MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL

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MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL M VOLUME 65, NO. 3, SUMMER 2011

DOI: 10.3751/65.3.11

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Dance and Political Credibility: The Appropriation of Dabkeh by Zionism,

Pan-Arabism, and Palestinian Nationalism

Nicholas Rowe

This article examines how the rural folkdance dabkeh has, in the last century, been appropriated and reinvented as a tradition in order to construct the imag- ined communities of Zionism, pan-Arabism, and Palestinian Nationalism within Palestine/Israel. This appropriation has led to extensive debates and suppositions on the source, meanings, and cultural ownership of dabkeh. The following his- torical narratives, emerging from interviews with dance practitioners and dance advocates in the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon, and from literature in librar- ies and archives in the West Bank, Israel, and Great Britain, draw attention to the salient links between dance and politics and the multiple ways in which col- lective identities can be constructed and deconstructed. These histories further raise questions about how local cultural autonomy and sustainability within the Occupied Palestinian Territories have been affected by the process of political appropriation.

Dabkeh,1 a circling folkdance made up of intricate steps and stomps, has helped construct three very different political communities and cultural identities during the 20th century. Zionism, pan-Arabism, and Palestinian Nationalism have all gained political credibility through the public performance of a dance2 that, in the previous century, had no associations with any of these ideals. The three histories of dabkeh present a post-nationalist critique of dance in Palestine/Israel.3 Revealing how dance can be used to define (and re-define) a col- lective identity, these narratives highlight the artistic legacies of Zionism, pan-Arabism, and Palestinian Nationalism. More importantly perhaps, they provide a historical baseline from which new, innovative choreographic histories might be identified and celebrated.

Nicholas Rowe is a graduate of the Australian Ballet School and holds a PhD in Dance Studies from the London Contemporary Dance School/University of Kent at Canterbury. He lived and worked in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from 2000–2008 and is the author of Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine (I.B. Tauris, 2010). Dr. Rowe is currently a Senior Lecturer in Dance Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

1. The transliteration of this term has resulted in various spellings: in Zionist and Israeli discourse it appears as debke, debkeh, or deppka, whereas within pan-Arabist and Palestinian Nationalist dis- course it appears as dabkeh, dabke, or dabka.

2. The word “dance” is inherently foreign in this context as there is no directly correlating term in Arabic. It is used here to refer to patterned movement activities that may have diverse cultural func- tions and meanings.

3. See Nicholas Rowe, “Post-salvagism: Cultural Interventions and Cultural Evolution in a Trau- matized Community — Dance in the Central West Bank,” Unpublished doctoral thesis, London Con- temporary Dance School, University of Kent at Canterbury, 2007; and Nicholas Rowe, Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).

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ImAGINING, INveNTING, AND sALvAGING CuLTuRAL IDeNTITy THROuGH DANCe

Across the world, the social dances and movement rituals of particular groups of people have been appropriated and given a “second existence”4 as physical spectacles. These spectacles display a homogenized cultural identity and help validate new na- tional, ethnic, or religious boundaries around people and place. In the public imagining of such a community,5 the invention of shared traditions6 through national folkdance troupes and festivals can make politicized aesthetics, ethics, gender roles, and social hierarchies appear inherent to a community.7 This re-invention of dances is thus highly selective and can be seen as influenced by the ideological agendas of political elites guiding the appropriation.8 As the following histories of dabkeh illustrate, shifts in these political environments and agendas can allow the boundaries of a community to continue to be guided by historical precedent while remaining in flux.

Within Israel and Palestine, the search for historical precedents as a basis for con- temporary cultural actions can have a particular urgency amongst population groups that have experienced collective traumas. War, exile, colonization, or other political and natural disasters can dislocate people from their cultural pasts, threatening a popu- lation’s existing bonds and networks.9 Reviving elements of the distant cultural past and reconstructing them as a shared traditions can demonstrate that the past is not lost, but rather continues on into the future.10 When the traumatic events themselves are also projected across generations through cultural lamentations (in folksongs, dances, oral histories, and other arts and rituals), the disrupted social bonds of a traumatized community can appear resilient to the traumatic events.11 Folk dances can therefore be perceived as carrying both an ancient cultural past and a reminder of the threats to a traumatized community.

