It is our duty then to write down the events that took place, as they took place, and to note them as they are before time weaves its strings of forgetfulness around them.
‘ARIF AL-‘ARIF, AL-NAKBA: NAKBAT BAYT AL-MAQDIS WA AL-FIRDAWS AL-MAFQUD, 1947–52, VOL. 1
On May 15 of every year, a speaker on the podium bores us to death with quotations from Israeli founding leaders who once said that our “old will die and the young will forget.” We are pleased with ourselves and we clap as we remember our Nakba and as we disprove this meaningless Zionist saying in one depopulated village or another. This is our great achievement after sixty-five years of the defeat: we remember.
MAJD KAYYAL, “FALASTIN: AL-NAKBA AL-MUSTAMIRRA”
Before the transformation of the Syrian uprising into an all-out war, the Right of Return Movement (RoRM) was politically organizing and mobilizing in the Palestinian refugee community. Through its activities, it was giving form, content, and meaning to the Nakba within a Palestinian universe of discourse. This universe of discourse may have had its roots in its Arab nationalist predecessor, but it is nevertheless also clearly distinct from it.
The RoRM has been defined as a protest movement composed of different community-based initiatives that aim to politically mobilize and organize around the defense of the refugees’ rights (Suleiman 2004, 265–266). It emerged in Syria, as has been the case in other places with Palestinian refugee communities (Aruri 2001a, 2001b; Jaradat 2001; Masalha 2008). Its emergence was primarily a response to the unprecedented threat, following the 1993 Oslo Accords, to the refugees’ right of return as legally enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (UNGA 1948). Many activists, however, described the US-Israeli attempts to impose a final-status settlement on the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) negotiations with Israel at the Camp David summit in 2000 as the turning point that led to the mushrooming of RoRM groups (Swisher 2004). This is because it was at that stage that the threat was perceived to be on the verge of becoming a reality. The RoRM therefore needs to be understood within the context of its emergence as a result and in direct contestation of the transformation of the Palestinian national liberation movement. For activists, this transformation is most clearly manifested in the Oslo Accords’ institutionalization of the separation of Palestinian liberation from return, and the inauguration of the now-failed Palestinian statist project in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
Given its operation within this Palestinian national arena of contention as well as in Syria, the RoRM also aimed to fill a local leadership and institutional void left behind by the crackdown on the PLO and Fatah in the 1980s. This means that the RoRM in Syria undoubtedly also needs to be understood within the context of the Palestinian political experience in that country, including the fact that the RoRM’s constituent groups operated only with the state’s approval. This approval was derived from Syria’s own national and foreign policy interests. After the collapse of negotiations with Israel over the Golan Heights in 2000, these interests translated into support for Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad during the second Palestinian intifada, the uprising against Israel that began in 2000. The Syrian regime did so while simultaneously taking part in new rounds of Turkish-brokered negotiations with Israel over its own occupied territories in the Golan (Hinnebusch 2014, 226–227).
The RoRM was therefore tolerated within what were deemed acceptable limits and boundaries conducive to Syria’s own interests. It did nonetheless operate in a sphere that could be characterized as a “space (as independent as possible from the direct interventions from the state, private business and family realms) for voluntary collective deliberations and actions that function as a source of autonomy” (Challand 2008, 399). Within this autonomous yet restricted space, activists sought to undermine the agenda of the PLO and the Oslo-created Palestinian Authority. They did so especially on the former’s claim to legitimate representation of the refugees as it barters their rights with Israel, and thus its ability to forfeit the right of return in negotiations.
In the process of translating this Palestinian national arena of contention into their local communities, RoRM activists sought to build what they termed a “culture of return” as a way in which to impede the ability of negotiators to sign away their rights. An important facet of this culture was the mobilization of memories associated with historic Palestine and the Nakba as resources for collective action (Beinin and Vairel 2011; Della Porta and Diani 2006). One goal of this mobilization was to harness the new generation of refugees’ Palestinian political identification and to organize these refugees around, and ensure their continued political claims to, the right of return.
Given this historical and political backdrop, the RoRM’s mobilization placed particular emphasis on the Palestine generation, the sole remaining witnesses to the Palestine that the leadership was seen as now willing to negotiate away, and this generation’s memories. Thus, in engaging the Palestinian national arena of contention through the resources available in their communities, activists also constructed and advanced what I term “memory discourses.” In these discourses the idea of memory as a politically expedient category came to be highly valued, as has been the case in other Palestinian communities in the OPT and beyond (see, e.g., Hammami 2010, 241; Hill 2005, 2008). This high value associated with memory is derived from activists’ linking of memories of pre-1948 Palestine and the Nakba with the imperative to remember in order to return. The activists were thus in effect utilizing as well as furthering the return’s high political currency in their own communities in order to carve a leadership role for themselves and to ensure the return’s continued importance for the new generations.
The RoRM’s memory discourses, which on the sixtieth anniversary of 1948 were pervasive and therefore popular, have therefore foregrounded particular significations of the Nakba. They did this through a memory/return matrix that advances the central Palestinian national concerns of RoRM activists. These activists’ success in advancing the memory/return matrix largely lay in their capitalizing on the high currency that the right of return has in Palestinian refugee communities. They therefore also furthered this importance of the return through their practices, rather than merely invented it (see, e.g., Allan 2007; 2014, 37–67). However, how the RoRM’s target constituencies—the members of local Palestinian refugee communities—understood these discourses and took part in the RoRM’s mobilization practices were open to interpretation. Thus, the different meanings of the Nakba and the importance ascribed to memories in the RoRM’s memory discourses were never without co- or even resignification, and sometimes contestation, in the RoRM activists’ own communities.
