The economy of fear is a strange beast: it sneaks up on you without you noticing it. You internalise its sweaty paws, its irregular heartbeats, and its repetitive stammer impedes your speech. And so, when travelling from Tel-Aviv airport back to Cairo, after a 2-week stay in Ramallah, I had to program myself for the Israeli airport experience. Having had a few rough brushes in the past, I decided I would lie through my teeth and play the game along. Armed with my sweetest smile and a good few layers of mascara and lip gloss, I had my story rehearsed: I came to Israel to meet with my good 100% kosher Jewish friends, and of course I only dwelled in party bubble Tel-Aviv, sighed devoutly at the Wailing Wall, and never associated with any Arabs…nothing of that sort. The truth could not have been farther: I flew to Tel-Aviv, and straight away took a service taxi to Ramallah for a 2-week curatorial research period. I had a keen interest of not getting my suitcases checked: it took me 15 days to painstakingly collect portfolios, DVDs, CDs, catalogues and other artist materials. I was not going to have them confiscated on “security grounds” by the Ben Gurion airport authorities. Experience taught me to take the necessary precautions (last time around my kosher Israeli tahini got confiscated!), and so I left the very political and “risky” (non-food) stuff, with friends in Tel-Aviv, to snail mail to me.

What is upsetting, is that though I played the part desired of me, eventually my cunning resulted in my defeat, and by corollary the economy of fear’s victory. But perhaps also the latter needs to be nuanced, for the victory is a deluded one: eventhough every attempt is being made by erecting physical barriers like walls and checkpoints, eventually culture, politics, economy, and any other matters tied into the condition of occupation, cannot be sealed off and treated as hermetic. There will always be seepage and leakage, and at times in very unexpected ways. And while it is true that the shops in Ramallah are flooded with Israeli products with Hebrew writing all over them (= the occupation goes beyond territory, and is also one of language, commerce and consumption), there are ample instances of resistant appropriation. For example, is it possible to read the kibbutz-cultivated watermelons sporting Hebrew “avatiakh sheli” stickers (= my watermelon), which are proudly displayed on Palestinian flags, as an act of reappropriation? Does the mere act of selling them as “baladi” (=local Palestinian) watermelons, signify resistance, wherein the visual mix-up reveals how convoluted matters actually are.

In a culture, so saturated with propagating a particular identity image, on the Israeli, as well as on the Palestinian side, I found myself while packing nervously discarding the plastic bags from the Beiruti supermarket I had wrapped my shoes in, and replacing bags with Arabic script with Hebrew writing. To my dismay, I discovered, I still had toothpaste left from a trip to Iran! You can imagine how many hours that would have cost me in the airport’s interrogation room. As aforementioned, an occupation is not only territorial, but it is also visual and cultural. In her series “Found” Photographer Shuruq Harb explores different aspects of clothing in the Palestinian souqs. Often Israeli “damaged goods” or discarded items, will find their way to the West Bank clothing stalls, whilst at the same time the West Bank factories produce clothes for Israeli brands, and the Israeli market. One particularly striking photo of the “Found” series, shows a close-up of a red sweatshirt with the text “Street, Tel-Aviv, Girls Only”. The Palestinian wearer gives us a “thumbs up” through the torn pocket. So what does this suggest? The occupation is indeed embodied here, worn as a second skin, for the shirt’s young wearer probably cannot go to Tel-Aviv, and the only proximity to the city is the wearing of the shirt. One might even argue, that the occupation stretches to the realm of dictating fashion sense. Yet on the other hand, can we view the shirt and its owner in a similar vein as the watermelons? This shirt, originally meant for Tel-Avivi girls only, is now defiantly worn by a Palestinian girl. While these reverse readings can be deemed overtly post-modern, I would still like to think that gestures of (re)appropriation are to be found in everyday practices. In his book Understanding Popular Culture, John Fiske dubs this “excorporation”, which he defines as “the process by which the subordinate make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system, and this is central to popular culture.”

Artist Jumana Manna takes this a step further in her video “Hatikva, The Israeli National Anthem”. Perched on a rooftop in Shu’fat, occupied East Jerusalem, she overlooks the urban landscape, clad in Israeli army fatigues, armed with a guitar. Manna herself is a product of the occupation: a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, which bars her in theory of entering the Palestinian territories, or any other Arab country sauf Jordan and Egypt. Performing a military drag, whilst overlooking disputed territory, is in and by itself a demonstration of literally wearing the occupation “on the body”. But taking the Israeli national anthem – which as any anthem is the 3’ musical articulation of nationalist and patriotic pride – and singing half of the lyrics – those pertaining to Judaism and Zionism in its original Hebrew, and half of them – those to pertaining to land, hope and freedom – in Arabic, is a clear stroke of critical culture jamming genius. Equally fluent in both languages, Manna plays simultaneously coloniser and colonised, yet the role division is murky, which is one of the reasons why this video is such an apt illustration of the complex dynamics of cultural de- and relocalisation.

At the airport I wondered whether my Lebanese friends would appreciate the irony of finding in the heart of Israel “Lebanese style” arak, complete with cedar tree and all, called Byblos…made in Israel of course. For a split second I contemplated getting them a bottle, as a curiosa. I didn’t of course….