Good afternoon, welcome, everybody. It's nice to see names appearing on the screen, but it's a little bit sad that we're not doing it face to face.
I'm very happy. I'm delighted to have the honour to present Haggai this afternoon.
But I can only wish we'd had the chance to sit together for lunch before and maybe afterwards.
So keep that promise for me for later.
A speaker Professor Hagai Raam is a historian of the Middle East at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev in Israel.
His area of research areas of research include the social and cultural histories of Iran and the Levant,
and amongst his publications are the books, myth and mobilisation in Revolutionary Iran.
Reading Iran and Israel came out in Hebrew in 2006 and Iran a phobia.
The logic of an Israeli obsession came out with Stanford University Press 20 09 and his latest book,
which is the topic of the talk today, is intoxicating Zion, a social history of Hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel.
And the title of his talk today is the social life of hashish in monetary policy and in Israel.
A global history I think is so much for joining this seminar.
Thank you, Yaakov, for this very generous introduction and my my.
The only thing which is a bit regretful is that I couldn't make it the best.
Thank God there is Zoom, although I'm sure that most of us who have been teaching and using it in the past two years, I've grown quite tired of it.
But I'll try to make the best of it. I'm going to share a PowerPoint presentation.
Please let me. Are you seeing it? Do you see it?
Yes, working. Fantastic. OK.
So my can you hear me well?
So everything is fantastic. OK, the social life of cannabis or association Palestine-Israel.
A global history. So my presentation here is based, as Yakov just mentioned, is based on my book Intoxicating Zion Social History of Fashion,
Mandatory Palestine and Israel, which was published earlier this year with Stanford University Press the.
The overall study is concerned with the previously untold social history of hashish in Palestine,
Israel, the drug which is made from the cannabis resin.
And my story begins in the 1920s, the mandatory period in Palestine and in the Levant in general,
which coincided with the criminalisation of cannabis and other drugs in the international arena.
And the story ends in nineteen sixty seven, specifically with the 1967 war, which, together with other local and global trends and circumstances,
dramatically transformed patterns of hashish policy and drug culture in the Levant region for years to come.
It is. A transnational, perhaps even global study that examines the transition from mandatory Palestine to the State of Israel in the 1950s and the
1960s through the perspective of hashish cannabis as an illicit commodity that is smuggled across borders that is traded,
consumed, regulated and endlessly debated,
and as a screen on which human beings project their class ethnic [INAUDIBLE] racial and gender desires and inside.
So just to give a short introduction starting in the 1990s.
Trained historians began to forge what historian Paul Guttenberg termed the new drug history.
So until that point in time, academic interests in criminalised drugs was largely limited to those in the biomedical or legal criminological fields.
So when historians began to demonstrate an interest in the subject, they mobilised the tools of their profession.
They delved into previously untapped archives and analysed a wide array of sources using cross-disciplinary,
cultural and sociological methods in order to understand such things as the
modern origins of a variety of intoxicants that have rich and complex social,
cultural, economic and political histories. In the process,
they have shed light on an immense and fascinating field of study that includes new
understandings of the political and cultural context within which substances became drugs.
The underworld of users and traffickers, the complex role of race,
gender and class in the construction of addiction and the place of colonialism and
nation building projects in dispersing drug use and enforcing drug restrictions.
Historical research on these topics has offered.
Exciting observations about a variety of societies in the Americas and Europe, in Asia and Africa, and perhaps more excitingly, at least to my mind.
These studies also demonstrate the links between criminalised drugs and broader political, social and economic histories.
So as of late? There has been, I would say, a trickle of monographs,
articles and dissertations on the history of drugs in the pre-modern early modern and modern Middle East,
specifically Egypt, Morocco, the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, Lebanon and Iran.
With regard to Palestine, Israel specifically, no historical study of drugs in Palestine has ever been undertaken,
and no academic attention has been paid to the links between criminalised drugs and broader
historical issues in the State of Israel from its establishment until the present,
intoxicating Zion is the first study that addresses these lacuna.
And it focuses on cannabis, which was and remains the main criminalised,
mind altering substance that circulated in the Levant in the region's most popular recreational drug.
So in my talk now, I would like to discuss three interrelated aspects of the social history of hashish in Mandatory Palestine in the State of Israel.
The first is hashish commodity chains.
And the movement of hashish traffickers across the Levant region, including Palestine.
The second is the evolution of hashish culture in mandatory Palestine, and the third is the attitude of Jews in pre and post 1948.
