1994); thus, ASU Student Day festivities are part of the contest over social order. That this contest is carried out over space and by means of spatial ‘statements’ infuses it with a message about collective marginalization in space. Furthermore, the ASU’s choices of where to celebrate position the students on the spatial margins of the Palestinian-Israeli border. Being in Jerusalem also facilitates students’ chances to participate in nationwide demonstrations held at government offices situated in the capital. Demonstrations turn West Jerusalem from the heart of Jewishness into a place to intermingle with Palestinian MKs, to participate in the mechanisms and processes of civil society, to confront the police, and to express solidarity with other aware Palestinian Israelis. At one demonstration against paltry allocations of the national budget to the Arab sector, a bus of students joined about 300


Palestinian Israeli protestors from all over the country in front of the government complex. Student leaders positioned themselves in the center of the group and led chants against the state (“A racist state,” “A police state,” “Barak, go home”) and in emphasis of their presence as a population (“We won’t leave— we are here until we die,” “Hand in hand, united we stand strong”). The head of the ASU led the crowd down the street while another student encouraged non-student stragglers watching the demonstration from a hilltop to join them: “We can just put your picture up there, and you can come down.” The head of Jabha made a rallying speech. Other students followed the leaders, watched from the sidelines, and tried to spot and point out Palestinian MKs. The slogans in Hebrew (“A racist state” and “A police state”) continue the theme of accusing the government of violating democracy, while the slogans in Arabic (“Hand in hand, united we stand strong”) and the singing of the Palestinian national anthem, “B’lady,” are active assertions of Palestinianness. Together with the Hebrew slogan “We won’t leave—we are here until we die,” they demand the right to be recognized as a collective in Israel, while they acknowledge that they are unwanted by the Zionist project. This political participation instructs the students that they are part of the social and political public discourse and can make themselves heard in it. It teaches them that they should attach themselves to the stratum of adult Palestinian Israeli society that is politically aware and demanding and should differentiate themselves from those who hesitate. The role of students in this stratum is valorized. At the demonstration, women students watched police beatings and asked if it was students who were hit. Amal said she heard that the ASU head had been hurt once in a demonstration. The following day, Yousra asked me to tell her about the demonstration “of the students,” and Jumana said she heard from a friend that four students were injured. This ritualization of pain is a powerful emotional mobilizer. Bodily punishment that is inflicted due to resistance turns the person being injured into a symbol of the marginality of his or her group (McLaren 1993). Whether students took part in the demonstration, watched from the sidelines, or followed it after the fact, the demonstration was a means for placing student leaders in the center of the national struggle and thus became an arena for the students themselves. Additional demonstrations dealing with national issues are held on campus and are combined with calls for the university not to limit Palestinian students’ rights to “freedom of expression.” The space and time allocated by the university for such demonstrations are strictly limited. Police barriers are set up, cordoning off a section of an open plaza at the heart of the campus. The demonstrations must be approved three days ahead of time and must begin and end at designated times. Counter-demonstrations by Jewish groups sprout up without prior permission, are not cordoned off by barriers, and are not restricted to the designated ending time of the ASU demonstrations. Furthermore, although the plaza is the largest open square on campus, it is removed from the Forum, the heart of the campus. The Forum is contiguous to the main library; connects the Humanities and Social Science wings and a major entrance to the


university; and houses a post office, copy center, cash machines, book stores, commercial booths, and fast-food stalls. At these demonstrations, ASU party members hang signs on the police barriers and often grip the barriers, shouting loudly in Arabic and Hebrew. They project their voices and bodies over the barriers, once even parading toward the Forum, shouting and demanding to be let in. Carried out on the margins of the center and further marginalized by university restrictions of space and time, these demonstrations are rituals in marginalization as well as in resistance. The spatial experience adds a sensual dimension to the messages of oppression and the obligation of resistance. They serve as rites of intensification (Wallace 1966) in which sentiments of marginalization and the commitment not to acquiesce are renewed. The fusing of ethos and world-view makes a certain presentation of worldview emotionally acceptable through the ethos of the ritual itself (Geertz 1957). The ethos or significance of ritual reifies world-view, making it cognitively graspable. In this case, a world-view of constant inequality and marginalization, as well as the imperative for civil struggle, is reified in the symbolic meaning of spatial and behavioral aspects of ASU rituals. In the context of an already-existing psychological or social search for identity, the reification of world-view in ritual ethos increases the power of instruction. The root paradigms instilled by ASU ritual events and artwork, the ritual commentators, and the connection between ethos and world-view are innovative and instructive for the student audience. Indicative of the power of ASU root paradigms and their novelty were students’ frequent comments of “injustice” at not having learned in high school about their own history and culture (including the poetry, songs, and historical facts presented at the Kufur Qassem evening). In memoirs of graduation ceremonies written by students,12 the lack of explicit national messages was pointed to repeatedly. Reem, who had attended a private high school, even related being suspended from school for wearing black in mourning of the 29 Palestinians massacred by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in 1994. Bekerman (2002) documents the suppression of Palestinian national sentiments even in the school ceremonies of bilingual Palestinian-Jewish schools. ASU ritual in the Palestinian Israeli ritual scene is then undoubtedly unique in its organized character and long-standing tradition. It should be viewed as an organized literacy project on belonging, directed by elder students, politicians, and tradition.

