scholarly journals GRASS-ROOTS COMMEMORATIONS: REMEMBERING THE LAND IN THE CAMPS OF LEBANON

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laleh Khalili

The Oslo negotiations——and the specter of a Palestinian renunciation of the right of return——greatly increased the insecurities of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The new uncertainties in turn triggered the emergence in the refugee camps of commemorative practices different from those previously sponsored by the Palestinian leadership. The new forms of commemoration, centered on the villages left behind in Palestine in 1948 and including popular ethnographies, memory museums, naming practices, and history-telling using new technologies, have become implicit vehicles of opposition and a means of asserting the refugees' membership in the Palestinian polity. Beyond reflecting nostalgia for a lost world, the practices have become the basis of the political identity of the younger generations and the motivation for their political mobilization.

Author(s):  
Sobhi Albadawi

The right of return has been a fundamental claim by Palestinian people since 1948. The ‘right’ refers to the political position or principle that all generations of Palestinian refugees have the right to return to the property they or their forebears left behind during the 1948 Palestinian exodus, and following the 1967 Six-Day War. This study examines and updates Palestinian refugees’ views of the right of return claim, adopting a quantitative research design surveying 1200 participants from five refugee camps located in Hebron and Bethlehem in the West Bank. The study finds that even after 72 years of displacement, the right of return remains an active but changing political construct among surveyed Palestinians living in the West Bank. As such, future negotiations must consider the generational narratives and ensure that the right of return claim, resettlement, and compensation particularly are not treated as mutually exclusive in the delivery of a just solution to the displacement of Palestinian refugees.


2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Fischbach

Unlike its demands for Holocaust reparations, Israel's compensation claims for properties that Jews left behind in the Arab world have aimed not to provide individual financial reparations, but rather to counter and offset Palestinian refugees' claims for restitution and the right of return. In U.S.-sponsored negotiations in 2000, Israel announced it would drop its counterclaim policy and agreed with the Palestinians that individual compensation would be paid out to all sides from an international fund. More recently, however, a new counterclaim strategy has emerged, based not on financial reparations, but rather on an argument that a fair population and property exchange occurred in 1948. By pursuing this strategy, Israel and international Jewish organizations risk exacerbating tensions between European Jews who have received Holocaust reparations, and Arab Jews angry that their claims are held hostage to diplomatic expediency.


1970 ◽  
pp. 20-24
Author(s):  
Assmaa Naguib

Darwish’s words echo those of millions of Palestinian refugees whose loss of a Home has led them to a lifelong struggle for the reconstruction of the concept. They resonate with thoughts of Palestinians everywhere who find themselves, after 60 years of displacement, locked in an endless search for the requisition of a Home, a process that is gradually becoming more of a symbol than a political end. Scores of academic essays have examined the right of return, the peace process and the conditions inside refugee camps in Lebanon and elsewhere; yet few have successfully dealt with the way in which Palestinian refugees have coped with the difficulties of those very conditions and actively sought to find meaning to the experience of displacement.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anaheed Al-Hardan

The 1948 Nakba has, in light of the 1993 Oslo Accords and Palestinian refugee activists' mobilisation around the right of return, taken on a new-found centrality and importance in Palestinian refugee communities. Closely-related to this, members of the ‘Generation of Palestine’, the only individuals who can recollect Nakba memories, have come to be seen as the guardians of memories that are eventually to reclaim the homeland. These historical, social and political realities are deeply rooted in the ways in which the few remaining members of the generation of Palestine recollect 1948. Moreover, as members of communities that were destroyed in Palestine, and whose common and temporal and spatial frameworks were non-linearly constituted anew in Syria, one of the multiples meanings of the Nakba today can be found in the way the refugee communities perceive and define this generation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-39
Author(s):  
Nabila El-Ahmed ◽  
Nadia Abu-Zahra

This article argues that Israel substituted the Palestinian refugees' internationally recognized right of return with a family reunification program during its maneuvering over admission at the United Nations following the creation of the state in May 1948. Israel was granted UN membership in 1949 on the understanding that it would have to comply with legal international requirements to ensure the return of a substantial number of the 750,000 Palestinians dispossessed in the process of establishing the Zionist state, as well as citizenship there as a successor state. However, once the coveted UN membership had been obtained, and armistice agreements signed with neighboring countries, Israel parlayed this commitment into the much vaguer family reunification program, which it proceeded to apply with Kafkaesque absurdity over the next fifty years. As a result, Palestinians made refugees first in 1948, and later in 1967, continue to be deprived of their legally recognized right to return to their homes and their homeland, and the family reunification program remains the unfulfilled promise of the early years of Israeli statehood.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Paul Karolyi

This is part 138 of a chronology begun by the Journal of Palestine Studies in Spring 1984, and covers events from 16 May to 15 August 2018 on the ground in the occupied Palestinian territories and in the diplomatic sphere, regionally and internationally. This quarter saw the start of the ongoing months-long Great March of Return, a protest demanding the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homes in Israel. These peaceful, large-scale protests along Gaza's border were met with stunning violence from Israeli forces. The bloodiest day, which fell on the day of the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the U.S. embassy's move to Jerusalem, and the day before the seventieth anniversary of the Nakba, saw fifty-eight Palestinians dead at the hands of Israeli troops. The U.S. and Israel successfully blocked a formal investigation into these killings, in spite of multiple requests from U.N. members. As well, U.S. president Trump announced his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, after which tension and military attacks and counterattacks between Israel and Iranian forces in Syria mounted.


1970 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Pfingst

In 2005, the 38th year of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and the year that saw the construction of an eight metre high concrete Wall of Separation through the Occupied West Bank, an exhibition, 'The New Hebrews: A Century of Israeli Art', was held at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin.  The exhibition can be read as the narration of the Zionist nation coming into being – a narration in which the Palestinian people do not figure, though the reconfiguration of the land does. Only in the room on Conflict are Palestinian refugees, the Occupation and the Wall represented by Israeli photographers and media artists, making a slight dent into a historiography and landscape devoid of Palestinian agency and presence. From a Jewish feminist engagement with the discourses on Palestinian Right of Return, the essay addresses a set of questions about the field of vision posed by Ariella Azoulay in Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy (2001) when she asks: Who sees? Who is capable of seeing, what, and from where? Who is authorised to look? How is this authorization given or acquired? In whose name does one look? What can be seen outside the narrative of redemption and the frame set by the Temple Scroll and the Jug of Tears? Are the photographs of the Intifada and the portraits from the refugee camps in effect inserting the presence of the spectral other, as described by Judith Butler? This essay will consider the ways in which we might read these Israeli photographic insertions in the circumstance where representation and representational space is such a contested feature of the conflict.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document