The polyvalent politics of martyr commemorations in the Palestinian Intifada

History and Memory

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 107-138

  Allen, Lori A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 42349110659     PISSN: 0935560X     EISSN: 15271994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ham.2007.0001     Document Type: Review

References (94)

1. It should be noted here that "martyr" (al-shahid) is the term most Palestinians use to refer to anyone who is deemed to have died as a result of the occupation, both Christians and Muslims, and not just combatants. Martyrs are people who were killed, whether at the hands of soldiers or settlers, or as a result of checkpoints and curfews that have, for instance, prevented access to medical care. Many contemporary studies of martyrdom in Islam deal with Shi'ite practices specifically, due to the centrality of the martyr Hussein to that branch of Islam, the importance of rituals commemorating his death, and the intense cultural production around martyrdom in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). See Kamran Aghaie, The Martyrs of karbala: Shi'i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran (Seattle, 2004)
2. Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi 'i Lebanon (Princeton, 2006)
3. Earle Waugh, "Muharram Rites: Community Death and Rebirth," in Frank E. Reynolds and Earle H. Waugh, eds., Religious Encounters with Death: Insights from the History and Anthropology of Religions (University Park, PA, 1977)
4. But martyrdom is also significant to Sunni Islam, the branch of which most Palestinians in the territories are members. While "martyr" is a category of polyvalent social and political significance in Palestine as elsewhere, Islamic teaching does inform beliefs about martyrdom. The Qur'an, words of the prophet (hadith), and subsequent commentary and jurisprudence have dictated rules of dealing with the dead and created a number of basic shared conceptions about martyrs in particular. One of the most important elements of Islamic teaching is the unique place accorded martyrs in the eyes of God and the special treatment they receive in the hereafter. Because, as many believe, only God knows and determines the appointed hour and means of death, that God has given a martyr this special way to die, the chosenness of the martyr is all the more significant. Martyrs are spared the interrogations and possible tortures of the grave and go directly to heaven (Sura 3:169-70), which is similar to the view of martyrs in the early Christian church, who were also believed to be purified by their martyrdom, their sins erased and granted immediate entry into Heaven. And as in the Christian tradition, Islam holds that martyrs are witnesses to the truth and to their faith. See Mahmoud M. Ayoub, "Martyrdom in Christianity and Islam," in Richard T. Antoun and Mary Elaine Hegland, eds., Religious Resurgence: Contemporary Cases in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (Syracuse, NY, 1987), 69
5. The label "martyr" is, therefore, itself a form of respect; the term expresses all these sedimented meanings of honor, reverence and distinction accrued from Islamic and nationalist teaching. For discussion of how images of martyrdom mediate social relations of dispersed populations, also see Brian Keith Axel, The Nation's Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh "Diaspora" (Durham, NC, 2001).
6. For classic works on political funerals and the politics of funerals, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London and New York, 1991)
7. Susan Gal, "Bartok's Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric," American Ethnologist 18, no. 3 (1991): 440-58
8. Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge, 1979)
9. Maurice Bloch and Johnathan Parry, Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge, 1982)
10. Gillian Feeley-Harnik, "The Political Economy of Death: Communication and Change in Malagasy Colonial History," American Ethnologist 11, no. 1 (1984): 1-19
11. Also see C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago, 1991)
12. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York, 1999)
13. Alex Weingrod, "Dry Bones: Nationalism and Symbolism in Contemporary Israel," Anthropology Today 11, no. 6 (1995): 7-12.
14. Gal, "Bartok's Funeral," 442
15. Also see Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor (New York, 1991).
16. See William Mazzarella, "Affect and Dialectics: A Marriage Made in Hell?" Presentation at the American Anthropological Association Meetings, Washington DC, 1 Dec. 2005.
17. The second intifada against Israeli occupation began in September 2000. For analyses of this uprising and its sociopolitical, historical and economic context after the 1993 Oslo Accords, see Joel Beinin and Rebecca Stein, eds., The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005 (Stanford, 2006).
