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Production Notes My son, oh future! I heard you in the other room asking your mother: Mama, am I a Palestinian? When she answered “Yes,” a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then—silence. . . . Do not believe that man grows. No: He is born suddenly—a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood onto the ruggedness of the road. —Ghassan Kanafani, writing to his son Fayez [T]he nation’s biography snatches, against the going mortality rate, exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions , wars, and holocausts. But, to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as “our own.” —Benedict Anderson Each Palestinian is true. —Jean Genet There is nothing simple about memory. Both seductive and perilous, memory can be a site of trauma, a place where the past “flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin 1968c) only to disappear as soon as we try to grasp it and pin it down. Memory can be a tool in the hands of emperors, presidents, corporations, and others who seek to extend their domination by fixing the meaning of the past; yet it can also be a strategic ally for those who are dominated. It can help create nations, and it can tear nations apart. It can inspire songs and stories, revenge and revolution . Memory, in other words, is a process, one whose outcome is uncertain and always subject to human struggle and creativity. Palestinians, like all colonized peoples, know this well. How, then, will the first intifada (hereafter referred to simply as the 1 10 “intifada”) be remembered? Which parts will be preserved in the collective memories of the Palestinian people, the Israeli military, the international media? Which parts will be actively suppressed by one or another of the protagonists? Which parts will remain submerged in fragments of individual memory, only to reemerge during later moments of crisis or reflection ? How will the many stories of the intifada be altered, debated, strategically mobilized? These are fundamental questions for scholars of social memory, and they are the kinds of questions that led me to Balata as a place to explore what happens when a period such as the first intifada passes into the realm of memory. With my focus on the jīl al-intifāda (the “intifada generation”) came another set of questions rooted in the experience of political activism and political violence. Many of these questions seem profoundly unanswerable . Take the example of Hatem, who was born and raised in Balata and was thirteen when the intifada began. When he went into the streets to face down the soldiers of the occupying Israeli army, what was he feeling? Did he act as a self-conscious representative of his nation? Did he share the political pessimism of many older camp residents? Was he afraid? Did he see himself as one of history’s losers? Or as a refugee ready to take revenge for the suffering visited upon his family? Or simply as “one of the guys”? Or, perhaps more radically, was he experiencing something more utopian, something that cannot be contained within the bounds of the national , at the moment of confrontation? And who, exactly, are the members of the “intifada generation”? They are everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, they are almost hypervisible , making regular appearances on the evening news and on the front page of newspapers around the world. They are on the cover of many intifada books, stones in hand, giving the “V” for victory sign as they confront Israeli tanks and troops. On the other hand, aside from the occasional quotation, their voices are often strikingly absent from these public venues, replaced by the words of the politicians, pundits, and scholars who are typically called upon to explain what is going on in Palestine. Much like the young activists who led the protests against South Africa’s apartheid regime during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s, then, the atfāl alhij āra (“children of the stones”) are political caricatures about whom we know surprisingly little. The assumption seems to be that the actions of the “intifada generation” speak for themselves, thus obviating the need for a closer look at the particular kinds of consciousness and social analysis they undoubtedly possess. This book is an attempt to work against the Production Notes | 11 [18...

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