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More generally, it is fair to say that different aspects of what has been claimed as
heritage have achieved a plethora of levels and types of articulation with the discourse
and politics of regional identity. They also have a complex relationship with the cele-
bration of historical events as points of departure for nationalistic politics. In further
pursuing the distinction between events and traditions that I am advocating here,
Valentine Daniel’s (1996: 13–45) parallel distinction between history and heritage
may prove helpful. Daniel suggests that in Sri Lanka the Tamil minority was more
interested in establishing its collective heritage, or cultural presence, in contrast to the
majority Sinhala insistence on history as the validation of rights.
At first, this might not seem a very promising approach to a part of the world
where “history” is so often invoked as the basis for establishing a cultural presence
and then discerned, or re-thought, as a form of heritage, especially when—notably in
Greece and Israel—history is often instantiated in the materiality of archaeological
finds (see, for example, Abu El-Haj, 2001; Hamilakis, 2007). But by contrasting the
commemoration of events as a national project with the use of traditions and heritage
as a way of linking the local, the regional, and the national, we can seek the points of
articulation that have led to the reinforcement of a Mediterranean identity in an age
when supranational entities such as the European Union are deliberately weakening
the authority of national cultural models. Of course there is no reason why models of
history and heritage should not coexist, and events are often commemorated as the
establishment of traditions. Working through the ways in which these combinations
are actually realized in the Mediterranean context, however, will add a new and useful
dimension to earlier critiques of the idea of a Mediterranean culture area. It will pro-
vide the historical traces of the process whereby that scholarly preoccupation, like its
popular realization in the tourist industry, has emerged as a widespread habit of
thought.
Architecture arguably provides the most promising avenue for probing these issues.
In Israel, for example, the creation of a national tradition that absorbs elements of Arab
domestic architecture and re-appropriates these to a supposedly—and very generically—
Mediterranean pattern shows very clearly how nationalism can exploit a regional iden-
tity, although the risk to the nationalist imperative remains the possibility of a further
re-appropriation at some future time. Well before the separation of Palestine into the
Israeli and Jordanian nation-states, the modernist architect Erich Mendelsohn was argu-
ing, against the stereotypically European styles that some Jewish settlers preferred, that
the Arab domestic styles offered a climatically much more suitable model, although he
also employed elements ostensibly derived from classical Greece—ironically, under the
circumstances, a Eurocentric move in itself (see Heinze-Greenberg, 2009: 185–189).
The tug-of-war between styles of European and Arab derivation, moreover, has
remained strong in contemporary Israeli architectural circles, and, supported in various
ways by allusions to archaeological discoveries, reflects a conflict between romantic
Orientalism on the one hand and the Eurocentric fear of cultural absorption into some-
thing “Middle Eastern” on the other. In that tension, appealing to a Mediterranean
identity—a focus also reinforced by a strong interest in Mediterranean Studies in aca-
demic circles^5 —offered a relatively cosmopolitan compromise in which Israelis, while
enjoying the benefits of an ethnically-motivated form of gentrification, could claim both
a national and a regional cultural identity without appearing to accept either of those
ostensibly more unattractive alternatives (see Lafi, 2013: 331).