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Garabli grew up in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa. The city made headlines this year after residents organized mass demonstrations to protest increasing gentrification, which has taken on an ethnic dimension as Jewish buyers displace Palestinian families who can no longer afford the rent on the homes they’ve been living in for generations.

In Jaffa, dance lessons were a privilege that not everyone could afford, she noted. There was also a social imbalance to the classes: the teachers were Jewish Israelis who did not speak Arabic or understand local norms, whereas most of the students were Palestinian citizens.

According to Garabli, who comes from a traditional Muslim family that prays and fasts during the holy month of Ramadan, many among the Palestinian community in Jaffa do not approve of dancing as a profession. Dance is considered a temptation, and women moving their bodies in such a free way can “damage” their reputations. Moreover, given that the community is heavily focused on its survival, advocating for affordable housing, and mobilizing against gun violence and police brutality, many Palestinian residents view artistic activities as an indulgence, Garabli explained. This, she added, is why relatively few Palestinians attend cultural events like hers.

Whitehouse and Swann describe the fully fused state, when commitment to one group dominates over all others, as a “form of alignment with groups that entails a visceral feeling of oneness with the group. This feeling is associated with unusually porous, highly permeable borders between the personal and social self.” In other words, an insult, a compliment or an injury to the group or another member of the group is perceived as an insult, a compliment or an injury to the self, as most people can recognize when someone from outside the family insults a family member.

In Jordan, no one I interviewed ever put their nationality in the top three, but rather chose family, tribe or region, religion or “Arabness.” (There was one exception, and it turned out he was working for the security services.)

Extreme states of belonging to a single group have enabled the most extreme violence seen throughout history and around the world, from suicide bombings to kamikaze attacks during times of war.

once an individual is fully fused to an identity, all positive and negative experiences serve to reinforce that single identity, with ever more rigid policing of the boundaries of “us” and “them,” and ever-shrinking spaces for communicating with the “other.”

they have come to feel that no one is coming to their rescue, a feeling reinforced by the example of Syria: Not only did the world not act to prevent Syrian deaths, but the world — including Arabs — also ignored President Bashar al-Assad’s brutality against his own Palestinian population.

Israel’s occupation causes daily, ongoing fear and humiliation among the Palestinian population, as well as challenges to everyday existence that dampen the energy to act. But, as Fromm writes, “Young people may succumb to apathy temporarily but a return to rage is always a possibility, in part as a vitalizing alternative to helplessness or despair.” That is, the violence we have witnessed from Palestinians is a natural response to Israel’s occupations when framed in terms of psychology; as an Israeli colleague of mine put it back in 2019, “There is no chance for peace without first ending the occupation.”

“The Holocaust for Israelis and the Nakba for Palestinians condense into two words a multitude of horrific experiences suffered by millions of people,” he wrote, describing a trauma not only for those who experienced them directly but also for their descendants; both are just within living memory. “When members of the victimized group are unable to bear the humiliation, reverse their helplessness, or mourn their losses, they pass on to their children powerful, emotionally charged images of their injured selves.”

For these people, Hamas’ actions symbolized a reassertion of dignity and pride in an Arab identity against an unjust oppressor. This single massacre, which included whole families shot in their beds, has prompted more demonstrations of support for the Palestinian cause than any other occasion in the past few decades. In Jordan, pro-Palestinian protesters only dispersed from the Israeli border after the Jordanian army used tear gas.

“apocalyptic mindset,”

classic asymmetric warfare, laid out in an al Qaeda manual taken up by the Islamic State, “The Management of Savagery,” which advocates baiting the enemy’s military into wars they cannot afford and depleting them — as was achieved by 9/11 at a financial cost of mere hundreds of thousands of dollars, compared to the trillions spent on the subsequent 20-year “war on terror.”

In times of low stress, even a hardened identity does not fear the other and can exhibit curiosity, or at least a lack of animosity, toward an out-group. But this retreat isn’t available to groups whose security is at risk. Fully fused large-group identities, with psychological boundaries hardened by both inherited trauma and daily fear, have another damaging implication for the prospects of peace. This is the perceived threat of reaching across the divide, including gestures of reconciliation. It is felt as betrayal to build bridges with the other and is experienced as a psychological wound.

