The Politics of Commemoration

In opening her insightful study of the dynamics of change in nationalist commemoration, Laleh Khalili states three key reasons for selecting a primary focus on Palestinians residing in Lebanon – the centrality of the Palestinian national struggle to Middle East politics; their condition of 'statelessness'; and the dramatic shifts which have occurred in national strategies and approaches since displacement of 1948. In interrogating 'performances of remembered Palestinian (hi)stories and transformations in national commemoration', Khalili's work offers sharp analysis, based on meticulous research, not only to scholars of the Middle East, but other fields, from studies of nationalisms to collective memory research, to the discipline of subaltern studies.

Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine originated with the author's doctoral fieldwork conducted in Lebanon, with additional fieldwork in the West Bank. Extensive ethnographic and archival research creates a text which should become a staple of future reading lists. The academic rigour of the study defies those who suggest that ethnographic and oral sources cannot offer the political authority and insight of the analysis of written sources.

Using the stark example of the part of the Palestinian community residing in Lebanon, Khalili's study demonstrates that, far from remaining stable, national commemoration is a dynamic and changing process. In the bloody arena of Lebanon, the fallen who might once have been commemorated as heroes of the battlefield, at a different time become immortalised as martyrs and represented as innocent victims of massacre.

Between 1969 and 1982 – a period known as the Thawra (revolution) – refugee camp affairs were controlled by Palestinian political factions through their representatives on popular committees. Until the 1982 expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon, trained Palestinian military took responsibility for protection of the camps, alongside their active military struggle against Israel and the hope of return to Palestine which it engendered. Palestinian national struggle of the 1970s articulated available contemporary secular transnational discourse of liberation – the spirit of Che Guevara, of Frantz Fanon and the anti-colonial struggle from Algeria to Vietnam. Khalili's interviews and reading of contemporary factional publications describe a time when to join a national political organisation and to take up arms for Palestine were seen to 'bestow maturity and wisdom on the shabab (the youth), and becoming a protector was a sign of manly courage'. In the Palestinian thawra to die in the national cause was to die a 'hero', to fall in armed conflict to die in 'battle'.

Fast forward to 1993 – Arafat and Rabin's handshake on the White House lawn, and a Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon (minus fighters exiled to Tunis) exhausted from a decade of siege by Lebanese Shi'a militia – and a very different commemorative climate exists. The dominant narrative is of massacres and martyrs, of those slaughtered in years of bombardment of Shatila, of innocent victims butchered as they tried to survive in the poverty of exile. While international Islamist groups commemorate their hero-martyrs, the secular transnational discourse (and the one providing significant funding) is a language of human rights violations, highlighting the innocent victims of brutal dictators, warlords and militants. From the 1990s, the institutions in the camps of Lebanon channelling, shaping and representing Palestinian lives are not the armed political national factions of the 1970s, but the internationally funded, post-Oslo shaped non-governmental organisations; the NGOs.

As media and academia clamour to discuss the role of 'militants' in the contemporary Middle East, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine points to the active role of NGOs in the shaping of national discourse and narrative. Further critical research into the politics of NGOs amongst vulnerable and oppressed groups – and significantly, the foundations that fund them – becomes all the more pressing in today's world. Khalili's work charts the way in which NGOs penetrate the lives of Palestinians in Lebanon, just as did the political factions of the thawra before them, deploying resources 'to act as conduits' – in the case of the NGOs – of tragic narratives. The author not only documents the...