Places of memory and mourning: Palestinian commemoration in the refugee camps of Lebanon

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 30-45

  Khalili, Laleh ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

INFORMAL SETTLEMENT; MEMORY; REFUGEE;

ASIA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; LEBANON; MIDDLE EAST; WORLD;

EID: 25444518917     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-25-1-30     Document Type: Review

References (104)

1. Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991);
2. Peteet, "Transforming Trust: Dispossession and Empowerment among Palestinian Refugees," in Mistrusting Refugees, ed. E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr. Knudsen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
3. Peteet, "Refugees, Resistance, and Identity," in Globalization and Social Movements: Culture, Power, and the Transnational Public Sphere, ed. John Guidry, Michael D. Kennedy, and Mayer N. Zald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000);
4. Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed, 1979);
5. Sayigh, Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (London: Zed, 1994);
6. Sayigh, "Palestinian Camp Women as Tellers of History," Journal of Palestine Studies 27 (1998): 42-58.
7. On the nation and commemoration, see especially Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991);
8. Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789-1996 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
9. John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
10. Don Handelman and Lea Shamgar-Handelman, "The Presence of Absence: The Memorialism of National Death in Israel," in Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience, ed. Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997);
11. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
12. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
13. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);
14. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993);
15. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
16. See Jonathan Boyarin, ed., Remapping Memory: The Politics of Time Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994);
17. Boyarin, Palestine and Jewish History: Criticism at the Borders of Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
18. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977);
19. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
20. Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, trans. Robert Lumley and Jude Bloomfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987):
21. Popular Memory Group, "Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method," in Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics, ed. Richard Johnson et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 205-52;
22. Susan Slyomovics, The Objects of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998);
23. Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995);
24. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);
25. Ruble S. Watson, Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series, 1994);
26. Richard Werbner, ed., Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London: Zed, 1998);
27. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
28. Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces. Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
29. Young, Texture of Memory;
30. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, introduction to "Memory and Counter-Memory," special issue, Representations 26 (1989), 1-6. and Counter-Memory," special issue, Representations
31. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 74.
32. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 297;
33. and Sayigh, Too Many Enemies, 17.
34. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 206.
35. Ghazi Khurshid, "Al Muqawama al-Filastiniyya wa al-'Amal al-ljtima'i" ("Palestinian Resistance and Social Services"), Shu'un al-Filastiniyya 6 (1972): 106.
36. The 'Id festivities mark the end of Hajj and the fasting month of Ramadan, respectively. Subhi Ghosheh, "Excerpts from Our Sun Will Never Set," in Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 654. In various memory books of destroyed or lost villages in Galilee, the refugee authors also mention the visitation of the graves on 'Id days.
37. See, for example, Al-Hajj 'Abd al-Majid Al-Ali, Kwaykat: Ahad Sharayin Filastin (Kwaykat: One of Palestine's Arteries) (Beirut: self-published, 2001), 198;
38. Ahmad and Hasan 'Atiya, 'Alma: Zaytuna Bilad Safad ('Alma: The Olive Tree of Safad Province) (Beirut: self-published, 1998), 121.
39. This also held true in the Occupied Territories, where, for example, during the first intifada, visits to the graves of martyrs were transformed into a form of protest against Israel's occupying forces. For example, Intifada Communiqué No. 22 (dated 21 July 1988) invites the Palestinians to celebrate "the 'Id days by organizing mass processions to visit the martyrs' tombs and place wreaths of flowers and Palestinian flags on them, staging mammoth demonstrations and visiting the families of martyrs, wounded, detainees and deportees" (Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation [Boston: South End, 1989], 371).
40. See also Shira Robinson, "Local Struggle, National Struggle: Palestinian Responses to the Kafr Qasim Massacre and Its Aftermath, 1956-1966," International Journal of Middle East Studies 35 (2003): 393-416.
41. Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), quoted in Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990), 47.
42. See especially Clifford Bob, "Merchants of Morality," Foreign Policy, March-April 2002, 35-45;
43. and Julia Elyachar, "Empowerment Money: The World Bank, Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Value of Culture in Egypt," Public Culture 14 (2002): 493-513.