The revival of dance heritage can, however, be highly and purposefully selec- tive. In Palestine, this selection has further been influenced by the ways in which local

4. Felix Hoerburger, “Once Again the Concept of Folk Dance,” The Journal of International Folk music Council, Vol. 20 (1968), pp. 30–31.

5. David B. Clark, “The Concept of Community: A Re-examination,” sociological Review, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1973), pp. 32–37; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).

6. Eric Hobsbawm, “The Invention of Tradition,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–15.

7. Anthony Shay, “Parallel Traditions: State Folk Dance Ensembles and Folk Dance in ‘The Field,’” Dance Research Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1999), pp. 29–56.

8. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Princ- eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

9. Kai Erikson, everything in its Path (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976). 10. Hamid Naficy, The making of exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Judith Hamera, “The Answerability of Memory: ‘Saving’ Khmer Classical Dance,” in Ackbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni, eds., Internationalizing Cultural studies (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 95–105.

11. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Ey- erman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, eds., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

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cultural history was documented in the early 20th century. Anthropologists and folklor- ists who engaged in early cultural research in the region expressed concerns that local traditions were on the verge of disappearing and thus required salvaging. Their “sal- vage paradigm”12 emphasized that these traditions were worth saving because the rural culture of Palestine had, up until that point, been frozen in time. This led to imaginative speculations on the Biblical nature of local culture and the assumption that no signifi- cant cultural change had occurred in the subsequent millennia.13 This salvage paradigm subsequently induced some spectacular (and highly politicized) suppositions as to the origins and authenticity of local dance forms in Palestine.

The selective appropriation of dance in Palestine has been made even more com- plex by the variety of political communities engaged in the appropriation. As Ilan Pappe noted, the Israeli colonial appropriation of music and food was not an indicator of any politically inclusive intentions within Zionism, “… and cannot be said to be a bridge between Jewish society and the Arab world […] [given that] the most right-wing parties play it at the very rallies where they preach anti-Arabic rhetoric.”14

While previous dance histories have often considered the Israeli absorption of dabkeh as an indication of the respect early Zionists had for the local population,15 this is perhaps a very romanticized speculation. In Dance and Authenticity in Israel and Palestine, Elke Kaschl more critically noted how this process of cultural appropriation only helped consolidate a new community amongst European immigrants; the local population were generally perceived as useful cultural vessels but not seen “as active, equal members of possibly the same community.”16

The political appropriation of dance might thus be seen as an action capable of antagonizing as well as engaging imaginings of community, leading to counter-hege- monic17 movements that seek to invent alternate traditions, construct alternate historical narratives, and form alternate borders for a community. The following three histories of the appropriation of dabkeh illustrate the ways in which dance has been used to col- lectivize and divide people in Palestine during the last century.

12. James Clifford, “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,” in Hal Foster, ed., Dis- cussions in Contemporary Culture (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1987), pp. 120–130. Clifford describes how late 19th century and early 20th century anthropologists such as Lowie, Boas, Kroeber, and Mal- inowski gathered the cultural knowledge, discourses, and products of indigenous populations in order to salvage them before they could be diluted or destroyed by the deluge of European cultural and political activities. This salvage paradigm provided a cultural snapshot of various populations in the late 19th century, but little comparative knowledge about earlier periods in each population’s history, leading to a perception of cultural stasis. For examples of such “salvage anthropology” in early 20th century Palestine, see Rowe, Raising Dust.

13. Hilma Granquist, marriage Conditions in a Palestinian village,vol.1 (Helsinki, Finland: Aka- demische Buchhandlung, 1931).

14. Ilan Pappe, “Post-Zionist Critique on Israel and the Palestinians, Part III: Popular Culture,” Journal of Palestine studies, Vol. 26, No. 4 (1997), p. 61.

15. See, for example, Judith B. Ingber, “Shorashim: The Roots of Israeli Folk Dance,” Dance Perspectives, Vol. 59 (1974), pp. 3–60.

16. Elke Kaschl, Dance and Authenticity in Israel and Palestine: Performing the Nation (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), p. 101.

17. Antonio Gramsci, selections from Cultural Writings, David Forgacs & Geoffrey Nowell- Smith, eds., translated by William Boelhower (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985, first published in 1946).

