A Simple Denial of Culture

It is difficult to avoid obvious cliches when contemplating recent actions taken by the Israeli police on Saturday to silence a small crowd of Palestinians in East Jerusalem from celebrating the city’s new designation as ‘capital of Arab culture’ for 2009. 

According to Al Jazeera, about 20 Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem were detained, flags and banners confiscated, and at one school in the area, balloons carrying the colours of the Palestinian flag to be released by children to mark the day were burst.

Celebrations in Nazareth (the largest Arab city in Israel) were also cancelled by police.

With absolutely no violence reported, it is almost impossible to justify or condone the rampant silencing of culture within a claimed  democratic state. Given the recent violence in Gaza, and its subsequent mobilizing of Arab sympathy across Israel and the Middle East, such brazen attempts to further suppress Arab expression must be seen as inciteful, and perhaps even taunting.

With Jerusalem following Damascus as the capital of Arab culture (an honour that is passed to a different city by the Arab League every year since 1996), this weekend’s celebrations and events were in no way designed to inflame discourse between Jewish Israelis and Arabs. Historically, the chosen city has marked the occasion with poetry, music, dance, and sporting events. 

In the media vortex that is ‘Middle East violence’, everyday facts and events like the freezing of cultural expression are often neglected, and their significance underestimated. Because the crucial subtext of this article admits the term ‘no violence’, these acts go relatively unreported in world headlines or in local evening news segments. 

This is indeed a pity, as in many ways the acts of the Israeli police on Saturday better summarize the ongoing denial of cultural identity that is occuring both within Israel borders as well as those areas in occupation whose names light up headline ticker tape. 

Perhaps even more urgently, it is crucial to realise that this story occurs every day, in a thousand places from Israel to Darfur to Tibet. Without the media catalyst of ‘violence’, rockets, and casualties, these stories seem less important - less weighty. 

Marshall McLuhan famously quipped, ““All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” 

It is difficult to deny this point to some degree, but the facts remain that meaningful stories do exist - and in a world of fully interactive and real-time access to diverse media sources, blogs, and digital opinions, it is everyone’s duty to find them.