Periods to cannabis and cannabis intoxication in the process,
what I hope would come through is the porous nature of the Levant states and the interdependence between them.
Not only in matters relating to live in time, culture and political horizons,
which have been sufficiently addressed in previous scholarship, but also in matters pertaining to criminal activity and leisure culture.
So let us begin. Contrary to 19th and 20th century Orientalist discourses, hashish consumption in late Ottoman Palestine.
Appears to have been very negligible. It is indeed likely that hashish was consumed in Palestine in moderation.
In much of the same way that opium was used in 19th century England without any fatal loss of control as it were.
This, however, began to change with the establishment of unprecedented global controls over opiates before and during the interwar years.
And over cannabis in the 1925 League of Nations 2nd Opium Convention.
So before the emergence of these incipient drugs, drug control regimes, Greece was the main supply source of Egypt, of hashish to Egypt,
Egypt being one of the having one of the longest histories with hashish in the Arab Middle East,
the history that dates back to the Middle Ages, indeed, as Philip Robins suggests.
And here I quote, I hope, verbatim with a mix of affection and mild contempt to this day,
Egyptians are widely referred to as the hashish scene that is hashish users across the rest of the Arab world.
In recognition of their fondness for their drug. At any rate, without supplies from Greece.
Egyptians turned for the first time to hashish supplies from Lebanon and Syria.
As a result, Palestine emerged as a new junction and a transit route in the Levant for three straight that extended between Lebanon in the North.
And Egypt in the south and short Palestine's geographical position ensured that vast quantities
of illicit hashish supplies would be smuggled across its territory and route to Egypt.
How should I proceed from here? OK? According to our zone upward ride, I had the ride.
It is classic the social life of things,
and I quote the diversion of commodities from specific from specified pets is always a sign of creativity or crisis.
Whether static or economic, so arguably the diversion of hashish smuggling routes from Egypt to Greece.
Sorry, the the the the diversion or hashish smuggling routes to Egypt from Greece to
the Levant was a sign of crisis for the British in Palestine and a sign of
creativity for hashish traffickers lacking the infrastructure to build the economic
capacity and sometimes the willpower to enforce the ban on the drug trade.
Border crossing illicit hashish flows demonstrated to the British, the porous and perforated nature of the mandate states border.
And by extension, they also question the very legitimacy of these states.
Let me just give you one example.
Claude Skidmore Jarvis, a British major who served in the English Army in Egypt and Palestine, conveyed this sentiment most succinctly,
as such as as as follows he complaining about the menace of hashish traffickers in the Levant region.
He mused she smuggling is rather like an attempt to dam a stream with the clay barrier directly.
You have plugged up one hole. The water comes through in another place.
On the other hand, as I mentioned, the diversion of smuggling routes to the Levant compelled or, I wouldn't say,
inspired hashish traffickers to come up with the most creative and ingenious rouses and
subterfuges in order to transport their cargoes safely from Lebanon to Egypt safely.
Now, to be remembered that the interwar period presented these hashish traffickers with serious challenges,
firstly, incipient, international and local control efforts had criminalised them.
But perhaps even more importantly, as people who were previously that is the late Ottoman period crossed territories in relative ease,
the creation of the Divine Mandate states with customs and police outposts created along these states,
borders restricted their movement and they could no longer expect their now illicit cargoes to go undetected.
These, in a special circumstances, required our traffickers.
I mean, I'm sorry, I should have said that before, because when I say traffickers, I mean ordinary Palestinians.
Arabs from adjacent countries. International gangs from different countries in Europe and the Middle East.
British soldiers stationed in Palestine, Egypt. And significantly also Zionist paramilitary organisations that fought the British.
So these circumstances of erecting borders in the Levant states required all of these people
to come up with a variety of ploys and deceptions to transport their cargoes safely.
So smugglers concealed hashish in shoes with thick, hollow soles and heels inside wheels in hollow,
a slab of chocolate on the bodies of men forced to dress as monks and priests in spare,
and secret compartments built in automobiles, buses, lorries and trains in false bottom of suitcases in musical instruments.
And the list goes on and on and on and on.
But significantly in these ploys for a few smugglers took advantage and were also empowered by what historian Paul Mecca
described in the context of criminal activity in interwar Europe as world shrinking technologies or speed technologies.
Part of the long 19th century art smugglers used cars, ships and even aeroplanes to ferry their illicit merchandise across borders.
