I Won't Be Presenting A Paper

I tried and applied:

From: Yisrael Medad
Sent: 19 March 2014 12:12
To:
Subject: RE: Jordan River Conference

According to your pre-conference notice, the Jordan River Conference aims to focus its attention on the northern sources of the river Jordan its southern course and essentially, would cover in its study both banks of the river Jordan.

I read that the Aram Society is "concerned with all aspects of Syro-Mesopotamian cultures" and that furthermore, "the Syro-Mesopotamian man is born out of a process of cultural continuity" and that "the academic work of Aram is a multidisciplinary one for it combines many different scholarly fields such as archaeology, history, arts, religions, philosophy, literatures and linguistics".

My conceived paper would deal with the cultural, political, religious and historical imagery of the Jordan River in pre-state Mandate Palestine especially, but not exclusively, as an instrument of the Zionist Revisionist stream led by Vladimir-Ze'ev Jabotinsky who, in a poem, coined the phrase "two banks has the Jordan; this one is ours and so is that one".

It would trace various developments such as territorial claims, such as the 1919 map presented at the Versailles Peace Conference and the 1949 Memorandum of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi to the United Nations, the various graphic images of the map including the rifle held aloft over both Mandate Palestine and Transjordan, the attempts by the World Zionist Organization to create Jewish communities in Transjordan in conjunction with the Emir Abdallah as well as Labour movement kibbutzim along its western bank and various songs on the theme of the Jordan River such as those of Naomi Shemer and other Zionist artists. The paper will also touch on school books and other educational material which stressed the existence of Jewish political-military control of areas on both banks as a conscious mobilization instrument.

I have graduated the Hebrew University's Political Science Department with an MA and am currently Director of Information Resources at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem.

The reply

Dear Mr. Medad

Thank you very much for your interest in the Aram conference on the "River Jordan", but we cannot accept your paper for two reasons. First, the conference is not dealing with the modern history of the Jordan River, and second, we would like to avoid any political paper which may cause misunderstanding and tension.

Yours sincerely,

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