Tourism, leisure and violence in Israel
I always have problems because I mix up the words ‘toerism’ and ‘terrorism’ in English. No wonder, look at the next report from Dutch newspaper Telegraaf:
[flashvideo filename=http://static.telegraaf.nl/telegraaf/video/200911231025.buitenland.00017429.flv /]
According to correspondent Brandsma Israël is exporting its knowledge from years of war and terrorism. The training (for example by Top Secure) is developed by former soldiers and others who still ‘like their jobs so much’ and about 2000 tourists a year make use of it. In particular anti-terrorism courses in which you can shoot (among others) Arabs with guns (not the Arabs with the keffiyah!). Such a course is for example developed by Security Consulting and Training. Now if you don’t have a criminal record and you are not mentally unstable, you can follow these courses.
Is this a form of tourism that has experiencing violence as one of its ultimate pleasures? We already have tourism in which people are visiting slums watching teen-age drug dealers with guns in Brazil and tourist visiting the killing fields of Rwanda and tourists visiting the sites struck by Katrina (read Erika M. Robb). It brings together leisure, education and violence; not the most obvious relation. Shooting Arab terrorists is also only a next step in what can be considered as the Israeli occupation as a tourist event.
?????? ?? ????? Views from the Occident: Souvenirs of Conquest: Israeli Occupations as Tourist Events
It is perhaps self-evident to suggest that military conquest shares something with tourism because both involve encounters with “strange” landscapes and people. Thus it may not surprise that the former sometimes borrows rhetorical strategies from the latter—strategies for rendering the strange familiar or for translating threatening images into benign ones. There have been numerous studies of this history of borrowing. Scholars have considered how scenes of battle draw tourist crowds, how soldiers’ ways of seeing can resemble those of leisure travelers, how televised wars have been visually structured as tourist events (e.g., the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq), and how the spoils of war can function as a body of souvenirs. These lines of inquiry expand our understanding of tourism as a field of cultural practices and help us to rethink the parameters of militarism and warfare by suggesting ways they are entangled with everyday leisure practices.
So now to make the issue a little more complicated (or should I write ironic?). A few months ago four Dutch youngsters were arrested in Kenya for alledgedly trying to join the Somali Al Shabab network in order to wage Jihad. According to themselves however they were ‘only tourists’. That is not entirely impossible although there story seems to be a little strange and copied from a similar incident a few years ago (of which one of the boys was part of as well). Young Dutch going abroad to fight for justice (as they would have it) is nothing new, it happened during the Spanish civil war, with Muslim youth going to Bosnia in the 1990s and Jewish youth going to Israel to join the Israelian army. The romantic ideas, the encounter with the ‘other’ and sensationalism are as much part of these practices as they are of ‘dark tourism’. But when these Muslim boys would have gone to Israel to join these fighting courses, would they have been arrested as well? I know a few other young Muslims aspiring to go abroad for Jihad, maybe I should recommend them to follow these courses first?
