The Guests' Guests: Palestinian Refugees,Lebanese Civilians,and the War of 2006

Abstract: In the war between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006, 10,000 displaced Lebanese citizens were granted shelter and hospitality by Palestinian refugees in the camps of southern Lebanon. For the duration of the war, the Palestinian guests became hosts to their own hosts, and this temporary reversal of the usual relations of refuge set the scene for the rebuilding and renegotiation of relations between Palestinian refugees and their host country and its citizens. This paper addresses these events through a focus on the nature, politics and ethics of Palestinian hospitality and argues that hospitality was not simply a selfless act of giving, but also an instrumental act that had the potential to transform Palestinian–Lebanese relations in lasting ways.     

The Bedouins in the Palestinian–Zionist struggle at the beginning of the British Mandate: 1920–1929

This article presents the causal factors behind the Arab riots of the 1920s and the reasons some of the Bedouin tribes joined that struggle. It provides an overview of the “Events,” as Zionist historiographers termed the riots—the developing conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews, the methods and resources used by both parties, as well as the responses of the British authorities—from the local, national, and regional perspectives, especially in the political arena. It investigates the political stances that emerged among the local Bedouin tribes regarding the Zionist–Palestinian struggle and the reasons for the diversity of stances: while some tribes took an active part in the events on the Palestinian side, others remained neutral and a few tribes even chose to ally with the Jews, or at least warn them of forthcoming attacks. These different stances consolidated during this period, affecting the events and outcomes of the Great Palestinian revolt that took place in 1936–1939, as well as the conduct of these groups during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.     

The Expansion of Emergency Powers: Social Conflict and the Military in Indonesia

The exercise of emergency powers is always controversial. This article identifies the expansion of the type and scope of emergency powers through legislative reform. It does so by examining the Indonesian Law on Social Conflict 2012, which allows a state of social conflict to be declared at the national, regional or local level in response to social conflict, such as conflict between religious or ethnic communities. The deliberate choice of the term “state of social conflict”, rather than “state of emergency”, is an attempt to obscure the nature of these powers. Analysis of these powers and the debate that has ensued suggests that the law expands the types of situation in which powers usually only reserved for an emergency are used, and by delegating this power to local authorities, the law in effect amounts to the expansion of emergency powers. I suggest that this should lead to renewed focus on meaningful limits and checks on the exercise of power during times of emergency.     

Enclosures from Below: The Mushaa’ in Contemporary Palestine

This article traces the declining fortunes of the mushaa’, a once‐prominent Levantine culture of common land. Palestinians managed to resist attempts by the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate to break up the mushaa’. Under Israeli colonization, the remaining commons are now subject to another type of appropriation: individual Palestinian contractors seize hold of mushaa’ land and build on it. This article introduces the concept of “enclosures from below”, whilst looking at the dynamics of seizure of the commons by Palestinian refugees, who once were peasants practising mushaa’ on their lands and are now landless, some having become expert contractors. I show that the contractors consider their actions to be a form of resistance against the settler colonial project, manifested in the advancing of the Wall and settlement expansion. This is described through a case study of the Shu'faat area in Jerusalem. Changing uses of mushaa’ land reflect wider tendencies in the Palestinian national project that has become increasingly individualized.     

Languages of Stateness in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings: The PLO's Popular Committees as Twilight Institutions

Public authority beyond the state has often been seen as isolated from the state and/or constituting a threat to the state. Recent scholarship, however, has started to conceptualize ‘state’ and ‘non‐state’ forms of public authority as closely connected and interdependent. This article contributes to this theoretical shift by means of a qualitative case study of public authority in Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon. Lebanon's Palestinian camps are routinely characterized as ‘states‐within‐the‐state’, undermining the sovereignty of the Lebanese state. Yet, as this article demonstrates, both a generic state idea and the specific Lebanese state system constitute crucial benchmarks for the Popular Committees that govern informal Palestinian settlements. The article therefore conceptualizes the Popular Committees as ‘twilight institutions’ and explores the ‘languages of stateness’ that they adopt both communicatively, vis‐à‐vis Palestinian competitors, and coordinatively, vis‐à‐vis Lebanese counterparts. This reveals that the Popular Committees emulate the Lebanese state institutions they come into contact with, to bolster their own authority. They do this partly to be viable interlocutors for Lebanese state institutions; this suggests that the Popular Committees’ non‐state authority might validate rather than challenge state authority in Lebanon, and that state and non‐state authority can be mutually constitutive.     

