The Seret ‘Aravi and the Israeli Imagination

The promotional poster for Abi foq al-shagara (1969) starring Abdel Halim Hafez.

For much of Israel’s early history, Egypt was regarded as a principal enemy, a foreign warring nation to be feared and scorned. And yet, some of Egypt’s cultural staples (its cinema, music, literature) were able to transcend this acrimony to gain a small but accepted place within the Israeli cultural imagination.

Perhaps the most apparently anomalous representation of this trend is the cultural phenomenon of the Friday night Seret ʿAravi. As Israel ramped up rhetoric against the Egyptians in the late 1960s and early 1970s, families of all backgrounds and all walks of life gathered together in their homes to laugh, smile, and cry, watching the films of the “enemy”— films like Risasat fi Al-Qalb (1944) with the famous Mohammed Abd Al-Wahhab, Lahn Al-Khulud (1952) featuring Magda and Farid Al-Atrash, or Shareʿa Al-Hob (1958) starring Sabah and Abd Al-Halim Hafez. By 1973, the two nations again found themselves at war, and yet the movies still captivated the Israeli public. In the morning, Israeli sons were sent to war on Egypt’s border, and in the evening their parents watched Egyptian films.[1] For one hour a week, Israelis put the ire and rancor aside to watch the Seret ʿAravi. But what does it mean to have apportioned or compartmentalized places for Arab culture within Israeli society or the Israeli imagination? Why was the Seret ʿAravi considered permissible when so much else was not? 

For the first twenty years after the founding of Israel, there was no state-run television. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, was vehemently opposed to the introduction of television in Israel, fearing “that the People of the Book would turn into the people of television, that ascetic and pioneering values would be uprooted by consumerism.”[2] Ben-Gurion would soon find that his crusade against broadcasting was futile and in 1966 Israel’s first television transmission was carried out by Israeli Educational Television (IETV) as part of an educational project directed at pupils in government schools. Just two short years later, the government saw a new opportunity in television. Broadcasting in Arabic to Palestinians in Israel and the lands recently occupied after the Six Day War could serve as a valuable opportunity to project Israeli hasbara to a hostile population. Prior to the transmission of Israeli television programs, Palestinians and Mizrahim had access to television broadcasts from Lebanon, Cyprus and Egypt; Israel saw this as a potential threat to stability. When the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) began its transmission, three hours of programming were in Arabic with only one hour in Hebrew. Israel wanted to capture the Palestinian population’s viewership from competing Arab countries. In order to get the Palestinian population to watch the televised news programs in Arabic, however, the IBA chose to broadcast the Seret ʿAravi. This decision may have proved to be a successful one in some respects, but it also had unintended consequences: The nation’s Jewish population, too, fell in love with the Friday night Arab film broadcasts.

Central to Eyal Sagui Bizawe and Sara Tsifroni’s 2015 film Seret ‘Aravi is the assertion that, for Israel’s large population of newly immigrated Jews from Arab countries, these films were a link to their past lives in cosmopolitan centers like Cairo, Baghdad, and Alexandria. More than anything, the Seret ʿAravi represented an opportunity among Mizrahim for an instinctive longing for one’s youth, for the simplicities of yesteryear. This phenomenon finds echoes in the work of Israeli filmmaker Rami Kimchi who discussed a similar sentiment expressed by his Egyptian-born mother, whose “most meaningful positive childhood memory is of the Arabic films she used to watch at the only cinema in [Mit-Ghamr], called ‘Cinema Mazre’—‘Cinema Egypt.’”[3]

The promotional poster for Eyal Sagui Bizawe and Sara Tsifroni’s Seret ‘Aravi (2015)