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ZIONIsT APPROPRIATION

It might be argued that the political persecution and physical humiliation of Jews in Europe in the early 20th century influenced a reconstruction of physically vibrant and powerful Jewish cultural identity through Zionism.18 European emigrants to Palestine challenged the stereotypical image of the downtrodden “ghetto Jew,” promoting Zionist pioneers who were strong, independent, and active.19 This sense of independence trans- formed into a need to possess cultural products that were non-European and a “… long- ing for the creation of an original Israeli dance style, to express the new way of life then coming into being in the land of Israel.”20 The need for a particularly Israeli dance form also emerged as a reaction to the cultural legacies that were being perpetuated amongst the European migrants. In considering the social dance forms engaged in by Zionists mi- grants during the British Mandate period, early Israeli choreographer Rivka Sturman re- flects how “I was, frankly, outraged that Israeli youth should be bringing German dances and songs to others.”21 Mirali Chen similarly recalls that within the Zionist communities in Palestine at this time “… we were against all European traditions so we needed new things, new steps, new music.”22 This rejection of European cultural identity might thus be seen as both a counter-hegemonic movement resulting from the persecution of Jews in Europe and a desire to legitimize an Occidental cultural presence in an Oriental land- scape.23 This evoked a need for a collective identity that would appear dynamic and new, yet linked to an ancient culture of Jews in the southeastern Mediterranean region.24

The culture of the indigenous rural population of Palestine in the early 20th cen- tury appeared to present such a link. The following observations by Vera Goldman in the early 1940s encapsulates this sense that local rural dances were a legacy of an ancient Jewish civilization:

Now, the “Deppka” is on — the Arabs shepherd-dance: a few light running steps, then little leaps on both legs with a turning of the hips — and running and leaping, running and leaping […] And the “Deppka”, the Arabs’ shepherd dance, is danced with spontaneous gaiety by the youth of our settlements. Perhaps, in some of these customs, occidental Jews felt as if they might have known them once in the forgot- ten past and re-recognised them now.25

18. Max Nordau, “The Jewry of Muscle,” in Paul Mendes-Flohr & Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the modern World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, first published in 1903), pp. 547–548.

19. Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West european Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

20. Z. Friedhaber, “Did Israeli Folk Dance Truly Spring from the Ashes of the Holocaust?,” Nirko- da, Vol. 11, No. 12 (1995), pp. 13–14.

21. Ingber, “Shorashim,” p. 17. 22. Judith B. Ingber, “Villified or Glorified: Views of the Jewish Body in 1947,” Jewish Folklore

and ethnology Review, Vol. 20, Nos. 1–2 (2000), p. 43. 23. Kaschl, Dance and Authenticity in Israel and Palestine. 24. Ruth Eshel, “Concert Dance in Israel,” Dance Research Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2003), pp.

61–80. 25. Vera Goldman, The Dance in Palestine (Tel-Aviv: Women’s International Zionist Organization

and Instruction Centre, 1945), pp. 5–6.

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Goldman implies here that through a process of either genetic recall or spiritual mediation, Jews returning to their ancient homeland felt an innate aesthetic apprecia- tion and connection with local peasant dances. The actual appropriation of dabkeh into Israeli culture can be seen, however, as far more socially constructed. During the 1930s and 1940s, Zionist pioneers studied the local peasant dabkeh and re-choreographed it into stage presentations for Zionist youth.26 Early Israeli choreographer Rivka Sturman attended the local celebrations, describing how

by the end of the 1930s I had seen many Arabic dances. At Ein Harod I could watch the Arabs as they lead their sheep down into the valley where the well lay. As they danced down the path, playing their hallil (simple wind pipe) their steps and behav- iour were of interest to me. I would watch for the good dancers. I recognized them from the village festivities. The observations gave an Arabic color to my earliest dances, especially in the step-bend, the restrained, erect bearing, and the special, abrupt rhythm.27

As a recent immigrant, Lea Bergstein also observed the local indigenous dances in the 1930s and considered how they might blend with the influences that she brought from Europe:

She danced with a sword, doing a kind of dance of attack. I thought her movements looked exactly like Laban’s. Even at weddings there were dances of war and victory […] Once I remember a girl entered the circle to dance and she didn’t do anything but walk in the kind of way that ballerinas try to achieve — an incredible fragile flight that was simplicity itself. The men danced the dabkeh. All these celebrations influenced me.28