Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency

Prologue: Approaching a Permanent State of Emergency

Prologue Approaching a Permanent State of Emergency I’ve written this story before. —Robert Fisk This is a book about the possibilities of memory. It is rooted in the belief that thinking and talking about the past is a worthwhile enterprise , but one that is inevitably marked by uncertainty. No mere exercise in simple recollection or in repeating received ideas, an active engagement with the past is necessarily about the present and the future as well. It is about open-endedness, not self-assuredness. To approach the past in this way is to embrace what Stuart Hall calls a “politics without guarantees,” a politics that assumes that even under the most oppressive conditions, meaning can never be fixed. This is also a book about memories of possibility, memories of a time when the window of opportunity for Palestinian liberation seemed to be more open than ever before. For members of the “intifada generation” (jīl al-intifāda), the fact that the window has appeared less open in subsequent years only enhances the power of those memories. As the title of this book suggests, they are “occupied by memory” in the most immediate way: the continuation of the Israeli occupation is a constant reminder of what they experienced, and what they were and were not able to accomplish during their youth. For the rest of us, a close look at their personal narratives, and their relationship to the present realities on the ground, provides its own unique window onto the dynamic, bustling intersection of historical and ideological forces that is the Palestinian struggle. 1 Like any ethnographer, I come to my research and writing with my own set of memories. When the intifada began in late 1987, I was a second -year undergraduate whose mild interest in the Middle East derived largely from slides my parents had shown me after returning from church-based trips to “the Holy Land.” Yet like many observers, including my Lebanese-Palestinian roommate and several Jewish friends who were inclined toward a critical view of the Israeli occupation, I found it impossible to ignore the television images of young Palestinians, rocks in hand, confronting Israeli soldiers in the streets of the West Bank and Gaza. The public face of this remarkable insurrection called to mind the biblical story of David and Goliath, but with a potent symbolic inversion: the Palestinian stonethrowers were both obliterating and appropriating Israel’s long-standing self-definition as a tiny, youthful nation surrounded by powerful enemies. Experiencing the intifada via television images— images that were violent, theatrical, sometimes horrific, and ultimately misleading in the sense that they hid much of the popular organizing, social upheaval, and systematic Israeli repression that were going on behind the scenes—led me to develop what I can only describe as a romantic, often envious attachment to the intifada’s young activists.1 In the relative comfort of my dorm room, I felt like a fraud, and a privileged one at that. Soon I cofounded a group devoted to promoting campus dialogue on Israel/Palestine, an action that generated significant anger at a school where support for Israel had traditionally been strong. I think some people didn’t know what to make of me, for I was neither Jewish nor Arab; my interest in the issue derived from my family’s commitment to social justice, not from any personal stake in the conflict. For those who were strongly pro-Israel, I may have been more objectionable than any of the three Palestinians on campus, and the more I learned about the history of Zionism and the Israeli occupation, the more confident I felt in playing the role of provocateur. Yet even as I began to find a public voice, and to feel that peculiar mix of adrenaline, empowerment, and self-importance that comes with being an activist during a time of crisis , I was always stopped in my tracks when I saw the latest news from the front lines of the intifada. I was organizing meetings, taking part in debates, and writing articles, but here were people my own age who were speaking to the world in a much more immediate, physical, and dangerous way. They were the “children of the stones” (atfāl al-hijāra), and they had my attention. 2 | Prologue In many ways, this book is the product of a long process through which I subsequently have come to...