Mourning the Un-mournable? Political Theology Between Refugees and Religion

Since the arrival, or the attempted arrival, of millions of refugees in Europe, the performances of the Center for Political Beauty – a Berlin-based collective of artists and activists – have had a huge impact on public and political debates about Germany's migration policies. In this paper, I analyze the performance “The Dead Are Coming” in which the artists buried refugees who drowned in their attempt to enter the European Union. Drawing on Judith Butler's political philosophy of performativity, I assess “The Dead Are Coming” as a “doing” rather than a “describing” of dignity. I argue that the integration of God into the practices of mourning enables both the activists and the audience to resist the differential distribution of dignity in Europe's migration policy. Ultimately, I advocate a re-thinking of political theology in which art learns from theology and theology learns from art in order to promote dignity under de-dignifying conditions.     

Inside Checkpoint 300: Checkpoint Regimes as Spatial Political Technologies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

As a part of the architecture of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories, the Israeli government introduced in 2005 a series of so‐called terminal checkpoints as “neutral border crossings”, to minimise the impact of these barriers on Palestinian lives through a different design and the use of several machines, such as turnstiles and metal detectors. In this article, we analyse terminal Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem, framing it as a spatial political technology aimed at controlling the movement of Palestinians. More specifically, we investigate the interactions between Palestinian commuters, Israeli soldiers/security guards and the machines operating inside Checkpoint 300. We conclude by suggesting that Checkpoint 300 is a porous barrier whose regime is produced, reproduced but also challenged by such interactions, and that, despite the new “neutral design”, Checkpoint 300 is a place still filled with tension and violence, often exercised by the machines and their “decisions”.     

Border Anxiety in Palestine–Israel

In this paper, I deal with representations of Palestinian women and their experiences with Israeli national security. In particular I explore how the political philosophy of Agamben and feminist psychoanalytic ideas of “abjection” could assist in understanding the nature and flexibility of the power relationships between Palestinian women and the Israeli state. I pay specific attention to moments when women carry out suicide attacks or when pregnant women in labour are forced to give birth at the checkpoint. I argue that, from a Western perspective, pregnant and exploding women's leaky bodily boundary embodies Israeli fears about the leakiness of the border between Israel and Palestine, fears which necessitated the construction of a so‐called “security fence” in order to create a hermetic border. As such, I emphasize women's capacity to produce, heighten and dissolve boundaries, bodily and political, thereby advancing a radically different kind of political geography.     

The People's Climate March: Environmental populism as political genre

Contemporary political ecological research on populism has demonstrated how authoritarian and strongarm tactics come to be hitched to reductive symbolic representations of “the people,” often with disastrous environmental impacts. Advocates of “left-populism” argue that such research can give the erroneous impression that “populism” and “authoritarianism” are essentially synonymous. Skeptical of formalist arguments, Gramscians argue that populism, as a quite variegated and fundamentally spatial phenomenon, must be viewed historically, in situ. But all three arguments share a quick assessment of populism, without always attending to its embedded multiplicity. Bringing together insights from Stuart Hall and Lauren Berlant, this article seeks to expand geographical understandings of the dynamic forms and styles of environmental politics by proposing thinking of populism as a political genre. This theoretical schema helps to cut through formalist versus historicist debates while directing attention to the affective scenes through which populism is performed. In order to demonstrate the utility of examining populism's genre and scenes, I examine political essays written surrounding the 2014 People’s Climate March. Essays debated activist expectations concerning political subjectivity, tactics, scales of action, signifiers, and aesthetics for best confronting global inequality and the climate crisis alike. Through contesting the meaning of “the people” and “populism,” divergent leftist political interpretations both repeated and tweaked generic populist forms. By examining the performative construction and contestation of “the people” through languages and spaces of climate action, I advocate a humble yet still critical political ecological approach to understanding contemporary populism.     