THE PALESTINIAN SPHERE IN SYRIA AND THE RIGHT OF RETURN MOVEMENT
The Syrian crackdown on the PLO in the country following the 1983 intra-Fatah fighting in the north of Lebanon left a Palestinian national and institutional void in Syria (Brand 1988c, 1990; R. Khalidi 1984; Y. Sayigh 1989). This was deepened by the Oslo Accords and the “return” of the PLO to the OPT. The permutation of the PLO into the PA as a result of the accords further marginalized the PLO’s Palestinian refugee constituency living beyond the OPT, once the core of the Palestinian liberation movement and the site from where it politically reemerged after 1948. Given this political and historical context of PLO-Syria relations and what the PLO’s “return” meant for Palestinian refugees living beyond the OPT, the prewar Palestinian sphere in Syria was as much heir as it was also a response to these historical realities. It could therefore also be characterized as a post-Oslo oppositional Palestinian sphere in which the PLO and Fatah had little, if any, role to play. This was as a direct result of their history in Syria and their role in the transformation of the Palestinian liberation movement after 1993. It is in this vibrant Palestinian sphere that the RoRM emerged and operated, and the movement was only one of its components.
In his study of the relationship between civil society and international donors in the OPT, the political sociologist Benoît Challand (2009, 27) has challenged Eurocentric conceptions of civil society. In particular, the assumptions “of progress that discourses of civil society entail, the questionable autonomy or independence vis-à-vis the state, and the cultural rootedness of the concept in European history.” He therefore moves away from conceptions that argue for civil society as a sphere independent of and distinct from the family, business, and state spheres. Instead, Challand builds on the ideas of the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis to argue that civil society should be defined as a sphere for autonomous collective decisions and actions. These can be measured in terms of this sphere’s “capacity of auto-institution” or “the possibility to choose and define its own laws…according to its chosen cognitive and ideational means” (35).
He also critically reviews Arabic literature on civil society and contrasts the recent adoption of the notion of civil society (al-mujtama‘ al-madani) with the longer tradition in Arab thought of the notion he translates as “civic society” (al-mujatama‘ al-ahli). The adjective “ahli” is derived from the noun “ahl.” This can be translated as “family, inhabitants and natives and may even be used as a translation of citizen: it designates members of a group that are tied by close association and a shared space…[that is] a sort of sub state realm of communal life” (Browers 2006, 100–101). Certain proponents of a liberal conception of civil society in Arab thought set up ahli society in dichotomous opposition to madani society (see, e.g., Browers 2006, 92–124). There have been recent arguments that it was civic society that was the in-between sphere in Syria that came to the fore during the early days of the uprising (al-Azm 2012). Others have noted that the Syrian regime in fact harnessed ahli society, given that it is essentially “primordial,” in order to neutralize the more politically threatening civil society (Fu’ad 2014; see also Elvira and Zintl 2012).
Challand’s (2009, 55) analytic move gives less or no “attention to the ‘civil’ in civil society and does not presuppose any particular form of polity (democracy or not, state present or not).” Rather, his emphasis is on this society’s “possible contribution towards the definition of a project of political autonomy” (193). His argument is compelling as it provides a lens through which to understand the vibrant and multifaceted Palestinian sphere that I encountered in Syria. This is because to begin with, all activists I interviewed, whether directly involved in the RoRM or not, used
ahli rather than
madani or used the two interchangeably in order to describe their group or the sphere within which they or their organization operated. Also, the multifaceted nature of this sphere meant that it included “political” (Palestinian political factions’ initiatives), “civic” (independent initiatives), “commercial” (initiatives that had a commercial facet to ensure autonomy and survival), and even “kinship” (family village memorial initiatives) society. Finally, RoRM activists, who composed only one component of this sphere, were at the forefront of the initial relief-oriented response to the displaced Syrians who arrived in Palestinian refugee camps to seek a safe haven as the militarization of the uprising escalated. Later still, they were to be at the forefront of the relief of their devastated communities. These different factors make the absolute theoretical distinction between
madani and
ahli society, even the setting up of civic society as the in-between, untenable.
This Palestinian sphere in Syria could be said to have constituted a space that by and large contributed toward a project of political autonomy. That the groups operating in this sphere did so only under the blessing, observation, and restrictions of the Syrian state restrained but did not lessen their contribution to Palestinian self-organization. Some factions in this sphere, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s (PFLP) splinter group PFLP–General Command (PFLP-GC), have historically been closely linked to the Syrian regime and are today actively fighting alongside it. The alliance between one component of this sphere and the regime underscored the sphere’s heterogeneity rather than dependency. It also underscored the latter’s own considerations and interests that at times, though not always, coincided with those of Palestinian factions. Finally, activist groups that composed this sphere were not contending against a state, a key component of a traditional conception of civil society. Rather, they were contesting a national liberation movement seen as having abandoned its liberation agenda. This sphere was therefore primarily a space of Palestinian civic activism that nevertheless also encompassed Palestinian factions and their institutions.
Insofar as financing is concerned, international donors have the ability to set the agenda and curtail the capacity of civic organizations’ political autonomy (Challand 2009). However, this was not an issue in Syria as a result of Law 93, which in 1958 put the registration, operation, and relationship of independent associations to foreign funders under the tightly regulated jurisdiction of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor. This process is overseen and controlled by the security services, further curtailing international funding bodies’ influence (Sawwah and Kawakibi 2013, 23). Law 93 also means that some groups that operated within the Palestinian sphere were not registered at all. Others operated on a commercial basis in order to circumvent registration restrictions, ensure financial independence, and guarantee continued survival. Thus, it is within the context of this multifaceted Palestinian sphere in Syria, with all its overlaps of civil, civic, political, commercial, and at times even kinship societies, that the RoRM emerged and operated. It continued to do so until the full-scale militarization of the uprising and the ongoing war in Syria.