Indeed, the histories of Jews in Arab countries often seem intimately intertwined with that of cinema. Jewish actresses Liliane Cohen (Camelia), Negma Ibrahim, and Leila Murad (who in 1947 converted to Islam) became stars on the silver screen. Egyptian director Togo Mizrahi, too, after beginning his career with farcical comedies starring Jewish comedian Shalom, would go on to produce widely popular films such as Mīt Alf Ginīh (One Hundred Thousand Pounds) and ̔Uthmān wi ̔Alī (Osman and Ali). Mizrahi’s production house was only rivaled by the famous Studio Misr, whose funding by Banque Misrwas overseen by Joseph Aslan Cattaui, another Egyptian Jew.[4]

In the wake of Israel’s establishment, Mizrahim were singled out as a potential fifth-column within a society already experiencing tension on the eve of war. Distinctions were muddled between Zionists and Jews, and as the situation in Palestine continued to outrage Arab nations, their Jewish populations faced growing animosity. In the vast majority of cases, police forces and government authorities were either unwilling or unable to provide adequate protections for Jewish communities in their respective nations. Simultaneously, Jewish populations were courted by pull-factors presented by Zionist organizations such as the Jewish Agency, which tacitly coordinated with several Arab states to ensure Jewish immigration to Israel. Zionist organizations played up opportunities for economic advancement, extant anti-Semitism in Arab countries, and took advantage of already existing ideas among Jewish populations regarding the ‘Promised Land.’ Soon, the Jewish populations of Egypt, as well as other Arab countries, began to leave en masse. The Jewish experience within and vis-à-vis Arab lands defies definitive classification, but was without a doubt forever changed. 

After the outbreak of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the departure of the majority of Egypt’s Jewish population, the role played by Jewish actors, directors, and notables declined considerably. Leila Murad was accused of having visited Israel, and Togo Mizrahi was forced to flee after being suspected of having Zionist sympathies.[5] While Jews became decidedly “de-Arabized” in much of Egyptian cinema (instead being presented as bloodthirsty Israeli enemies), nostalgic echoes for an Arab Jewish past in Egypt can be seen in films such as Youssef Chahine’s Iskindiriyya lih? (Alexandria, Why?) produced in 1978, and more recently the 2015 Ramadan mosalsal (soap opera) Haret Al-Yahud about the Jewish Quarter in Cairo during the Suez Crisis. Mizrahi nostalgia for an Egyptian cosmopolitan past was not without its contrapuntal voice in Egypt.

 During a period of Israeli history when Mizrahim were encouraged to become “good Israelis” by hating the Arab-within and the Arab-without, the weekly Arab film served as a respite of sorts. When the IBA broadcasting of the Seret ʿAravi first began, Mizrahim were offered a window: They could be Arab for one hour each week from six o’clock to seven o’clock on Friday evenings. Even though this Mizrahi nostalgia was contained, it became an important challenge to the saliency of shlilat ha-galut (the negation of exile). By insisting that there was a Jewish diasporic life that existed apart from the Zionist narrative of endemic discrimination, persecution, and decay of the Diaspora, Mizrahi nostalgia posed a threat to Zionism, even if only a discursive one. Ella Shohat refers to these forms of remembering as “taboo memories.”

Longing for the Diaspora, rather than for Zion, is a reversal of the biblical verse which expresses the primordial yearning of the Jewish people: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.” Instead, Shohat writes, such a will for the return to the Diaspora invokes the opposite sentiment, a subversive one: “By the waters of Zion, where we sat down, and there we wept, and when we remembered Babylon.”[6] Israeli film scholar Raz Yosef has suggested that the forbidden nature of this remembering of mourning translated Mizrahi trauma into a sort of Freudian melancholia in which loss was felt but what exactly that loss entailed remained unclear.[7]

Of course, nostalgia in and of itself is not politically valuable nor is it necessarily productive, but, as Sagui Bizawe reminds us, “sometimes nostalgia…can be used order to say critical things about the here and now.”[8] Shohat, too, has noted the implications of these taboo memories’ translation into a “revolutionary nostalgia” which highlights alternate potentialities for Arab-Jewish existence as well as the “the could-have-beens of history, i.e., what might have happened had they stayed.”[9] In the face of a Zionist ideology which seized every opportunity to mark itself as different from the Arab world encircling it, Mizrahim (and some Ashkenazim as well) saw themselves in these films.[10] Their self-identification with characters in the films worked against Israel’s self-definition as the “Villa in the Jungle,” a point made poignantly in Sagui Bizawe and Tsifroni’s film. [11]

