reshaping indigenous identity.pdf

Advances in Language and Literary Studies

Palestinian narrative comes to reflect the reality of a nation under dislocation, Diaspora, and reshaping the indigenous identity. The Palestinian narratives always attempt to show part of the Palestinian suffering and struggling under the Israeli occupation. This study traces the life of a family, it is Abulheja’s during three generations as presented by Susan Abulhawa’s “While the World Sleeps” as the title of Arabic version, and it has other versions in English entitled ‘Mornings in Jenin’ or ‘Scar of David’, (2006). The study addresses the postcolonial concepts of dislocation, Diaspora, exile and reshaping the Palestinian identity of people/place in Susan Abulhawa’s “Mornings in Jenin”, it is a story of a Palestinian family living in the refugees’ camp of Jenin from 1948 to the beginning of the third millennium, 2002. It does not only represent the life of Abulheja’s family, it is a story of a nation, living in the refugees’ camp: Jenin refugees’, being strangers, even in their ...

Kodex, 2018

Although Palestinian citizens of Israel remained in their homeland, this community has undergone massive transformations in almost all aspects of life. The 1948 War, during which Israel was created, was a catastrophe (Nakba) for the Palestinians. Some 750,000 Palestinians were displaced during this war, which erupted in November 1947, and became refugees. A group of 156,000 Palestinians remained to become citizens in Israel. How did the Palestinian citizens of Israel adapt to their new status as a minority, numerical and political, and to the subsequent social and political reality? To answer this question, in this article I will analyze the first Palestinian novel to be published in Israel after the 1948 War. Mudhakkarāt lājiʾ aw Ḥayfā fī al-maʿraka (A Refugee’s Memoirs or Haifa in the Battle, 1958), by Tawfīq Muʿammar. This novel registers some aspects of the initial transformation in Palestinian discourse, as well as the considerations that underlie them. This article will focus on the political motivations as well as the inhibitions that surround the publishing of this novel.

2018

2012

This article examines Palestinian identity transformation in Israel during the years between 1967 and 1987. Fifteen Palestinian novels and autobiographies were published in Israel during this period. My article will focus on a group of five from among them that I call counteraction novels. Counteraction novels show the failure of the Zionist modernist paradigm—according to which modernization and integration of Palestinians in Israel are complementary processes—by reflecting a Palestinian distinction between modernism and Zionism. On the one hand, the novels reflect that Palestinians in Israel are grappling with issues posed to them by modernization. On the other hand, counteraction novels present a uniform rejection of Zionism’s erasure and alienation of Palestinians in Israel. I also argue that counteraction novels do not portray a “positive” Palestinian identity; they do not voice what Palestinian identity is.

NORMALIZING OCCUPATION The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements Edited by Marco Allegra, Ariel Handel, and Erez Maggor Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2017

The palestinian encounter with the Zionist colonial proj ect, with its varying historical forms and expressions, is a focal point in the Arab discourse in general and the national Palestinian discourse in par tic u lar. One would be hard pressed to fi nd a Palestinian intellectual who has not written on the topic. Some have written about the development of the colonial proj ect, its earlier stages, the plans developed to empty Palestine of its indigenous population and their eff ects and dynamic; others have written about the power relations and the strategy behind the success of the colonial proj ect, the global and regional conditions, and the cooperation between the Zionist movement and the British Mandate. However , alongside such serious scholarship, more superfi cial volumes have also been written, characterized by demagogical and essentialist discourse. Th e result has been an overwhelming deluge of writing about Jews, Zionists, settlements, settlers, colonialism, imperialism, the historical Khaibar tribe and Ibn al-Nadhir, the Jewish plot, and Yajuj and Majuj. Instead of focusing the discussion , a discursive chaos was created. Oft en, the readers fi nd themselves fl oun-dering between two polar opposites, the essentialist pole and the dynamic pole, with numerous variations and levels of complexity between them. At the one pole is a discourse in which the Zionist settler is mediated through a variety of essentialist, cultural, historical ste reo types of the Jew as avaricious, fraudulent, and traitorous. At the other pole, one fi nds rigorous, sociohistorical research that attempts to understand the Zionist enterprise, and its settler-colonial proj ect in par tic u lar, as a product of social dynamics, shaped by the historical conditions and pro cesses created at vari ous crossroads. Th is body of research usually applies a structural and systemic approach, concentrating mainly on macro pro cesses. Between these two trends, the last two de cades have witnessed a growing anthro-pological and so cio log i cal interest in the Palestinian experience vis-à-vis the