Given the centrality of Damascus and Yarmouk Camp to Palestinian refugee life in the country, many RoRM activists were headquartered in this camp and in the capital. However, their activities extended to other camps and suburbs in and around the capital and, indeed, to Syria as a whole. What follows is a brief introduction to the RoRM constituent groups whose activists I interviewed and whose headquarters or offices I visited. This introduction is not meant to provide a comprehensive map of all the RoRM’s constituent groups that were operating in the Damascus area. Rather, the point is to stress the groups’ heterogeneity and the multifaceted complexity of an aspect of the Palestinian sphere within which they operated.
Some RoRM groups were directly affiliated to factions, like the PFLP’s Refugees and Right of Return Committee (RRRC). Another example of a group directly affiliated to a faction was the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s (DFLP) electronic online portal, the 194 Group. It was formed as a research group in 2001 and housed in the headquarters of the DFLP’s main publication,
Al-Hurriya.
1 Some factions, like Islamic Jihad, saw the movement as essentially futile; others, like the PFLP-GC, were not part of the RoRM at all. Fatah was also not a part of the RoRM given its history in Syria and weak presence in the country. Other groups had a looser factional affiliation through funding, like the Palestinian Return Community–Wajeb (Duty), established in 2006 and perceived as a Hamas front by community members. A Wajeb activist I interviewed insisted that this was not the case, as the group is nonfactional and open to no-strings-attached financial contributions from any donor. He did acknowledge, however, that Wajeb and Hamas have a common Islamist outlook and conceded that Hamas is Wajeb’s biggest funder.
2 Today the main Wajeb activists who ran the group are no longer in the country.
Other groups were staffed by former members of factions, some of whom continued to have relationships with the PLO. An example of this is Ai’doun, an advocacy and pressure group established in 2000 in Lebanon and Syria. It used as its headquarters the semidefunct PLO Media and Cultural Affairs Office for free and solicited donations for its activities. Ai’doun activists who remain in the country are actively involved in the relief of their devastated communities. Other RoRM groups partly involved commercial initiatives, which allowed them to fund their activities and secure autonomy from political factions. An example of this was Dar al-Shajara publishing house, linked to the Shajara Institute for Oral Memory, which was active in commemoration.
3 Its founder and director, the late Ghassan Shihabi, was murdered by a sniper in Yarmouk in January 2013 while driving back into the camp with his wife and twin daughters after the PFLP-GC gave him clearance to reenter (see also C. Nasser 2013). Dar al-Shajara was subsequently looted, its books removed, and the disks on its premises smashed.
4 Finally, some “groups” represented fewer people, lacked the resources of bigger groups, and could comprise only one or two persons.
The beginning of right of return–oriented initiatives as a response to Oslo was underscored by the late director of al-Shajara. According to him, the publishing house began as the “Committee for the Defense of Palestinian National Culture,” founded in 1994 by eighty-three intellectuals, journalists, and writers. The committee’s financial difficulties led him to create Dar al-Shajara as a commercial enterprise.
5 Some RoRM activists, acknowledging that Oslo raised the alarm, emphasized the failed Camp David final-status negotiations of 2000 as a turning point. When I asked an activist in Ai’doun why it took so long after the accords for activists to finally translate their alarm into action on the ground, he explained:
Politically speaking, since 1993, when Oslo was signed…the primary and essential Palestinian issues…refugees, Jerusalem, the borders, and the issue of the settlements—the very bases of the solution—they were all postponed…. And hence the fear began in 1993, but it became frantic horror in 2000 when Clinton decided that he could not finish his presidency without achieving a solution…[and so] they took Arafat and put him in a corner for fifteen days [at Camp David], with a lot of pressure in order to sign an agreement.
6
The Camp David summit was therefore a watershed in the rise of the RoRM in Syria, as it was in other refugee communities that also began to organize around the right of return. Even political factions, especially those that opposed or had reservations about the Oslo Accords, like the PFLP, see themselves as part of this movement. An activist in the PFLP’s RRRC explained that
insofar as Syria is concerned, the return movement grew out of civic initiatives [
al-mubadarat al-ahliyya] and independent committees after the Oslo Accords. There were truly popular feelings among the refugees concerning the unfolding of something threatening their rights and interests. So several committees were formed; the committees were personal or collective initiatives. And then it reached the stage where all the Palestinian factions formed a committee in order to defend the right of return, especially when the refugee issue was being discussed within the framework of the multilateral negotiations.
7
RoRM activists therefore primarily see themselves as operating within a Palestinian national arena of contention that is transnational. The transnational character of this arena derives from activists’ visions, aims, and practices, connecting them to Palestinian groups outside Syria. For example, Dar al-Shajara, in its Shajara Institute for Oral Memory commemorative guise, was part of the Palestinian Oral History Network. Ai’doun, for its part, is a member of the Global Palestine Right to Return Coalition. The transnational character of the RoRM’s arena of contention also stems from primarily articulating a collective political struggle against the PLO and Israel, as the object of their claims.
While expounding further on the difference between factional and nonfactional right of return committees, the PFLP’s RRRC activist stated, “So when the fear began [after Oslo], this worry, it began—like I said—these committees began to crystallize in order to tell the Palestinian negotiator: we are here and we are present, to try and pressure and to prevent this negotiator from offering concessions, and to address public opinion, that there is no solution without the refugee issue.”
8Given that the RRRC is directly linked to the PFLP, an argument could be made for the inevitability of the primacy that the RRRC attributes to the national arena of contention. However, other nonaligned RoRM activists also pointed out the primacy of the national arena. For example, the Ai’doun activist stated, “We started off on the basis that, like I told you at the beginning [of our interview], the right of return is in danger, we have to get active defending this right in the face of this threat, by making the stakeholders of this right aware [so that] they don’t give it up, and to form a lobby group to pressure the Palestinian negotiator.”
9Another important point highlighted in both interviews can be read in the way both activists stressed what they termed “public opinion” and “stakeholders.” In other words, both emphasized that they are not only defending Palestinian refugees’ rights but also attempting to position themselves as community leaders and representatives. Their aspirations are directly related to the history of the PLO in Syria, its transformation post-Oslo, and the Palestinian institutional and leadership void in the country.
