The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions

Front matter

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The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword from the Series Editor Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Foreword

From the Series Editor

There was a time when the political imagination of Palestinians revolved tightly around “factions” such as Fateh, PFLP, and DFLP. So much so, that it was impossible to disentangle the personal from the political. Relationships—familial, local, economic, romantic, and so on—always mediated politics and the politics of factions coursed through these relationships like an electrical current. I recall as a faculty member at Birzeit University in the early 1980s that almost every student, staff, teacher, or administrator—whether they wanted to or not, or whether it was true or not—was identified as affiliated (mahsub), formally or informally, to one faction or another. Far more often than not, these markers were based not on activism or ideological position, but on that persons interactions with family, friends, colleagues, lovers, and enemies. Inversely, factions were incubators for the production and reproduction of social relations that formed them in the first place; or so it seemed at that time.

Among the population of the Palestinian territories conquered by Israel in 1967 (West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza), this hyper-political condition deepened and culminated in the first Intifada (1987-1993), then was almost immediately eviscerated by the imposition of a new political order based on the Oslo Accords. In Lebanon, the fall of the factions came a decade earlier with the 1982 Israeli invasion, which expelled the PLO and destroyed most of its political, social, economic, and cultural institutions. Young men with Kalashnikovs who had long dominated public spaces in the refugee camps faded away and the organizations they belonged to turned into pitiful shadows of their former selves. The end of the armed struggle (thawra) phase of the Palestinian national movement also meant, or so it seemed at that time, the end of the PLO factions that embodied it. Henceforth, nary a kind word could be heard about the factions in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon.

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Yet, almost four decades later, the monopoly of factions over political representation in the camps continues to endure even though they have little or no political legitimacy. How is this possible? Explaining continuity is a much harder analytical nut to crack than accounting for change. Through microstudies of family home life in Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, Perla Issa argues that this continuity is due to the double nature of factions. They are embedded social networks, but their daily practices create the effect of a separate bounded entity. In this intimate and long-term ethnographic study of quotidian acts, such as how people join factions and how aid is distributed, Issa maps out the ways power relations are produced in the process of demarcating a line between inside an organization and outside of it. Like a chameleon, the social relations are camouflaged and give the appearance of power, thus allowing discredited factions to remain central to political and social life.

The implications of Issa’s theoretical frame, methodological approach, and empirical findings are significant for Palestinian studies. The past generation has witnessed a major expansion of what qualifies as “political” in narrating the history of Palestine and the Palestinians so as to include subaltern actors and the minutia of everyday life. Rosemary Sayigh—and the many excellent anthropologists of camp life in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, West Bank, and Gaza that built on her work—have cleared a wide path for this expansion. Issa’s is the first granular study of how political factions are produced and one of the rare few on Nahr al-Bared camp, which was viciously destroyed in 2007 then partially rebuilt.

The intellectual and political implications of Issa’s study are also relevant to those seeking to understand the internal impasse of Palestinian politics in certain periods, such as the centrality of discredited political formations during the Mandate period and, once again, in the post-Oslo era. How is it, for example, that the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority has still been able to dominate political life in the West Bank over the past generation even though it enjoys little popular support? The endurance of what appears to be discrete political structures located outside society long after their shelf life has expired is, moreover, a global phenomenon. As Issa poignantly relates, a particularly relevant example is the factional sectarian system in Lebanon, which has survived one of the most massive uprisings in the country’s history in 2019, even though it has been publicly discredited and hated since the outbreak of the civil war in 1975.

The New Directions in Palestinian Studies (NDPS) book series centers “ordinary” Palestinians in knowledge production projects that engage the Palestinian condition as a site for the production of theory. Issa’s book joins the two previous books in the NDPS series—Palestinian Chicago, a study of diaspora activism by Loren Lybarger, and Al-Haq, a global history by Lynn Welchman about Palestine’s pioneering and internationally influential human rights organization—in exploring how the Palestinian experience can help us understand, mobilize, and effect change in a world still struggling to find a decolonial political compass long after the demise of the third world project of the Bandung era.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My biggest fortune in life has always been the people I have met. The writing of this book is no exception. I would like to thank first and foremost the people of Nahr el-Bared camp, and my host family in particular. While they remain anonymous, they have been my best and most patient teachers. I was humbled by their strength, inspired by their laughter, and made a better person by their example. I hope one day I can be a positive force in their lives the way they have strengthened mine. This book is dedicated to them.

Furthermore, I feel a profound sense of gratitude towards my mentors, whose encouragement and faith in my abilities were instrumental throughout this project. Michael Dumper helped me through the early stages of my research. He patiently provided the freedom to probe many avenues of inquiry. Daniel Neep taught me what it means to stay with a problem, to push against my own limitations, and to savor the slow, and at times unexpected, rewards. He extended to me his intellect, labour, and time; I can never hope to repay the debt.

Friends and colleagues were instrumental in keeping me sane and providing me with much needed support to keep going forward when everything seemed to be going backwards. I would like to especially thank Ismael Sheikh Hassan, Hala Abou-Zaki, Rosemary Sayigh, Rochelle Davis, Nadya Hajj, Mariam Balhas, Hana Sleiman, Farah Salka, Polly Withers, Leen al-Habash, and Brown Carson. I would also like to acknowledge Ali Alloush, who graciously allowed me to use his photographs.

This project started as a PhD thesis and was funded by a Studentship from the Politics Department at Exeter University. I am grateful for this financial support. I am also thankful for the support that the Institute for Palestine Studies offered me as a Resident Researcher, which allowed me to dedicate time to turn my thesis into ix

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS a book. Thanks go to Maher Charif, Muhammad Ali-Khalidi, Camille Mansour, and Khaled Farraj for their support. Furthermore this manuscript benefited from the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) book development workshop, which provided me with critical and helpful feedback that made a real difference in how I thought and wrote about my research. Parts of chapters 1, 3, and 4 previously appeared in “Rethinking Palestinian Political Factions,’ Middle East Critique 27, no. 3 (2018): 261-274, and are republished with permission of the journal. Parts of chapter 5 previously appeared in “Fracturing Communities: Aid Distribution in a Palestinian Refugee Camp; Journal for Palestine Studies 48, no. 3 (2019): 7-20, and are republished with the permission of the Institute for Palestine Studies. I would also like to thank the editors of the University of California Press's New Directions in Palestinian Studies series—Beshara Doumani, Samera Esmier, Rema Hammami, Rashid Khalidi, and Sherene Seikaly—for embracing the project. Thank you as well as to Executive Editor Niels Hooper, Project Editor Francisco Reinking, and Editorial Assistants Robin Manley and Madison Wetzell, and a special thanks to copyeditor Catherine Osborne, who helped in more than one way.

I would also like to acknowledge my family: my parents and sister. It is hard to truly assess the extent of their influence, as their contribution to my life goes well beyond what is possible for me to comprehend. Finally, I would like to thank my daughters Yasmina and Nai, who graciously endured while the making of this book took me away from them time and again.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

I adopt the system of Arabic transliteration from the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

FIGURE 1. Boy in wheelbarrow, Nahr el-Bared camp. Photograph: Ali Alloush.