The supreme court of Israel: Formative years, 1948–1955

In seeking to establish a paradigm of a literary “New Jew” for the early twentieth century, we must view the cultural developments of the time on the background of European modernist culture. During this period the European “New Jew” underwent many incarnations, including Max Nordau's muscular hero, Buber's “Renaissance” Jew, Berdyczewski's Nietzschean “new man,” Herzl's “authentic Jew,” and the Hebrew literary talush (rootless person). All the divergent ideas of Jewish renewal propounded in Europe were united in Shaul Tchernichovsky's poetry, either through deliberate reference or as a result of the tenor of the time. This article examines Tchernichovsky's implicit conception of the “New Jew” through two poems: “Lenokhah pesel Apollo” (Before a statue of Apollo, 1899) and “Ani – li misheli ein klum” (I have nothing of my own, 1937).     

Destroying Nahr el-Bared: Sovereignty and urbicide in the space of exception

During the summer of 2007, Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon was the scene of a fierce battle between the Lebanese Armed Forces and a militant Islamist group called Fateh al-Islam. When Palestinian evacuees returned after the conflict, they found Nahr el-Bared utterly destroyed, houses smashed first by shells and bombs, then by vandalism and arson, possessions stolen and broken, offensive graffiti daubed on walls. I argue in this paper that the battle of Nahr el-Bared, and particularly the month of looting and arson that followed the battle, was a case of urbicide in a space of exception. The seemingly unrestricted destruction of homes, the theft of possessions and arson, went beyond any possible military necessity and became the deliberate and systematic erasure of the camp. This urbicide was made more possible by the very nature of the political spaces of the camp, which are in Lebanon but not of Lebanon, in which Lebanese sovereignty and law are not fully enforced, in which a whole range of non-Lebanese actors exercise political power outside the control of the Lebanese state. In these spaces of exception in which the rule of law is suspended, the looting, arson and vandalism took place without sanction. Palestinian homes and lives had become sacred in the sense that they could be destroyed without sanction, without recourse to legal redress, because there was no law.     

Beyond Tragedy: Differential Commoning in a Manufactured Housing Cooperative

Caught between the dual crises of declining economic opportunity and diminishing public assistance, people on the economic margins resist threats to their livelihoods by opting to share resources. The processes involved in managing these “commons” are often messy and paradoxical amid differing livelihood concerns and subject positions. Unevenness tends to emerge along new and existing lines of power. Rather than reducing such tendencies to a “tragedy” to be eliminated, I argue that grappling with uneven relations offers a more dynamic account of commoning: “differential commoning”. This paper takes as its example the residents of a “manufactured housing” community who organized as a cooperative in response to the threat of eviction. Their struggle to collectivize, I suggest, illustrates the need for a more situated conceptualization of commoning, rather than a concept defined within the rigidity of economic rationality or the homogeneity of some imagined community.     

Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe

A significant outcome of the global crisis for refugees has been the abandonment of forced migrants to live in makeshift camps inside the EU. This paper details how state authorities have prevented refugees from surviving with formal provision, leading directly to thousands having to live in hazardous spaces such as the informal camp in Calais, the site of this study. We then explore the violent consequences of this abandonment. By bringing together thus far poorly integrated literatures on bio/necropolitics (Michel Foucault; Achille Mbembe) and structural violence (Johan Galtung), we retheorize the connections between deliberate political indifference towards refugees and the physiological violence they suffer. In framing the management of refugees as a series of violent inactions, we demonstrate how the biopolitics of migrant control has given way to necropolitical brutality. Advancing geographies of violence and migration, the paper argues that political inaction, as well as action, can be used as a means of control.     

Conserving “The Ottoman(s)” at an Israeli World Heritage Site

This article explores the construction and representation of “Ottoman” heritage in Old Acre, Israel by examining one of the major texts guiding its conservation: its UNESCO World Heritage nomination file. By analyzing how this text has been animated for the tourist public through the Hammam al-Pasha tourist attraction, I demonstrate the ways in which the recognition and celebration of “Ottoman” heritage in Old Acre may actually reinforce Jewish-Israeli sovereignty over Israel/Palestine. I show how these conservation practices may undermine claims to Palestinian indigeneity at the exact moment that they acknowledge, protect, and memorialize the heritage of Israel’s cultural other.     

Repertoires of Family Life and the Anchoring of Afghan Trading Networks in Ukraine

This article examines the “repertories” of family life of men of Afghan background in Odessa, Ukraine. It focuses on these men's intimate relationships with “local women” and challenges the notion that such unions merely offer a form of emotional escape for migrants or refugees far from home. Instead, we advance two arguments: first, that Afghan men in Ukraine form part of a complex transnational trading network, rather than a bounded group of refugees or migrants; second, that the cross-community relationships between Afghan men and “local women” play a significant role in the spatial anchoring and commercial fortunes of transnational Afghan traders in Ukraine. In the analysis of our ethnographic data, we consider the importance of the aftermath of the Cold War in shaping the diverse forms of family life within these trading networks.     