Despite these realities, however, RoRM groups were commonly not mass membership based, even though there were important intergroup differences in their activities, scope, and influence. Although there are no statistics to support this claim, the impression imparted to me through my meetings with RoRM activists and discussions with community members who participated in their activities was the top-down nature of the RoRM’s visions and activities. That is, their visions and activities were formulated by the groups’ members, voluntary or paid, and implemented in their own local Palestinian communities.
The RoRM groups did, though, commonly aspire to be grassroots organizations, given both the arena in which they operated and their self-positioning as community leaders and representatives. The Wajeb activist articulated the group’s emphasis on the grassroots connection this way:
We don’t want to stay isolated from the street, we don’t want to remain isolated from the people, we have to be in touch, so I tell some committees, and some of the institutions that are present in all the camps, prioritize this activity over any of your other activities: visit people in their homes, and be in touch with the youth, in their gatherings, in their get-togethers, in their late nights, this is much more important than any other activity…. I always say, the personal and individual connection is much more important than any of our activities…. This is very important for achieving your goals, in order to push through your vision, in order for you to in fact create a condition that reacts [to your ideas], because in the end, you have a vision but you don’t want to continue singing this vision alone.
10
Thus, going to people’s homes, staying in touch with community members, and spending time with the youth involve more than just merely advancing the right of return. These social activities are also an attempt to build a space from which to lead and to claim legitimate grounds for the representation of the interests of the Palestinian refugees in Syria in opposition to the PLO and the PA. It is therefore somewhat unsurprising that the older RoRM activists were former cadres of various Palestinian political factions and see the movement as a continuation of national activism by other means. When discussing the founding members of his group, the Ai’doun activist noted that most “have left organized work, but we never left national work, never. Our activities were always ongoing, but the commitment to a party or to a specific faction ended, so some people [in Ai’doun] are former members of the factions.”
11Thus the local, national, transnational, and even international all figure in the RoRM activists’ aspirations and goals. As the Ai’doun activist continued later in our discussion in relation to what he saw as one of the achievements of the RoRM:
The right of return has been advanced as an issue more so than before, before what was advanced was liberation, a state, and so forth. Given the spread of return committees all over the world, it has now become an issue that is advanced…. Basically, just talking about it, or if there is a threat to it, there is an immediate mobilization against that threat. So the return committees have put forth issues [on the table]. Of course they didn’t achieve anything that is important, but the issue of the right of return has become an issue that is discussed on the Arab level, on the Palestinian level, and on the international level.
12
When these interviews are read together, a fairly straightforward narrative of the RoRM emerges: The military-oriented, Fatah-dominated PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist on the Palestine belonging to the refugees but in return did not get its desired statelet in the now-truncated OPT. This betrayal marginalized the refugees, once the core of the Palestinian liberation movement, and threatened their legally enshrined right of return (Suleiman 2001). The RoRM groups arose in response and geared their activities toward claiming a stake for refugees in Palestinian national politics (R. Sayigh 2008b). Operating in local communities within the broader context of grassroots nationalist commemoration (see, e.g., Khalili 2004, 2005, 2007), RoRM groups largely aimed at mobilizing the refugee communities in order to prevent the PLO and PA from negotiating away the right of return.
However, what the RoRM represents or aims to be and achieve depends largely on how it is perceived and understood in the communities within which it operates. In Syria, the abundance of RoRM groups—fully or partly independent, faction affiliated or not—has led to popular perceptions of these groups as private right-of-return “corner shops” [
dakakin] that “trade” on the right of return. Theorists of social movements have argued that activists are rational actors, that they are social entrepreneurs who mobilize resources for collective action (McCarthy and Zald 1977; see also Goodwin, Jasper, and Khattra 1999; McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996).
13 The commonly held belief that RoRM initiatives constitute “corner shops” through which activists “trade” highlights the importance that the return has among Palestinian refugees. Given this high currency, the exchange value for activists when “trading” the right of return in their communities lay in filling an institutional void and taking on a refugee leadership and representational role in the Palestinian national arena of contention.
14Extending the entrepreneurial metaphor further, one way in which RoRM activists ran their shops and traded was through advancing what they termed a “culture of return.” This culture is essentially a political identity project. It revolves around a shared homeland that once belonged to the refugees, its unlawful and violent usurpation in 1948, and the need for the rectification of this historical and ongoing injustice. This rectification needs to take place through organizing around, and insisting on, the refugees’ now-threatened collective and personal right of return. Given the aims and aspirations of RoRM activists, the most important resources at their disposal in order to advance this culture of return were memories of historic Palestine and the Nakba. Through this mobilization of memories as resources for the return, RoRM activists also gave the category of memory itself a newfound importance by directly linking it to the return in their communities.
I now examine how RoRM activists’ notion of a culture of return led to particular discourses around memory. I then turn to how activists’ memory mobilization practices foregrounded particular Palestinian patriotic understandings of the 1948 Nakba as part of these discourses.
FROM THE NATIONAL TO THE LOCAL: BUILDING A CULTURE OF RETURN
During our discussion of the group’s beginnings, the Ai’doun activist related that one of the group’s founding principles was based on
spreading the culture of return [
thaqafat al-‘awda] among the Palestinian refugees, and to implant the hope that despite the difficult circumstances, and despite the imbalance in power to the advantage of our enemies, we shouldn’t lose hope and [ensure] that a hope and a conviction continues to exist among the new and young generations, that they have a right in Palestine, and that they won’t give up this right, and that they call for its implementation, even if time passes, and even if the current circumstances don’t allow for the return of the refugees.
