This article inquires into Israel's understandings of its conflict with Iran by relocating analysis from the realm of political–strategic issues, with which previous scholarship on Israel and Iran has been preoccupied, to the realm of culture. The article draws on works that read metropolitan and colonial cultures together, or contrapuntally. By studying one history (Iranian) as at once the condition and the effect of the other history (Israeli), I show that Israelis fashioned and comprehended the post 1979 Iranian polity on the basis of what they believed to be the (dis)ordering of their society at home. In this way, Israeli perceptions of Iranians as alien and threatening have turned into a defensive protection of the home front. Anti-Iran phobias in the Israeli public sphere reveal not only justified strategic concerns, but also fears of “Oriental” (Mizrahi) and ultrareligious, Iran-like “demons” operating within the Israeli polity. The Israeli sense of danger emanating from Iran is related to the very process of demarcating and safeguarding the Jewish state's Western character

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In 2005 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization accepted Lebanon's archaeological site of Nahr al-Kalb into its Memory of the World Programme, turning it from national heritage into a globally memorable text. I argue that it is not the content of the commemorative inscriptions but the mode of repeated commemoration that makes it possible to reinterpret potentially divisive markers of Lebanon's past into icons of national unity and a shared humanity. By focusing on the intersection of public monumentality, repetition, and the construction of community identity based on the logic of resemblance, I show that governmental elites at times of political transition need to make public interventions into the past to bolster their legitimacy, new commemorations are confined by rules and conventions of public memorializing, and the logic of resemblance inherent in commemorative processes can be used to convert a fragmented history into a memory of unity and strength

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During the late 19th century, British supremacy in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean basin increasingly brought the hajj under the surveillance and regulation of non-Muslim powers. With the development of steamship travel and the opening of the Suez Canal came rapid growth in the number of oceangoing pilgrims. Colonial authorities eventually identified the steamship-era hajj as both a conduit for the spread of epidemic diseases, such as cholera and plague, and a critical outlet for the growth of Pan-Islamic networks being forged among Indian dissidents, pilgrims, and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the British and Ottoman empires engaged in a contestation of sacred space in which the stakes ranged from suzerainty over the Hijaz and the administration of the hajj to even larger questions of hegemony in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and even dār al-Islām as a whole