18. Here I am not referring to aesthetics as the study of art or beauty, but as that area of philosophy that emerged as a "discourse of the body," that which relates to perception by feeling, or the sensory experience of perception. For more on this, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990)
19. For a history of the concept of "aesthetic experience" as it emerged out of 17th- and 18th-century British empiricism, and only later became isolated from mainstream epistemology and ontology, see Dabney Townsend, "From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience," Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 2 (1987): 287
20. For a discussion of howthe philosophical meaning of "aesthetics" has shifted from one indicating a kind of sensibility to a class-based meaning and connotations of a moral style, see Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Art Work Essay Reconsidered," (1992), in Rosalind Krauss et al., eds., October: The Second Decade, 1986-1996 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1997).
21. See Mazzarella, "Affect and Dialectics."
22. Michele Barrett, "Ideology, Politics, Hegemony: From Gramsci to Laclau and Mouffe," in Slavoj Žižek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London, 1994), 243.
23. While many consider "boredom" to be a particular element of a bourgeois or specifically modern affective economy, my exploration in this essay of the culturally and historically specific valence of this language of emotion is guided by the local discourse about it. The goal of starting from this point, which is to analyze the social and political significance of boredom in Palestine, is quite different from those studies that view boredom as a transhistorical universal human condition, or those that take boredom and discourses about it as an analytic of modernity. An example of one such study is Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford, 2005).
24. Edward Keith-Roach, Pasha of Jerusalem: Memoirs of a District Commissioner under the British Mandate, ed. Paul Eedle (London and New York, 1994), 151.
25. Mamdouh Nofal was born in the West Bank city of Qalqilya in 1944 and was involved in political and military activities from 1961 until his death in 2006. See Mamdouh Nofal, "Reflections on al-Nakbah," Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 1 (1998): 8-9
26. Also, email communication with the author. For more on the Israeli attack on Qalqilya on 10-11 October 1956, see Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (New York, 1997), 413-18.
27. The first Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation began in December 1987. See Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin, eds. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation (Washington, DC, 1989).
28. Lance Laird, "Martyrs, Heroes, and Saints: Shared Symbols of Muslims and Christians in Contemporary Palestine" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1998), 263.
29. See Islah Jad, "A Palestinian View: A Road Littered with Disappointment," at www.bitterlemons.org, Edition 17, 13 May 2002.
30. One explicit expression of this was broadcast in a video tape released after a suicide operation by Abdullah Badran, a Palestinian man who blew himself up along with four Israelis in Tel Aviv on 25 February 2005. Badran said the aim of the bombing was "to attack the self-rule Authority, which acts according to American interests." Amos Harel and Arnon Regular, "Suicide Bomber: My Target Was the PA," Ha'aretz, 26 Feb. 2005 (English edition).
31. See Rex Brynen, "An Imperfect Authority." Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 4 (summer 2002): 129-30.
32. Salim Tamari and Reema Hammami, "The Second Uprising: End or New Beginning?" Journal of Palestine Studies 30, no. 2 (winter 2001): 5-25.
33. Joost R Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women's Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, 1991).
34. In the first month 107 Palestinians were killed, approximately one-third of them children under the age of 18. During the first few days of the intifada, the IDF fired approximately one million rounds in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. An IDF officer referred to the project as "a bullet for every child." Cited in Ben Caspit, "Israel Is Not a Country with an Army, but an Army with an Attached Country," Ma'ariv (Rosh Hashanah supplement) (Hebrew), 6 Sept. 2002, 8-11, 32 (FBIS translated excerpt)
35. For statistics on deaths and injuries of Israeli civilians and soldiers caused by Palestinian attacks, see http://www.btselem.org/english/Statistics/Casualties.asp.
36. Penny Johnson and Eileen Kuttab, "Where Have All the Women (and Men) Gone? Reflections on Gender and the Second Palestinian Intifada," Feminist Review 69, no. 1 (2001): 21-43.
37. Tamari and Hammami, "The Second Uprising," 17.
38. Early Muslim jurisprudents have deemed walking in funerary processions as a Muslim's duty to another Muslim; some associated fulfilling that duty with "earning of qirat, a currency of value in the afterlife." Leor Halavi, "Muhammad's Grave: Death, Rtual and Society in the Early Islamic World" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2002), 295-96. Some participants in martyr funerals in Palestine also considered what they were doing to be a good deed.