Events That Instruct ASU ritual events can be both models of and models for the new communitas they aim to arouse. They can mirror, present, and re-present (Handelman 1990). The key to the communitas of the Palestinian Israeli educated is the dialectic between the models of how Israeli society positions Palestinian Israelis and the models for how the educated should relate to their collective position. I am not proposing that we throw out these helpful analytical tools. My suggestion is much more modest. I believe that by looking at ritual events as literacy


events—as events that instruct—we can better pick apart the paradigms or messages they proffer in creating (as well as reproducing) communitas. For instance, let us consider the instructive or pedagogical planes on which the root paradigms of the ASU are built. I identify at least four planes: 1. The demystification of inequality. The power of secular rituals, as opposed to religious ones, resides in their demystification of social relations (Moore and Myerhoff 1977b). Be it in the presentation of historical events, discussion of current political issues, or analysis of the state of the educated Arab elite, ASU events provide instruction on the current state of inequality between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. They provide historical explanations for this inequality and illustrate its continuance today. The uncovering of hegemonic practices and the suggestion of ways to combat them change the nature of this inequality from an all-encompassing, untouchable force to a constructed and thus de-constructible social relationship. 2. The demonization of Israeli oppression. The object of combat for the Palestinian Israeli struggle is vague because of the absence of armed conflict and the fact of civil participation in the state. Militant heroes in Palestinian Israeli history are few, and their heroization would delegitimate civil struggle. ASU events work to identify and elaborate an enemy. Although the Kufur Qassem event is a memorial ceremony, it does not celebrate dead heroes, and fear of death is not the focus of unity. “The common and most feared of all enemies,” as Warner (1962: 32) characterized death, becomes Israeli government oppression—its unpredictable non-rationality, its seemingly all-encompassing power, and its Big Brother–like eye. The idea that you can be arrested for doing nothing (such as staying out after a curfew you knew nothing about) finds resonance with students’ fear of being rejected from future jobs if they are marked as politically active at the university. The cult of oppression and injustice—and not the cult of the dead—is the focus. The demonization of Israeli oppression is both reflective of a world-view and a tool for rallying students to take action. 3. The Israeli chapter in Palestinian history. The calendar of rituals and the repetition of social stories that are read publicly year after year pass down a special chapter in Palestinian national history. They tell a tale of a unique type of oppression and suffering. Although less visible in the media, less paid for in life and blood, and non-militant in its resistance, it is nonetheless felt daily and struggled against. Struggle against this type of suffering is then an Israeli version of participation in the Palestinian national struggle, in that it requires acting within Israeli society. Passing down this chapter in history connects the students to Palestinian history, while positioning them in Israeli society. 4. The potential of the educated. That the educated should have a special role in this struggle is instructed by reifying the educated into an elite. Pride in Palestinian educational achievements that have been attained


despite displacement and lack of means is an inherent part of Palestinian national discourse in general, and Palestinian Israeli discourse in particular (Al-Haj 1995; Rosenfeld 2004). The students are aware that a small percentage of their high-school classmates—and an even smaller percentage of their parents’ generation—made it to university. Yet without the messages of the ASU, this distinguished status can be meaningless. Through rituals of reification into a national-oriented elite, the ASU gives meaning to being educated. With the tools and ability to see and reveal oppression, the educated class is thus expected to work for liberation. That the pedagogical work of ASU ritual life creates a communitas of the Palestinian Israeli educated suggests that the seeds of identification and resistance, even if they are not staged through mass rites, can be planted through the backstage creation of a literate public. Whether or not this literacy is part of school or educational organizations, we should look for and at rituals as events that instruct about identity. A word of caution is in order here. It would be misleading to interpret the messages and paradigms of the ASU as rigidly accepted or as monolithic. There are certainly criticisms, rejections, and alternate readings of these rituals by the students themselves.13 Regardless, in their readings of ASU events, students are forced to reflect on and work on identity. It is in the collective nature of this identity work that they make the leap from instruction to communitas. For this very reason, I feel that it is useful to see ASU rituals as instructive. They provide a text of social relations that is read and interpreted by the participants in it. Yet the way this text works is by instructing toward a specific reading of social relations and investing this reading with emotional fervor. There is general agreement among anthropologists of ritual that something non-rational is involved in ritual processes (Handelman 1990; Lane 1981; Moore and Myerhoff 1977b; Rappaport 1999)—that communitas comes about when people get caught up in ritual and find themselves playing a part together with others. Ritual can then be very powerful as a tool of pedagogy. This brings me to two theoretical reflections on ritual and literacy. First, ritual’s non-rational venue of enterprise can have powerful effects as part of a literacy project. This is good news for critical pedagogues, who can perhaps use communitas as a means for bringing about a pedagogy of liberation. Second, the power of communitas brings into question, from a theoretical standpoint, the agency of the individual that is assumed in the idea of ideological literacy. Perhaps this view—that through literacy alone, individuals can contest power relations by repositioning themselves with their uses of knowledge—is itself too idyllic.

