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Sherene Seikaly

Co-Founder

The Meaning of Revolution: On Samira Ibrahim

[Graffiti of Samira Ibrahim and Khaled Sa‘id on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Photo by Sherene Seikaly]

At that thin membrane, the hymen, narratives unfold and lives are determined. There, the binaries of the clean and the stained, the righteous and the debauched, the honorable and the shamed flourish. There the blurry border between the civilized and the backward, the liberated and the oppressed, the East and the West, pretends to lie. There the claims to flesh as an evidentiary terrain stand. For the last year and a half, one woman has chipped away at this edifice erected ...

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عدّ الكالوريات وصناعة الليمونادا في غزة

[أحد انفاق رفح، 2009، تصوير زوريا]

تعتبر السعرة الحرارية مقياساً ضرورياً في عملية الرقابة – الذاتية التي نفرضها على أجسادنا. وكما أظهرت وثيقة قامت الحكومة الإسرائيلية بإصدارها مؤخراً، فالسعرة تشكّل أيضاً أداة حكم. وكانت مؤسسة حقوق الإنسان الإسرائيلية "جيشا"، قد تمكّنت بعد معركة قانونية استمرت لمدة سنتين، من الحصول على هذه الوثيقة التي تحمل عنوان "إستهلاك الطعام في قطاع غزة – خطوط حمراء".   الهوس بالقياس بعد اعتلاء حماس سدّة الحكم في غزة في أيلول عام 2007، فرضت الحكومة ...

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Counting Calories and Making Lemonade in Gaza

[Rafah Tunnel, 2009. Image by Zoriah]

The calorie is a crucial measurement in our self-imposed scrutiny of the body. As a recently released Israeli government document shows, it is also an instrument of rule. After a two-year legal battle, the Israeli human rights organization Gisha has secured the release of “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip — Red Lines.” Measurement obsession In September 2007, after Hamas took control of Gaza, the Israeli cabinet restricted the passage of goods, fuel, and people to and ...

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An Apocalyptic Air of Approaching Peril: Zionism at the United Nations

[Scene from I, Crocodile, by Fred Marcellino (Michael Di Capua Books, 1999)]

Bibi sauntered. He swaggered. He spoke freely, seemingly unguided by any text. He irreverently made circles with his fingers. He called the group of diplomats and interns assembled in front of him actors in “a theater of the absurd.” He proudly modeled his thick coat of indifference just as he called the United Nations, a “house of lies.” Indeed, so capable was the UN in presenting the false as true, Bibi gestured assuredly, they could go so far to declare ...

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At the Table: Sharif Waked's Khumus

[Sharif Waked, Khumus (2008). Image from artist's archive]

Just outside a Palestinian restaurant, named “al-Bayt” in the recently recognized village of Ayn Hawd southeast of Haifa, a table and two chairs stand precariously balanced on a steep slope. From a distance it is a pretty scene that promises the serenity of a picnic. On closer look, there is deformity and fragility. Together they offer an incisive reflection on those many moments when the Palestinian everyday in Israel meets the persistent apprehension and restlessness of ...

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To Stay Modern

BP WWII advertisement (company website)

On 4 August, after more than five million barrels of oil battered the Gulf of Mexico for over 100 days, BP proclaimed the success of its “static kill strategy.” Pumping the blown out well with mud and cement was working to stop what BP calls the “leak” or alternatively, “the Gulf of Mexico incident.” The company, its website explained, was “doing everything we can to make this right.” In the meantime, the environmental and economic devastation of the worst spill in US ...

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More than a stain

from Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963)

The Israeli Army’s recent killing of nine activists on the Gaza Flotilla has sparked a wave of contemplation on Israel’s morality. These questions are not new. Since the inception of the Zionist enterprise in the late nineteenth century, intellectuals such as Asher Ginsberg, known by his pen name Ahad Ha’am, fretted over how European Jews could realize their national project with the presence of a majority Palestinian population on the land they understood as ...

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Bio

Sherene Seikaly

 

Sherene Seikaly is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at the American University in Cairo. She is a co-editor of the Arab Studies Journal and co-founder and contributing editor of Jadaliyya ezine.