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To be a Palestinian
Searing images of suicide bombings and retaliatory strikes now define the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many Westerners, but television and print media are not the only visual realms in which the conflict is playing out. Even tourist postcards and greeting cards have been pressed into service as vehicles through which Israelis and Palestinians present competing visions of national selfhood and conflicting claims to their common homeland. In this book, Tim Jon Semmerling explores how Israelis and Palestinians have recently used postcards and greeting cards to present images of the national self, to build national awareness and reinforce nationalist ideologies, and to gain international acceptance. He discusses and displays the works of numerous postcard/greeting card manufacturers, artists, and photographers and identifies the symbolic choices in their postcards, how the choices are arranged into messages, what the messages convey and to whom, and who benefits and loses in these presentations of national self. Semmerling convincingly demonstrates that, far from being ephemeral, Israeli and Palestinian postcards constitute an important arena of struggle over visual signs and the power to produce reality.
From the refugee camps of the Lebanon to the relative prosperity of life in the USA, the Palestinian diaspora has been dispersed across the world. In this pioneering study, Helena Lindholm Schulz examines the ways in which Palestinian identity has been formed in the diaspora through constant longing for a homeland lost. In so doing, the author advances the debate on the relationship between diaspora and the creation of national identity as well as on nationalist politics tied to a particular territory. But The Palestinian Diaspora also sheds light on the possibilities opened up by a transnational existence, the possibility of new, less territorialized identities, even in a diaspora as bound to the idea of an idealized homeland as the Palestinian. Members of the diaspora form new lives in new settings and the idea of homeland becomes one important, but not the only, source of identity. Ultimately though, Schulz argues, the strong attachment to Palestine makes the diaspora crucial in any understandings of how to formulate a viable strategy for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
In the decade following the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, some 100,000 diasporic Palestinians returned to the West Bank and Gaza. Among them were children and young adults who were born in exile and whose sense of Palestinian identity was shaped not by lived experience but rather through the transmission and re-creation of memories, images, and history. As a result, "returning" to the homeland that had never actually been their home presented challenges and disappointments for these young Palestinians, who found their lifeways and values sometimes at odds with those of their new neighbors in the West Bank and Gaza. This original ethnography records the experiences of Palestinians born in exile who have emigrated to the Palestinian homeland. Juliane Hammer interviews young adults between the ages of 16 and 35 to learn how their Palestinian identity has been affected by living in various Arab countries or the United States and then moving to the West Bank and Gaza. Their responses underscore how much the experience of living outside of Palestine has become integral to the Palestinian national character, even as Palestinians maintain an overwhelming sense of belonging to one another as a people.
This article explores experiences and notions of exile and return as attempts at the reconstruction of identity and nation in Palestinian literature: Raja Shehadeh's Strangers in the House (2002), Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (1997), Fawaz Turki's Exile's Return (1994), and Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness (1986). The exilic experience represents an act of ejection and dispossession, feelings of displacement and poignancy and a capacity for survival and resistance. While return represents the recapture of being Palestinian, and of Palestine. The interweaving of history, politics and religion in the creation of Palestinian exile is met with the interweaving of things literary, political and spiritual, in the reconstruction and re-affirmation of identity and geography. This literature is an attempt at re-narration, re-constitution and continuity: the collective quilting together of experiences of exile and dispossession in an effort to re-possess not just an identity, but a nation, forming Palestinian return.
Some 5 million people live in the Palestinian diaspora today, with the possibility of their ‘return’ to their homeland ever bleaker due to the failure of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. As a result of the nature of their dispossession from their homeland and their politicised exile, understanding the complexities of their lived experiences requires us to go beyond conventional notions of “first” and “second” migrant generations. This paper argues that the experiences of diaspora Palestinians are in many ways framed not so much by what “generation” they belong to in terms of migration, but by how many generations they have been in exile. It examines shifts in negotiations of concepts of identity, belonging and home for successive generations of diaspora Palestinians. It then explores these ideas through the case study of the community of Palestinians from Kuwait who relocated to Australia as a result of the 1990–91 Gulf conflict.
In this article, I explore the intersection of humanitarian practice and refugee law in shaping categories of “refugee” and “citizen” in Gaza in the first years after 1948. I examine how humanitarian practice produced enduring distinctions within the Gazan population and provided a space in which ideas about Palestinian citizenship began to take shape. A key argument is that humanitarianism, despite commitments to political neutrality, often has profound and enduring political effects. In this case, humanitarian distinctions contributed to making the “refugee” a central figure in the Palestinian political landscape. I also consider how humanitarianism in Palestine was guided by the larger, emerging postwar refugee regime, even as Palestinians were formally excluded from some of its mechanisms.
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