15
The visions formulated in the national arena of contention therefore directly lead to the emphasis on building a culture of return for the new generation of refugees. Thus, when translating the national arena of contention through the culture of return, activists were striving to ensure that newer generations of refugees were aware of both their right to return and the need to exercise it. What they were essentially formulating and advancing is therefore a political identity envisioned and advanced because of the current impossibility of return and the potential impact of the passage of time on the rights of the refugees. As a political project, the culture of return is primarily oriented toward the future and firmly situated within its post-Oslo historical and political moment.
The notion of a culture of return, and its advancement, was widespread in RoRM circles. For example, the PFLP’s RRRC activist articulated the same elements of the culture of return as the Ai’doun activist
with the growth of the culture of civil society [
al-mujtama‘ al-madani], many Palestinian activists, through their connections with civic organizations [
munazamat ahliyya], and nongovernmental organizations, began spreading a kind of culture that is concerned with the popular or civil [
al-madani] dimension in order to withstand this issue [the threat posed to the right of return], and not only through the slogans of armed struggle or the right of return as a national cornerstone. They began to work on the ground…. in order to stop the winds of pessimism and hopelessness and the culture of compensation from spreading in our camps.
16
Time as working against the right of return is also a notion central to the culture of return. This is because the RoRM’s object of claims is the historic Palestine of the refugees that is becoming ever more temporally distant. This distance is made acute by the fact of the passing of members of the Palestine generation while new generations come of age under the shadow of the Oslo Accords. These new generations have no lived knowledge or direct connection to their homeland, which has been Hebraicized by Israeli settler-colonialism (Benvenisti 2000). Most important, they have come of age in an era in which Palestinian leaders have been willing to rubberstamp their stateless and dispossessed reality and Israel’s facts on the ground. When asked to further articulate the culture of return, the Ai’doun activist put it this way:
The culture of return means…that the right of return is a personal right, and a collective right, this is your right that isn’t going to disappear…through the passage of time, and no one ought to manipulate it. I want to make the young Palestinian person understand that this personal right shouldn’t be touched, [that] Mahmoud Abbas cannot give up the right of your father—whether it is to a house or a
dunam of land in Palestine—on your behalf, because this is a personal right.
17If you don’t personally give it up—you—then the political leader won’t be able to give it up…. Part of the culture of return…[includes the] United Nations’ resolutions that were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, and one of them is Resolution 194…. I would make him understand these issues, I need to put it to him that if you don’t willfully give up your right in Palestine, no one can give up that right for you, and this right is not only a personal right, but it is an inheritance right, for your children and grandchildren, so it is the right of the children and the grandchildren to demand this right…. And within the culture of return, there is a focus on Palestinian identity, [for] we are a people, an Arab people, but we have specific characteristics that are unique to us…. So these issues that enhance Palestinian identity, I want to focus on them, not because of a parochial regionalism, but on the basis of the crystallization of Palestinian national identity. All these issues are part of the culture of return.
18
Clearly then, through the culture of return and its various components activists were addressing the nemesis of memory, “forgetfulness.” This forgetfulness relates, in a political sense, to the possibility that younger refugees might relinquish their political rights as a result of a combination of factors that have been noted. These include the passage of time, the threat of the right being negotiated away, and the lack of Palestinian institutions that can advance and harness the young refugees’ national identification and continued political claims and demands. Thus, to counter the threat of forgetfulness, activists predicated their culture of return on the imperative to remember, giving memory itself a central place in their mobilization-derived memory discourses. It is this imperative within the broader political vision of a culture of return that has led to the notion of “memory as a guarantor of return.” This is essentially a memory/return matrix at the heart of the RoRM-created and -harnessed memory discourses in Palestinian refugee communities in Syria.
In view of this, an important way in which activists translated their culture of return into concrete community practices in order to achieve their goals was through the mobilization of memories of historic Palestine and the Nakba as resources for collective action. An example of such activities can be seen in the publication of oral history–based books on destroyed villages and towns in Palestine. These books were central to the discursive reemergence of the Palestinian Nakba in the 1980s. Recent English-language scholarly interest in these books refer to them as “memorial books,” rather than the Arabic “destroyed villages books” (kutub al-qura al-mudammara). This is in reference to similar books created by European Jewish Holocaust survivors and Armenians to memorialize the authors’ towns and villages that no longer exist (Slyomovics 1998, xiii; see also R. Davis 2007, 2010).
In Syria, Dar al-Shajara was the leading, though not sole, publisher and distributor of these books. Wajeb, for example, also published destroyed villages books. There were also individual efforts by nonaffiliated individuals to publish these books. Commonly, these books employ memories to construct oral history–based accounts of pre-Nakba life in historic Palestine. The late director of Dar al-Shajara explained the rationale for their publication:
Within the context of us wanting a specifically Palestinian book. After that, the idea began developing more specifically about why isn’t it about Palestinian memory per se, why isn’t it about the destroyed Palestinian villages, why isn’t it about this huge heritage that is now on the threshold of forgetfulness, which day after day people are forgetting, and when you ask a child in school, “What village are you from?” They tell you, “I am from Yarmouk Camp” or “I am Palestinian,” but he doesn’t know where he is exactly from.
19
This rationale for publishing books on destroyed localities in Palestine articulates the most important facets of the culture of return. It also emphasizes the direct relationship between the threat of forgetfulness and the creative use of memories to combat this threat.
In my conversations with community members, the issue of authorship, extent of readership, and reception of these books was controversial. Some people claimed that the books are nothing more than glorified family histories. That there was controversy, debate, and ultimately interest in these books testifies to the activists’ success in both creating and advancing the memory/return matrix. However, how community members have understood the RoRM’s memory discourses and practices and even the memories they mobilized has remained open to interpretation.
In the remaining part of this chapter, I further explore the meanings RoRM activists have appended to the memory signifiers they mobilized through their grassroots oral history recordings. I also demonstrate the interpretatively open nature of the RoRM’s memory discourses through community members’ participation in and impressions of activists’ public village commemorations.