Acknowledgments This research was supported by the Hebrew University’s School of Education, Truman Institute, and Lafer Center and by the Hadassah Brandeis Institute. I thank Efrat Ben Ze’ev and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier drafts.


Lauren Erdreich is a currently a Ginsberg Post-doctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University. She has held post-doctoral fellowships at Tel Aviv University and Princeton University. Her work has been published in Ethnography, Ethos, City & Society and other journals. At present, she is conducting a research project on gender, higher education, and religion and doing fieldwork at an Islamic teachers’ college in Israel.

Notes 1. One year (1999–2000) was spent living with Palestinian Israeli women, attending ASU events, collecting fliers delivered to the dorms, and following nationwide ASU activities in an Israeli Hebrew paper. Half a year before and after included more sporadic participation in ASU events and reports from informants. 2. During the years of research, the ASU comprised three parties: the Front for Democracy and Equality (Jabha), the National Democratic Alliance (Itijamu), and the Independents. The membership and sponsorship of the Islamic Movement Il-Risali, although not an official ASU party, overlapped with that of the Independents. Il-Risali’s activities and organization are similar to those of the other parties. 3. The Kufur Qassem Massacre occurred on 29 October 1956. The Israeli authorities declared a curfew without informing men working in the fields. By returning to their homes, they violated the curfew, and some were shot. A total of forty-nine people were killed. Il-Nakba, the Disaster, refers to the dispersion of refugees and the destruction of villages in 1948. Student Day is an Israeli tradition of a one-day holiday from studies; on this occasion, the SU organizes parties. During Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, a communal break fast is held. 4. In the 1999–2000 school year, the most well-attended events were a lecture by Member of the Knesset Azmi Bishara, the Student Day party in a Jericho resort, several films about the Kufur Qassem Massacre, Land Day celebrations by two rival parties, and a series of demonstrations sparked by the death of an old woman during Land Day demonstrations in northern Israel. 5. Marseil Halifa is a Lebanese singer who sings about the Palestinian cause. He was jailed for a short period on the pretense that he had defamed God by singing Qur’anic verses in a popular song. Later in the school year, he gave a concert in Jordan that some students attended. 6. Names of students are fictitious. 7. Darwish is a famous Palestinian Israeli poet living in self-exile. In the poem, he laments the oppressed situation of Arabs in Israel, affirms their timeless rootedness in the place, and ends with a disclaimer and warning that although the Arab hates nobody, “when I starve/I eat the flesh of my marauders/Beware/Beware my hunger/Beware my wrath” (translation from Zureik 1979: 186). 8. Naji Il-Ali was a caricaturist who criticized both the Palestinian and Israeli leadership. He was killed in London in 1987; rumors claim that he was assassinated by the PLO or the Shabak. His character Handela (meaning ‘bitter’) is a small man with spiky hair. Handela always appears with his back to the reader, symbolizing the facelessness of the Palestinian people, who will be seen only when they look upon their restored homeland. In the cartoon most frequently used by the ASU, a small, co-opted upper-class man in a suit asks a muscular refugee to define himself by religion, “Are you Muslim or Christian? Suni or Shii? Druze or Alawi?” To which the refugee yells in response, “I am an Arab, you ass!!” A new version of this was used on Itijamu T-shirts after the October Events.


9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

The question was changed to “Are you a Nazarethean or a Haifan? A Nablusean or a Jerichan? A Gazan or a West Banker?” The answer was, “I am a Palestinian, you ass!” The same film was shown a week later at an Il-Risali event. Il-Risali events proffered a different version of this same message: the role of the educated to further a different society than that of their parents, translated into the role of the educated to understand the Sharia. Commentators on this message were often educated leaders themselves, such as Musa Abu Rumi, who had been studying for a PhD in biology before taking the post of mayor of Tamra. Although students are certainly aware of Israeli oppression before they come to the university, this awareness is vague, unarticulated, and, most importantly, often delegitimized (Erdreich 2003). These memoirs were part of an assignment in which students were asked to bring a picture of a social event and to analyze the messages it conveyed. Palestinian students taking the course brought mostly pictures of graduation ceremonies and weddings. An analysis of these readings is beyond the scope of this article. To briefly mention a few, however, some female students belittle the relevance of the ASU’s political character to them as women (Erdreich 2006). They criticize politically active women as “acting like men” and offset the political character of events by relating to them as social events. Much inter-party competition goes into offsetting and disrupting an idyllic communitas. Participation in public demonstrations—events that can be understood as activations of ASU paradigms—is much lower than that of other events.

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