the International Folk music
nal of the International Folk music Council, Vol. 12 (1960), pp. 85–86. 42. As cited in Ingber, “Shorashim,” pp. 47–48. 43. Avi Shlaim, “The Debate about 1948,” in Ilan Pappe, ed., The Israel-Palestine Question (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1999), pp. 171–192. 44. Kadman, “Folk Dance in Israel,” pp. 28–30. 45. See, for example, Ingber, “Shorashim.” 46. See Pamela Squires, “Review of ‘Shorashim: The Roots of Israeli Dance,’” Dance Research
Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1975), p. 34; Susan Puretz, “Review of ‘Shorashim: The Roots of Israeli Dance,’” Dance Research Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1975), p. 35; Eshel, “Concert Dance in Israel”; Gaby Aldor, “The Borders of Contemporary Israeli Dance: ‘Invisible Unless in Final Pain,’” Dance Research Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Summer 2003), pp. 81–97.
370 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
a spectacular oversight, given that Zionist, and subsequently Israeli, political leaders have persistently denied the existence of an indigenous population from which the dances were appropriated.47
Appropriated dabkeh steps were even used in an antagonistic context against the indigenous population. Rivkah Sturman’s dance piece Debkeh Gilboa glorified the Gil- boa Settlement’s conquest of a new hill after expelling the indigenous population, and her yes, They Will Lose, performed by hundreds of Israeli soldiers at the first Indepen- dence Day in 1949, used dabkeh patterns to mimic acts of attack and final triumph over the local indigenous population.48
The Zionist engagement with dabkeh in the early 20th century might have emerged from an Orientalist curiosity, speculation on what the Kingdom of Israel might have been like two millennia earlier, or a sharing of culture between colonizers and colo- nized. It soon became integrated, however, into a wider political process that ultimately marginalized the indigenous population.49 Dance steps, formations, and movements were studied and replicated for their aesthetic value and accorded new symbolic mean- ings associated with Zionist nationalism.50 Dabkeh was not learnt so as to embody a set of meanings that would help new immigrants in Palestine integrate more effectively into the indigenous population, but appropriated to express a new political ideal. It might thus be argued that by learning and performing dabkeh, a hegemonic Western colonial movement developed an Eastern cultural identity that could authenticate their claims to territory in the Middle East.
PAN-ARABIsT APPROPRIATION
The military conflict of 1947–1948 and establishment of Israel in Palestine re- sulted in the displacement and exile of the majority of the indigenous population.51 Referred to in Arabic as al Nakba [the catastrophe],52 this collective trauma fragmented existing familial, social, economic, geographic, and political bonds, disrupting both the indigenous society and its intangible culture. Diverse dance practices were suddenly removed from the geographic and social environments that had provided them with contextual meaning, threatening their continuity as cultural practices.
The subsequent attempts to reconstruct this population’s cultural bonds were
