Refugees of the Revolution

EXPERIENCES OF PALESTINIAN EXILE

Stanford University Press

Contents

CHAPTER 1

COMMEMORATIVE ECONOMIES

ONE MORNING IN EARLY MAY 2004, at the start of what some residents of Shatilajokingly refer to as "the tourist season," I stopped by Najdeh, a women's NGO,to see Samar, a friend who worked there. During the summer months Najdehbecomes home to a steady flow of foreigners, principally activist delegationsand volunteers working with children. On this particular day, a battered minibuswas parked outside the entrance, and I could hear foreign voices over theearly-morning din of the camp. Inside, a group of middle-aged Americans,mainly women, were seated around a small table littered with pamphlets aboutNajdeh's work. Mazen, a young Palestinian American man working with a US-basedright-of-return organization, was midway through a presentation onthe history of the 1948 expulsion. I found a chair at the back of the room andsat with Umm Qasim, one of the center's coordinators. She explained that thegroup was part of a New York coalition that had come to Shatila to learn aboutthe problems Palestinians faced in the Lebanese camps.

After coffee was served, Mazen recounted to the group a story my friendSamar had just told him about her father. "I want to share with you Samar'sstory," Mazen began:

When her family first came to the camp in the early 1950s from Tripoli, wherethey had been living since they were forced out of Palestine in 1948, her fatherplanted the same trees and plants they had in Palestine.... He also planted agrape vine that he tended every day. During the 1982 Israeli invasion his house wasdestroyed and so were the plants and the vine.... Afterwards he rebuilt his houseand planted another vine that he calls the symbol of his future and of his hope.

This narrative, as related by Mazen, sought to highlight the continuity of Palestinianculture, the tenacity of peasant traditions, and localized structures ofbelonging in exile. The hope alluded to is, implicitly, that of return. Mazen'speroration made this explicit: "The right of return and the desire to go backto Palestine, to our villages, is at the center of every refugee's identity. The realNakba was not just the loss of our land but the total destruction of the socialfabric" The director of Najdeh, who had chaperoned the group, then added, "Itis very important that you tell your communities in America how refugees inShatila are suffering and how we still remember our villages in Palestine andwant to return to them." Deeply moved, a member of the group responded:"Please tell Samar and your colleagues here that we haven't given up on them."

For the next few hours I accompanied the delegation as they were escortedby Samar through the camp, first to the mosque to see the tombs of refugeesburied during the sieges of the War of the Camps, and then to the burial groundfor the victims of the 1982 massacre, just south of the camp. The group wanderedaround the memorial site, taking photos and looking at the graphic imageserected on large billboards around the periphery: montages of black andbloated bodies piled in the streets and in the foreground a woman screaming.The display was framed by a quote: "What is ... the Guilt She Committed tobe Murdered?" As we stood in the shade of one of the trees near the entrance,Samar recalled her own memories of the massacre for the visitors. About halfan hour later the same dusty minibus pulled up outside the gate of the groundsto take the group back to their hotel.

As I reflected on the day's events, I was struck by the almost total absenceof any discussion of the quotidian concerns of camp residents. Shatila, whenit was discussed at all, was presented as the negation of everything believedto constitute an authentic Palestinian community. The discussion had beenthematically dominated by an idealized pre–1948 Palestine, a backdrop ofcultural and political wholeness against which the camp—temporary, fragmentary,defined by abnormality and lack, without cultural integrity or intrinsicworth—figured as a pathological foil. Mazen's talk, structured as it wasaround nostalgic descriptions of life in Palestine, interwoven with accounts ofrefugee steadfastness in Lebanon, presented identity as a function of memoryand a relation to the past, animated by what had been lost rather than whathas been created. Mazen had effectively glossed over the history of the campitself, the material conditions shaping the lives of Palestinians in Shatila today,and the fraught relations that refugees have with their host society. It was asif attending to the complex support structures that have kept the communitygoing, or local forms of affiliation that have taken root after generations inexile, would somehow compromise or contaminate a continuity of attachmentto a Palestinian homeland.

Commemorative activities such as these are increasingly important forNGOs and other local institutions, and I attended a great many of them in thecourse of living and working in Shatila. After the 1993 Oslo Accords revealedthe Palestinian Authority's willingness to sign away the right of return, commemorating1948 became a way for refugees to counter their political marginalization,resist normalization of the expulsion, and underscore that they werenot willing to concede the right of return. The Palestinian scholar Lena Jayyusinoted that foregrounding the Nakba was understood to be central to the preservationof Palestinian identity: "Our narrative of dispossession, so fundamentalto our moral condition, and to our national and collective claims, and to thepossibility of genuine restitution, still needs to be spoken and insisted upon"(quoted in Sayigh 2006, 134). As Palestinians in Lebanon found themselvesmarginalized and excluded from negotiations, the political and institutionalvalue placed on Nakba commemoration increased. Nakba-themed plays, films,art exhibits, oral history projects, and memorial books documenting personalhistories of villages and cities in Palestine proliferated.