But significantly, these these were employed alongside more traditional transportation needs, such as camels and other beasts of burden smugglers.
For instance, wood glue hashish cylinders underneath the hair of camels, humps or ultimately, and please don't try this at home.
They would force these hashish cylinders down their throats.
Once crossing the border into Egypt, the unfortunate beasts would then be slaughtered and the valuable cargo recovered.
Another illuminating example of such ploys is transmitted in the 1994 novella Majima A Fraa Bundle of secrets by the celebrated Lebanese novelist,
playwright and critic. Elias, who was one of the novellas protagonists, is a certain also Ulsterman,
a convict in a Beirut prison in the 1940s who's awaiting his verdict execution by hanging for the killing of two prostitutes.
Listens. Attempt to.
Two stories disclosed to him by Ahmad and Munir is to cellmates, he's fascinated by their tales about the exploits of a certain Sami Al.
Not to be confused, of course, with the author alias hoodie,
who is described in Novella and I quote as one of the most dangerous smugglers in the world of the drugs, a.k.a. the boss.
While the following Kabbage story, which illustrates the boss's ingenuity and his quote amazing ability to escape police
networks that pursued him impressed Hunter the most and steered up his emotions.
And the story goes like this. The boss instructed us That is Ahmad Amir to saw cabbage.
We thought he lost his mind. He said obtain the plot and land and saw cabbage.
We said bus, we came here to eat bread. We're not farmers, he said.
Stop cabbages and the rest is on me. So we saw, you know, when the cabbage starts growing, they explained to to find out a sermon.
When the cabbage starts growing, it's open. We kept watering the cabbage looking around us, not understanding.
We were instructed to see to it that the cabbage would open one moonless night.
The bus arrived with 10 young men equipped with magnum revolvers and tent trucks loaded with hashish.
We took the hashish and planted it inside the open cabbages.
We worked all night, Darren Sammy insisted on rolling up his sleeves.
This wasn't a smuggling operation. It was a hobby. He planted hashish in between the cabbage leaves as though he were a physician,
given giving medicine to a patient after 10 days, which lasted like 100 years.
The cabbage leaves had sharp, covering the hashish and swallowing it up, I swear to Allah.
After that, we collected the cabbage and sent it in cargo planes to Egypt under the pretence of a cabbage export deal.
So to be clear, the novella is primarily a work of fiction.
However, like most fictional, work it or it also echoes a credible historical reality and demonstrates the extent to which the creation of the Levant
hashish trade stretching from Lebanon to Egypt with Palestine in between provided a bonanza for many hashish traffickers,
Lebanese and many others as well. The credibility of this tale is reinforced by the fact that Sami, a hoodie,
was indeed a real Lebanese drug baron, both during the interwar period in and afterwards in 1952.
It was described in, I quote, as the most powerful and notorious drug trafficker in Lebanon's young history.
At an early stage of his career, he indeed may have run hashish trafficking operations from Lebanon to Egypt,
along the lines recounted in bundle of secrets. As a matter of fact,
as I found out later in 1947 and who was imprisoned in Egypt for three years after attempting to smuggle two hundred and sixty
six kilograms of hashish and 47 kilograms of opium on board of an aeroplane which stopped over in Palestine for refuelling.
Anyway, it was under these circumstances. In 1936, Joseph Broadhurst, a senior officer at the Palestine Police, recalled with exasperation,
and I quote the immensity of the smuggling problem that faced the Palestine police and the so numerous what he called smugglers of originality,
who, by virtue of having been born with great natural cunning, had played so many tricks of the police and gave us endless trouble.
Broadhurst went on to say, and I quote again,
by every measure of the trick of trick hashish is smuggled over the Syrian Penn Palestinian frontier through Palestine,
across the burning Sinai desert, over a lonely part of the Suez Canal and up to Cairo.
So let me move to the second theme of my lecture the the emergence of Hashish Culture in Palestine,
which, as you will see, is closely related to my previous discussion.
And I'll start with Sebastian Conran, who in his book What Is History Suggests follows and I quote the history of commodities traces particular items,
most famously sugar in the classic study by Sidney Mintz, but also cotton sold porcelain in glass.
And I may add hashish as well across distinct geographies and across time.
These are studies of interconnectedness that link sites of production and consumption
in different locations and show how these commodities impacted individual households,
as well as larger groups and social formations accordingly.
What I would like to argue now is that the novel links.