Still, the Seret ‘Aravi was seen as benign enough of an expression of Arab identity to be tolerated, and even in some cases to be considered entertainingly kitsch by Israeli authorities. The movies were so beloved by Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, and Palestinians alike that the Knesset was petitioned to subtitle the films in Hebrew, a request that was initially rejected by the IBA, fearing it could lead to binationalism. [12] Many loved what they perceived as the accessible and unsubtle aspects of the Seret ʿAravi. When they cried, you cried. When they laughed, you laughed. They were seen as easy and universal, and above all as melodramatic. Writing on melodrama in the context of Egyptian television programs, Lila Abu-Lughod has noted that there seems to be “a good deal of confusion—or at least an enormous range of possibility—in the use of the term ‘melodrama.’”[13] It would be helpful, then, to unpack this term’s great weight especially as it pertains to the Seret ʿAravi.

Longtime Labor and later Meretz MK Yossi Beilin writes about his experience watching the Seret 'Aravi in Davar, 1974 when it was finally broadcasted with Hebrew subtitles. The article is titled "An Oriental Experience."

In her 1983 essay “Egypt: Cinema and Revolution,” Ella Shohat delineates two major genres of Egyptian cinema. The first, which she argues has a much older tradition than Egypt’s independent film industry, is that of the “sentimental melodrama.”[14] The second, Shohat claims, is a more politically conscious cinema imbued by “the political dilemmas and social problems of contemporary Egypt” which developed after the 1952 Free Officers coup.[15] While the sentimental melodramas featured “stereotypical characters,” “farcical misunderstandings,” and “superfluous oriental songs and dances,”[16] the politically conscious movies of Youssef Chahine and later films like Al-irhab wal kabab (Terrorism and Kebab) touched on locally specific cultural, political, and socioeconomic issues.[17] Sagui Bizawe contends that in Israel the differences between these two veins of film were largely ignored.[18] The very name of the phenomenon, Seret ʿAravi, supersedes and collapses all genres. Rather than comedies, thrillers, or political dramas, these films were Arab, full stop. People watched these different genres with the same set of eyes, overlooking, the political bent of certain films. Watching the Seret ʿAravi was only acceptable if it was contorted to be politically sterile. This bifurcation of the social and the political is seen elsewhere in the Israeli political sphere, particularly around issues relating to Mizrahim. The Zionist left’s mantra to justify its unwillingness to engage with radical Mizrahi political movements was, famously, “You cannot wave the security flag and the socioeconomic flag at the same time.”[19]

One highly significant fact that is unexplored in Sagui Bizawe and Tsifroni’s film is that the heyday of the Seret ʿAravi coincided with a peak in the popularity of Israeli bourekas films, which focused on comedic melodramas bolstered by ethnic stereotypes of Mizrahim.  The resonances of bourekas cinema came to be seen as aesthetic disasters, even “anti-cinema” by many of Israel’s most prominent film critics.[20] The Mizrahi protagonists of the bourekas films were “brutish” or “vulgar,” and their locales were chaotic.[21] And yet, the films were wildly popular, even among Mizrahim. According to Ella Shohat, Mizrahim themselves often internalized the racism they saw in these films.[22] While bourekas films took influence from both the Arab and European film industries, they were without a doubt a distinctly Israeli genre in which a new Israeli masculinity featured heavily.