44. Um Faruq, interview by author, Burj al Barajna, Lebanon, 6 February 2002.
45. On the emergence of these supra- and subnational collectivities, see Randa Farah, "Reconstruction of Palestinian identities in al-Baq'a Camp," in Palestine, Palestiniens: Territoire national, espaces communautaires, ed. Riccardo Bocco, Blandine Destremau, and Jean Hannoyer (Beirut: Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain, 1997).
46. In the local history of Palestinians in Lebanon, two different conflicts are labeled "War of the Camps": the first a bloody internecine conflict between warring Palestinian factions in 1983; and, more significant, Lebanese Shi'a Harkat Amal's siege and attempted destruction of the camps in Beirut and southern Lebanon between 1985 and 1988. For the best account of the latter, see Sayigh, Too Many Enemies.
47. Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Vintage, 1986), 172.
48. Nasri Hajjaj, "Qubur al-Filastiniyyin fi Lubnan: Laji'un Ahia'an ... Laji'un Amwatan-1" ("Palestinian Gravesites in Lebanon: Living and Deceased Refugees, Part 1"), Al Quds al-Arabi, 2 November 2000, 13. See also part 2 of the same article published on 3 November 2000.
49. Nicolas Pelham, "Sabra and Shatilla Encore," Cairo Times, 17 September 1998.
50. Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscapes: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 296-99.
51. Benvenisti considers graves of ancestors as the strongest "proof of roots" put down in a place. For a critique of the language of roots and "arborescent culture," see Liisa Malkki, "National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees," Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 24-44.
52. Boyarin, Palestine and Jewish History, 86n55. Interestingly, one of the earliest publications of the Institute for Palestine Studies is a slender book titled The Desecration of Christian Cemeteries and Church Property in Israel (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968), which pictorially captures the deliberate devastation such places suffered after the 1948 and 1967 wars. Additionally, the cemeteries of depopulated and destroyed Palestinian villages in Israel are often transformed into "parks" and "natural sites" effacing Palestinian claim to the land.
53. See Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).
54. Hajjaj, "Qubur al-Filastiniyyin fi Lubnan," pt. 1, 13.
55. For a more inclusive list of the luminaries buried in the martyrs' cemetery, see Hajjaj, "Qubur al-Filastiniyyin fi Lubnan," pt. 2, 13.
56. Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 401. The best extended account of the Tal al-Za'tar siege and massacre in English is still the semifictional novel by Liana Badr based on survivor testimonies.
57. See Liana Badr, The Eye of the Mirror, trans. Samira Kawar (Reading, UK: Garnet, 1991). For other accounts,
58. see Ali Husayn Khalaf, Al-Nuhud Marra Ukhra: Shihadat Waqi'iyya min Tal al-Za'tar (Another Restoration: Eyewitness Testimonies from Tal al-Za'tar) (Beirut: PLO Research Centre, 1977);
59. Hani Mindis, "Al-Tariq ila Tsssssssssssssssssal al-Za'tar" ("The Way to Tal al-Za'tar") Shu'un al-Filastiniyya 59 (1976): 6-30.
60. Nasri Hajjaj, interview by author, Beirut, Lebanon, 5 May 2002.
61. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 206.
62. On Ali's art before Ali took up cartoons, see Kamal Boullata, "Artists Re-member Palestine in Beirut," Journal of Palestine Studies 32 (2003): 22-38.
63. Britain tried and convicted a Palestinian Mossad agent, Ismail Sawwan, expelled two Israeli diplomats: - "the first Israeli diplomats ever to be expelled from Britain" - and suspended all Mossad-British intelligence cooperation for a year, all in relation to Ali's assassination. However, Abd al-Rahman Mustafa, an officer in Arafat's security detail, Force 17, has also been implicated in the killing (Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire [New York: Random House, 1992], 5;
64. and Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 603).
65. Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 603.
66. Hanzala is depicted as a small barefoot child in tattered clothing with his hair standing on end and his back to the observer, situated in the corner of every cartoon drawn by Ali. Hanzala is intended as the symbolic and eternal witness to the suffering, violence, and struggle depicted within the frame of Ali's drawings. Ali has said that Hanzala represented "himself, a child who had never been able to grow up because of the terrifying things that he had been obliged to watch" (Staughton Lynd, Sam Bahour, and Alice Lynd, eds., Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians [New York: Olive Branch, 1994], 11).
67. After 1987, this faction, Abu Nidal's Fatah-Revolutionary Council, used the likeness of Hanzala on the masthead of their factional organ, Filastin al-Thawra, and named a training camp in Libya after Ali (Seale, Abu Nidal, 4). After 1987, this faction, Abu Nidal's Fatah-Revolutionary Council, used the likeness of Hanzala on the masthead of their factional organ, Filastin al-Thawra, and named a training camp in Libya after Ali
68. On this story and related images, see Mahmud Abdallah Kallam, Naji al-Ali: Kamil Turab al-Filastini (Naji al-Ali: The Entirety of the Palestinian Soil) (Beirut: Bisan, 2001), 149-58.
69. On "forgetting" fratricide in the cause of a national narrative, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 187-206;
70. and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of Histoty (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 31-69.
71. For a comprehensive list and history of these places, see Hajjaj, "Qubur al-Filastiniyyin fi Lubnan," pts. 1, 2.
72. See "Qissata Masjid" ("The Story of the Mosque"), Filastin al-Thawra, 25 January 1986, 30-31.
73. Chris Giannou, Besieged: A Doctor's Story of Life and Death in Beirut (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 115-16.