We are now seeing mass hardening of psychological barriers in the region and globally, with many unable to see faults on their side or, conversely, laudable elements on the other. And it is not just rhetoric

there is a shrinking space for empathy and dialogue

Conflict resolution in such a situation seems meaningless: Neither side wants nor can even conceive of a relationship with the other, so what is the possible basis for negotiation, let alone peaceful coexistence?

all around the world people have told me a version of “No one has suffered as we have suffered.” Victimhood limits our ability to see others also as victims, to everyone’s detriment, for violence is then justifiable, and this is what fuels ongoing wars. It is unclear who can address the intergenerational wounds of the past, but without that work, nothing can improve.

Although the talking points about protecting the family echo those espoused by some right-wing politicians in the United States, there are other influences closer to home, specifically Russia.

Russian videos with Turkish subtitles were proliferating on social media, promoting a new law in Russia that makes it illegal to spread “LGBT propaganda.”

Tarek Zeidan, the director of Helem, a Lebanese LGBTQ advocacy group, told The Post of “a cloud of fear and anxiety among the community.” Last week, he said, the organization received “dozens of calls” from people asking for assistance in leaving the country and advice on what to do if they were attacked.

the moral panic over LGBTQ people is ultimately a deflection strategy, “to shift the tension away from the actual problems” in a region beset by economic troubles, political stasis and climate woes.

The statement threatened that the three organizations would take the matter to court if the government announced a HAICA membership that failed to meet the standards of the 2011 law.

A statement released Monday by three groups involved in the process to select members of the High Authority for Audiovisual Communication (HAICA) held the “President of the Republic and his counsellors accountable for the prevarication and delaying tactics that have marked the process of setting up [the] HAICA.” The statement was signed by the National Union of Tunisian Journalists (SNJT), the National Authority for Information and Communication Reform (INRIC), and the General Culture and Information Union. They assert that the delay has occurred for political reasons.

Monday’s statement accuses the government of claiming “excessive power for itself,” evaluating nominations on “purely political and ideological grounds,” and excluding qualified candidates. The government announced the beginning of the HAICA nomination process after a general strike by Tunisian journalists in October 2012.

established shortly after the 2011 revolution and now is the most-watched channel in Tunisia

ongoing legal proceedings against the channel’s director, Sami Fehri, who has been held in jail for months on corruption charges

Riahi is the leader of the Free Patriotic Union party, which he founded in 2011. It has a secular, pro-business agenda and gained one seat in National Constituent Assembly (NCA)

symptomatic of the problems regarding regulation of Tunisian media. “The government has created a legislative vacuum,”

advertising revenue for Tunisian television stations is too meager to actually fund their operations. He questioned why a businessman such as Riahi would want to enter such an unprofitable sector, suggesting that the real motivation is to gain control over a powerful tool to disseminate one’s own messages to the public

The creation of the High Authority for Audiovisual Communication (HAICA) was called for in a November 2011 law. The statute calls for a nine-person body representing the Tunisian government, the journalists’ union, and the audiovisual communications industry. The HAICA would be tasked with regulating the Tunisian media sector, supervising the media during electoral campaigns, and nominating directors of public radio and television stations. The announcement of this body has been repeatedly delayed, however, leaving the sector largely free from regulatory restrictions.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says there is clear proof that the phishing campaign is organised and co-ordinated by the Tunisian government, as did other sources that Al Jazeera spoke with.

