Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile by Diana Allan (review)

Although the literature on the Palestinian camp of Shatila in Lebanon is already vast, in Refugees of the Revolution, Diana Allan provides a very important and nuanced account of its political economy and the dwellers’ tactics of survival and moral resilience to longstanding oppression and exile. The everyday politics of the Shatila camp dwellers, which she foregrounds throughout six chapters, goes beyond right-to-return campaigns, institutional politics, and ritual public commemorations. The past of the Palestinian refugees, for Allan, is no longer something given once and for all and inherited, but rather a performative and situational process. The author challenges the popular assumption that advocating for the Palestinian cause has the limited meaning of supporting the “right to return” of the families of the refugees who were expelled from 1948 onward due to the foundation of the state of Israel (the so-called Nakba).

In Allan’s argument, it is not merely the loss of Palestinian land that undermines people’s contemporary lives, but the destruction of their social fabric as well as the premature aging of young Palestinians. The Shatila camp embodies much more than a community of memory. Allan, from the introduction on, subtly contests how identity is commonly investigated through a retrospective lens, enfeebling collective memory as an efficacious explanation of the present needs and affects of Shatila’s dwellers. As a result, refugee agentivity is internationally framed as merely past-oriented and past-focused, meaning that, with no resolution of their past, the refugees’ present acts of resilience are rarely foregrounded. Through analysis of the camp economy of survival and subsistence, Allan shows how focusing on what I would call retrospective nationalism is ultimately an immoral dismissal of the Palestinian cause, in that it limits the latter to a rhetoric of return and nationhood.

By identifying in camp politics one of the sources of people’s tangible grievance, Allan marks the 1982 PLO’s (Palestinian Liberation Organization) departure from Lebanon as the end of its armed struggle for national liberation, as well as a critical point for a Palestinian laboratory of human rights in Lebanon. In Allan’s account, collective dispossession and return are still substantial components of the present condition of refugee-hood, but are also well combined with an everyday economy of memory and “post-memory”¹ (Hirsch 2008)—that is, assuming the memory of earlier generations. In this regard, the first chapter engages with a critique of the international demand for commemoration, which turns into what Allan calls “historical claustrophobia” (2014:61), where Palestinians are unable to turn past memories into a solid basis for better futures.

The outsider activist’s desire for a reified justice for Palestinians and what I would call an NGO-fed Nakba industry are questioned here. With a pleasantly balanced analysis of her own life in the camp and her interlocutors’ experiential accounts, Allan goes far beyond the arid binary of refugee victimization and agency. She does not intend to nullify the value of testimony, but rather contends that it should be reworked towards a future-oriented perspective. The snapshots she provides of local struggles over electricity, the Palestinaian performative culture of hope conveyed through sharing dream stories, and other similar mechanisms to cope with chronic uncertainty are all a checkmate to the imperative of nationalist aspirations dominating Palestinian diaspora narratives.

Nonetheless, in the second chapter, the nostalgia for the days of the Palestinian Revolution (ayam ath-thawra) before the 1982 departure of the PLO from Lebanon, is not abstract, but, rather, attributes greater significance to the present pragmatics of survival in the camp. Nostalgia, reconsidered as a factor validating present tactics of subsistence, leads Allan to prioritize discussions on the economic safety nets woven by the community of residents, political parties, and NGOs, in their effort to assist the community. Ethnographic examples of these daily acts of mutual indebtedness are the hospitalization and burial of the elderly Shatila resident Umm ‘Ali, the attempt to heal the gastrointestinal infection of a neighbor...