Welcome to a new issue of Contemporary Levant. As a journal focused on the Levant region, and published by an organisation with a longstanding presence in the region, it is impossible to start this editorial note with anything but an expression of great sorrow at the appalling effects of the earthquakes that struck Syria and Turkey in early February. The death toll, at the time of writing in early March, stands at over 50,000 people, with hundreds of thousands more injured and displaced, and the impacts in many regions compounded by political intransigence and ongoing conflicts.
On Thursday 9th February, three days after the most serious tremors, CBRL issued the following statement:
We are devastated by the events in Türkiye and Syria following Monday’s catastrophic earthquakes.
At CBRL, our connection to Syria, one of the most important countries covered by our work, spans many years. Our thoughts and prayers are with our Syrian friends and colleagues and their families in these difficult times.
Before the earthquakes hit on Monday, the humanitarian crisis in the northwestern region of Syria was considered one of the most urgent in the world. A natural disaster of this scale could not have hit a more vulnerable population. In an effort to give back to the people of Syria, who always welcomed us with utmost generosity, hospitality, and warmth, we are encouraging our members and friends to contribute to any of the following organisations, which are running urgent earthquake relief campaigns, and to help us spread the word.
The statement linked to a number of organisations providing help and support to people affected by the earthquake at the time, and which will continue to do so long after it ceases to top the headlines. Links to them can be found at https://cbrl.ac.uk/news/ways-to-help-syria-and-turkiye/.
Moving on to the contents of this issue of Contemporary Levant: this is another general issue, with a mixture of themes and topics, allowing us to include a number of articles which have been available online since the summer of 2022. This is testament to Contemporary Levant’s growing reach and the high quality of many of the articles submitted to us, especially from scholars in the Levant region. Amongst the articles ready for incorporation into an issue of the journal several clear themes emerge. One of them, in pieces by Hussam Hussein and Kholoud al-Ajarma, and by Yara Saifi and Buad Khales, is the importance of education in the contemporary Palestinian setting – ranging from the latter’s focus on the conditions under which young Palestinian children in East Jerusalem experience their first years of education, to the ways in which issues of water, colonialism and sovereignty are expressed in textbooks approved by the Palestinian authority.
Alongside this is a pair of articles which highlight the effects of Orientalist and Biblical ideas and narratives on the ways that the histories of both sides of the Jordan Valley are known and understood, from the nineteenth century to the present day. For Emanuel Pfoh, this is a question of the ways in which Victorian ethnographers see Palestine and its residents, and the relationship of that vision to Euro-American Biblical agendas. Meanwhile Rama Al Rabady and Shatha Abu-Khafajah consider more recent impacts of the Biblification of knowledge about Jordan on the priorities and execution of archaeology and heritage preservation.
Three other pieces consider public media, including radio, the press and social media. In her article, Sahar Mor Bostock makes an important contribution to the literature on radio in Mandatory Palestine, bringing listenership and reception studies into the history of how the advent of radio affected culture, society and politics. And with more up-to-date subjects, Yousef Barahmeh considers the way in which political humour such as cartoons and satire has been deployed on the Jordanian scene since the Arab uprisings, and in a second article Barahmeh, this time writing with Jona Fras, examines the use of military metaphors to talk about the Covid-19 pandemic.
Finally, there is also a fine crop of book reviews, introducing and analysing new works on the Levant region. Jacopo Pili examines Maria Chiara Rioli’s A Liminal Church: refugees, conversions and the Latin Diocese of Jerusalem, 1946–1956, one of an increasing and important number of studies engaging with the history of Palestine immediately following the Nakba. Jacob Scott devotes his attention to Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire, a new classic in the history of British colonial policy in Palestine and its disastrous impacts. And finally Saverio Leopardi reviews Erling Lorentzen Sogge’s study of one of the refugee communities created by those British polices, in The Palestinian national movement in Lebanon: a political history of the ‘Ain al-Hilwe Camp.