Disrupted Futures: Unpacking Metaphors of Marginalization in Eviction and Resettlement Narratives

In this paper, I examine how linguistic tropes that emerged during ethnographic fieldwork in a Delhi resettlement colony both capture and reaffirm the experiences of forced eviction and marginalization on the urban periphery. By analyzing the urban subjectivities embedded in recurrent metaphors, I explore how people “make sense” of dispossession and ultimately, articulate their “place” in the city. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson (1980, Metaphors We Live By; 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought), I argue that the utilization of metaphors in everyday language influences how people structure their relationships—with the state, with other residents of the resettlement colony, and with the city itself—and captures the pervasive uncertainty of resettlement. Unpacking such metaphors as “guides” to thought and practice can contribute to theories on spaces of insecurity and performativity of the marginalized in the city.     

Warm nationalism: Mapping and imagining the Jordanian nation

In 2002, fourteen years after their withdrawal from the West Bank, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan revealed its new national program known as “Jordan First.” The Palace initiated this campaign as part of its shifting national discourse which now sought to actively unite Palestinian-Jordanians and East Jordanians living to the east of the Jordan River. This campaign, and particularly its common map-logo symbol, has evolved over the last fourteen years into a rather “banal” national discourse and symbol. However, Jordanian nationalism and the everyday symbols of the Jordan First campaign are not forgotten. Instead, for many Jordanians, the campaign is a reminder of “hot” geopolitics and palpable identity politics. Drawing from Michael Billig's theorizations of banal nationalism, I examine the relationship between banal and hot forms of nationalism in Jordan and argue that scholarly work on banality needs to focus attention on the connections between these categories. As such, I suggest that framing nationalism as something quite “warm” can in many instances more aptly capture the complexity of nationalism. Using a multi-method approach that includes analyses of national maps and map-logos of Jordan and in-depth interviews with Jordanians about their national identities, I highlight the connections of hot and banal nationalism. Through my analysis, I also show that a Jordanian national identity is multi-scalar, merging Arab supranationalism with Jordanian and Palestinian identities; and thus I also extend Billig's work to examine the multiple scales of nationalism.     

ON HANDLING URBAN INFORMALITY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

In this article I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realized. Using illustrative cases of top–down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the “disorder” and spatial “unruliness” of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be “converted”, dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio‐economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub‐Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible.     

Political Crisis and Palestine's Cultural Heritage: A Case Study from the Khirbet el-Lauz Site in Area C

Abstract

The protection of Palestine's archaeological heritage faces several serious obstacles: unenforced laws, lack of public awareness, deterioration of Palestine's economic status, unregulated urban development, and the protracted political conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis. As a result, a significant number of archaeological features and sites have been vandalized, looted, or intentionally destroyed without compunction over the past several decades. The Palestinian-Israeli political conflict has negatively affected the archaeological heritage in “Area C,” which remains under complete Israeli civil and military control. This area includes nearly 60% of the archaeological heritage located within the Palestinian Occupied Territories, but the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage lacks the authority to monitor and protect these sites. Furthermore, the Israeli civil and military authorities in the West Bank do not provide the necessary protection of cultural heritage resources in Area C. The devastation of these resources throughout the Palestinian Territories provides the impetus for this research. The main aim is to identify the results of the political conflict on Palestinian archaeological and cultural heritage sites, using a case study at the site of Khirbet el-Lauz.     

The Right to the World

The global number of refugees, asylum seekers, and those displaced within their countries are at record levels in the post‐World War II era. Meanwhile, efforts by relatively wealthy and powerful nation‐states to exclude unwanted migrants through enhanced territorial control have reached unprecedented heights, producing great harm–most notably premature death–for many. The factors driving out‐migration from homelands made unviable, coupled with multiple forms of violence experienced by migrants, demonstrate the need for an expansion of rights–conceived of as both entitlements and sites of struggle. So, herein, I assert the need for “the right to the world”–specifically a right to mobility and a just share of the Earth's resources–to help realize the promise of a dignified life for all. In making the case for such, the article offers a critical analysis of the contemporary human rights regime and of the “right to the city”.