In the siege against cyber dissidence, Twitter has been a bastion for activists. Because people can access Twitter via clients rather than going through the website itself, many Tunisians can still communicate online. The web-savvy use proxies to browse the other censored sites. Yet even if bloggers manage to maintain their blogging, the censorship deprives them of those readers who do not use proxies. The result is what Ben Gharbia described as the "killing" of the Tunisian blogosphere.  Ben Mhenni said that the government's biggest censorship of webpages en masse happened in April 2010, when more than 100 blogs were blocked, in addition to other websites. She said the hijackings that had taken place in the past week, however, marked the biggest government-organised hacking operation. Most of the pages that had been deleted in recent days were already censored. Amamy said the government's approach to the internet policy is invasive and all-controlling. "Here we don't really have internet, we have a national intranet," he said.

low-cost organizational structure and no durable organizational mechanisms are put in place

he political evanescence of social media activism raises issues of accountability and democratic control on the new emerging leaders of social movements, because of a certain opacity that accompanies the fluidity and partial anonymity of online interactions

The political evanescence of digital activism in the Egyptian revolution needs to be understood in connection with the libertarian ideology of “leaderlessness” and “horizontality” that has provided a cultural framing for social media use among activists

it is apparent that the Egyptian revolution, as any great upheaval in history, was not completely spontaneous and leaderless. Rather it bore the mark of complex direction exercised in concert by multiple leaders, from grassroots groups on the ground as the April 6 Youth Movement, to organized forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Left opposition parties and NGOs, to end with digital activists responsible for spreading revolutionary information, recruiting online communities of supporters and publicizing protest events

While Ghonim had some basic activist experience, having done some digital campaigning in support of the presidential campaign of Mohammed el-Baradei in 2010, he was little known within activist circles. From the distance and safety of Dubai where he was working for Google, he collaborated with activists on the ground including Mohammed AbdelRahman Mansour who acted as co-admin on the page, and Ahmed Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement, the group that pioneered digital activism in Egypt. It was only after he was released from prison in the midst of the eighteen-day insurrection, that he suddenly became a famous and respected figure. Yet, Ghonim did not manage, neither he tried, to turn the great influence he had exercised during the revolution into any form of structured political leadership during the transitional phase. Ironically the Facebook fanpage he founded has discontinued its communications with a status message celebrating “the power of the people” on 3 July 2013, the day of the anti-Morsi coup. Ghonim has recently left the country for voluntary exile after a streak of attacks on the news media.

The case of Tamarrod demonstrates how the fluidity in the field of social media in the activist field, dominated by flexible groupings coordinated through social network sites can open space for opportunist groups. Both Wael Ghonim and the main leaders of Tamarrod were secondary figures in the activist scene in Cairo, despite the fact that some of them, had been previously involved in pro-democracy campaigns and in the Elbaradei presidential campaigns. Similarly to what happened with previous political groups it was a great extent this outsider aura that managed to gather so much enthusiasm from Egyptian youth. The group managed to build an extensive network across the country, collecting millions of signature (the exact quantity will remain unverified) to withdraw confidence from Morsi. However, it progressively became clear that Tamarrod was far from being simply a disingenuous and spontaneous citizens groups. It has been publicly confirmed that the campaign received substantial funding from a number of Egyptian entrepreneurs, including Naguib Sawiris. It is also reasonably suspected that the group received financial and operational support from the Egyptian army, and the so-called deep state, which saw in Tamarrod a sort of useful idiot to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and create a favorable climate for the coup d'etat. Since the campaign of repression orchestrated by al-Sisi and the new post-coup government, the group has been marred by intestine fight between different factions, and seems to have lost much of its “street cred” among Egyptian youth. It was yet another group falling victim of its own precipitous rise.

economic self-sufficiency in the production of basic software such as operating systems and software

The best rap and metal in the region succeeds because it manages to avoid both the kind of “extreme consciousness of doom” that leads to aesthetic nihilism, hyper-stylized violence and other forms of artistic “idle chatter,” while also avoiding the kind of surrender to the culture industry which leads even the most well-intentioned of mainstream artists to “collaborate with culture as its salaried and honoured nuisance” rather than challenge it directly from the margins.

the ultimate function of immanent criticism: to enable a positive synthesis, or irreducible hybridization of identities. Such identities can not be subsumed under any dominant ideology or political and economic narrative and therefore cannot serve to reinforce them

in the Middle East and North Africa region, in the years leading up to the current revolutionary moment, the growing popularity of metal and rap music represents a return of the aura to local music scenes. Both Benjamin and Adorno believed that a remnant, or perhaps better, specter of the original aura remained within works of art even in the mechanical/industrial age. This spector becomes visible in the kind of critical art represented by the groups discussed here, contributing to the continued “excessiveness”, “aesthetic deviance”, and “pointing elsewhere” towards cultural difference and a different future that characterize the best exemplars of the music

