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8. Other Worlds to Live In Palestinian Retrievals of Religion and Tradition under Conditions of Chronic National Collapse Loren D. Lybarger today, perhaps more than ever, the question of Palestinian identity has become obvious and urgent. The always-fragile national consensus has ceded to open schism. In the wake of devastating interfactional bloodletting, the Islamic political movement, Hamas, now dominates the Gaza strip while the weakened secular-nationalist Fatah movement putatively controls the West Bank. The choice for Palestinians, as it comes across in media analyses and think-tank position papers, seems stark: either an embattled secular-nationalist Fatah movement reasserts itself, or Palestine becomes “Hamastan.”1 But, even the very possibility of Palestine, or, for that matter, “Hamastan,” seems ever more unrealizable. Israel, backed by the United states and the european Union, relentlessly presses its advantage. It has expanded its settlements and road networks while extending a system of walls, fences, and checkpoints that have isolated Palestinians within their towns, villages, and camps, and in the case of Gaza, within a besieged coastal strip subject to punishing bombardments from air, sea, and land. negotiation and armed resistance have seemed to yield little more than cynicism, despair, and death. The parties backing these diverging approaches—Fatah and Hamas, primarily—have failed to galvanize consistent broad majority support. neither secular nationalism nor Islamism in their current forms appear to offer any clear basis for political unity and collective action.2 But if not these, then what? Other Worlds to Live In 159 This question is keenly ontological. The deep and chronic political divisions and concomitant collapse of the “plausibility structure”—the takenfor -granted institutions and legitimating discourses3 —of Palestinian nationalism have produced what Catarina Kinvall, quoting anthony Giddens, refers to as “existential anxiety” and corresponding attempts to “securitize the subject .”4 For Kinvall and Giddens, who follow erikson here, existential anxiety results from a loss of a sense of “fundamental safety in the world” rooted in “a basic trust of other people.”5 such loss is itself the consequence of an inability to sustain a “feeling of biographical continuity,” that is to say, a coherent narrative of self in relation to others across time and space, a narrative often expressed in the category of home.6 violent displacement—an experience that Palestinians have suffered repeatedly—shatters the coherence of this category of home, leading individuals to attempt to retrieve, repair, or create a new canopy under which to shelter a singular, stable, and integrated self. Often this attempt to re-securitize the subject expresses itself in a “politics of resistance” and the “growth of local identities” that aim to “surpass the life of contradictions and anxieties of homelessness.”7 Kinvall argues further that the sentiments and values mobilized within these politics often get expressed through the notions of nation and religion. They do so precisely because these symbolic-institutional complexes serve to stabilize a single, unified self within “an essentializing historical narrative .”8 nation and religion “provide answers to questions concerning existence itself, the external world and human life, the existence of ‘the other,’ and what self-identity actually is.”9 yet, while they certainly may perform the locative, stabilizing functions that Kinvall describes, the reappropriation and revivification of religious and nationalist narratives, symbols, and structures can just as frequently dislocate, destabilize, and divide individuals and social groups. Because it concerns itself with the legitimacy and precariousness of social systems, religion often enters into direct competition with politics.10 When the political order legitimizes itself with reference to religious conceptions and practices, then resistance and protest against the prevailing order, especially during periods of crisis, will likely take the form of either heterodox religious or explicitly anti-religious secular movements. alternatively, when the political order is based on an ideology that negates or subordinates religious values and institutions within a secular or multisectarian conception 9.255.162] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 02:29 GMT) 160 loren d. lybarger of collective belonging, protest and resistance in periods of crisis quite often can manifest as politicized religion. In both cases, however, the “solutions ” that religious or nationalist revivification provide are never automatic or self-evident. rather, these “must be rediscovered, reinvented, and reconceptualized every time [they are] called upon as an answer to ontological insecurity.”11 This process is not a unitary one precisely because no society constitutes a single homogenous entity. rather, various and conflicting interpretations of nation and religion will emerge in relation to the differing interests and needs of...

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