Similar to the lambasting of bourekas as the antithesis of art film, as visions of all Egyptian cinema as melodrama took root, the Seret ʿAravi became code for over-acting and low production value. It was seen as low culture, in no small part because of its characters’ resemblance to the Mizrahim. Mizrahi identity had been subjected to the same Orientalist tunnel vision by Zionist authorities since their early encounters with the state. Still, a younger generation of Mizrahim was given the opportunity to stake a claim in the state despite being seen as Oriental. Arabic-speaking Mizrahim made inroads into Israeli society through both the negation of the Arab self and the orientalizing of the Arab other. Still, Zionism’s relationship vis-à-vis the Orient was a complex and dialectical one. Israel could be Oriental, but only to the extent that it could remain an “outpost of civilization against barbarism.”[23]

It is important to recognize that just as bourekas films occupied a sort of liminal space between Orientalism and the carnivalesque, the Seret ʿAravi was at once a form of liberation from the steadfast exilic silences demanded by shlilat ha-galut and a symbol of Oriental maudlinism to be caricatured as emblematic of Arab culture. One of the most fascinating turns in Sagui Bizawe and Tsifroni’s documentary is the story of a 1986 broadcast by the Israeli sketch comedy series, Zehu Ze! (“That’s It!”) on the cultural resonances of the Seret ʿAravi. After watching just one Egyptian film and insisting that “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” the Zehu Ze! team created a sketch poking fun at the Seret ʿAravi. Featuring shisha, belly dancing, overzealous males, souks, guttural accents, and fezzes galore, the perceived ubiquitous markers of Oriental essence all descended upon the set at once. The sketch parodies several of the melodramatic themes that Israelis recognized in the Seret ʿAravi. Its play on the over-the-top emotions in Egyptian cinema reaches its pinnacle as a fellahi father embraces his lost son; the two wail: “Ya Ibni! Ya Baba!”[24] Of course, there is nothing wrong with parody in principle. And as Shohat and Robert Stam demonstrate in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, satire can open doors towards self-reflection (the carnivalesque in bourekas films with more subversive undertones is just one example).[25] However, when later generations of Israelis speak of the Seret ʿAravi, they often quote the jokes made in Zehu Ze! and not the films themselves.[26]  The parody of the Seret ʿAravi became more popular than the films themselves, causing stereotypical representations to drown out the full picture and stopping Israelis “from examining the phenomenon and trying to understand [their] relationship with the movie.”[27]

Indeed, when the Friday night Arab film resurfaces in Israeli popular culture, it is not always in the same nostalgic light in which previous generations viewed it. In 2015, Israeli rap artist Tuna released a song titled Seret ʿAravi. The song, with lyrics in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, strings together a series of words and phrases in Arabic slang and pseudo-Arabic.[28] Linguistically, the song tries to invoke the same type of feel as the Zehu Ze! sketch. Tuna adds the guttural ʿayn letter in Arabic to words where it does not exist and scatters phrases such as keffiyeh, hamoula, habibti, tiz, and ʿarab al-saʿudiyya throughout the song. The opening words of the track harken back not to the actual Seret ʿAravi but to lines in Zehu Ze!; the song begins: “Ya Ibni! Ya Baba!”[29] The music video, too, is replete with many of the same images of the 1986 sketch. Belly dancing, headdresses, and markers of low production value all feature centrally.

A still from the music video for Israeli rapper Tuna’s song Seret ‘Aravi

Responding to the song in a remix of his own, Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar of the group DAM suggests that it is all good and fun to mock the Seret ʿAravi or sample Arabic music, but that this can only be done in light of Israelis’ viewing it as detached from the current political situation: 

“Ya Ibni! Ya Baba! What in the hell is he talking about?…This is a parody of a parody but not everyone is at this party, they are stuck at the checkpoint…Deir Yassin was erased from history, meanwhile Zionist commercial rappers keep on sampling Arabic music.”[30]

Here, Nafar refuses the bifurcation of the social and the political. For him, the social, political, territorial, economic, and demographic realities which have led to the present situation are inextricable from each other. 