That develop between the sides of hashish production in Lebanon,
on the one hand and the sides of hashish consumption in Egypt on the other led
to a dramatic change in the leisure culture practises of Palestinian Arabs,
while Palestinian Arabs, as I previously mentioned, were not known to be avid hashish consumers in the late Ottoman period.
The emergence of Palestine as the largest hashish depot in the Levant during the interwar years led to a surge in hashish,
smoking, smoking amongst them. My sources provide ample evidence that by the early 1930s,
hashish smoking spread throughout Palestine's urban centres of Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, A. Nablus,
Tiberius, Ramallah leader and even Tel-Aviv, the first Hebrew city and many persons could be seen wandering the streets of these towns utterly stoned.
Venues of hashish consumption were primarily of two kinds.
Makeshift hashish dens, which the Hebrew and Arabic press at the time described as hashish, smoking clubs and coffee houses.
What went on inside these establishments?
A contemporary Jewish observer described what transpired in one such club, which was located in an Arab quarter of Haifa's lower city.
And he describes it as follows Various people were either sitting down or lying down.
Others were smoking glucans, water pipes and the rest were lying motions.
The motionless as if dead, their lips mumbled.
Meaningless, meaningless, broken words and syllables. Their face glowing with silly smiles.
Within two hours, all the guests were fast asleep.
The only sounds were fleeting words and unintelligible roars coming out of the sleeping man's mouths.
Be that as it made, decisions were not the main main venues of hashish smoking in the interior.
Palestine, like elsewhere in the Arab, Ottoman, Turkish and Iranian Middle East coffeehouses, were now.
This is not surprising. A Middle Eastern adventure coffee first appeared in the Ottoman Empire and in Safavi Iran in the 16th and 17th century.
Soon, emerging oops. Sorry, so emerging as as urban venues where new kinds of sociability and new patrons
of public conviviality came into play from the perspective of drug history.
One of the reasons why these institutions reached such such a paramount social position, I argue,
is that they became a point of convergence of consumable drugs such as coffee, tobacco, opium and cannabis.
The combination of all of these enabled coffeehouses patrons to sip coffee leisurely,
but also pursuing collective pleasure in ingesting opium and hashish and beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries,
also smoking each of them mixed with tobacco.
Now it is a known fact amongst historians of Palestine. The coffeehouse culture had expanded dramatically in the interwar years.
It is my contention that this expansion may have led may have been linked to the
emergence of Palestine as a major depot of hashish commodities in the Levant.
As I discussed earlier. Indeed, it may not have been a coincidence that the record recreational activities that were soon
hosted in coffeehouses in Palestine included in addition to two small scale gambling.
The performance of music and prostitution. It also included the sale and consumption of tobacco and hashish.
Now it is certain that hashish serving cafes were a thorn in the side of the British authorities in Palestine.
And that is why café patrons and café owners were regularly arrested due to hashish smoking and or hashish possession and wine from the 1930s onward.
The police conducted repeated and coordinated raids on cafes in various towns at the same time that these hashish smoking venues concern.
The British authorities can also be gleaned from the dangerous from the Dangerous
Drugs Ordinance issued by the Government of Palestine in nineteen thirty six.
Article 14 of the ordinance, which did not appear in the previous British ordinance is of 1925 1928 to 1932,
was designed to contend with the situation previously not known right as it shows on the on the upper right side of the slide.
The offences in connexion with the premises used for sale or smoking or opium were hashish or, in other words,
recreational fishers, smoking in cafes and other spaces designated for the same illicit activity.
Conspicuously missing from drug smuggling activities were Palestine's Jews.
Was number had risen from fifty six thousand in the wake of World War one to around six hundred and fifty thousand.
Towards the end of the mandate period, first, of course, there were Zionist values to be considered as intoxication.
To put it mildly, did not sit well with a movement, then rising the virtues of abstemious frontier pioneering and Hebrew labour.
Now augmenting Jewish aversion to hashish was fear of over assimilation into the area to into the Orient.
Now I see over assimilation because Zionist attitudes towards the Orient, as I'm sure we all know, were never free of tensions and contradictions.
Alongside the rejection of the Orient Pre 1948 Zionists were attracted to, for instance.
They were fascinated with the image of the Bedouin, its noble warriors, and sought to emulate them,
and they contemplated the life of Arab peasants Philippine as a window onto a biblical times.