39. For reflections on the waning power of the PA and its strategic options, see Mahdi Abdulhadi, "In Search of a Palestinian Strategy," The Daily Star (Lebanon), 24 Jan. 2004
40. Yezid Sayigh, "Arafat and the Anatomy of a Revolt," Survival 43, no. 3 (2001): 47-60
41. Khalil Shikaki, "Palestinians Divided," Foreign Affairs 81, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 2002): 89-105.
42. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, 3,808 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and Gaza as a result of the occupation between 29 September 2000 and 14 February 2006, while 29,456 were injured (http://palestinercs.org/intifadasummaryhtm, last accessed 16 Feb. 2006). Most Palestinians, including Palestinian human rights groups, considered anyone who died as a result of occupation measures, including those who died because they were prevented by checkpoints from reaching medical care, to be a martyr. Most Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza considered suicide bombers to be martyrs as well, and many would consider them as having died as a result of the Israeli occupation, which is believed to have driven them to carry out their acts. Only some human rights groups counted suicide bombers in their martyr or death statistics.
43. Khalili discusses the same practices occurring in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. She describes such naming practices as creating "a mnemonic association" between a newborn "and a national narrative, thus literally embedding the new child into the national history." Laleh Khalili, "Citizens of an Unborn Kingdom: Stateless Palestinian Refugess and Contentious Commemoration" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005), 7.
44. For information on curfews and roadblocks, see reports by the Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem, such as "Civilians under Siege: Restrictions on Freedom of Movement as Collective Punishment," and "One Big Prison: Freedom of Movement to and from the Gaza Strip on the Eve of the Disengagement Plan." Available at www.btselem.org.
45. William Roseberry, "Hegemony and the Language of Contention," in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC, and London, 1994), 361.
46. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977).
47. Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (Oxford, 1999), 460.
48. For example, after the massive Israeli invasions of Palestinian areas in the spring of 2002, more people began to speak out openly against the intifada's militarization, and the popular reactions to those public debates became less acerbic. A petition published in a local newspaper in 2002 was signed first by 55 academics and civil society leaders calling for a reevaluation of the use of suicide bombs and then gained hundreds of more signatures. But it was met by a flurry of angry responses, condemning the signatories for their apparent disrespect of the resistance and its martyrs. See Lori Allen, "Palestinians Debate 'Polite' Resistance to Occupation," Middle East Report, no. 225 (winter 2002): 38-43. By the winter of 2005, however, after the death of Yasir Arafat, newly elected Palestinian president Mahmoud 'Abbas was able to work towards an end to "violence" as part of renewed negotiations efforts with Israelis, while those same calls had gained him scorn and derision just months earlier. Who is allowed to speak openly and critically also depends on the nationalist reputation of the speaker, whether or not they are deemed to have gained the right to speak out by having themselves worked and sacrificed for the nationalist cause. A street leader of the UNL from the first intifada could confront a resistance fighter during this intifada without as much fear of retribution, whereas a well-to-do academic from the political elite, such as Sari Nusseibeh, for example, has been publicly excoriated for his calls for nonviolence (and other unpopular political views such as giving up the refugees' right of return). Critical nationalist debate is always sensitive.
49. Ramzy Baroud, ed., Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion (Seattle, 2002).
50. See the description of Javier Zuniga, Amnesty International's Director of Regional Strategy who entered Jenin refugee camp on 17 April 2002, ibid. Several books were written about what happened during the siege, some by residents of the camp itself. Palestinians throughout the territories and others also produced music cassettes and poetry honoring this "battle." For more information on this set of events, see the report by Human Rights Watch, Jenin: IDF Military Operations, 2 May 2002, available at http://hrw.org/reports/2002/israel3/
51. For an account of the death of 'Imad Qaraka' in front of the Intercontinental Hotel on 28 April 2001, see the report by Israeli journalist Amira Hass "Mistake after Mistake," 17 May 2001, Ha'aretz (English translation at http://www.acj.org/may/may-17.htm#5).
52. Also see LAW's human rights report on the events of Saturday, 28 April 2001, at http://www.law-society.org/Press/Preleases/2001/May/May02w.html.
53. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12.
54. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, as of 30 April 2004, 355 (14%) Palestinians were killed in assassination operations, of whom at least 137 were bystanders, and 40 were children (http://www.pchrgaza.org/Intifada/Killings-stat.htm)
55. The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem records different numbers for a different time period, reporting that, as of September 2005, 288 Palestinians had been killed in the course of assassinations, while 181 Palestinians had been the targets of these attacks. For more on extrajudicial killings, see B'Tselem's publication, "Israel's Assassination Policy: Extra-judicial Executions Position Paper, January 2001," available at www.btselem.org
56. as well as the collection of articles posted on Electronic Intifada, http://electronicinti-fada.net/bytopic/146.shtml
57. and the May 2002 report by LAW and PCATI, at http://www.stoptorture.org.il/eng/images/uploaded/publications/50.doc.
58. The Health Development Information and Policy Institute (HDIP) reports that at least 82% of Palestinians killed were civilian, at http://www.hdip.org/new-web/index-news.htm.
59. Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography," in idem, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (1927; Cambridge, MA, 1955), 57.
60. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago, 2002), 44.
61. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 28
62. It should be noted that Eagleton's discussion of this paradox, in which he highlights the tension between the way in which the aesthetic can cement politically repressive forces, or a way in which alternative or even resistant forms of sociality become strengthened, is historically specific to the period in which bourgeois society was gaining strength against the absolutist state in Europe. I am drawing on this work, however, as a more general description of the social power of aesthetic forms. Also see Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology and Culture (New York, 1987), 134-37
63. William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, NC, 2003), 103-6.
64. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, 1993), 25.
65. Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 47.
66. Allen Feldman, "Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities," Radical History Review, no. 85 (winter 2003): 68.
67. W. J. T. Mitchell observes in his discussion of a photo essay on Palestinian society that "the representation of Palestinians as ordinary human beings, 'captur-able' by ordinary, domestic sorts of snapshots, should be in itself remarkable is a measure of how extraordinarily limited the normal image of the Palestinian is." W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, 1994), 315.
68. Khalili, Citizens of an Unborn kingdom, chap. 4.
69. Regarding symbolic theory, see Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY, 1967), 28
70. For discussion of a similar dynamic during World Wars I and II, during which memorialization transformed the dead into symbols, abstract concepts, making personal death "a symbol of martyred liberty," see George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990), 36.
71. This included articles in the Los Angeles Times and the New york Times. See http://www.sakakini.org/shaheed for more information on the exhibit.
72. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York, 1997), 28.
73. Penny Johnson, "The Eloquence of Objects: The Hundred Martyrs Exhibit." Jerusalem Quarterly File, no. 11-12 (2001): 90.
74. Many believed that el-Kadi was targeted because of his suspected involvement in the murder of an Israeli citizen. According to some accounts, he and the two children were killed when Israel blew up a two-story apartment building in which they were staying, while some human rights organizations listed the deaths as occurring in "mysterious circumstances." See http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/W-report/English/03-05-2001.htm
75. Erwan Jourand, "Palestinians Bury Five Blast Victims, Blame Israel and Call for Vengeance," Agence France-Presse (English), 1 May 2001.
76. Feldman, "Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory," 62.
77. It is precisely such disjunctures that Roseberry cites as ideal nodal points that reveal the relationship between popular culture and processes of state formation as they exist within a complex "field of force." See "Hegemony and the Language of Contention," 365.
78. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London and New York, 1991), 1.
79. See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
80. In Bourdieu's usage, "doxa" refers to a state of unreflexion, a realm of the taken for granted. For a discussion of Bourdieu's interpretation of Husserl's concept of "doxa," see John F. Myles, "From Doxa to Experience: Issues in Bourdieu's Adoption of Husserlian Phenomenology," Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 2 (April 2004): 91-107.
81. See Jean and John Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO, 1992), 25.
82. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990).
83. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York, 1915).
84. John Kelly and Martha Kaplan, "History, Structure, and Ritual," Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 135.
85. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge, 1987).
86. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996), 7.
87. For comparison, see Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, eds., Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience (Albany, NY, 1997).
88. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms.
89. For comparison, see James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985)
90. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT, 1990)
91. and for a critique, see Susan Gal, "Review Essay: Language and the 'Arts of Resistance,'" Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 3 (1995): 407-24.
92. Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago, 1985), 78.
93. Many anthropologists have viewed ritual as a powerful image crystallizing key symbols and values within a culture and reproducing hierarchical relations within a social structure. See, for example, Durkheim, The Elementary Forms; Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, 1986)
94. Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison, WI, 1989).