In recent years, though, the Seret ʿAravi has begun to disappear from Israeli television screens and, in some respects, from the Israeli imagination entirely. Today, the Seret ʿAravi is touted as an ephemeral anomaly instead of something that could still function as part and parcel of daily life. Generally speaking, watching television has become less a ritual gathering of families or neighbors and more an act driven by individual consumer-based preferences. In the early 1990s, Israeli viewers gained access to subscription cable services, and after the First Intifada ended in 1993, a second broadcaster launched a new over-the-air channel.[31] Having been in decline for some time, Sagui Bizawe maintains that 1993 was the final death knell for the Seret ʿAravi as a veritable phenomenon.[32] This is not because Arab films were unviewable. To the contrary, access to the films has been made easier in the years since its inception. Instead, the films remained unwatched because, with the proliferation of cable and in 2000 satellite programming, television further compartmentalized Arab and Israeli culture in the name of catering different channels to individual preferences. Yes, the Seret ʿAravi can still be viewed today, but on Channel 33, Israel’s public station for Arabic-language programming.[33] Arabic and Hebrew language programming have since been largely segregated.

Challenges to the longevity of the Seret ʿAravi have been both political and economic in nature. More recently, individuals have sought to revive the Seret ʿAravi or what it represented in response to both types of challenges at different times. In October 2000, Ron Cahlili launched the all-Mizrahi satellite channel Briza.[34] A subsidiary of the satellite provider YES, Briza sought to revive Egyptian dramas and Arab music, and to bring stories from Israel’s periphery into the homes of the Mizrahi public. However, Cahlili and his project also faced criticism. For some, he was not challenging any sort of pervasive political divide but was priming Mizrahi culture for the neo-liberal era wherein it would still be marginalized but would now, through consumption by Mizrahim, make money for Ashkenazi profiteers— far from a Mizrahi insurrection, in the eyes of anthropologist Galit Saʿada-Ofir.[35] While initially a success with approximately 60% of YES subscribers purchasing the channel, the venture failed in 2003, just three short years later.[36]

While the reclamation of Mizrahi culture via satellite television had decidedly failed, second-generation Mizrahi filmmakers have sought to return to the site of loss through artistic media. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a new and peculiar genre was on the rise in Israeli Mizrahi cinema-- that of salvage cinema. Hamid Naficy defines salvage filmmaking more broadly as “films that serve to preserve and recover cultural and ethnic heritage.”[37] In Mizrahi cinema specifically, Yaron Shemer argues that the quest to recover this heritage often takes the form of a physical journey, citing Taqasim (1991) and Azhi Ayima (2009) as two such examples.[38] There is one film highlighted by Shemer, in particular, which deals explicitly with Arab cinema as a site of nostalgia: Rami Kimchi’s Cinema Egypt (2001). In the film, Kimchi, the second-generation Mizrahi filmmaker, renovates his home and screens the 1941 Egyptian film Leila bint al-rif (Leila the Village Girl) in an effort to persuade his mother to revisit and open up about her childhood in Egypt. 

In his work on the materiality of cinema theaters in Nigeria, Brian Larkin quips that cinemas illustrate “the paradox of travel without movement.”[39] Such a paradox is acutely recognizable in the renovated home-cinema Kimchi constructs for his mother. The theater allows her to revisit her roots in Mit-Ghamr and now in Holon, and yet be transported by the imaginative melodrama of the Seret ʿAravi. Purnima Mankekar notes that, through television programs, “viewing subjects could imaginatively connect with larger collectivities.”[40] I would suggest that in very different but still significant ways, the Seret ʿAravi performs a similar function. In a recent essay thinking through “imaginary returns” in the writing of Iranian and Iraqi Jews in exile, Shohat has argued that in his novel Outcast, Shimon Ballas’s “writing about Iraq while in Israel, thus challenged the metanarrative of an Arab ‘enemy country’ by imagining Iraq as a geography of identification for the Hebrew reader.”[41] One could argue that the Seret ʿAravi likewise allows for the Israeli viewing subject to identify with those who are dubbed “enemies” by the state. In this respect, displacement itself is endemic to form in the Seret ʿAravi.

