Pastoral in Palestine: a literary/political travelogue

Abstract

This essay offers an appraisal and critique of some aspects of the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank, in the form of a first-person narrative of the author's experiences while teaching at Al-Quds University during the spring semester of 2011. The author's sense of the unstable hierarchical relations of Palestinians and Israelis, as seen through the lens of the literary-theoretical notion of ‘pastoral’, is developed, first, out of a consideration of the effect the starkly stony landscape has on thinking about these competing societies, and then through an account of a vendetta between two Palestinian villages that he was witness to over the course of the semester.

Keywords:

• landscape
• Ma'ale Adumim
• Palestine
• settlements
• vendetta
• West Bank