ABSTRACT

The Mistaʿarvim are Jewish undercover agents who masquerade as Arabs in order to infiltrate Palestinian and other Arab societies in the service of the Israeli military. The first Mistaʿarvim unit, which served in the pre-1948 Palmach Zionist militia, was based on Jews of Arab origin. Arabs in appearance and in speech, these undercover Jewish agents masqueraded as Arabs to blend into Arab communities without raising suspicion. They successfully executed their operations only by transforming their Arab selves into a performative imitation of ‘Arabs’ as Others. Complying with the Zionist binary separation between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’ as two different identities, they broke their originally hyphenated Jewish-Arab identity, and in return they gained heroic acceptance into the exclusively Jewish nation in Israel. In this article, we examine how the military-oriented tactic of histaʿarvut (the infinitive form of acting as Mistaʿarvim) sheds light on performative acts in the field of popular music, whereby a Jewish Israeli identity is asserted through a ‘masked’ performance of Arabs. As an act of self-imitation, ‘cultural histaʿarvut’ includes symbolic borrowing of visual, linguistic, or musical elements from Arab and Palestinian cultures in order to stage a masked performance that ‘crosses’ the cultural lines to ridicule or demean Arabs and their culture, as a means of Jewish Israeli entertainment. Drawing on this, we introduce the term ‘sonic masquerading’ to elaborate on the specific performative uses of the Arabic accent and musical features as an example of cultural histaʿarvut in the work of the Israeli musicians Shefita, Daniel Saʿadon, and Tuna.

摘要

Mistaʿarvim 是犹太卧底特工，他们伪装成阿拉伯人，以便渗透到巴勒斯坦和其他阿拉伯社会，为以色列军队服务。第一米斯塔ʿarvim 部队在 1948 年之前的 Palmach 犹太复国主义民兵中服役，其基础是阿拉伯血统的犹太人。外表和言谈都是阿拉伯人，这些卧底犹太特工伪装成阿拉伯人，融入阿拉伯社区而不引起怀疑。他们只是通过将阿拉伯人的自我转变为对“阿拉伯人”作为其他人的表演性模仿，才成功地执行了他们的行动。遵照犹太复国主义将“阿拉伯人”和“犹太人”作为两个不同身份的二元分离，他们打破了他们最初被连字符连接起来的犹太-阿拉伯身份，作为回报，他们英勇地接受了以色列这个纯粹的犹太民族。在这篇文章中，我们研究了histaʿarvut（作为 Mista ʿ的不定式形式）的军事导向策略arvim) 揭示了流行音乐领域的表演行为，通过阿拉伯人的“蒙面”表演来断言犹太以色列人的身份。作为一种自我模仿的行为，“文化histaʿarvut ”包括从阿拉伯和巴勒斯坦文化中象征性地借用视觉、语言或音乐元素，以进行“跨越”文化界线的蒙面表演，以嘲笑或贬低阿拉伯人及其文化, 作为以色列犹太人娱乐的一种方式。以此为基础，我们引入了“声波伪装”一词，以详细说明阿拉伯口音和音乐特征的特定表演用途，作为以色列音乐家 Shefita、Daniel Sa ʿ adon 和金枪鱼作品中文化histaʿarvut的一个例子。