The fact that the film which Kimchi screens for his mother stars Jewish-Egyptian Leila Murad and is directed by Jewish-Egyptian Togo Mizrahi is not insignificant. In choosing this film, Kimchi hopes to revive the image of  Egypt’s mid-20th century cosmopolitan past. Just as the IBA broadcast of the Seret ʿAravi served as a way to express Mizrahi nostalgia, the screening of Leila bint al-rif in Kimchi’s work seeks to return his mother to a simpler past before Arab-Jewish existence was rendered “virtually impossible.”[42] 

While Kimchi’s work and other examples of salvage cinema made by second-generation Mizrahi filmmakers purport to be about the lives of their first-generation Mizrahi parents, both Yaron Shemer and Raz Yosef suggest that these films often say much more about the cultural dissonance felt by the filmmakers themselves.[43] In searching for their parents’ loss, second-generation Mizrahi filmmakers oftentimes also reject the way in which this loss was “meekly accepted.” Revolt against the parent (especially the father figure) seems to be a common motif in Mizrahi politics. In the 1970s, the Israeli Black Panthers explicitly presented their protest movement as a revolt against the previous generation of Mizrahim, who they believed to be docile in the face of oppression. Raz Yosef argues that this revolt is equally visible in contemporary salvage cinema. By restaging the loss and reclaiming lost desire, the Mizrahi filmmaker fills the void of the failed father by allowing the mother to “‘solve’ the origin of [her] melancholia.”[44]

Poster for a screening of Niazi Mostafa's Abu Hadid (1958) at Aviv Cinema in 1972. The film starred Egyptian actors Farid Shawqi and Mahmoud el-Meliguy.

It must be said, however, that the filmmakers’ emphasis on arriving at some sort of fixedness or rootedness their parents’ identity risks imposing unto their mothers or fathers emotions or identifications they may not hold. Shemer contends that such a position risks overstating the previous generation’s Arab identity, writing, “Kimchi himself resorts somewhat to essentialist-modernist articulations in accentuating the mother’s ‘Arabness,’ whereas the mother actually ventures a more open and (may I dare) postmodernist stance—her reflections…are qualified and ambiguous.”[45] This charge of strategic essentialism has been levied at several second-generation Mizrahi scholars by post-structuralist critics. Ultimately, after all his searching, Kimchi finds that his identity, too, defies binaric fixedness: “He simultaneously identifies with Cinema Egypt and with the ‘Armon’ cinema, Mit-Ghamr and Holon, Israel and Egypt.”[46]

Whether driven by the neo-liberal market, separation and compartmentalization of cultural spheres, or “repression and active forgetting,”[47] the death of the Seret ʿAravi in any meaningful form highlights the decline of a once prominent symbol of cultural inseparability. Sagui Bizawe and Tsifroni’s documentary explores the rise and fall of this phenomenon alongside a wide array of changes in Israeli society with great tact. In doing so, they raise a number of crucial questions about the nature of cinema, Orientalism, Zionism, and Mizrahiut.

Notes

1. Eyal Sagui Bizawe, interview by Alex Shams, Jadaliyya, July 7, 2015.

2. Elihu Katz, Hadassah Haas, and Michael Gurevitch, “20 Years of Television in Israel: Are There Long-run Effects on Values, Social Connectedness, and Cultural Practices?” Journal of Communication No. 47 Vol. 2 (1997): 4.

3. Raz Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2011), 67.

4. Walker Robins, “Cinema, Arabic, Jews in,” in Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, ed. Norman A. Stillman, 2010.

5. Ibid.

6. Ella Shohat, “Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew,” Movement Research: Performance Journal 5 (1992): 8.

7. Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema, 65, 69.

8. Eyal Sagui Bizawe, interview by Alex Shams, Jadaliyya, July 7, 2015.

9. Ella Shohat, “Lost Homelands, Imaginary Returns: The Exilic Literature of Iranian and Iraqi Jews,” in Moments of Silence: Authenticity in the Cultural Expressions of the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988, ed. Arta Khakpour, Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, and Shouleh Vatanabadi (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 50.