74. Françoise Zonabend, The Enduring Memory: Time and History in a French Village, trans, Anthony Forster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 136.
75. Abd al-Salam Aql, "Palestinian Refugees of Lebanon Speak," Journal of Palestine Studies 25 1995): 59.
76. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 53.
77. Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 376.
78. Bernard Khoury, "Urban or Artefact" (panel discussion at the American University of Beirut, 8 May 2002).
79. The name of the nightclub derives from the address of a small studio in East Beirut, where the club's owner, Naji Jibran, resided during the civil war.
80. Khoury, "Urban or Artefact."
81. These photographs "echo [the photographs of the dead] found at monuments like Qana" where over one hundred civilians were slaughtered in a clearly marked U.N. shelter during Israel's Grapes of Wrath operation in 1996 (Jim Quilty and Tiare Rath, "Dueling Architects Debate Reconstruction," Daily Star, 10 May 2002, 10).
82. Bernard Khoury, interview by author, Beirut, Lebanon, 13 May 2002.
83. Oral testimony and committee research about the Sabra and Shatila massacres are more numerous than similar documents about other massacres perpetrated against Palestinians in Lebanon. See Ang Swee Chai, From Beirut to Jerusalem (London: Grafton, 1989);
84. The Beirut Massacre: Press Profile, 2nd ed. (New York: Claremont Research and Publications, 1983);
85. Jean Genet, "Four Hours in Shatila," Journal of Palestine Studies 12 (1983): 3-22;
86. Bayan Nuayhad al-Hut, "Sabra wa Shatila 1982: Iqtiham Mustashfa 'Akka" ("Sabra and Shatila 1982: Storming Akka Hospital"), Majalla Dirasat al-Filastiniyya 52 (2002): 109-28, and her monumental collection of oral histories in Sabra wa Shatila: Aylul 1982 (Sabra and Shatila: September 1982) (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2003);
87. Amnon Kapeliouk, Sabra and Shatila: Inquiry into a Massacre (Belmont, MA: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1983);
88. Seán MacBride, ed., Israel in Lebanon: Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during Its Invasion of the Lebanon (London: Ithaca Press, 1983);
89. Leila Shahid, "The Sabra and Shatila Massacres: Eye-Witness Reports," with an introduction by Linda Butler, Journal of Palestine Studies 32 (2002): 36-58;
90. Zakaria al-Shaikh, "Sabra and Shatila 1982: Resisting the Massacre," Journal of Palestine Studies 14 (1984): 57-90;
91. Ellen Siegel, "Inside and Outside the Hospital, People Were Screaming: 'Haddad, Kataeb, Israel - Massacre,'" Journal of Palestine Studies 12 (1983): 61-71.
92. Kapeliouk, Sabra and Shatila, 14.
93. Though the majority of those murdered were Palestinian, numerous Lebanese families and even nine elderly Jewish women married to Palestinians were among those slaughtered (Kapeliouk, Sabra and Shatila, 31-32). Though the majority of those murdered were Palestinian, numerous Lebanese families and even nine elderly Jewish women married to Palestinians were among those slaughtered
94. MacBride, Israel in Lebanon, 176.
95. Shahid, "Sabra and Shatila Massacres," 44.
96. "Twenty Lebanese and Palestinian women volunteers worked tirelessly for three months under clandestine conditions recording some 300 eyewitness accounts of the massacre. On February 5, 1983 a car bomb gutted six stories of the [PLO] Research Center building [in Beirut] killing 18 people and wounding 95.... most of the interviews were lost or destroyed" (Mark Garfield, "Recent Books," Journal of Palestine Studies 13 (1984]: 102).
97. Interview with Elias Khoury in Sonja Mejcher, Geschichten über Geschichten: Erinnerung im Romanwerk von Ilyas Huri (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2001), 47.
98. See "Al-Tarikh fi 'Mazbala' Sabra wa Shatila" ("History in the Garbage Dump of Sabra and Shatila"), Al-Safir, 6 April 1998, 1.
99. Hizbullah's backing for the Palestinian refugees and the camps results from a complex set of motives. Among these are genuine solidarity with the Palestinian cause, shared animosity toward Israeli militarism, a history of military training with the Palestinians, as well as the internal politics of Lebanon that often pits Hizbullah against Amal for Shi'a (and the poor in general) support and against the already established leaders of other sectarian groups. Hizbullah support for the camps when they were besieged by Amal in the mid-1980s and in the contemporary sectarian political skirmishes of Lebanon, as well as Hizbullah's successful resistance against Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, garners reciprocal respect and support from the Palestinians in the camps.
100. The groundskeeper is a southern Lebanese Shi'a displaced by the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. He belongs to the Miqdadi family, who lost thirty-eight members in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. See Rabab Abdulhadi, "Where Is Home? Fragmented Lives, Border Crossings, and the Politics of Exile," Radical History 86 (2003): 98.
101. See also Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman, "Presence of Absence."
102. Elizabeth Kendall has pointed out to me that Lebanese avant-garde director Roger Assaf commemorated the civil war by using wandering street theater in the sites of atrocities and using real witnesses as actors in the presentations. These performances, though also commemorating Palestinian deaths, were intended to interrogate the culpability of all parties to the war. As such, I have not included them as part of the commemorative practices specific to Palestinians.
103. See also Ilan Pappé, "Fear, Victimhood, Self, and Other," MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies (2001): 4-14, web.mit.edu/ cis/www/mitejmes/issues/200105/pappe.htm.
104. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 78.