THE MOBILIZATION AND INTERPRETATION OF MEMORIES AS RESOURCES FOR THE RETURN
One way memories have been mobilized as a resource for the return is through activists’ recording of oral histories (see, e.g., Wajeb n/a). These recordings are intended to preserve the Palestine generation’s memories for the younger generations and to ensure the continued existence of a counternarrative to the Israeli state’s denial of the Nakba even after its last witnesses pass away. During our discussion of Wajeb’s Documentation and Oral History Section, the Wajeb activist stated that
the Section asked all Wajeb’s camp-based committees [in Syria] to work on surveying the elderly. Every elderly person who witnessed the Nakba, who lived during the Nakba period and is able [to recollect]—meaning, that they were at the time cognizant of the unfolding events—should have his name, telephone number and the village from which he comes, his address and so on, recorded. We now have the addresses of most of the elderly, in all the Syrian camps, and we have now begun paying visits, in a slow and gradual manner. We are going to those who are older than the others because of the age issue, and the life and death issue; we are racing against time.
20
Similarly, the Ai’doun activist’s discussion of his group’s Oral History Unit, which began in 2007, emphasized that his group worked along these same lines, even though in retrospect its work failed to materialize to the same extent as that of Wajeb. He said:
We are focusing on the first years of the Nakba so that those who lived through them do not die before we get to them. Now for example, when we come to the experience of being refugees, they [the Oral History Unit] can for example talk to me, and people from my generation…. We lived through being refugees, and we lived through the tents and so forth, and how the camp was, all these issues. So those people can still be found and still have some time ahead of them, right? This generation, the generation that [lived through events] from approximately 1946 to 1950, this period, we want to try and cover it [first].
21
The question of time in both activists’ discussion of their groups’ oral history recordings once again conjures up the threat of forgetfulness. The fight against forgetfulness is, in short, a race against time. This is unsurprising, given that remembering and the very ability to speak of memories are anchored in temporal referents. Social groups’ relationships to time are socially constructed and have meaning only insofar as they serve a particular purpose for the group. With regard to time and memory, Halbwachs (1980, 127) has argued that “time is real only insofar as it has content—that is, insofar as it offers events as material for thought…. substantial enough to offer the individual consciousness a framework within which to arrange and retrieve its remembrances.” The RoRM’s emphasis on the Nakba means that activists have advanced the Nakba as a marker of their communities’ time (i.e., before and after the dispossession, the ongoing
nakba).
Remembering and speaking of memories are also anchored in space. The relationship of groups to space, like time, is also socially constructed. By prioritizing the Palestine generation’s Nakba memories, RoRM activists have in effect also transformed the Nakba into Halbwachs’s (1980, 131) notion of an “extraordinary event.” Such events are “also fitted within this spatial framework [of memory], because they occasion in the group a more intense awareness of its past and present, the bonds attaching it to physical locale gaining greater clarity in the very moment of their destruction”. The Nakba as an extraordinary event marks time before and after the homeland, and it also marks the homeland, historic Palestine, as such. It also encapsulates the reasons for the distance and uprootedness from the homeland. Thus, given the overall objectives of the culture of return, the RoRM have mobilized the Nakba in a way that is politically conducive to its demands for justice.
The Nakba has therefore been constructed as a marker of time and space in the RoRM’s communities, as anchored in concrete commemorative practices and memory discourses. The pervasiveness and popularity of these discourses and the meanings of their memory signifiers were striking in Damascus. My research and its importance were often associated with “al-dhakira al-shafawiyya” (oral memory) in my everyday encounters. This also indicated a familiarity with the RoRM’s mobilization of memories and the importance of this mobilization’s associated memory/return matrix.
While discussing oral history work, the Ai’doun activist articulated his group’s understanding of the category of memory in this way:
We have, insofar as the units are concerned, if I give you an hour or an hour and a bit, I can’t really tell you everything. But I told you we have specialist working-units and we have geographical working-units. Part of the specialist working-units, we have the Oral History Unit, and this is concerned with the issue of memory. Of course it has a camera, and it has a recorder, and it goes to the elderly—we of course began to feel strongly that oral memory in fact completes Palestinian history, because the written history is written, and you know how history is written, and how it is filtered. So we began to feel that a very big part of those who lived as young people in Palestine is passing away, that is something normal. For example, someone who left at the age of twenty, as a young fighting man, or during an age when he was cognizant [of unfolding events], now he is eighty years old, those are a very small minority. So during those [first] two years, we rushed in order to locate those of them who remain, meaning to take information from them and to record oral history, in order to record Palestinian memory through oral history, and to try in the future, if we are able to, what I told you about [earlier], which is to form a Palestinian narrative that can face Israeli memory.
22
Thus, how activists envisioned the use of oral history sheds light on their understanding of memory, clearly conceived in its concrete and referential sense. Oral memory completes history because the latter is written and filtered, implying that the former is somehow pure, unmediated, and more faithful to the past. Thus, it is not history that activists were making available to the new generations; it was these referential memories on the verge of being lost to history, of being written and filtered, as a result of the death of the Palestine generation. The result is a division between memory and history, or a memory in realization of its sharp break with the past (Nora 1996b, 2001). “Palestinian memory” is constructed through this essentially antagonistic relationship between memory and history. There is also an attempt to turn the Nakba into Pierre Nora’s lieu de mémoire, or site of memory. The primary purpose of a lieu de mémoire is to capture time and make the site of memory stand still, to act as a buffer from the loss of memory to history. It is therefore no surprise that the RoRM’s site of memory is a “great event,” what Nora (1996b, 18) also termed “spectacular” or “foundational” events.