10. Eyal Sagui Bizawe, interview by Pierre Bellagamba, OnOrient, November 3, 2015.

11. Seret ʿAravi, directed by Eyal Sagui Bizawe and Sara Tsifroni, (2015; Israel: Go2Films), DVD.

12. Ibid.

13. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject?” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod, Faye D. Ginsburg, Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 115.

14. Ella Shohat, “Egypt: Cinema and Revolution,” Critical Arts Vol. 2 No 4. (1983): 22.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 24.

17. This is not to say that melodrama is necessarily apolitical. Indeed, Abu-Lughod has masterfully illustrated how the melodramatic serial form in Egypt has been used not only to convey conscious political messaging in the form of nationally promulgated developmentalist discourse, but also projected towards viewing subjects certain ideals about citizenship, national belonging, and individual subjectivity. See: Lila Abu-Lughod, “Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject?” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod, Faye D. Ginsburg, Brian Larkin, 115-133 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Brian Larkin, “Extravagant Aesthetics: Instability and the Excessive World of Nigerian Film,” in Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 168-216.

18. Sagui Bizawe, interview by Alex Shams, Jadaliyya, July 7, 2015.

19. Sami Shalom Chetrit, “Why Are SHAS and the Mizrahim Supporters of the Right?” in Between the Lines — Readings on Israel, The Palestinians, and the U.S. ‘War on Terror’, ed. Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007), 200.

20. Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East / West and the Politics of Representation (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 115.

21. Ibid., 113-126.

22. Ibid., 124.

23. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), 96.

24. Hanan Peled and Avinoam Dumari, Seret ʿAravi, Zehu Ze! (1986; Israel; Israeli Educational Television).

25. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 2014), 315-316.

26. Sagui Bizawe, interview by Alex Shams, Jadaliyya, July 7, 2015.

27. Ibid.

28. Matan Sharon, “Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar Remixes Tuna’s Seret ʿAravi (הראפר הפלסטיני תאמר נפאר ברימיקס ל"סרט ערבי" של טונה),” Time Out Tel Aviv, January 7, 2016.

29. Tuna, “Seret ʿAravi,” recorded August 2015, track 3 on Gam Ze Yaʿavor, Anana Ltd.

30. Tamer Nafar, “Seret ʿAravi (Remix),” recorded January 2016, Jigga Juice, IDC Radio.

31. Katz et al., “20 Years of Television in Israel: Are There Long-run Effects on Values, Social Connectedness, and Cultural Practices?,” 5.

32. Sagui Bizawe, interview by Pierre Bellagamba, OnOrient, November 3, 2015.

33. Ibid.

34. Shoshana London Sappir, “Satellite TV’s Spicy Dish,” The Jerusalem Report (2001): 40.

35. Ibid.

36. Anat Balint, “The Briza channel closes (ערוץ בריזה נסגר),” Walla!, December 10, 2003.

37. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 19.

38. Yaron Shemer, Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013), 53-59.

39. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) 124-125.

40. Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham: Duke University, 1999), 79.

41. Ella Shohat, “Lost Homelands, Imaginary Returns: The Exilic Literature of Iranian and Iraqi Jews,” in Moments of Silence: Authenticity in the Cultural Expressions of the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988, ed. Arta Khakpour, Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, and Shouleh Vatanabadi (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 36.

42. Ella Shohat and Evelyn Alsultany, “Arab Jews, Diasporas, and Multicultural Feminism,” in On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements(London: Pluto Press, 2017), 374.

43. Shemer, Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, 63; Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema, 76.

44. Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema, 79-81.

45. Shemer, Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, 65.

46. Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema, 76.

47. Gil Z. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), ix.

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject?” In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Edited by Lila Abu-Lughod, Faye D. Ginsburg, Brian Larkin, 115-133. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Balint, Anat. “The Briza channel closes (ערוץ בריזה נסגר).” Walla!, December 10, 2003.

Behar, Moshe. “Palestine, Arabized Jews and the Elusive Consequences of Jewish and Arab National Formations.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 13 (2007): 581-611.

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