As Moe Hamzeh, leader of one of the most talented and successful Arab rock/metal groups, Beriut's The Kordz6, explains, while Arab rock or rap artists obviously want to be successful, the relative lack of interest in the two genres by Rotana and other Arab media conglomerates has been a blessing from an aesthetic perspective. It has saved them from the inevitable fate of all commercialized popular music, whether American hiphop and hair metal to Arab video-clip driven pop. At the same time, the lack of commercialization has made the public performance of the music, usually in small group settings or festivals geared specifically to fans of the genres, the crucial means of creating audiences and building solidarity among their communities of fans.

singers and rappers were actually smiling as they performed their music. And so were the crowds surrounding them. This is likely not the vibe Adorno imagined would surround the kind of immanently critical music he felt was necessary to wake people up to the false consciousness they had been mindlessly inhabiting. But it points to a crucial problem with Adorno’s musical aesthetic, at least form the standpoint of reception. The more abstract, atonal, and devoid of recognizable harmonies or rhythmic pulse a piece of music is, the harder it will be for it to inspire a large number of people. Once people are actually on the streets protesting rather than in their smaller subcultural gatherings, they need something catchier and more uplifting to sing along to than brutal vocals and rapid fire rhymes

Adorno did not think much of the aesthetic and political potential of folk music, which he tied both to nationalist and fascist sentiments. In its then present-day form (rather than traditional-historical form), he believed it to foster little more than a “pseudo-folk community,” particularly in its cultural and aesthetic historical trajectory in Germany. But in Egypt as in the United States, the music has played a more critical political role in struggles for political freedom and social justice.

the band’s popularity is inseparable from its dual role as a voice of protest and a regenerator of traditional styles of music that recently were in danger of disappearing completely because of a combination of market forces and government censorship

What the kind of joyful hybridity exemplified by the production style of Armada Bizerta and myriad other rap groups around the Arab and larger Muslim worlds (and across Africa) reveal is that even within one genre of music, such as hip hop, talented artists can create innumerable sonic tapestries to match, and help shape, the national mood—from dissonant anger to joyful creativity—as the political and cultural situation on the ground changes. Their flexibility is key to their function as the kind immanent critique Adorno and other critical theorists hoped would be able to “reliquify” the “congealed” ideologically bounded identities imposed by authoritarian regimes on their citizens

The joyful aesthetics of groups such as Amarda Bizerta, Emel Mathlouthi, Ramy Essam, and other artists at the heart of youth-inspired revolutions challenges Adorno’s belief that critical music in the age of mass reproduction and consumption has to be, essentially, hard to listen to in order to make the listener think and perhaps even motivated to take some form of action. It seems that while in the pre-Revolutionary period, when cultural expression was still heavily policed, this indeed was the case—thus the power and popularity of genres like metal and hardcore rap. But with the explosion of political, cultural, and artistic energy of the protests a new aesthetic dynamic was born that, at least as of the time of this writing, remains quite powerful. As important, by drawing people literally closer together, the music brings them closer to its critical and transformational aura, closing a circle that was broken, according to Benjamin, with the mechanical reproduction and commodification of musi a century ago

It remains to be seen whether Americans and Europeans, so used to providing the “original” music and culture which others have long sampled, will prove as adept as the “new generation” of Arab revolutionaries in adapting the tools and ideas of others to create their own cultural, political, and economic hybrids. But if the experience of the last year is any indication, without doing so there is little chance of the current wave of protests across the West producing the kind of large-scale transformation now underway, however problematically, in the Arab world.

The conventional wisdom is that the alternative communications links offered by the internet and social networking on the web will have a limited effect on change in Tunisia. But with national media either repressed or full square behind the state, it remains the main conduit for news of any kind from Tunisia, especially for foreign media, chief among them al-Jazeera, which has given substantial coverage to the protests, even though its operations in the country are strictly limited, requiring it to rely on video content and updates from social networking sites.