Spoilsport

Ronit Lentin

mo-farah-london-2012Don’t ask me why I was watching a bit of the extravagant but dead boring Olympics closing ceremony, and to be honest, also one or two events, when my interest in sports aspires to nil. I read the Guardian/ICM poll results, that 55 per cent of Britons considered the games ‘well worth’ the huge £9bn expense because they ‘were doing a good job in cheering the country during hard times’, and wondered how can the expense be justified in the face of the social problems that need tackling in Britain and elsewhere.

I then watched this country go crazy about Katie Taylor and the other boxers, show jumpers and sailors, and like the spoilsport I normally am, I couldn’t but reflect on some lessons of the extravaganza, which not only cost a fortune, but also heightened divisive nationalist sentiments. Continue reading “Spoilsport”

Review of Arab-Israeli Activism in Israel-Palestine by Marcelo Svirsky

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Ronit Lentin

Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine. Marcelo Svirsky. Farnham: Ashgate. 2012.  211 pp.

ISBN 978 40942297

anarchists-against-the-wallSince the onset of ‘the Arab Spring’ social scientists have been moving from analysing oppressive political regimes to analyses of acts of resistance. This is particularly relevant in the case of Israel-Palestine, where, since the turning point events of October 2000, when 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel who protested in solidarity with the Al Aqsa Intifada were shot by the Israeli police, acts of resistance are becoming widespread. Several social scientists are beginning to grapple with acts of resistance not only in the OPT, where non violent protestors confront the Israeli security forces on a weekly basis, but also within the state of Israel, where protestors (mostly Jewish) take to the streets to campaign for social justice.
That the two campaigns rarely meet, even though many of the protestors are active on both fronts, has been addressed by bloggers and contributors to social networks and is a point Marcelo Svirsky’s new book may have addressed. Continue reading “Review of Arab-Israeli Activism in Israel-Palestine by Marcelo Svirsky”

Mea culpa: Goodbye migration studies

Ronit Lentin

Last week I attended ‘On migrations: Images, subjects, objects’, an event co-organised by the Dublin City Council Arts Office in association with PhotoIreland Festival 2012 and GradCam. Listening to papers on ‘diaspora space’ among indigenous Irish people in the north inner city and on ‘collaborative’ photography projects with residents of direct provision hostels, a line from the Israeli poet Nathan Alterman rang in my head: ‘Here are the trees with their murmuring leaves / Here is the air dizzy with height. / I do not want to write about them / I want to touch their heart’.

But the poet, like us academics, did continue to write. Indeed, writing was his stock in trade, as it is ours. And writing ‘about them’ is just as invasive as the poet’s wish to ‘touch their heart’. So I reflected aloud about the permission we give ourselves to turn others, in this specific case migrants, into the objects of our ‘desire to know’, as Alice Feldman of UCD expressed it. And – although I was a founder member of the Trinity Immigration Initiative, for which I managed a project on migrant networks assisting in their own integration, and although I am deeply committed to supporting migrants in Ireland and elsewhere – I made a decision there and then that I will never again research and write about migrants. Continue reading “Mea culpa: Goodbye migration studies”