In short, before 1948, many, many Zionists viewed the Orient not just as an enemy territory,
but also as a token space of possibility for Jewish renewal.
The same goes incidentally for more mundane concerns, such as culinary preferences.
As anthropologist Duff Mekere shows vividly demonstrated,
Jewish Zionist settlers discovered that popular leavened time dip and spread in the late in the late mandate period and began to consume
it because they believed it to be part of a repertoire of Arab food whose effect was the consolidation of an authentic tied to the net.
Moreover, and since the late 1950s, hummus was gradually nationalised by Israeli Jews and its Arab identity
suppressed with Jewish immigrants from the Middle East acting as intermediaries.
However. Or the Jews of Palestine, are she smoking was a wholly different matter.
It amounted to an extreme act of border crossing between Jews and Arabs, and one that would take them far too down the road of Oriental ization,
thereby exposing Jewish bodies most perilously to the implication of an alien space, virtually turning them into Arabs, by the way.
Much of the same way that English opium smokers in the late 19th century were deemed as being or gentlemen.
But I don't have time to go into that right now.
Be that as a historian of free, Ilana has recently shown that during the mandatory period, so-called contraction.
Of sodomy by Jews and particularly by European Zionists was described as an especially
severe symptom of ideological laxity and the harming effect of the Arab environment.
I argue that perhaps second only to sodomy, hashish,
smoking in mandatory Palestine was seen as a form of backwardness and barbarism linked to the realities of living amongst Arabs in the least.
That is why such venues as hashish,
dense coffee houses and brothels in which Arabs and Jews could co-mingle and assimilate while sharing a fish field hookah were construed as a
national political threat that these venues were also signal out is as disreputable places of sexual and homosexual encounters is not coincidental.
Both represented an oriental advice not to be transgress to further dissuade.
Juice from joining Eric's. To become hashish smokers,
Zionist public discourse relied on interwar colleague colonial knowledge with a view to asserting that cannabis was specifically oriental substance.
It's special kinds of intoxication being racially compatible with the mentality of Arabs,
and there's only this knowledge it is important to stress arrived in Palestine from three main sites.
As I show in my book India and Egypt,
where the British had contended with cannabis oriented cultures long before arriving in Palestine and from the Geneva based League of Nations,
which was one of the of the forums in which colonial knowledge about cannabis was produced and exchanged within and across imperial centres.
Take, for example, Dr. Zul Book Inspector of pharmacies in Tunis hospitals and a member of the Subcommittee on Cannabis Cannabis,
appointed by the League of Nations in 1934,
who proclaimed and I quote repeated prohibition from imams edicts and penalties from the emirs and Sultans.
All were in vain. Hashish triumphed and triumph.
Still, for it is precisely owing to their special mentality that Muslims became and remain devotees of the drug.
On another occasion, the same expert also asserted,
and this is important that cannabis for Orientals increased sexual arousal and caused violent frenzy.
On the one hand, and indolence and many probability on the other, he concluded by saying that Europeans in North Africa.
We've had the fencing to try hashish did not experience these particular effects because cannabis intoxication was
quote a question of racial sensibility or a question of race receptiveness right there by rationalising the substance.
What I'd like to show you, and very briefly, is that into war zones discourse.
Reproduce these ideas and at the same time, adapted them to local circumstances.
A 1938 commentary in the daily newspapers defied the mouthpiece of the mainstream
Zionism's labour movement and the most popular Hebrew language newspaper,
and into work on this night should should demonstrate this to demonstrate this point.
The commentary was the commentary was published during the 1936 1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine,
which is rightly considered the most significant anti-colonial insurgency in the Arab East during the interwar period.
The writer's primary objective, however, was to repudiate the revolt by reducing its causes and motivations to one overarching cause.
And I quote oriental intoxication or poisoning, which is carried out, which is carried on for generations and on a massive scale,
massive scale by means of oriental drugs by which he meant hashish in order to substantiate this point.
The writer begins by enumerating the effects of hashish intoxication.
Which, as you will see, echoes the arguments of Zubac of the of the League of Nations.
First, the writer claims hashish and I quote begets powerful erotic feelings and generally speaking, it increases sexual drives and sexual activity.
Second, as the writer goes on to say hashish induces violent insanity,
it begets angry behaviour which can easily reach brutal and fearless aggression.
The hashish user, he claims, is easily given to boiling rage or homicide with remarkable, cold hearted.
That is because hashish quote starts, his mind weakens or destroys his recognition of reality and neutralises his natural and social conditions.