These particular understandings of memory and of the Nakba were open to interpretation by members of the RoRM’s target communities. Activists were, after all, mobilizing the resources available in their communities. Like activists, the RoRM’s target communities’ members also have personal and emotional connections to their families’ places of origin. This means that they participated in the RoRM’s mobilization practices against the backdrop of their own understandings of their familial and Palestinian past. They also brought their own beliefs and perceptions of the RoRM’s national arena of contention to bear on the movement’s practices.
Two interviewees noted their participation in the RoRM’s commemorative village day events when the village in question was that of their family. These events, known as Palestinian Village Day (yawm al-qarya al-falastiniyya), were organized by Wajeb but suspended during the first year of the uprising in 2011. The events were for the people of the village that was the subject of the commemoration and for their descendants (see, e.g., Wajeb 2010). The Wajeb activist explained his group’s first event as follows:
We chose al-Tira [in the subdistrict of Haifa] as the first village. We decided to convene [the event] in al-Tira’s square [in Yarmouk Camp], outside on the street. So we went to the square, and we pitched a tent, and we set up an exhibition, we put up pictures of al-Tira’s martyrs, whatever we could find, we put up al-Tira’s inhabitants’ belongings in the exhibition…. Some one thousand people attended this activity. And we spoke about al-Tira…its name, the origin of the name, what happened in al-Tira, and its most important customs and traditions. After that, we showed a film about al-Tira, a new documentary film that has just been filmed. The people who were sitting, especially the elderly, began to cry. Many people cried. [They said,] “This is my land, this is the school in which I studied, and this is this, and this is that street,” and so on and so forth. All these issues conversed with emotions. Afterward, four Nakba witnesses from al-Tira sat with a man who introduced them and led the questions and answers, and then the men started narrating…. [They] presented oral memory to the people, and after that, we honored the elderly, as well as the distinguished personalities from al-Tira.
23
Much could be said about the al-Tira village day event from the point of view of the organizers. For example, their use of various materials to mobilize memories of the village, including the exhibition, the belongings of the people of al-Tira, the film screening, and the Palestine generation’s memories. Together, these ironically speak to the copresence of memory and history, rather than the divergence between the two. In addition, these village day events are male centered, with the stage being occupied by men, and with the interviewees who related their participation to me being men as well. This gendered limitation has implications for the kinds of memories and histories that are mobilized in this particular public forum.
24 Finally, these village day events and the RoRM’s mobilization efforts more generally also provide a space to realize community as practice. The idea of community as practice largely comes from the construction of collective identities and communities by activists in social movements (see, e.g., Melucci 1996, in Delanty 2010, 95). This kind of community arguably exists through Palestinian refugee activists’ “communities of dissent” (Delanty 2010, 83–102). These village day events also clearly allow for the creation and realization of community for the participants (e.g., the descendants recognizing al-Tira as “our village”). Thus, such events allow for community as practice through providing spaces that allow for “the expansion in the community of reference and the attempt to make belonging a real possibility” (102).
With regard to community members’ own participation, Muhammad, a young third-generation Palestinian refugee whose grandparents are from al-Tira, related to me his attendance of the al-Tira Palestinian Village Day. Within the context of our discussion of the Palestine generation’s memories, he said:
They did the al-Tira tent, they invited four old men from al-Tira, and they began to narrate events…. The moderator asked one of the old men a question, he told him, “When was al-Yarmouk Camp established?” He told him, “During the 1960s.” So there were [other] old men sitting with us, they weren’t being interviewed, and one of them got upset and got up and left. I said to him, “Where are you going?” He said to me, “What nonsense is this man talking about?! He doesn’t know anything, he has already spoken nonsense on four different occasions!”…Perhaps it stemmed from his [the first old man’s] age or something like that, perhaps because he is old, he spoke a bit of nonsense or he was exaggerating and so forth…. So issues [of truth] come up through [reading] history, studying, knowledge. They [the Palestine generation] only gave us a piece of the string.
25
Wajeb’s creative use of memory was clearly effective if its purpose was to attract young refugees like Muhammad. In other words, to attract youths whose families were expelled from al-Tira in 1948 and to enable them to learn more about their families’ place of origin in historic Palestine. However, for Muhammad, what is at stake in the al-Tira village day is not so much that he learned about al-Tira and his right to return to it. For Muhammad, what is at stake is the question of the truth and reliability of the Palestine generation’s memories. Wajeb activists gave the stage to the Palestine generation and presented their memories as a source of authority on al-Tira, even honoring them in a closing ceremony. For Muhammad, however, this generation and their memories can never be the final authority on the past. Their memories are only partial, “a piece of the string,” and within this generation there are disagreements over the past, as illustrated by the man who stormed off. Thus, if members of the Palestine generation and their memories are being given a central place in the RoRM’s mobilization-derived memory discourses, this role is open to interpretation by community members. The same could be said for the centrality that activists are giving to the Nakba as well as to the notion that memories are guarantors of a future return. To extend Muhammad’s metaphor, studying Palestinian history and understanding present realities, combined with his own political activism, which he also discussed in his interview, are for him the other pieces of the string.
Another village day event took place in al-Qabun, today a wartorn suburb of Damascus, where a small community of Palestinian refugees from the Haifa subdistrict village of Tantura and their descendants lived. Abu Muhammad, a second-generation Tanturan refugee, related the following about his attendance of this event:
They were showing us that until this day, the generations that are like myself and younger, they care about these issues. Take this example, this paper which they printed: “On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the occupation of Palestine, The Palestinian Return Community—Wajeb, al-Qabun Committee, invites you to attend the Palestinian Village Day event,” and between three dots they have put “al-Tantura,” which is our village, “and that is at 5:30
P.M. on Friday, June 6, 2008, in the tent that has been erected in al-Qabun Park that is to the east of the vegetable market. Your presence is support for the right of return.” Look at how beautiful this sentence is: “Your presence is support for the right of return, and the invitation is public.” I even have some Syrian friends who came with me and participated in this event, which made me so happy…. This paper, despite the fact that it has no value, it means so much to me and to my village, so I keep it with me in my pocket.