Athens Journal of Philology, 2016

This survey article explores the parameters of the Palestinian national identity as represented in the fictional world of a number of Palestinian narratives written in Arabic and other languages over the past hundred years. More specifically, the article traces the dramatic transition of identity formation from personal discomfiture with the breakdown of self-interested enterprises to mass awareness of the existential threat posed by the Zionist Movement Project 1 against the national aspiration of the Palestinian people in Palestine as their only homeland. The threat in question was the consequence of the militant immigrant Jewish settlers who infiltrated into Palestine in successive waves of European Jewish immigrants in the wake of Sykes-Picot Agreement 2 and Balfour Declaration. 3 Ever since the coming out of the first Arab Palestinian novel, al-Wareth, 4 the issue of identity has been steadily gaining a central place in the Palestinian narrative art, irrespective of the stance and angle of vision from which the story is told. As a form of art of fiction, the Palestinian novel says something about the loss or distortion of the Palestinian national identity through a deliberate, programmed erosion of individual and collective memories, including history and popular culture. This purposeful erosion has been consistently the target of the single-handed historical narrative provided by the official annals of Israel 5 as an immigrant settlers' colonial project replacing the state of Palestine on the world map. The Palestinian narratives under study bring out into the open the long-denied version of the truth by unfolding the hidden narrative account of the Palestinian national identity for the fullness of history.

2020

The aim of this chapter is to determine and examine what constituted everyday resistance for those Palestinians who lived in Israel,1 and who experienced life under Israeli military rule, from 1948 to 1966. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the outcome of the war changed the power relations between Israel and the Palestinians and had an immediate and direct impact on the Palestinian people: Palestinians refer to these events as "the year of the Al Nakba" or "the Catastrophe". The majority of Palestinians either were forced out of their homes or fled as a result of the war and became refugees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and neighbouring Arab countries (Pappé 2006, 86-123). Those who remained were reduced to a minority within their homeland, cut off from the rest of their fellow nationals. It is estimated that in 1948 between 80,000 and 160,000 Palestinians remained, representing somewhere in the region of 10 percent of the original population. As a result of Al Nakba, Palestinians faced the destruction of their political, economic, and social structures (Ghanem and Mustafa 2009, 107; Bauml 2007), and this defeated population is largely absent from the Israeli state's official history: Israel's founding myth has been that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land (Pappé 2014). Where the Palestinian citizens of Israel did appear in the history of Israel, they were cast in the passive role of victims, and, at the same time that they were being excluded from Israeli narratives, Palestinians in Israel were also being excluded from the history of the Palestinian national resistance movement and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) (Darweish 2006; Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury 2011). Scholarly research on the military period has inadvertently reinforced their erasure by focusing on Israeli mechanisms of control and oppression (Jiryis 1976; Zureik 1979; Lustick 1980; Cohen 2010; Sa'di 2014). After Al Nakba, Palestinian areas were divided into three main districts, each directly administered by a military governor. Harsh restrictions were imposed on the lives of the Arab minority, and these restrictions drew upon the Emergency Regulation Laws inherited from the British Mandate of 1945. Palestinians' movements were restricted, and so people required a permit from the military governor to leave their village, whether it was to work, cultivate their land, visit family, obtain medical treatment, study, or travel for any other purpose outside the village boundary (Lustick 1980; Bauml 2007; Sa'di 2014). This research thus presents a new perspective on the reality faced by Palestinians in Israel after 1948, one which emphasises the agency of this community and documents its history of survival and resistance. While their new reality was characterised by the asymmetry of power between Israel and its Arab minority, and by marginalisation, they were able in their own way to resist the structural imbalance imposed on them. To maintain the fragmentation of and control over the Palestinian minority, the Israeli state reinforced the Palestinians' economic dependence on the Jewish sector. The majority of Arab land was confiscated, water sources were controlled, and Palestinians were excluded from economic development plans. Having been detached from their land, they were positioned as an unskilled labour force for the Israeli economy. Arab villages became the source of cheap labour and served as dormitories for Arab workers (Kretzmer 1990; Khalidi 1988). Meanwhile, the family, which was the primary social economic unit of Palestinian society, was deeply shattered and became vulnerable. Mari (1978, 18) depicts Palestinians in this situation as "emotionally wounded, socially rural, politically lost, economically poverty stricken and nationally hurt. They suddenly became a minority ruled by a powerful, sophisticated majority against whom they fought to retain their country and land". The heads of the extended families (mukhtar) became key contacts for people who wanted to obtain permits from