- Hey everybody, it's Chris.
I'm a visual anthropologist here at cut.com
and we're back with more 100 Years of Beauty.
Today we explored a place that we describe
as Israel and as Palestine.
I think no other project brings more controversy,
more complexity, and more sensitivity
than any of the projects I think we've done so far.
First of all, I wanna say there is no way
that we are at all qualified to comment on
or make definitive statements about a two-state solution,
about Israeli settlements.
Nobody's asked us to make that commentary
and we're not qualified to do it.
What we can do is explore how different
and plural claims to political sovereignty
are articulated through women and young girls'
personal preferences, tastes, styles and fashions.
Zionism refers to a movement where Jewish people
in the diaspora want to return to Israel
to claim territory for a sovereign Jewish state.
Arab Palestinians also have claim
to a sovereign Palestinian state.
So, it's in this moment that we begin to see the
emerging tensions between these two groups of people.
It's not necessarily a religious conflict,
although it takes upon that dimension later.
It really is about conflicts over territory.
So it's not until 1947 and 1948 that
the British decide that it's time to pack up the belief,
and in the process, divide up this parcel of land
into two territories,
one that's supposed to be a Jewish state,
and one that's supposed to be an Arab state
even though in reality, if we think about the demography,
there are Jewish people and Arabs living in both places.
So we see this mass migration of people,
of political refugees at the start of the
Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948.
In our research, what we continue to find
over and over again for both the Jewish women
and for Arab Palestinian women in this area
is a kind of exoticization of war and armed conflict.
We find numerous pictures from all kinds of state actors,
legitimate or not, that have women holding guns,
that have women in military uniforms,
the glamorized and make sort of a fashion
out of military engagements and in armed conflict.
I think one think we might be able to say
is that in the quest for self-determination
and sovereignty amongst Jews and amongst Arabs,
that in this place it has taken upon a really
radical militaristic dimension.
We were really fortunate enough to have had so many people
around the world collaborate with us in the production
and the research of this video.
So we have our researchers here at home,
and we also have a lot, a lot of help from people in Israel,
in Palestine,
in the diasporas of both the Jewish international community
and the international Palestinian community.
One thing, though,
I think everybody we consulted with shares,
is A, a sense that we approach this project
with as much ethical sensitivity as possible,
to understand the very real pain and hurt
that some of these images produce
for people out in the world, and then B,
to use this project to think about hybridity
instead of the narratives of division and partition
that saturate our understanding about Israel and Palestine.
And I think it's easy for us to all take a position
on the question of Israel and Palestine,
but it's a completely different project
to look at women that might be on both sides
of that partition and ask,
when you go out into the world dancing with your friends,
when you go shopping, what do you do?
What does your ritual look like?
We'll find that young women want the same thing
regardless of the situations they find themselves in.
This is not at all to minimize the complexity
or the particularity of individual people's experiences
in this place,
but to just say that beauty is a way
that young people have always aspired
to form their own individuality,
to navigate a world that's complicated,
to find joy and delight in a world
that's ugly and sometimes violent.
We think of this video as just an entree for you,
it's a jumping off point,
we hope that instead of leaving this video with a feeling
that we've taken a position on Israel and Palestine,
that instead you are now invited into a discussion
and to a conversation that's been happening
and that there are plenty of women
from both sides of this dispute
who have incredibly interesting
and provocative things to say.
And that those things are available and accessible to you.
And you should comment about them here in this video.