The 1998 celebrations of Israeli independence further raised the historicalstakes. In stark contrast to previous years, the fiftieth-anniversary commemorationsof the Nakba were accompanied by demonstrations in downtown Beirut,widely circulated right-of-return petitions, and public debates. Such events,supported by local and international right-of-return groups, NGOs, and politicalfactions in the camps, focused discussion of the "refugee problem" andthe suffering of Palestinians in Lebanon around the issue of historical responsibility,foregrounding that of Israel and deflecting that of the Lebanese governmentand its discriminatory policies (al-Hout 1998; Khalili 2007; Sayigh 1998b).Both explicitly and implicitly, these commemorative events also reinforced thenationalist argument that when refugees reject naturalization in Lebanon, theyare not acquiescing to a Lebanese caste system tantamount to a second, contemporaryphase of their dispossession but rather are adopting a position ofprincipled agency regarding their historical dispossession by Israel.

That this campaign of commemoration was at its height when I beganworking in Shatila in 2002 has had profound implications for the original conceptionand final argument of this book. Just as the moral imperative to bearwitness to 1948 felt by camp institutions representing refugee interests—as wellas by academic and international activist networks—was decisively shaped bya particular political moment, so, too, is my analysis of the politics of commemoration.And, if anything, this interest of NGOs, activists, and scholars indocumenting and publicly commemorating the 1948 expulsion has gained momentumover the past decade.

The growing prominence of camp NGOs and solidarity networks as mediatorsof national claims and cultivators of nationalist sensibility, moreover, isrepresentative of a broader shift in the nature of Palestinian resistance in Lebanon.After the PLO departed in 1982, marking the end of the military strugglefor national liberation among Palestinians in Lebanon, refugees increasinglyaddressed their claims to the international community, framing their strugglein terms of human rights and international law (Allen 2009; Khalili 2007).A consequence of this shift has been the evolution of a rights-based approachto activism, promoted in large part by civil institutions in the camps. LikeNajdeh, many Palestinian NGOs have turned to commemoration and testimonialas a way of attracting attention and support from the international humanrights community. While institutional investment in commemoration remainsstrong, the last few years have witnessed a sharp fall in communal participation;refugees increasingly see these events and practices as directed at an internationalaudience and motivated by the funding considerations of NGOs.

In Shatila, this cottage industry of commemoration has cropped up aroundnot only the Nakba but also the other instantly recognizable symbol of collectivePalestinian victimization, the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre. Demonstrationsand rallies are organized on May 15 to mark the anniversary of the Nakba,to which foreign donor organizations are invited, and a committee of local andforeign activists now organizes an annual march to the Sabra and Shatila memorialsite. In the course of these events, foreign visitors are often taken to thehomes of camp elders to hear personal accounts of the 1948 expulsion or to visitsurvivors of the 1982 massacre. Those with firsthand knowledge of these eventsare increasingly called upon to inhabit the valued roles of victim or survivorbecause their narratives merge individual recollection with a collective memoryof persecution in a way that resonates with the moral and political goals ofPalestinian nationalism.

Though elegiac in tone, elders' narratives invoke a form of reminiscence inwhich evidentiary claims and causal explanations take precedence over moreephemeral, idiosyncratic, or trace elements of memory and experience. It oftenseems as if the rhetorical power of these types of narrative, which have becomesynecdochic of the Palestinian struggle, has subsumed a plurality of memoriesand stories into a singular narrative of loss, erasing less starkly political strataof experience. This politics of commemoration has also created a hierarchy ofexperiences deemed worthy of retention and fostered the belief that daily lifein Palestinian communities—in all its minutiae—is always a direct reflectionof larger political forces. The net result is that macrohistories masquerade asmicrohistories.

COLLECTIVIZING MEMORY

During the early years of exile, the term Nakba had not yet acquired symboliccurrency, and the expulsion more often represented a moment of weakness andhumiliation to be exorcized than an event to be actively commemorated. Refugeesexpected that their exile would be temporary; they referred to themselvesas "returnees" and actively resisted using the term Nakba, fearing that it lentpermanency to their situation. In the 1950s and early 1960s other, more euphemisticterms were employed to describe the events of 1948, including "the rape"(al-ightisab), "the events" (al-ahdath), "the exodus" (al-hijra), and "when weblackened our faces and left" (lamma tsakhamna wa tla'na). While Palestiniannationalism thrived in Lebanon in the 1970s under the leadership of the PLO,the focus was on revolution and renewal, making the invocation of 1948 memoryneither desirable nor appropriate. It was not until the 1990s, largely inresponse to the perception that Yasser Arafat was on the point of signing awaythe right of return in exchange for Palestinian statehood, that a renewed interestin commemorating the Nakba developed among institutions representingPalestinian refugees in Lebanon, in large part as a signal to the internationalcommunity that this right was not negotiable.