By the way. Compare this.
To the moral panic of reefer madness and killer weed in the U.S. at the very same time.
Which demonstrates the global reverberations of these attitudes.
So let me have much more time, do I have Yaku old, we'll had some more time.
You have plenty of time for the test. OK, good. So I'll move on quickly to the Post 1948 era and discuss Jewish attitudes to hashish
and in the social history of in the first two decades of the State of Israel.
Now what? I would like to argue that these attitudes that I've just described to you.
In the post, 1948 era represented a continuation of pre 1948 notions of the grass.
But responding to new demographic and political realities and when I say new demographic and political realities,
I am specifically referring to the explosion and flight of the Arab population of Palestine
on the one hand and the country's recognition by Jews from the Middle East and North Africa,
collectively known as Mr. Rahim. On the other hand, some of these Jews,
not too many I should have used hashish in their countries of origin and had brought the habit with them to Israel.
Other first and second generation immigrants from Muslim countries were not hashish smokers,
but had picked up on the habit in Israel owing to their socioeconomic and ethnic marginalisation.
Many of these immigrants were settled in transit camps in Hebrew and singular Marlborough,
which sprang up across the country with some transforming into development towns in the 1960s, as their name implies.
These settlements were originally perceived as temporary places of dwelling.
Yet many Jews remained there for much longer periods, with settlement between one to seven years.
They suffered from poor sanitary and hygiene conditions, poverty and neglect,
as well as ill treatment and discrimination by the state authorities so beset by these adversities.
Transit camps soon evolved into centres of drug wheeling and dealing and substance abuse,
and this way hashish became a Jewish problem where formerly it was considered largely an Arab world.
It is crucial to stress that the she smoking in Israel remained limited to no more than a few thousand members of the
Israeli underclass and did not make inroads into the dominant Ashkenazi middle classes until after the 1967 war.
Yet there were plenty of moral entrepreneurs.
Removable hashish consuming this regime endangered the very western foundations of the Jewish state,
bringing it to the brink of becoming a full fledged Arab or Levantine space.
The primary terms that expressed these fears were contagion and a plague,
as though hashish smoking was a disease that might spread to the enlightened European.
Not to say white sectors of Jewish society in Israel.
These metaphors are reminiscent. Of older continental anxieties of reverse colonialism,
which spoke of an insidious invasion of Orientals and oriental drugs disrupting metropolitan life by debilitating and immobilising citizens.
Consider, for example, the following ominous warning issued by senior police officer in 1956.
What we have here is a national peril, a terrible peril.
If something is not done to eliminate this terrible plague in ten years time, Israel will become a second Egypt.
How she smoking venues or hashish could be shared by Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews.
On the one hand, and between Jews and Arabs on the other,
we're especially signalled out as a threat to the homogeneity common euro centricity of the national project.
Now that these venues were usually located in Israel's ethnically mixed towns such as Jaffa, Haifa,
Acre, Lod and these towns are basically binational borderlands in which Arabs and Jews live together.
That that these venues were actually located there heightened the threat of mixing this issue,
issuing from the mainstream public discourse, test these hashish smoking spaces into the realms of radical alternative.
Patrons of these venues were described as, and I quote from a collection of references.
They were described as worn out and filthy riffraff.
The most revolting figures ever seen a mixture of malignant diseases, degeneration and the underworld, and the prey for bugs and lice.
The interiors of these establishments were also said to be filthy, foul smelling, depressing and in a state of utterly disrepair.
And here again, a collection of utterances about this, about about these places.
Everything in this place is dirty and sticky.
The furniture, the glasses, the cups, the thick hair air hanging in space, or most of these cafes are very dirty.
They are located in ancient, ramshackle one-story buildings in quarters of tin shacks, in pitiable wooden checks,
in plaster lost buildings whose entrance yawns before you, bringing to mind toothless old women.
The stench is discernible in every corner. The smell of beasts manure is truly nosy.
OK. Briefly turning the gaze to the voices of the restructuring themselves.
And I don't have time to go into it.
It is interesting to note that they oftentimes assimilated these negative derogatory notions of hashish and hashish smoking.
The case in point, and again, I don't have time to go into it right now.
A case in point is novelist Shimon Bus.
Now. And of course, I take it that most of you are familiar with him.
So I will keep it short for all of us.
How should I put it vehemently subversive?