26
Unlike Muhammad, Abu Muhammad ascribed the village day event’s importance to its affirmation of his village, a community of Tanturans and their descendants, and of the right of return, despite the temporal distance to Tantura and the coming-of-age of new generations. From the organizers’ point of view, the Wajeb activist related that 1,500 people attended this particular village day, despite the small size of the community in al-Qabun. He asserted that this was because “we carried out an event that perhaps in the end addresses [personal] concerns, emotions.”
27 Thus, the RoRM provided spaces, whether concrete through village day events or discursive though oral history recordings and books, where memories and histories, their meanings and purposes, could be constructed, articulated, contested, and rearticulated. The RoRM’s mobilization of memories as resources also provided spaces where communities could realize themselves. This realization of communities took place around members’ shared cultural forms of memories as well as histories of specific cultural codifications, such as places of origin and the Nakba.
Communities as practice or as constructed and realized in the process of their achievement therefore need not be mutually exclusive or in opposition to communities understood through their members’ shared yet interpretatively open symbolic cultural forms (Cohen 1985, in Delanty 2010, 33–35; Delanty 2010, 102). For example, in the Tantura Village Day, Tantura is constructed as defining the community of Tanturans and their descendants, with the commemorative events providing the space for the community’s realization. At the same time, Tantura is a symbolic cultural form, the village of origin, relevant to those such as Muhammad, who chose to attend Tantura’s commemoration because of his own imagination of belongings. Through creating spaces for the realization of communities, RoRM activists therefore also sought to influence the interpretation of these communities’ forms and codifications in line with their overall political objectives. Ultimately, however, these forms, like the symbolic contours of the communities they mark, were open, fluid, and contingent.
CONCLUSION
On January 23, 2010, the Qatar-based Arabic- and English-language international news network Al Jazeera began publishing more than 1,600 confidential documents over a three-day period. Dubbed the “Palestine Papers,” these documents were leaked from the PLO’s Negotiations Support Unit (NSU) and spanned the last decade (1999–2010) of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations (Hijab 2011; Swisher 2011). The leaked documents confirmed what many observers, including RoRM activists, had long feared.
One of the Al Jazeera analysts who pored over the documents noted that in a 2007 draft of proposals for a “Permanent Status Agreement,” the Palestinian negotiators agreed to the return of only 10,000 refugees per year for a maximum of ten years (Abunimah 2011a). The papers documented how, two years later, Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat was even willing to waive this essentially symbolic number of returnees and “proposed accepting just one thousand refugees per year over ten years” (Abunimah 2011a; Swisher 2011, 48).
Whether 10,000 or 100,000, the documents therefore finally and conclusively confirmed that the Palestinian leadership had offered unprecedented concessions in its attempt to ensure its continued survival. This was clearly the case even if this survival had, within the framework of the Oslo Accords, become possible only in its role as a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation. These concessions included rescinding the right of return and any meaningful sovereignty. It also offered unprecedented security coordination with Israel following the second intifada and the victory of its political rival, Hamas, in local elections in the OPT (Swisher 2011, 25–71).
Following the leaks, the PLO and the PA went on an all-out media offensive. The strategy was to shoot the messenger rather than deal with the message. This approach was accompanied by a clumsy insistence that the documents were forgeries, even when some negotiators publicly confirmed their authenticity (Swisher 2011, 19). In an interview on Al Jazeera Arabic, Erekat went on a tirade in which he accused Al Jazeera’s then Palestinian director general and British and American intelligence officers of being behind the politically motivated distortions in a bid to remove the PA president. The latter’s mandate to govern had, in any case, expired two years earlier (AJA 2011).
Some two weeks after his interview, and following an internal investigation, Erekat announced his resignation as the PLO’s chief negotiator. However, the premise on which he resigned was not so much the content of the leaked papers, for he retained his position on the PLO’s Executive Committee. Rather, Erekat resigned because the investigation did indeed trace the leaked papers to the NSU that he led. The NSU, consisting of lawyers and policy experts, was itself dissolved. This move has been compared to “the US State Department firing its own legal advisors over the embarrassing WikiLeaks disclosures rather than addressing the causes of the leaks or the misguided policies exposed by them” (Swisher 2011, 19).
The leaked documents and the scandal surrounding their contents demonstrate the extent of the transformation of the Palestinian liberation movement post-Oslo, especially in terms of its subservience to US-Israeli dictates. They also expose the extent of its unaccountability and relinquishment of any pretenses to forwarding the cause of the majority of Palestinians, the refugees. Finally, the leaks and the scandal also demonstrate the nature of the Palestinian national arena of contention in which RoRM activists saw themselves operating and in which they were trying to exert influence. Clearly then, the RoRM’s emergence may have heightened awareness of the threat posed to the right of return. The movement’s ability to effect change, however, has been minimal, given the lack of accountability and political bankruptcy of the PLO and the PA in the wake of Oslo.
Whatever change RoRM activists have effected has been in their own communities. Through their mobilization-derived memory discourses, activists have constructed the Nakba as a marker of their communities’ times and spaces. The Nakba has come to signify the singular extraordinary event that centers on a historical injustice that needs to be rectified through the return, no matter the position of the Palestinian leadership or the impossibility of return today. They have tied the Palestine generation’s memories of the Nakba and pre-1948 Palestine more generally to the return and have used these cultural forms and codifications to mobilize in communities whose symbolic contours are marked by them.
While RoRM activists’ discourses and practices essentially encapsulated one of the interpretively open meanings of the Palestinian Nakba today, other meanings of 1948 can also be found in community members’ own memories of and narratives on the Nakba. In the subsequent chapters, I turn to these different meanings. I do this first through examining the narration and transmission of memories in Palestinian refugee families, then the Palestine generation’s communities and their memories, and finally, the post-Palestine generations’ postmemories and narratives on Nakba memory.