Narratives about the Nakba have since emerged as the symbolic linchpinof collective identity and the bedrock of nationalism. Personal histories thatmemorialize villages and cities and lay claim to the land are both an assertionof ownership in the face of dispossession and a challenge to the erasures of ahegemonic Israeli narrative. Rashid Khalidi notes that "an attachment to place,a love of country and a local patriotism"—in short, parochial loyalties—constituted"the crucial elements in the construction of nation-state nationalism"among Palestinians (1997, 21). Mass displacement and the creation of a diasporawere key to Palestinian nation formation, and Palestinian nationalism continuesto draw on idioms of home and homelessness. Alienation and exile deepenthe need to reconstruct a homeland; they generate acts of imagination believedto be essential to the forging of national identity. Edward Said described thePalestinian diaspora's impulse to cultural creativity as deriving from this "perilousterritory of not-belonging" (1984a, 50). Indeed, the very absence of a stateand national institutions has increased the prestige of Palestinian intellectuals,activists, and scholars in the field of Palestine studies, whose work has collectivelyconsolidated this nationalist discourse and helped to fashion a vocabularyof cultural authenticity and belonging.

The writings of Mahmoud Darwish—Palestine's most beloved poet—arethe best example of this phenomenon, transforming Palestine and the collectivesuffering of its people into lyrical archetypes of sumud. In his classicprose poem Memory for Forgetfulness (Dhakira li-l-nisyan) Darwish addressesan imagined Israeli reader: "The true homeland is not that which is known orproved.... Your insistent need to demonstrate the history of stones and yourability to invent proofs does not give you prior membership over him whoknows the time of the rain from the smell of the stone. The stone for you is anintellectual effort. For its owner it is a roof and walls" (1995, 72). The image ofthe Palestinian as viscerally attached to—even synonymous with—the land isset against the abstract, intellectual, or archeological claims of Zionism. Thestruggle is framed in terms of two kinds of knowledge, one ontic and the otherepistemic, with the former lived and the latter learned. While the poem's narratorclaims to remember in order to forget and to reconcile, the work is clearlyabout the need not to forget. Underwriting this need is a perception that forPalestinians, individual forgetting is tantamount to an erasure of self; collectiveforgetting, in the words of the Palestinian psychologist George Awad, to "psychicgenocide."

The power of collective memory and the existential threat posed by forgettingare indeed pervasive themes in much Palestinian scholarship and literature.The continued existence of Palestine and its people, it is assumed, nowdepends on a consciously remembered history and cultural tradition. By extensionof this logic, it is thanks to their mnemonic tenacity that Palestinian refugeesin the diaspora, despite the long years of exile, have defied all predictionsthat they would eventually become Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, or other nationalities.This refusal to forget or disappear symbolically imparts to their sufferingand marginality a "latent form of power" (Sayigh 2006, 134).

By a further extension of this logic, nowhere is memory claimed to be—orrhetorically constructed to be—more authentic or vital than in the camps. Thecamps are where, in spite of the poverty and powerlessness of refugees—or perhapsbecause of it—"the Palestinian national spirit was, and still is, burning.They are the real Palestinians" (Klaus 2003, 129, emphasis added). The memorializingconsciousness believed to structure refugee experience in exile is oftencharacterized as a compulsive desire to map, through narrative, "every tree,every stone fence, every grave, house, mosque, every street and village square[the refugees] had left behind." Cartographic naming practices and the creationof intimate records of a lost past "make the absent present."

Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar goes one step further, describing this experiencein terms of radical substitution and synecdoche: "To rescue their land,"he writes, "the refugees would gamble everything on taking it with them, graduallybecoming the temporary replacement of their homeland.... They wouldlive as if they were everything—Palestine and Palestinians, a people and itsland" (2001, 90). Tellingly, Sanbar collapses the distinctions between memoryas recollection and memory as cultural reproduction, making it almost indistinguishablefrom culture or identity. In other words, for refugees, the memoryof 1948 is presented as the essence of their identity and humanity.

The rhetorical power of memory and cultural transmission in the contextof the camps also draws upon the belief that disempowered communities arepreternaturally oriented toward remembering and have a rich, spontaneousoral tradition—the "social glue" of identity politics—through which they recordthe injustices and suffering of the past. The claim that Sanbar and othersappear to be making—that the identity of refugees from different generations,with different experiences, remains an enduring constant—does not accountfor the passage of time, for the disparateness of individual memory, or, mostcontroversially, for the fact that new avenues of aspiration and belonging maybe decoupling the nationalist dyad of territory and home.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Refugees of the Revolution by Diana Allan. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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