Mizrahi susceptibilities, oftentimes anti-Zionist in nature, his literary works, such as is his novel The Transit, the Transit Camp, Karbala write.
His literary works also testified to a remarkable, even wholesale integration of Zionist oriented,
ized racialised and gendered conceptual accusations of hashish and hashish addicts.
The same goes, however, for other Mizrahi novelists such as Kahlo selling sail.
Your show had modified to be Amir of Non Shamash, to name, but a few.
So I shall limit myself saying that this circumstance is consistent with other cases of the colonial
post-corona world in which the indigenous middle classes have conceptualised hashish in negative terms.
In much of the same way as the recently departed European colonisers had done, so, I come to the conclusion.
Global trends and the occupation of Palestinian territories in 19 in the 1967 war joined to prompt a
significant expansion of hashish smoking amongst Israeli Jews that were previously immune to to the habit,
thus bringing down the ethnic, gender and class boundaries that kept the fees strictly an Arab or Mizrahi, or it is roughly vice.
This process? Which was by no means linear resisted through the 21st century.
In this circumstance prompted a rather recent publication of an op ed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that crowned Israelis as a nation of stoners.
Let me just give you a little piece from that op ed about the op was titled What Really Unites Israel?
Israel's right, left and Centre, and it argues as follows A love of pot smoking is shared amongst all populations in Israel.
Hilltop settler youth in Tel Aviv. Radicals young and old Knesset members and simple folk, city and country people.
Religious and secular. Everyone loves.
Marijuana and hashish are the largest common denominator in Israeli society, despite the common ideals held by hippies in Israel.
It turns out that one can be a religious fanatic, a human rights trampling racist or a war mongering militarist.
And will be incredibly and still will be incredibly good at rolling joints.
No problem. Hot couldn't be any more common in Israel.
There aren't enough lungs, so admittedly this description of Jewish Israel as a nation of stoners is surely an overstatement.
But a 2017 survey conducted conducted by the Israel Anti-Drug Authority validates the general impression.
Backing breaking it up with hard numbers. The survey found.
A dramatic surge in the adult. A surge in the prevalence of cannabis use by Israelis,
Jews and non-Jews like twenty seven percent of the adult population reported using
cannabis in the past year in comparison to just under nine percent in 2000 and not.
A comparison with surveys conducted in other countries shows that Israel is probably at the top of cannabis use by adult populations,
with Iceland and the U.S. lagging behind at 18 percent and 60 percent, respectively.
So although the normalisation of recreational cannabis use in Israel has been gaining
steam in recent years as old mythologies about the substance are losing their credibility.
Remnants of obsolete oriental fantasies about the substance remain in reconfigured form.
A blatant example of this is a short 33 second video clip prepared by the Israel Anti-Drug Authority 2006,
with which I will conclude designed to dissuade teenagers from using intoxicating drugs,
particularly cannabis, and broadcast on Israel's main public television channel.
The clip was produced in the style of the Daily Times lasting will testament videos by Muslim suicide bombers.
It shows a teenage boy holding a bong as a deadly weapon, standing in front of an unsteady camera and reciting the following monologue.
Look. I, Omer Kendall, aged 16, of Ranjana, bid goodbye today from my parents ramekin,
Cherwell and from my sister Karen, and I'm going to a party in Tel Aviv.
There's only one way to be truly liberated to get drunk, take drugs and get really stoned.
Don't cry, mom. I'm going to paradise now.
It is easy to see in this short clip echoes of Orientalist fantasies about sheesh taking Muslims,
which are addressed in an early 21st century Islamophobic garb.
At the time of the clips broadcast, and let me remind you that 2006, so it's the final days of the Second Intifada.
And at the height of President George W. Bush's global war on terror, the suicide bomber had in the US,
in Western Europe and in Israel become emblematic of the so-called Islamic death culture.
The clip does argued, deliberately played on the strength of these anti-Muslim sentiments that were rampant in Israeli society at the time.
At the same time, it drew upon the vocabulary of 19th and early 20th century images of cannabis,
namely that hashish is an oriental substance used by uncivilised Muslim Arab zealots who championed a ritual of death rather than a ritual of life.
Whatever the case may be, it appears that the Zionist nightmare of assimilation into the Levant and nightmare
that haunted Jews in Palestine Israel since the 1920s had has materialised,
at least to some extent, or at least to the extent that cannabis consumption is concerned.
Thank you very much. They thank you for this fascinating, fascinating presentation.