2025 Theses Doctoral

Present Interruptus: Reincarnation and Sovereignty in the Golan Heights

Ibrahim, Amer

This dissertation offers an ethnography of the social and political space of the Golan Heights, exploring how it has been shaped by the intensities of two sovereign polities involved in an ongoing war, Israel and Syria, with a focus on the realms of self, political attachment, and theology. The Arab Israeli War of 1967 brought a profound transformation in the demographic landscape of the Heights. What was once a thriving agricultural region in rural Syria, home to hundreds of thousands, is today a sparsely populated borderland in northern Israel, inhabited exclusively by Syrian Druze and incoming Israeli Jews.

For more than half a century, from the occupation to the present day, much of the development of this landscape has been predicated upon efforts to make it internal to either of the national projects. In the Syrian nationalist and post-colonial imaginary, the Golan Heights and its people stand as idealized symbols of a nostalgic past, a bygone interiority waiting to be one day reassembled. In Israeli settlement visions, in contrast, they have emerged as a site of fascinating exteriority, an Edenic extension of the “Six Day War” of 1967 promised to be organically annexed. This political interplay between interiorities and exteriorities has a psychic life of its own.

Taking the Golan Heights as the ground of such cacophonic transformations, this dissertation explores the lives of the remaining Druze community. Present Interruptus draws on two years of ethnographic and archival research (2020 – 2022), weaving together an array of sources from historical documents to participant-observations and ethnographic fieldwork in multiple languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, English, and French. In five chapters, this dissertation investigates the pervasive medium through which responses to 1967 were expressed—the proliferation of experiences of Druze reincarnation, by which men and women of that community vividly recall past-life memories. This recalling of a deep past, however, is not to be understood in simply nostalgic terms, for in every story of reincarnation there is an encounter with a state form that shows remarkable tenacity and adaptability.